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The Africa of the animals is a sort of dream kingdom. Carl Jung traveled to East Africa in 1925 and wrote of a "most intense sentiment of returning to the land of my youth," of a "recognition of the immemorially known." Africa, he said, had "the stillness of the eternal beginning."
Earliest man lived in these landscapes, among such animals, among these splendid trees that have personalities as distinct as those of the animals: the aristocratic flat-topped acacia, the gnarled and magisterial baobab. Possibly scenes from that infancy are lodged in some layer of human memory, in the brilliant but preconscious morning.
An American visitor to Africa decided to ask people about the way that animals come to them in dreams. His five-year-old son in New York City has nightmares about animals he has never seen. He dreams, for instance, of lions. What does an African boy dream about? The visitor collected dreams from Masai and Kikuyu schoolchildren, from schoolteachers, from witch doctors, from Masai warriors and safari guides, from white ranchers and game catchers and naturalists and from himself. It was a way of seeing the animals.
The Masai elder sat in the Lord Delamere Restaurant in the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi and explained that all animals are left-handed. It is true, said the elder, named Moses. Never get onto a lion's left side. A lion attacks to his left. All animals instinctively lead with the left paw, the left hoof, the left horn. Even cows are left-handed, said Moses.
The Masai are pastoralists who have always lived among the wild animals, lived amicably enough, with some violent exceptions that come with the territory. Moses lives in the remote Loita Hills in southwestern Kenya. On this day he wore his Nairobi clothes: two sweatshirts, one over the other, and dark trousers and sneakers. There were holes in his earlobes where ornaments might fit, but they were austerely empty. Handsome, thoughtful, impassive, answering questions like a visiting lecturer, Moses conjured up wild animals. His gaze was sleepy and distant.
On the table Moses demonstrated how the rhinoceros thinks. He used the saltshaker to represent the American visitor. The pepper shaker would be the rhino. The sugar bowl would be the boulder that stood between them. "Be careful," Moses warned. He moved the rhino in an ominous drift to its left. The rhino began to circle the sugar bowl, using the bowl as cover in order to ambush the saltshaker (the visitor) from behind. The visitor became a naked and oblivious wanderer on the white linen plain. He stood frozen and defenseless as the rhino came on.
"Rhino will always go to the left, like this," said Moses softly. He knocked down the saltshaker with a sharp crack of the pepper shaker, like a chess master toppling the king. The visitor went down. White grains of salt spilled out of the holes in the top of his head, and he expired on the flat white linen. The expanse of tablecloth had become for an instant dangerous, in a surreal way. The American had been run down by a pepper shaker from the Pleistocene in a restaurant named for the paramount white colonial of British East Africa, Lord Delamere (1870-1931).