A Primate's Memoir Read online

  ROBERT SAPOLSKY

  A Primate’s Memoir

  Love, Death and Baboons

  Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PART 1. THE ADOLESCENT YEARS: WHEN I FIRST JOINED THE TROOP 1. THE BABOONS: THE GENERATIONS OF ISRAEL

  2. ZEBRA KABOBS AND A LIFE OF CRIME

  3. THE REVENGE OF THE LIBERALS

  4. THE MASAI FUNDAMENTALIST AND MY DEBUT AS A SOCIAL WORKER

  5. THE COCA-COLA DEVIL

  6. TEACHING OLD MEN ABOUT MAPS

  7. MEMORIES OF BLOOD: THE EAST AFRICAN WARS

  PART 2: THE SUBADULT YEARS 8. THE BABOONS: SAUL IN THE WILDERNESS

  9. SAMWELLY VERSUS THE ELEPHANTS

  10. THE FIRST MASAI

  11. ZOOLOGY AND NATIONAL SECURITY: A SHAGGY HYENA STORY

  12. THE COUP

  13. HEARING VOICES AT THE WRONG TIME

  14. SUDAN

  PART 3: TENUOUS ADULTHOOD 15. THE BABOONS: THE UNSTABLE YEARS

  16. OL’ CURLY TOES AND THE KING OF NUBIAN-JUDEA

  17. THE PENGUINS OF GUYANA

  18. WHEN BABOONS WERE FALLING OUT OF THE TREES

  19. THE OLD WHITE MAN

  20. THE ELEVATOR

  21. THE MOUND BEHIND THE 7-ELEVEN

  PART 4: ADULTHOOD 22. THE BABOONS: NICK

  23. THE RAID

  24. ICE

  25. JOSEPH

  26. THE WONDERS OF MACHINES IN A LAND WHERE THEY ARE STILL NOVEL: THE BLIND LEADING THE BLIND

  27. WHO’S ON FIRST, WHAT’S ON SECOND

  28. THE LAST WARRIORS

  29. THE PLAGUE

  About the Author

  Robert M. Sapolsky holds degrees from Harvard and Rockefeller Universities and is currently a Professor of Biology and Neurology at Stanford University and a Research Associate with the Institute of Primate Research, National Museums of Kenya. He is the author of The Trouble with Testosterone, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers (both finalists for the LA Times Book Award), A Primate’s Memoir and Behave. Sapolsky has contributed to Natural History, Discover, Men’s Health, and Scientific American, and is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation genius grant.

  ALSO BY ROBERT SAPOLSKY

  Monkeyluv and Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals

  The Trouble with Testosterone and Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament

  Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: A Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping

  Stress, the Aging Brain, and the Mechanisms of Neuron Death

  Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

  To Benjamin and Rachel

  Acknowledgments

  This is a memoir of my more than twenty years spent working intermittently in a national park in East Africa. The stories are true but, as is often the case in such retellings, subject to a bit of literary license that I want to describe here. The story of Wilson Kipkoi is true in most details. However, names and some other details have been changed to protect anonymity. The final chapter, unfortunately, is true in all its devastating details; however, here, too, I have changed names and certain characteristics. The chronology of the various chapters has been expanded in some places, truncated in others. In a few cases, the sequence of some stories has been changed; the sequence of all events in the lives of the baboons, however, is unchanged. Finally, a number of humans, and a number of baboons, represent composites of a few members of their species. This was done to keep down the cast of characters coming and going—for example, within the human realm, a particular game-park ranger, British tour operator, or tourist-lodge waiter may be a composite of a few individuals. All of the major baboon figures are real individuals, as are the major human characters—Richard, Hudson, Laurence of the Hyenas, (the late) Rhoda, Samwelly, Soirowa, Jim Else, Mbarak Suleman, Ross Tarara, and, of course, Lisa are all real people. I, to the best of my knowledge, am not a composite.

  A number of individuals helped me with fact checking, reading part or all of this book or, in the case of Soirowa, who cannot read, having sections in it related, in order to confirm the accuracy of facts as they remember them. As such, I thank Jim Else, Laurence Frank, Richard Kones, Hudson Oyaro, and Soirowa. I also thank Colin Warner for some formal fact checking in the library, and John McLaughlin, Anne Meyer, Miranda Ip, and Mani Roy for help in proofreading the manuscript. Dan Greenwood and Carol Salem shared stories with me of their travels in East Africa, and I thank them for that. I thank Jonathan Cobb, Liz Ziemska, and Patricia Gadsby for their priceless editorial advice when reading what was a proto-version of this book, a number of years ago.

  Funding for this work was made possible by the Explorer’s Club, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Templeton Foundation. I thank them not only for their generosity but for their extraordinary flexibility in recognizing the peculiar exigencies of fieldwork—at the very least, I thank them for accepting receipts and budget summaries on waterlogged, moth-eaten (literally) accounting notebooks. I thank the Institute of Primate Research, National Museums of Kenya, for my association with them, and the Office of the President, Republic of Kenya, for permission to conduct my research all these years. Two colleagues—Shirley Strum of the University of California at San Diego, and Jeanne Altmann, of Princeton University, have opened their field sites to me as part of our collaborations, and I thank them for that experience. And I thank a number of individuals who taught me aspects of doing fieldwork or helped me with data collection during some of the early seasons—Davie Brooks, Denise Costich, Francis Onchiri, and Reed Sutherland.

  I thank my agent, Katinka Matson, for her tremendous support and expertise in making this book a reality, and Gillian Blake, my editor, and Rachel Sussman, her assistant—you have been remarkably graceful in pointing out problems in this manuscript that anyone but a scientist should have learned back in Creative Writing 101. It has been a pleasure working with you all.

  And finally, I thank my wife, Lisa, the love of my life, who has shared so many of these moments in Kenya with me.

  A final note: The depredations and plunderings of colonialism in Africa are now a thing of the past. However, the West often continues to exploit Africa in far subtler ways, even on those occasions when intentions are the best. I have now spent more than half my life connected with Africa, and I have intense feelings of warmth, respect, and gratitude for the place and my friends there. I deeply hope that I have not inadvertendy been exploitative in any way in these writings. This was the last thing I would have intended.

  PART 1

  The Adolescent Years: When I First Joined The Troop

  1

  The Baboons: The Generations of Israel

  I joined the baboon troop during my twenty-first year. I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla. As a child in New York, I endlessly begged and cajoled my mother into taking me to the Museum of Natural History, where I would spend hours looking at the African dioramas, wishing to live in one. Racing effortlessly across the grasslands as a zebra certainly had its appeal, and on some occasions, I could conceive of overcoming my childhood endomorphism and would aspire to giraffehood. During one period, I became enthused with the collectivist utopian rants of my elderly communist relatives and decided that I would someday grow up to be a social insect. A worker ant, of course. I made the miscalculation of putting this scheme into an elementary-school writing assignment about my plan for life, resulting in a worried note from the teacher to my mother.

  Yet, whenever I wandered the Africa halls in the museum, I would invariably return to the mountain gorilla diorama. Something primal had clicked the first time I stood in front of it. My grandfathers had died long before I was bo
rn. They were mythically distant enough that I would not be able to pick either out in a picture. Amid this grandfatherly vacuum, I decided that a real-life version of the massive, sheltering silverback male gorilla stuffed in the glass case would be a good substitute. A mountainous African rain forest amid a group of gorillas began to seem like the greatest refuge imaginable.

  By age twelve, I was writing fan letters to primatologists. By fourteen, I was reading textbooks on the subject. Throughout high school, I finagled jobs in a primate lab at a medical school and, finally, sojourning to Mecca itself, volunteered in the primate wing of the museum. I even forced the chairman of my high school language department to find me a self-paced course in Swahili, in preparation for the fieldwork I planned to do in Africa. Eventually, I went off to college to study with one of the deans of primatology. Everything seemed to be falling into place.

  But in college, some of my research interests shifted and I became focused on scientific questions that could not be answered with gorillas. I would need to study a species that lived out in the open in the grasslands, with a different type of social organization, a species that was not endangered. Savanna baboons, who had struck no particular chord in me before, became the logical species to study. You make compromises in life; not every kid can grow up to become president or a baseball star or a mountain gorilla. So I made plans to join the baboon troop.

  I joined the troop in the last year of the reign of Solomon. In those days, the other central members of the troop were Leah, Devorah, Aaron, Isaac, Naomi, and Rachel. I didn’t plan beforehand to give the baboons Old Testament names. It just happened. A new adult male, leaving the troop he grew up in, would transfer into the troop, and during the few weeks when he’d vacillate about joining permanently, I would hesitate about giving him a name. I’d just refer to him in my notes as the new adult transfer, or NAT, or Nat, or, by the time he decided to stay forever, Nathanial. Adam was first known as ATM, for adult transfer male. The small kid who was first abbreviated as the SML kid then turned into Samuel on me. At that point I just gave up and started handing out the prophets and matriarchs and judges left and right. I would still occasionally stick with a purely descriptive name—Gums or Limp, for example. And I was way too insecure in my science to publish technical papers using these names—everyone got a number then. But the rest of the time, I wallowed in biblical names.

  I have always liked Old Testament names, but I would hesitate to inflict Obadiah or Ezekial on a child of mine, so I ran wild with the sixty baboons in the troop. Plus, clearly, I was still irritated by the years I spent toting my Time-Life books on evolution to show my Hebrew school teachers, having them blanch at such sacrilege and tell me to put them away; it felt like a pleasing revenge to hand out the names of the patriarchs to a bunch of baboons on the African plains. And, with some sort of perversity that I suspect powers a lot of what primatologists do, I couldn’t wait for the inevitable day that I could record in my field notebook that Nebuchanezzar and Naomi were off screwing in the bushes.

  What I wanted to study was stress-related disease and its relationship to behavior. Sixty years ago, a scientist named Selye discovered that your emotional life can affect your health. It struck the mainstream doctors as ludicrous—people were perfectly accustomed to the idea of viruses or bacteria or carcinogens or whatnot getting you sick, but your emotions? Selye found that if you got rats upset in all sorts of purely psychological ways, they got sick. They got ulcers, their immune systems collapsed, their reproduction went to hell, they got high blood pressure. We know now exactly what was happening—this was the discovery of stress-related disease. Selye showed that stress was what you were undergoing when emotional or physical disturbances threw your body’s balance out of whack. And if it went on for too long, you got sick.

  That last piece has been hammered home with a vengeance—stress makes all sorts of things in the body go bad, and in the years since Selye, people have documented numerous diseases that can be worsened by stress. Adult onset diabetes, muscle atrophy, high blood pressure and atherosclerosis, arrested growth, impotency, amenorrhea, depression, decalcification of bones. You name it. In my laboratory work, I was studying how, on top of all that, stress can kill certain brain cells.

  It seemed a miracle that any of us survived. But clearly we did. I decided that, in addition to my laboratory work on neurons, I wanted to study the optimistic side of it—how come some of us are more resistant to stress than others? Why are some bodies and some psyches better at coping? Does it have something to do with your rank in society? If you have lots of relatives, if you hang out with friends? If you play with kids? If you sulk when you’re upset about something or if you find someone else to take it out on? I decided to go study this in wild baboons.

  They were perfect for it. Baboons live in big, complex social groups, and the population I went to study lived like kings. Great ecosystem, the Serengeti. Grass and trees and animals forever, Marlin Perkins country. The baboons work maybe four hours a day to feed themselves; hardly anyone is likely to eat them. Basically, baboons have about a half dozen solid hours of sunlight a day to devote to being rotten to each other. Just like our society—few of us are getting hypertensive from physical stressors, none of us are worrying about famines or locust plagues or the ax fight we’re going to have with the boss out in the parking lot at five o’clock. We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress. Just like these baboons.

  So I would go out and study the behavior of baboons, see who was doing what with whom—fights, trysts and friendships, alliances and dalliances. Then I would dart them, anesthetize them, see how their bodies were doing—blood pressure, cholesterol levels, rate of wound healing, levels of stress hormones. What would individual differences in behavior and psychological patterns have to do with the individual differences in how their bodies were working? I wound up studying only the males. You wouldn’t want to anesthetize females when they were pregnant, or when they had a dependent nursing kid, and that’s most of the time for most of the females. Thus, I settled in with the males and planned to get to know them very well.

  It was 1978; John Travolta was the most important human alive, white suits were sweeping our proud nation, and Solomon was in the final year of his rule. Solomon was good and wise and just. Actually, that’s nonsense, but I was an impressionable young transfer male at the time. Nevertheless, he was a pretty imposing baboon. For years, the anthropology textbooks had been having a love affair with savanna baboons and their top-ranking male, the alpha male. According to the books, the baboons were complex social primates living in open grasslands; they had organized hunts, a hierarchical rank system, and at their core was the alpha male. He led the troop to food, spearheaded the hunts, defended against predators, kept the females in line, changed the lightbulbs, fixed the car, blah blah blah. Just like our human ancestors, the textbooks ached to say, and sometimes even did. Most of that turned out to be wrong, naturally. The hunts for food were disorganized free-for-alls. Furthermore, the alpha male couldn’t lead the troop to food during a crisis, as he wouldn’t know where to go. The males transferred into the troops as adolescents, while the females spent their whole lives in the same troop. Thus, it would be the old females who remembered the grove of olive trees past the fourth hill. When predators attacked, the alpha male would be in the thick of it, defending an infant. But only if he was absolutely certain that it was his kid who was at risk of becoming someone’s dinner. Otherwise, he had the highest, safest spot in the tree to watch the action. So much for Robert Ardrey and 1960s anthropology.

  Nevertheless, within the small, parochial, self-interested, unreflective, petty world of male baboons, being alpha was hot stuff. You might not really be the troop leader, but you got to do about half the matings, sit in the shade when it was hot, enjoy the best food with a minimum of effort merely by ripping off someone else’s lunch box. And Solomon excelled at all of this. He had been alpha male in th
e troop for three years, an inordinately long time for a male’s tenure. The grad student who preceded me with the troop said that Solomon had been a ferocious and canny fighter back when he defeated his predecessor, but by the time I got there (and secretly instituted the name Solomon—his boring published identification number I will never divulge), he was in his silver years and resting on his laurels, persisting out of sheer psychological intimidation. He was damn good at it. He hadn’t had a major fight in a year. He would just glance at someone, rouse himself from his regal setting and saunter over, at the most swat him, and that would settle things. Everyone was terrified of him. He swatted at me once, knocked me off a rock, shattered my going-away-to-Africa-gift binoculars, left me terrified of him as well. I immediately dropped any plans I might have had of challenging him for the alpha position.

  Most of his days he spent lounging with the many infants who he felt certain were his kids (i.e., no one else went near the female baboon during the part of the cycle she conceived), stealing the occasional tuber or root that someone else had dug up, being groomed, consorting with new females in heat. As of late, the hot number in the troop was Devorah, daughter of Leah, who was probably the oldest member of the troop, the alpha female, and one incredibly tough cookie. Male baboon ranks shift over time; as someone grows into his prime, someone else snaps a canine and is out of business. Females, on the other hand, inherit their rank from their mothers; they get the rank below mom, kid sister gets one below that, and so on, until the next lower-ranking family starts. So Leah had been sitting on top of that pile for at least a quarter of a century. Leah would harass Naomi, around her age and the matriarch of a much lower-ranking family. Old Naomi would sit down to a midday rest in some nice spot in the shade, and Leah would bash on over and boot her out. Naomi, unruffled, would find someplace else to sit, and, unable to resist, Leah would do it again and again. I would marvel at the antiquity of it. Some years before, Jimmy Carter was jogging at the White House, people were buying Pet Rocks and trying to look like Farrah Fawcett-Majors, and the aging Leah was giving Naomi grief. Even further back, the My Lai massacre occurred, people were wearing cranberry bell-bottoms and dancing on waterbeds, and the prime-aged Leah was forcing Naomi to groom her. Further back, Lyndon Johnson was showing off his gallbladder scar while the adolescent Leah was waiting for Naomi to fall asleep during her midday nap before hassling her. And way back when people were still protesting the Rosenbergs’ being executed and I was positioned in my grandmother s lap in her nursing home for us to be photographed with the Brownie camera, Naomi, the toddler, had to give the branch she was playing with to Leah. And now they were two decrepit old ladies still playing musical chairs in the savanna.