Of elephant-dung spliffs, conservatism and progress
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The first installment of a regular weekly set of pieces by me, a series I call “52 Places To Go In The Human Soul,” looking not only at travel to different locales, but also looking into the psychology, neurology and philosophy of the human spirit. All text is copyrighted (but may be edited by @aviwoolf), and all photos here are my own and likewise copyrighted:
Copyright: Tim Skellett (@Gurdur).
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Once I was offered to share a spliff of termite-processed elephant dung, for which marvelous effects were claimed, effects supposed to put me deep in touch with the nature around me, deep down in a remote part of East Africa, next to the Selous Game Reserve in the southern corner of Tanzania. I diplomatically declined the offer, something which plagued my conscience for years, but lately I have concluded I was right to decline. Accepting would have been fine too, but my feelings were not wrong in my rejection. The elephant dung itself had been processed by termites, to the point it looked not like a heap of dung, but instead a heap of tiny pellets resembling coffee-grounds (see my photo below). The man who offered to share a spliff was named George (not his real name, for reasons which will become clear), and he had made a strong impression on the small group of tourists from the beginning on that day, appearing at the camp-site clad only in a loincloth, and with ashes over his skin. He set out to discombobulate us tourists from the beginning; I suspected him of simply winding everyone up by offering the spliff, but he swore it was traditional bush sorcery, meant to help on the hunt by putting one in touch with one’s ancestors and nature.
George came from the Sandawe tribe, a tribe who form a part of the very original modern human settlers in East Africa, completely unrelated to the Bantu, Cushitic and Nilotic peoples who would — far, far later in history — also settle in East Africa. The Bantu form the huge majority, and came in waves of cattle-herders and farmers, as did too later the Cushitics who settled in the area. In contrast, the Sandawe, an exceptionally ancient people who are the likely relatives of the Bushmen of southern Africa, historically were primarily nomadic hunter-gatherers until quite recently. They still speak a Khoe-family language completely unrelated to any of the neighboring languages. They are related to the Hadza, a tribe belonging too to the last remnants of the extremely ancient Khoe family, living in the north of Tanzania roughly 600 miles (1,000 km) away, still speaking their own language. Unlike the Sandawe, the Hadza fiercely insist on remaining nomadic hunter-gatherers, refusing to live in houses. The central government of Tanzania, ruled as it is largely by Bantu (who are felt by the Hadza to be alien interlopers), tried forcing the Hadza to settle; between the simple refusal by the Hadza, and the high death-rate (from pneumonia, depression and so on) of the forcibly housed, the government was eventually forced to give up, and the Hadza still today (photo below) resolutely live a rigorous hunter-gatherer, nomadic lifestyle. Yet they pay a big price; just like the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert, they are forced by Bantu neighboring tribes into arid areas, where game is sparse, and today there are fewer than 800 Hadza still alive. In comparison, the Sandawe, who started adopting agriculture and permanent housing perhaps 300 years ago, and who today are completely settled, number more than 40,000. Although the Sandawe have intermarried to some small extent with neighboring peoples (though still showing massive genetic differences), the Hadza again insist on staying furiously independent, remaining genetically completely different from all their neighbors.
George wanted to resurrect the ways of his remote hunter-gatherer Sandawe ancestors, but it was more creation than recreating, since those days were so far off that only vague tales were handed down. I felt much sympathy, as I do for the ferocious conservatism and independence of the Hadza, but the price paid is obvious. Any area can only support much fewer hunter-gatherers than settled agriculturalists, and pressure by more numerous agriculturalists means hunter-gatherers are pinched between harsh nature and hostile encroachment. Here, progress has led to far more people living better on the same land, but at the same time it has meant the displacement and forced gradual extinctions of peoples.
My feelings about the elephant-dung, even though it now only resembled innocuous coffee-grounds, were influenced partly by disgust — who would want to smoke dung? — and by many other considerations. This amused George, on his own personal crusade to fuddle and ruffle the tourists whom he was guiding on a forest walk. George, though, did not know many of my other reasons; he took me for just an ignorant Westerner, only put off by the thought of elephant dung. George smoked the spliff, and announced he was now in touch with his forebears (an important part of the original Sandawe religion, which revolved mainly around ancestor-worship, with a very distant, theist-like God who Himself was non-interventionist, and a veneration of praying-mantises). Disgust is something which disgusts the likes of Richard Dawkins, on a jihad against “yuck-reaction morality” which he sees as impeding rational progress, and Steven Pinker, who manages still to be a bit more thoughtful at times on the subject. Disgust is also an emotion one has to learn how to suppress in medical settings; otherwise much life-saving treatment could never be carried out. The noted philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote “Surely the moral progress of society can be measured by the degree to which it separates disgust from danger and indignation” in what is a common tendency to view ethical stances as being made illegitimate if seen as motivated or even just accompanied by disgust.
The noted medical ethicist Leon Kass coined the phrase “the wisdom of repugnance,” an avowal of the validity of disgust, a view loosely shared by philosophers like Mary Midgley, who saw a legitimate role for disgust in ethics, and Mary Warnock, who would, in her advisory role to the British government, make a point that ordinary, public moral reactions should be respected in the formation of governmental ethical policy. Kass himself had made long cultural journeys, raised by a secular, socialist Jewish parents, going with his wife Amy (neé Apfel) to do civil rights work at a dangerous time in 1965 in Holmes County, Mississippi — other civil rights activists were murdered very nearby shortly beforehand. Kass’ cultural journey led him to wonder why his fellow secular, Harvard students showed less “honor, decency, and dignity” and more “ self-absorption and self-indulgence” than the “impoverished and ignorant but church-going black farmers” among whom he lived in Mississippi. This all influenced his views when he, along with Allan Bloom, became a supporter of liberal studies via the “Great Books” program. Kass became known as “the President’s philosopher,” serving as chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005. In the end, no ethic is worth its salt without a set of feelings to move one into implementing the ethic, and in this way, the long-thought-out ethics are nothing without the sheer emotion. Feelings themselves are nothing without ethics, otherwise we become mere robots to our emotions and circumstances.
Be all that that is, even so my feelings were not just based on disgust of what George thought was unknown and alien to me. The disgust I felt was not a moral reaction, but as with anything, I tend to reflect if it was invalid if seen from a scientific viewpoint, though in this case I don’t think so. I find rhubarb quite repugnant, but I have no feelings of real disgust to it. Although Dawkins might see disgust as a mere emotion being a block to his own idea of social progress, that is more than questionable. The neural basis of disgust is still hazy, though localized, and disgust may not accompany revulsion. If a chemotherapy patient involuntarily develops a reflex of vomiting when the patient sees a white-coat or hypodermic, that is revulsion with acute nausea, but not disgust. Disgust itself is a loose term, including both the raw emotion, and the feeling of disgust; like all feelings, there is more than the raw emotional component, there are also two other cognitive components, an internally if subconsciously verbalized sentence (such as, “Well, I’m certainly not going to smoke that, not dung”), and an accompanying set of internal body-pictures (in this case, imagined pictures of me retching in disgust, or being infected with parasites).
George look a long drag of the spliff, then hit himself quite hard with his fist on the back of his head, announced he was now quite high (though it looked to me more like simple hyperventilation), and in touch with his ancestors, and that we could all now go off looking for elephants in the woods.
He stopped by a tree, and said that the bark of the tree helped combat the side-effects of the spliff. He cut off and chewed a bit of the bark; I did the same, but I found the bark tough and almost unchewable. We came across a green tree snake, and a giant elephant-shrew, in our walk through the woods, but no live elephants — only a sad, forlorn heap of bones, left behind from a fairly recently dead elephant.
This was a grim reminder that in the neighboring Selous Game Reserve, the total number of elephants recently plummeted by more than 90 percent in the space of only 10 years. In other words, elephants are facing extinction in a giant nature reserve — not because of encroachment by farmers, but because of rampant poaching, most often driven by Chinese mafias selling the ivory back in China and Vietnam. The game rangers of the Selous do their best, but the huge, sprawling size of the reserve (19,000 square miles, or 50,000 square kilometers), and the dirt roads, plus that the Selous, being in the south of Tanzania, is visited by far fewer tourists than the game parks in the north( meaning far less unofficial policing by tourists and tour-guides), all add up to a good deal of poaching going on. This became the subject of my first argument with George; he did not see the poaching as a real problem. Instead, he started extolling the alleged benefits of ‘bushmeat’ — the overall term for meat from wild animals. I pointed out that the idea of bushmeat as something good or magical is an idea originally foreign to the peoples of Tanzania, an idea imported over the Congo from West Africa (where bushmeat is prized for its miraculous properties to an absurd extent). I also pointed out that once the elephants completely disappear from the Selous, then so too will the tourists. This will be a huge problem economically in the area, in a poor part of a poor country. Mean wages were only $0.68 per man-hour in 2012 in Tanzania, and the whole country is heavily indebted. International aid forms a huge part of the country’s annual budget; without it, the country would collapse overnight. According to Wikipedia and its sources, “approximately 68 percent of Tanzania’s 44.9 million citizens live below the poverty line of $1.25 a day.” Tourist dollars form a huge chunk of income, and, by going often directly to the people through tourist-guides and their families, also help in the long-term building of a real civic democracy. The south of Tanzania, where the Selous is, is even more underdeveloped than the north; the roads and bridges are in bad condition, local government tends to be haphazard and sometimes corrupt, and jobs are scarce.
George was not impressed. He told me, with real excitement in his eyes, of how the local villagers had formed a loose network of bushmeat vendors, based on the ever-present motor scooters that comprise much of the transportation in the local region. His elation at humble villagers outwitting the government and game-park wardens was clear, as too his regaling of the supposed benefits of bushmeat (elephant flesh for longevity, lion meat for courage and so on). Yet while the streak of rugged independence could be appealing, so too is the price that will eventually be paid — villagers in the region will be grossly impoverished once the tourists stay in the better-protected nature reserves in the north, and stop coming at all to the south.
With an influx of migrant workers from the Congo, many working in the mines in Tanzania, there is also an influx of ideas regarding superstition, like the fancy of bushmeat, or the use of human body-parts in black-magic, something that has led to many albino people being murdered in recent years in Tanzania — sociopathic ideas formerly totally unknown to East Africa and Tanzania in particular. The impetus given to poaching is also hugely driven by the Chinese mafias, and the money gained by poaching also funds trade in drugs, illegal arms — and terrorism.
The problem of protecting elephants in the Selous cannot just be done by involving local villagers in conversation, although that is vital too; the money from international triads is simply too overwhelming, so the fight against poaching has to be on a national and international level, too. Barry Goldwater, Sherwood Boehlert, William Ruckelshaus, Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon were all committed U.S. Republicans and nature-conservationists; conservatism can mean also recognizing the value of shared public grounds, and the need to protect species for their own worth, and not just for their supposed value to humans at any one time. Progress can also mean protecting the environment and nature for its own sake, and again not just for its supposed utility.
But, as said, George was not impressed by my reeling off these points, though he began to look suspiciously at me as if I might be more than he had assumed. He told us of a friend of his who had recently illegally killed an elephant (probably the same one as which appears in my photo of the bones). George grew quite agitated as he detailed how the rangers had come to his friend’s village house looking for the friend, and how his friend was now living in hiding. George was incensed the rangers would get paid a bonus if they caught a poacher; but the rangers (and the national government) also come from the people of Tanzania.
As our small group of tourists slowly wandered back through the woods towards the campsite, George started singing a song in Swahili about marching to the Congo, a song dating back to 1960 to 1965 at the time of the civil war in the Congo. He then suddenly made a run at me with his spear, which failed to give him the rise he wanted out of me, since often I am pathetically slow in reaction, and I just stood there like a sack of wheat. Even though he hadn’t gotten the reaction he wanted, I still felt the need to make points in the game myself, so I accused him of having gone to university. At this, George looked aghast, and in a hushed voice asked me not to mention that, and that he would talk with me the next day.
The next day, George came to our group’s campsite, dressed this time in the usual town or village semi-Western clothes, and he and I had a long conversation over many mugs of coffee. As I suspected, from his accidental use of a couple of botanical terms during the walk in the woods, and also from the verbally Western frame into which he had cast his wanting to recreate the ways of his ancestors, he had indeed been to university inside Tanzania, studying tourism-guidance. He was a man straddling three worlds and wanting to create a fourth world. Almost each day he lived in the world of a traditional Sandawe local villager, the world of the Westernised town and city life in Tanzania, and the ultra-Western world of tourists (in the Selous, most tourists come from Western countries; Asians who are just tourists and not big-game hunters tend to stick to the northern circuit of wildlife reservations in Tanzania). The tensions of such crassly clashing worlds, each subject to change, are the norm for anyone living in a developing country. And there he was, wanting to restore a way of life he had never known, and his ancestors would have last really known at least 200 years ago.
He asked me how I had been so fast on my suspicions; but like him, I also straddle worlds, if not daily now. His dressing in a loincloth and ashes was not a surprise to me, for that was once common among Australian Aboriginals living in the Outback; wood-ashes provide protection against insects and sunburn. His outspoken appeals to his ancestry were again of little surprise, since on other trips to Tanzania I had often mixed with Hadza, Datoga and Maasai tribespeople, who often still lead very traditional lives. And I had spent much of my childhood in places not more than 300 miles (500 kilometers) away from where we sat, drinking coffee. The world of a small Tanzanian village was intensely familiar to me. The disgust I had felt at the idea of smoking elephant-dung was largely motivated by the anxiety regarding parasites, of which a good many exist in sub-tropical southern Tanzania; parasites and tropical infections are something one becomes quite familiar with if one lives there. Chewing a piece of bark was considerably less risky, although not totally so, which was why I had been quite happy to try the bark to see if it had any effects on me.
We parted on terms of good friendship, although he seemed to feel a little betrayed when I told him of my childhood, as if I had deliberately spoilt the game by keeping my past under wraps. Years later after that trip and conversation, I wonder how George and his family are. And what they will live from when the last elephants are gone.
