The Serengeti Tangle

I’m watching a nature documentary but not very successfully. I keep shutting it off because I know it lies.

It’s called the Serengeti Rules, and it’s based on a book of the same name. I’ve read the book, which I enjoyed, even though it does tend to follow the Malcom Gladwell school of non-fiction writing.

(What is the solution to getting good at anything, no matter the skill, no matter your personal level of talent? Miraculously, the answer stays the same: it is *always* 10,000 hours of practice. How remarkably easy to remember, how fortuitously easy to market!)

In the case of the Serengeti Rules — the book — the central premise is that there’s a set of rules that applies pressure in any life system — from, as one scientist puts it, “E. Coli to Elephants” — and this pressure keeps all the elements of that system in check. Some of these rules might be non-obvious at first glance.

For instance, wolves in Yellowstone apply negative pressure to herbivore populations. If you remove the wolves, you end up with more herbivores — that’s a fairly obvious repercussion.

But by removing the wolves you *also* end up with fewer things that the herbivores eat, like small trees — that’s a less obvious repercussion.

And then, by removing the wolves, you also end up with less habitat for animals that would have lived in the trees or used the trees, like beavers. So, fewer wolves —> more herbivores —> fewer trees —> fewer beavers.

By removing a “break” in the system (the wolves), humans added an accelerant to other parts of the system (the herbivores), which then added new breaks in other parts of the system.

It can sometimes be hard to determine the cause of the system change if you just examine the end results (fewer beavers). You don’t want to get stuck looking for more beaver predators, for instance. You should consider the system as a whole to trace the problem back to the decrease in wolves.

It was a good book, and a successful one, as far as I can tell. And listen — I guess I should say here — I’m no expert on any of this. I’m just reading along, trying to make sense of things with my English degree and my high school class in biology.

I don’t have any special expertise in safaris either, or in Kenya, or in the Serengeti. I’ve been extremely, unbelievably lucky to have been able to go on three safaris in the past six years — I still can’t believe it.

I used to get these travel pamphlets when I was working a temp job after college, from Intrepid Travel. I’d stack them in the bathroom and moon over them and even though they were supposed to be for younger people on tight budgets — you shared rooms, you went to “off-the-beaten-path” locations, you stayed in hostels — I still couldn’t afford the trips, and I remember crying one day, thinking, “that’s it, I’m just never going to be able to afford travel as an adult, I’ll just have to give up on that particular dream.” I think I was 22 at the time, so I may have been a little dramatic, but still, you get the point, I am genuinely surprised at how things have turned out.

The people who *have* been on a lot of safaris, who are true safari experts, are the people at SafariTalk.net, and I’m sure I’ll talk about them more some other time.

But anyway, since I liked the book well enough, I tried to watch The Serengeti Rules the documentary, butI can’t get much past the introduction. They’re explaining that they’re going to follow all these different scientists — all white men by the way, and maybe there’s one white woman as well — in their areas of study, and of course one of the scientists studies the Serengeti. And there’s a voiceover talking about the majestic Serengeti and how for ages past, animals have been migrating across the Serengeti, etc. etc. It feels like we’ve all heard this voiceover if we’ve ever seen a nature documentary of any kind, or visited a natural history museum.

But unfortunately, it’s bollocks.

As I say, I’m no expert on this, but I do listen, and I do love talking with the guides and trackers on safari.

Oh lort. That  gets me into a whole other entry that I’ll have to write some other time about who the guides and trackers are and how that’s structured and how and why it’s different in different countries and so on and so forth but anyway — for right now, let’s just say that, in Kenya, I chose our mind-bogglingly awe-inspiring camp Serian The Original mainly for the guides, and because they do something almost completely unique — they give each guest group its own vehicle with its own guides — and also because, since we were coming at the beginning of the season, they were willing to let my family group take over the camp for a week.

I will also say that Black guides tend to live double lives, with double names: a “European” name that’s given to tourists, and another name, their tribal name, that their family and friends call them. I was honored to learn some of my guides’ tribal names, but I never pressed. (Later on, I’d like to try to write a little more about this, too.)

At any rate, I think it was Steve, or Liram as we later came to know him, who told us that the Serengeti was not the Serengeti, or at least not as it’s marketed to us as Westerners.  The Serengeti came about largely as a result of post-WWII and — more to the point — post-colonial political machinations.

And listen, again, I’m no expert on this, but I am reading a book about it, Imagining Serengeti: A History of Landscape Memory in Tanzania from Earliest Times to the Present, by Jan Bender Shetler.

Shetler writes:

One might see this western Serengeti landscape as nature at its finest, a last remnant of unspoiled wilderness where animals can roam free. Or one might see it as a landscape shaped by people who set fires to create openly spaced woodlands with productive grasses, tell stories about ancestors settling at Mangwesi Mountain, propitiate spirits at the nearby spring, and follow the paths of hunters, traders, and raiders that crisscross the land. This second way of seeing the landscape is that of people whose ancestors lived in the western part of the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem for the past two thousand years, including land that is now within Serengeti National Park and surrounding game regions.

According to Liram, at least part of what happened was that, as the British left, the peoples whose land it was began reclaiming it, mainly for cattle grazing. They burnt down a good part of the vegetation, but found that, one, the grassland thus created also began to draw what is now known as the “great migration,” and two, the great migration in turn drew tourists. And the tourists paid better than the cattle did.

(By this time, the Serengeti was already a national park — it was made a national park in 1951, and it gained more fame in 1959, after the early nature documentary, Serengeti Shall Not Die, came to prominence. But more on all of that at another time.)

But all of this is very much not history! These dynamics — who owns the land, who can use the land for what, what “nature” really looks like, whether grazing should be allowed — all of these factors are still very much in play. Today, you can see Masai cattle grazers in the Serengeti — where and when they’re allowed to graze is still an ongoing negotiation.

Here’s a man we saw grazing his cattle while we were on safari.

Even as we waited for our safari, a camp in another region was burned to the ground over cattle rights.

It’s complicated, is what I’m trying to say. It’s way more complicated than the nature shows let on.

I love nature shows in general, but I’m also sad that, at least to some extent, they’ve limited me all these years, showing me some blank canvas of nature, some literal whitewash, a European palace park vision of Africa. They’ve given all of us a distorted, bleached version of the wilderness – when what’s actually there is complicated, and very human, and is also way, way wilder than any it’s-been-like-this-for-millennia narrative could possibly express.