Although there are a whole bunch of glossy magazines out there suggesting we eat our vegetables raw, the mere fact the we, or our ancestors rather, were able to cook their food, changed the course of human evolution and we were well on our way to yuppies driving four wheel drive SUVs clutching cellular phones!
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Huge plumes of smoke, painted with light
from the fire and the setting sun! |
The ability to hold a root over the fire, provided Zog and family with an opportunity to detoxify the tubers and other plant materials, increased their palatability, so the toddlers would also eat roots and tubers otherwise filled with vile tannins, increasing its digestibility. To cook meat so it would last a little longer also contributed significantly to improve diets and reduce the body's strain against toxins and other strange chemicals… Cooking increased our culinary diversity and many great thinkers suggest therefore that fire lit up human evolution and put it into overdrive… some even suggest that the use of fire lead to the rapid increase in human brain size! So its clear that since our days as cave-dwellers, fire has played a clear and directing role in the evolution of humankind.
However, this is not a lesson in anthropology! And I am seriously digressing!! I am simply trying to justify my innate attraction to fire… I love fire, and as a scientist I need to have an hypothesis as to why it is such a demanding factor in my make-up as a modern man writing blogs!
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Systematically consuming all dry vegetation
converting biomass into heat, ash and carbon dioxide |
My theory is that fire had such a profound impact on the collective human construct that our fascination and attraction to it remains to this day. Not only did it cook and preserve our food but it prevented us from freezing to death in our wintery caves, and crucially it kept the predators at bay. Fire therefore contributed in various ways to reduce mortality in the human line able to control it. That is not trivial and we will not forget that! Reinforcing the role of fire, it gave us the opportunity to invent graffiti, and the written language was born as our ancestral toddlers started playing noughts-and-crosses on the cave walls using charcoal left over from last night’s tuber and ostrich BBQ!
The other side of fire, the uncontrolled wild fire, is incredibly devastating! It destroys, it requires oxygen and fuel and creates heat and if that fuel is your grassland or house or car, then fire is an immense enemy! That side of me also hates fire. As a biologist I understand the role of fire, positive and negative on the environment. It can transform a golden waving grassland into ash and black soot in minutes and hours… an entire season’s growth can be destroyed in a single fire lasting no longer than a few hours. A year's rainfall can go up in smoke and leave us with nothing but bare soil and starving herbivores. The reality is that Africa still burns probably much like in the days when Zog and his clan discussed ways in which to control this new innovation! Its been part of this (and other) continents for a very very long time. It shaped the vegetation and everything else with it. No part of this world is untouched by it (apart from the poles, to some extent!). In short, fire shaped the way this continent and its inhabitants evolved and it will continue to do so in many ways.
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| Captivating the human mind and soul. |
So as I leave the office and drive home at night in the winter, and I turn onto Matopos road my eyes start looking for the tell tale glow on the horizon. I am looking for it cause I don’t want to see it! I love watching the savanna grow and ripen into a rich honey colored mass of waving grass in the late summer. To see it destroyed with all its inhabitants is soul destroying. Then when you see it, that red and orange smokey glow in the distance your heart pounce in your throat, just like in my younger days on the farm, where fire was enemy number one and everyone in one’s household was ready to assist if a neighbor would call and say the dreaded word “FIRE”.
But when you see it and when you are over the initial shock of it, and like the rest of Africa, who has accepted death and destruction to a large extent - when you get to that point, then the ancient role of fire takes its effect on me. I cannot drive past it, I can not ignore it though other cars speed by. I, however, have to stop and look, get out the car and walk to it, as I am drawn to it. You often hear the anger in it - its amazing how much noise it makes, an angry beast consuming everything in its way. An incredible number of minute explosions, as oils and resins and gasses ignite with audible cracks and sizzling sounds are emitted as gasses are extruded from confined spaces in dead and live wood and dense grass stands.
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The contrasts are amazing - dry grass, bright fire, dull smoke
and an amazing array of smells and sounds
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When you stop and watch, it is mesmerizing… it consumes your mind like it consumes the dry vegetation. Sometimes rapidly it will lunge itself forward into large clumps of dense fuel, other times it will gently find its way through the short grass, bridging itself to the next large accumulation of dry matter… almost like an athlete pacing himself, for the final assault on the finish line. Sometimes during these the gentle periods, there are patches which are rejected, or forgotten by the fire or simply not worthy of being devoured, either the biomass is too sparse or the fire out-burned itself and then cant get to it… I love looking at these patches of unburnt vegetation amongst a sea of black, after the fire. They remind me of last standing pieces on a chessboard, the last remaining subjects of a game between masters… the last men standing in a war.
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| While fires are attractive - be sure not to ge trapped! |
While devastating, and highly destructive, fire is also amazingly life-giving. How contradictory can this be? Like the rest of this continent, there are paradoxes and ironies and sometimes just plain illogical phenomena. Yet, soon in contrast to the otherwise black world a new sword of green grass will emerge, bright green, greener than where the veld did not burn - or perhaps it is a cynical play of color in your eyes and in your mind! The reality is that this world sometimes needs it - where we live and work in rural Africa, the grass are habitually burned every year, which is not good. But in places with “sound” management - there is often the need to burn.. To remove the dead wood, the moribund grass and reset the system. Some plants only germinate after smoky fires stimulate their seeds from dormancy… So its not all completely negative! It facilitates and initiates the next cycle, its just that sometimes these cycles follow too rapidly after each other.
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Fires at night are simply amazing. Captivating, Awesome!
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Whichever the case may be, in the day that may follow such fires, I always look for the new grass, those green little guys bravely pushing their heads into this great new world, unaware of what may follow. Not knowing whether they fill the simple stomach of a locust, the complex series of fermentation chambers of a ruminant like the impala or the sheep and goats, whether it will be a stately sable antelope or if they would survive the cycle and be consumed by Africa’s ultimate herbivore, fire.
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Turing reality into a temporary fairy land of color and a
hypnotic theatre of which the aftermath is a cruel black world. |
So, I stop and look, perhaps allow the fire to play with my eyes and my mind a little… allow myself the luxury to travel back to the cave days where our ancestors may have scavenged the after effects of these fires, just like modern raptors swoop down and catch insects fleeing in the face of the fire or other scavengers searching the barren landscape for half cooked victims of the fire…. I may take a few photographs… smell the smoke, wonder about the puff-adders and squirrels again… and when I have had my fix I drive home. There, I greet my family, eat a well cooked meal, pour something smooth and settle in front of my fireplace, and contemplate my day and the ones to follow.
