Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [20]
The focus of attention switched instead to East Africa.
CHAPTER 4
WHITE AFRICAN
LIKE RAYMOND DART and Robert Broom, Louis Leakey was regarded by the scientific establishment as a maverick, best kept at a safe distance. His early career as a field scientist had been full of promise, but he had since become immersed in controversy and scandal. No one doubted his energy, enthusiasm and talent, but colleagues found him too impetuous, too dogmatic, too intolerant of criticism, too much of a showman.
The son of an English missionary, born in 1903 on a mission station at Kabete in the hills above Nairobi, Leakey had grown up among the Kikuyu people, imbibing Kikuyu customs and folklore. At the age of thirteen, he had been initiated as a member of the Mukanda age group. ‘In language and in mental outlook I was more Kikuyu than English’, he wrote in his book White African, ‘and it never occurred to me to act other than as a Kikuyu’. Chief Koinange of the Kikuyu spoke of him as ‘the blackman with a white face’, accepting him as ‘one of ourselves’.
Leakey also acquired an early fascination with stone tools. His interest was prompted by a book on the ‘Stone Age Men’ of Britain, sent to him by a cousin in England as a Christmas present when he was twelve. Reading about how they had used flint arrowheads and axe heads, he set out to see if he could find some around Kabete. He had no clear idea what flints looked like, only that they were blackish in colour. Exploring road cuttings and other areas of exposed ground, he soon collected a mass of black flakes of rock that seemed to correspond to the flint tools he had read about. But his parents were sceptical and referred to them as ‘broken bottles’. His Kikuyu friends were also doubtful. Noticing how black flakes appeared on the ground after heavy bouts of rain, their explanation was that they had fallen from the sky; they called them nyenji cia ngoma—razors of the spirits of the sky.
Leakey eventually resolved to show his collection to Arthur Loveridge, the curator of the Nairobi Museum. He arrived fearing that Loveridge too might laugh at him but was ‘delighted beyond words’ by his response. Loveridge explained that his stones were not flint but obsidian—a black volcanic glass that produced a sharp cutting edge when flaked—and that obsidian was known to have been used for toolmaking in the past. Indeed, said Loveridge, several of the specimens in Leakey’s collection had undoubtedly been fashioned for tool use. From that moment, Leakey became addicted to prehistory.
Sent to school in England at the age of sixteen, Leakey endured two miserable years there, making few friends, but managed to gain a place at Cambridge to study anthropology. He impressed fellow students at Cambridge with his energy, enthusiasm and passion for prehistory but was also noted for being brash and impetuous—‘overcharged and unbalanced and unlikely to make good’, according to one contemporary.
During his university years he gained valuable field experience spending eight months in southeast Tanganyika with a British Museum expedition hunting for fossils at Tendaguru, the site where Hans Reck’s team had discovered the remains of a Braciosaurus in 1912. He also excelled in studies of anthropology and archaeology, becoming all the more convinced that Africa was the place to search for the origins of humankind, not Asia.
Shortly after graduating with a ‘double first’ in 1926, he set out on what he grandly called the East African Archaeological Expedition, to look for human fossils in Kenya. A Cambridge professor tried to dissuade him: ‘Don’t waste your time. There’s nothing of significance to be found there. If you really want to spend your life studying early man, do it in Asia’. But Leakey was adamant. ‘No’, he replied. ‘I was born in East Africa, and I’ve already found traces of early man there. Furthermore,