Around sixty thousand years ago a population of hunter-gatherers walked out of southern Africa and rapidly spread over the rest of the planet. Most human beings alive today are direct descendants of that small group. Parts of that founder population never left their African Eden; they continued to develop and thrive as nomadic hunter-gatherers into modern times, protected by the harshness of the Kalahari Desert. Today their children barely survive, forced off their ancestral hunting grounds, often living in squalor, at the mercy of government agencies. Recent genetic and linguistic mapping studies support what long seemed clear to many of us who grew up in South Africa: Bushmen populations are the closest living relatives to our shared “African Adam and Eve.”* Their traditional cosmology is most likely among the oldest on earth, seeming to recede back into the Paleolithic origins of human consciousness. Traditional nomadic Bushmen led an existence that in some ways seems enchanted, moving in small egalitarian bands held together by an ethos of caring for and sharing with one another, while being sensitively attuned to the natural world.
By contrast, the dominant political and economic institutions of our modern world were created from radically different assumptions about our origins. Political philosophers like John Locke accepted the Genesis account of earth’s creation: that the planet was young, that all the plant and animal species appeared as a result of separate acts of divine creation, which culminated on the sixth day in the miraculous appearance of human beings. They believed the natural world existed as raw material for the central human project of productive labor — converting wilderness into wealth. In 1688, when Locke published his Two Treatises on Government, the iconic text of modern politics, the global human population was less than half a billion and vast tracts of forest and prairie still covered North America. Southern Africa was an Eden filled with great herds of grazing and browsing animals. To Locke and his contemporaries, all of this existed to feed human appetite and ambition. It was simply “waste” until transformed by human labor:
Revelation
After visiting the Robberg and other coastal sites of early modern humans, I continued my pilgrimage north through Johannesburg, the violence-plagued metropolis of the country, and then into the sanctuary of the Drakensberg, the “dragon mountains,” the highest range in the South African escarpment. This was the ancient summer hunting ground and last refuge of the /Xam, the southern San Bushmen. It is also something of a wilderness temple containing one of the largest concentrations of the most complex and beautiful of their sacred rock paintings.
I spent most of the first day following my guide across a gloriously empty setting: golden grass-covered foothills, sandstone cliffs, sheltered bush-lined valleys with icy streams, all framed by mountains, hazy blue and purple in the distance. It was perfect winter weather, warm, sunny, and windless with an impossibly blue sky. Every stone, every leaf, every blade of grass sparkled as if cut from crystal. Occasionally we would spot grazing eland — the largest of the African antelope and the sacred game animal of the Bushmen. We were looking for a shelter that contained a particularly significant collection of old paintings. The guide crossed a stream and then climbed up to the base of a sandstone cliff. We walked through a clump of thick bushes and, without any warning, stepped into the entrance — an enormous overhang of sandstone with a level sandy floor and sun-warmed rock panels. The shelter was like a gigantic natural balcony, offering a panoramic view of the valleys below and the mountains in the distance. But the view that fixed my gaze was the back wall covered with dozens of hauntingly detailed multicolored paintings.
A line of eland seemed to move across the central panel. Several cloaked figures stood behind. Some of the images are carefully painted over one another, in great detail and with obvious care. Off to one side was a large solitary eland with its head down, back legs crossed, and the hair on its shoulders erect, all signs of its death throes. Touching the tail of the eland was an upright human-like figure, also painted with legs crossed — but instead of human feet, the figure had painted hooves with the detailed fetlocks clearly visible. The part-antelope, part-human creature held what looked like a dancing stick in one hand, suggesting the central religious ritual of the Kalahari San — the healing trance dance sometimes called “the little death.”*
The complexity and mystery of the images were immediately obvious. No easy literal interpretation would do. The sensitivity of execution contrasted movingly with the rugged mountainscape outside the shelter. Yet the paintings seemed to complete the scene perfectly by suggesting the presence of an ancient creative hand and beauty-loving eye, both hand and eye crafted by that same surrounding wilderness.
The guide left me to spend the rest of the day alone, examining the paintings and enjoying the view. In late afternoon I walked back, satisfied and relaxed, happily musing how ancestral San life must have fitted into this landscape, hand in glove. The sun was setting below the hills in the distance. On my right, a series of steep sandstone cliffs glowed pink and gold in the last light. Suddenly, a hoarse shout echoed across the valley, sounding like “GET-EM!” Shocked wide awake, I looked up: the silhouette of a head and shoulders appeared on the cliff edge ahead of me. More figures appeared. My thoughts flashed to Johannesburg, then the murder capital of the world. I tensed and held my breath. The shout was repeated — and just as suddenly I relaxed, recognizing from some forgotten memory the strangely human sound of a baboon’s warning bark.
While less dangerous than their two-legged, urban relatives, baboons can still be intimidating. They seem a mix of human and dog, with teeth that can match a leopard’s and a bad habit, probably learned from humans, of stoning climbers from above. A whole troop had arrived, and in the distance, a second troop appeared; I could see the outlines of the young scampering over the rocks. They were no longer looking at me. The adults moved to the edge of the cliff and squatted, still as sentinels, staring at the sinking sun. I found a flat rock, and as we sat together and watched the sun disappear, something deep inside me shifted and settled. For a long moment I had an exquisite feeling of complete identity with the baboons echoing back through the millennia to some old, ancestral primate sitting on a warm rock watching an African sunset. It was an exquisite feeling of connection to this place and a bone-deep certainty of the truth of Darwin’s insight — “who understands the baboon would do more toward metaphysics than Locke.”
This simple revelation was a turning point in my journey and a powerful affirmation of my quest. It had touched some emotional bedrock that gave me the confidence to continue my efforts to reconstruct a deeper, truer way of being human, of living together on this miraculous, evolving, and now-threatened earth.
The Navel of the World
My subsequent journeys back to South Africa also helped me find meaning in my comfortable Hawaiian exile through an illuminating opposition. Hawai‘i is one of the most isolated, ecologically fragile pieces of land on the planet. Surrounded by thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean in every direction, it is the exact antipode of South Africa, both geographically and culturally as far away from my African roots as it is possible to get. As I sit on my lanai writing this, I can look up and see the emerald green Ko‘olau mountain range at the back of the valley. Directly beneath the Ko‘olaus, on the other side of the planet, are the eroded granite cliffs of Cape Town’s Table Mountain. Like the Ko‘olaus, Table Mountain rises dramatically from beaches and rocky coves. In photographs the two locations appear strikingly similar. On the ground they couldn’t be more different. The Ko‘olaus are geologically young, pushed up through a volcano on the ocean floor barely three million years ago. Their valleys and cliffs often seem lonely — no screeching monkeys, no snakes, no leopards, no sunset bark of baboon.
On the other hand, the Cape Fold Mountains are hundreds of millions of years old, scarred, cracked, and weathered by baking sun, storms, cold ocean fog, and the numberless generations of African wildlife living, growing, and dying on its surface. Hiking around the Cape today