As our Land Cruiser drove down the long, winding road heading out from Serengeti towards the Ngorongoro Crater, a flash of red caught our eye. We turned our heads to find a Maasai tribesman loping effortlessly on the dusty plain beyond the road, headed God knows where, to the next village, the market, a watering hole... We watched for a long while, as his long, lithe strides gracefully ate up the distance and he disappeared into the horizon.
It is often said that going to Serengeti is like going back in time, but even sitting in Chennai, not a first-world city by a long shot, it is difficult to imagine just how far back this means. When you reach Serengeti, you realise that it means the very beginning of time. From the relentless immensity of the terrain to the very contours of the baobab tree, from the vultures that wait patiently for the lions to finish eating to the solitude of the lone hyena trudging bleakly on an endless search, or the Maasai man who simply ups and runs to get to his destination, there is a pervasive sense that this is where it all began. And that you just got off a DeLorean time machine and are watching it unfold before your eyes.
One of the things that made me catch my breath every one of the myriad times it happened was when I swept my eyes in a great arc across the panorama and saw a multitude of species in the same frame. No amount of Nat Geo quite prepares you for that — your eyes swing from dozens of elephants to a massive herd of wild buffaloes to even larger herds of wildebeest and zebras and impala and in the distance you can still see the trees under which you know two leopards are resting. There they all are, as if nothing had disturbed them since creation, as if this is how they might have been grazing when Noah set to work on his ark.
When the engine cuts out, there is complete silence. You can hear the grass rustling, the low harrumph of an elephant, a bird call out. There is a sense of rightness, as if this is how it was meant to be before we came and spoilt it all. Even as we watch, a leopard lazily stretches, sniffs the air and gracefully lopes off to stalk a lone gazelle he has spotted. The gazelle, in turn, looks up with a start, and scampers away. We watch the chase for a long while until they both vanish into the grass. We don’t know if leopard won or gazelle, but either victory would be right. Because we are now in pre-lapsarian land where there is no sin, only life.
Dotting the endless plains are Maasai settlements, enkangs, circular hamlets fenced off with thorny acacia. Inside are round huts with conical roofs, built of branches webbed together and plastered with mud, grass and cow dung. The villages merge with the earth, dusty, brown and invisible, against which the Maasai in their flamboyant red, scarlet, and vermilion shuka flame out. The cattle are kept in an enclosure in the centre, and sometimes you spot a patch of cultivation nearby. This is how the first hunter-gatherers would have settled down, first sown a seed. This is where family, tribe, marriage, trade would have started. This is how we would have begun.
After centuries of trying to persuade the tribe to adopt ‘civilisation’, apparently scientists now recognise that the Maasai way of life comes closest to perfect coexistence with nature. The circle of life might well bring us right back to the beginning.
