The World Without Us

If Africa’s animals evolved learning to avoid human predators, how would the balance swing with humans gone? Are any of its megafauna so adapted to us that some subtle dependence or even symbiosis would be lost along with the human race, in a world without us?

The high, cold Aberdares moors in central Kenya have discouraged human settlers, though people must have always made pilgrimages to this source. Four rivers are born here, heading in four directions to water Africa below, plunging along the way from basalt overhangs into deep ravines. One of these waterfalls, the Gura, arcs through nearly 1,000 feet of mountain air before being swallowed by mist and tree-sized ferns.

In a land of megafauna, this is an alpine moor of megaflora. Except for a few pockets of rosewood, it is above the tree line, occupying a long saddle between two 13,000-foot peaks that form part of the Rift Valley’s eastern wall, just below the equator. Treeless—yet giant heather rises 60 feet here, dripping curtains of lichen. Groundcover lobelia turns into columns eight feet high, and even groundsel, usually just a weed, mutates into 30-foot trunks with cabbage tops, growing amid massive grass tussocks.

Small wonder that the descendants of early Homo who climbed out of the Rift and eventually became Kenya’s highland Kikuyu tribe figured that this was where Ngai—God—lived. Beyond the wind in the sedges and the tweep of wagtails, it’s sacredly quiet. Rills lined with yellow asters flow soundlessly across spongy, hummocked meadows, so rain-logged that streams appear to float. Eland—Africa’s biggest antelopes, seven feet tall and 1,500 pounds, their helix horns a yard long, their numbers dwindling—seek refuge at these freezing heights. The moor is too high for most game, though, except for waterbucks and hidden lions who await them in fern forests along the plunge pools.

At times elephants appear, babies following a big tusker as she stomps through purple clover and smashes giant thickets of St. John’s wort in pursuit of her daily 400 pounds of forage. Fifty miles east of Aberdares, across a flat valley, elephants have been spotted near the snow line of Mount Kenya’s 17,000-foot spire. Far more adaptable than their late woolly mammoth cousins, individual African elephants once could be tracked by trails of dung leading from Mount Kenya or the cold Aberdares down to Kenya’s Samburo desert, an elevation drop of two miles. Today, the din of humanity interrupts the corridors linking those three habitats. The elephant populations of Aberdares, Mount Kenya, and Samburo have not seen each other for decades.

Below the moor, a 1,000-foot band of bamboo circles the Aberdares Mountains, sanctuary to the nearly extinct bongo, another of Africa’s striped camouflagees. In bamboo so dense it discourages hyenas and even pythons, the spiral-horned bongo’s only predator is unique to the Aberdares: the seldom-seen melanistic, or black, leopard. The brooding Aberdares rain forest is also home to a black serval and a black race of the African golden cat.

It’s one of the wildest places left in Kenya, with camphor, cedar, and croton trees so thick with lianas and orchids that 12,000-pound elephants easily hide here. So does the most imperiled of all African species: the black rhino. About 400 remain in Kenya, down from 20,000 in 1970, the rest poached for horns that bring $25,000 each in the Orient for alleged medicinal properties, and in Yemen for use as ceremonial dagger handles. The estimated 70 Aberdares black rhinos are the only ones in their original wild habitat.

Humans once hid here, too. During colonial times, the well-watered, volcanic Aberdares slopes belonged to British tea and coffee growers who alternated their plantations with sheep and cattle ranches. The agricultural Kikuyu were reduced to sharecropping plots called shambas on their now-conquered land. In 1953, under the cover of the Aberdares forest, they organized. Surviving on wild figs and the brown speckled trout stocked by the British in Aberdares streams, Kikuyu guerrillas terrorized white landowners in what became known as the Mau Mau Rebellion. The Crown brought divisions from England and bombed the Aberdares and Mount Kenya. Thousands of Kenyans were killed or hung. Barely 100 British died, but by 1963 a negotiated truce had inexorably led to majority rule, which became known in Kenya as uhuru—independence.

Today, the Aberdares is an example of that wobbly kind of pact that we humans have struck with the rest of nature known as a national park. It is haven to rare giant forest hogs and the smallest antelopes—jackrabbit-sized suni—and to golden-winged sunbirds, silvery-cheeked hornbills, and incredible scarlet-and-beyond-blue Hartlaub’s turacos. The black-and-white colobus monkey, whose bearded visage surely shares genes with Buddhist monks, dwells in this primal forest, which sweeps in all directions down the slopes of the Aberdares…