The World Without Us

And a lot of it. Cattle now account for more than half the live weight of African savanna ecosystems. Without Maasai spears to protect them, they would provide an orgy for binging lions and hyenas. Once cows were gone, there would be more than double the feed for everything else. Shading his eyes, Western leans against his Jeep and calculates what the new numbers would mean. “A million and a half wildebeest can take out grass just as effectively as cattle. You’d see much tighter interaction between them and elephants. They would play the role the Maasai refer to when they say that ‘cattle grow trees, elephants grow grass.’”

As for elephants without people: “Darwin estimated 10 million elephants in Africa. That was actually quite close to what was here before the big ivory trade.” He turns to look at the female herd sloshing in the Amboseli swamp. “At the moment we have half a million.”

No people and 20 times more elephants would restore them as the undisputed keystone species in a patchwork mosaic African landscape. By contrast, in North and South America, for 13,000 years nearly no creatures except insects have eaten tree bark and bushes. After mammoths died, enormous forests would spread unless farmers cleared them, ranchers burned them, peasants cut them for fuel, or developers bulldozed them. Without humans, American forests represent vast niches awaiting any herbivore big enough to extract their woody nutrients.

3. Insidious Epitaph

Partois ole Santian heard the story often when he was growing up, wandering with his father’s cows west of Amboseli. He listens respectfully as Kasi Koonyi, the gray old man living with his three wives in a boma in Maasai Mara, where Santian now works, tells it again.

“In the beginning, when there was only forest, Ngai gave us bushmen to hunt for us. But then the animals moved away, too far to be hunted. The Maasai prayed to Ngai to give us an animal that wouldn’t move away, and He said wait seven days.”

Koonyi takes a hide strap and holds one end of it skyward, to demonstrate a ramp sweeping down to Earth. “Cattle came down from heaven, and everyone said, ‘Look at that! Our god is so kind, he sent us such a beautiful beast. It has milk, beautiful horns, and different colors. Not like wildebeest or buffalo, with only one color.’”

At this point, the story gets sticky. The Maasai claim all the cattle are meant for them, and kick the bushmen out of their bomas. When the bushmen ask Ngai for their own cattle to feed themselves, He refuses, but offers them the bow and arrow. “That’s why they still hunt in the forests instead of herding like we Maasai.”

Koonyi grins, his wide eyes glowing red in afternoon sun that flashes off the pendulous, cone-shaped bronze earrings that stretch his lobes chin-ward. The Maasai, he explains, figured out how to burn trees to create savannas for their herds; the fires also smoked out malarial mosquitoes. Santian gets his drift: When humans were mere hunter-gatherers, we weren’t much different from any other animal. Then we were chosen by God to became pastoralists, with divine dominion over the best animals, and our blessings grew.

The trouble is, Santian also knows, the Maasai didn’t stop there.

Even after white colonials took so much grazing land, nomadic life had still worked. But Maasai men each took at least three wives, and as each wife bore five or six children, she needed about 100 cows to support them. Such numbers were bound to catch up with them. In Santian’s young lifetime, he has seen round bomas become keyhole-shaped as Maasai appended fields of wheat and corn and began to stay in one place to tend them. Once they became agriculturalists, everything began to change.

Partois ole Santian, who grew up in a modernizing Maasai generation with the option of studying, excelled in sciences, learned English and French, and became a naturalist. At 26, he became one of a handful of Africans to earn silver certification from the Kenya Professional Safari Guide Association—the highest level. He found work with an ecotourism lodge in the Kenyan extension of Tanzania’s Serengeti Plain, Maasai Mara, a park combining an animals-only reserve with mixed conservation areas where Maasai, their herds, and wildlife might coexist as they always have. The red oat-grass Maasai Mara plain, dotted with desert date and flat-topped acacias, is still as splendid a savanna as any in Africa. Except that the most predominant animal grazing here is now the cow.