IN THE POPULAR
imagination, the
Serengeti ecosystem
is an ancient African
landscape of sweep-ing golden plains, unchanged for
eons. Towering giraffes move grace-
fully in step. Elephant herds wade
through waves of grasses. Lions
chase down spiral-horned antelope
in gory hunts. Zigzagging lines of
wildebeests and zebras are perpet-
ually on the move. And the people
who live in the Serengeti, the Maa-
sai and others, if they are acknowl-
edged at all, are generally portrayed
as exotic figures clinging stubbornly
to archaic pastoral traditions.
These representations bear somelikeness to the actual place, but they
fail to capture the complexity of a
vast ecosystem that ranges from
northern Tanzania to southwestern
Kenya and is home to thousands of
plant and animal species. Even the
name, Serengeti—believed to come
from the Maa word for “endless plain”—is deceptive. The
Serengeti is many landscapes, including savanna, woodland,
and riverine forests.
It’s a place like no other on the planet, with the last thriving
populations of some animals. And it’s a place where humans
have lived in balance with animals since the beginnings of our
species. But some of the animals that we have come to know
so much about—and many others that remain mysteries—are
at risk of disappearing as we humans increasingly lay claim to
their habitats and heat the climate.
For scientists like me, the Serengeti is both a time capsule
of an immemorial age and a bellwether for our future. As
comforting as it may be to see it through familiar images and
story lines, we need to understand it as an intricate web of life
that depends on landscapes well beyond the parks, reserves,
and conservancies we’ve set aside.
Like most East Africans, I never visited the Serengeti as a
child. It was for tourists, a place seen by us as out of reach and
irrelevant to our lives. But unlike many, I was lucky, even as a
child growing up in Nairobi in the 1970s, to see some of Kenya’s
wildlife in the wild. To keep order in the house, my mother
would lock me and my brother out and tell us not to come
home until dinnertime. We’d explore the nearby forest, climb
trees, swim rivers, wade through swamps. One day we spotted
a cute animal that looked like a gigantic guinea pig, way up in
a fig tree. A neighbor pulled up, rolled down the window, andDATE
DEC. 20 21NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
WELCOME TO EARTHPAGE
NO. 4 6BY
PAULA KAHUMBUWEB OF LIFE
AN INTRICATE
I