Love in the Time of Nomads
A Valentine's Day tale of love and riches, from our ancient past...
When you want to go fast, go alone. When you want to go far, go together.
~ African Proverb
One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.
~ Henry Miller
The campfire crackled under the starry heavens. Yellow and orange flames licked at the cooling night air, illuminating a circle of red-dark faces crouching around it. Dear wife had retired to our nearby tent for the evening. Only the menfolk remained – half a dozen Maasai warriors...and one mzungu (loosely translated as "wandering white man").
After a prolonged silence, one of the young men finally piped up. His gaze was unsure...a tad nervous even...but he seemed too inquisitive to let the moment pass him by. Our patient guide, Shankala, handled the translation for us...
“This man, he wishes to tell you about his herd,” he began. “He says he has no fewer than eight cows. And this year, if the rains come on time and all goes to plan, he hopes to increase his herd by another three heads.”
We nodded, impressed...if a little unsure as to what to offer by way of response.
“Someday soon,” Shankala continued, “he hopes to have enough wealth to take a wife.”
“That's, er... admirable,” we ventured, wondering what might be lost in translation.
The Massai are a semi-nomadic tribe populating the areas of northern Tanzania and southern Kenya. In many ways, they are an ancient and little-changed people, still practicing methods and ways thousands of years in the making.
There we sat, pondering this casual profundity for a blink in time, when another man spoke up. He looked somewhat older than the first, with considerably more confidence and swagger. Again, Shankala delivered a careful and deliberate translation.
“This man here, he says he has twenty-six cows. And not only that,” he went on, to the author’s visible approval, “but he also has two wives...and another one soon on the way.”
Again, your ordinarily loquacious correspondent found no words immediately forthcoming. And yet the man, standing tall and beaming with pride, was clearly awaiting a response...
Time and Space Travel
As faithful (and even unfaithful) readers of these pages know, our aim here at The Modern Flânuer is to wander the world, one idea at a time. Sometimes that means reminiscences, like this one, from travels of yore... other times it means envisioning a future adventure (we’re currently planning our next trip, more about which in upcoming installments...)
When we travel through space, say by plane, train and automobile...or wade through time, as via history books, archeological discoveries, guesswork, conjecture and theory...a number of differing perspectives jostle for our attention. What we thought we knew for sure is often exposed as merely a product of our “programming.”
In other words, we come to find that what is sacred to one man – flags, gods, poetry, football teams, Valentine’s Day, ancient texts, modern conveniences, irony, taste, Beethoven, democracy, monogamy, polygamy, profit and prophets – may well be profane to another.
Today, for large parts of “Western Civilization,” material possessions are held aloft as signs of wealth and status. McMansions. Hummer Homes. Triple-car garages. A television in every room and an iGadget in the palm of every hand.
But this wasn't always that way. For our Paleolithic forefathers, when it came to “tangible” assets, less was often considered more. Instead of “stuff,” he yearned for “freedom.”
Free time. Free exchange. Freedom of movement.
Free afternoons spent whiling away the hours under the shade of the coolabah tree...
No TSA check points. No passport stamps. No visa requirements. Nothing but the sun and the moon, the rainy and the dry, yesterday receding in his memory, tomorrow stretching out like a dream.
Excess Baggage
In this way, extraneous possessions were to nomadic men and women but a nuisance. Indeed, when mobility is highly regarded, “excess baggage” soon becomes a trap...a weight...something to hold you back.
And yet, according to some anthropologists, despite their “lack” of possessions (or, more likely, because of it) life was no worse off for these itinerant wanderers than for the Agriculturalists that came immediately after them. In fact, in many cases these wanderers were better off the less material “wealth” they had.
As professor Marshall Sahlins writes in his fascinating collection of essays, Stone Age Economics...
A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.
It was only when he set down roots...when he gained more “stuff”...that the idea of “the things you own eventually coming to own you” really came into high relief.
The generally accepted theory of societal evolution holds that man domesticated plants and animals during the Agricultural Revolution, pressing both into the service and maintenance of his new life of leisure and luxury.
Again, that’s just one story...one perspective.
But consider for a moment the primary food he "domesticated:" wheat. Before he took to seeding the earth with this otherwise unimportant crop, it was but a random grass, confined to a tiny scrap of Africa.
Today, at over 220 million hectares, wheat is by a good margin the most widespread crop on the planet. And across much of the developed world, Modern Man sets his back...and his capital, his machines, his time and his effort...to spreading it ever further...as he has done now for thousands of years.
True, the human population has increased dramatically during this same period...but to the extent that evolutionary success is measured by fecundity, wheat is, by an order of some magnitude, far more successful a reproducer than man.
The obvious question begs itself: Who domesticated whom?
Food for thought...
Meanwhile, Back at Camp…
We looked at the Maasai warrior across the campfire, thinking of something to say. The whites of his eyes couldn’t have been brighter if they had fallen directly from the Milky Way, stretched across the sky above. Here was a man who had in his possession, as we'd just learned, more than two-dozen animals...plus a couple of wives...with another on the way!
What do you say to the man who “has everything?”
We shuffled about a bit and offered a bumbling “congratulations” of sorts.
Then came question time. The Maasai men—friendly, ancient, otherworldly, clad in purple shawls and each carrying a spear—wanted to know a little something about the white mzungu's wealth.
“I’m afraid I have no cows, gentlemen,” we confessed. “And one wife is plenty for me."
A hushed confusion fell on the group as Shankala translated our words to them in solemn tones. The men looked first at each other...then at the ground in front of the cooling embers.
“These men are sorry to have embarrassed you, Mr. Joel,” our translator conveyed the heartfelt contrition in the air between us. “They had no idea you were so very poor."
Happy Valentine’s Day.
Joel Bowman
The best Valentine's story I read this year.
Delightful storytelling. It make me smile. Gracias.