A Primate's Memoir, by Robert Sapolsky

A primatolagist's adventures in Africa.

Look: this starts as a kind of what-you'd-expect dad-humour book about studying Kenyan baboons, like reporting anthromorphically on the baboons' amorous activities and clear social pecking order, and discussing the joys of spitting tranquiliser darts at baboons' butts (for science!).

That stuff was all enjoyable, and thought-provoking. It admittedly has some of the kind of "white man in Africa" stuff that you might fear/expect, but honestly it could have been so much worse.

Then, suddenly, unexpectedly, there's a long section about the Mau Mau revolt and some biographical sketches of human life under colonialism and post-colonialism, and then he lurches into descriptions of his travels around East Africa, hitchhiking with loggers and truckers, visting Uganda right at the fall of Idi Amin, and... it's all pretty great journalism? I guess it has the benefit that, since he's not a journalist and the politics is not the "point" of the book, he can just tell these stories without having to go quite as deep or detailed as a Politics Book might feel obliged to, and that makes the stories roll much better.

And then, at the end, there's another incredible section with him and the baboons – described, with spoilers, below. But God, it's so good – this book is so good.

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So: the end of the book is that his baboon troop catches tuberculosis and begins dying off. These are baboons he has followed for years and truly cares about like friends or family, and he has to bury them one by one, and its devastating.

He starts the section by saying that, for the rest of this book, he tried to think about craft and how to make his stories interesting, but that for this section he would just talk about his experiences. And that it wouldn't be fully satisfying, because there wasn't a real villain. But (in my opinion) the episode captures so many of the themes of the book, and a particular emotional experience that I've rarely (or never?) seen written about.

First, when the baboons start dying, Sapolsky tries to get one to Nairobi for testing but is blocked at every turn by bureaucracy and corruption. The park warden tells him that if he takes one out of the park he will be done for poaching or smuggling. Well: first the warden hides from him for weeks, has his assistant pretend he's Out Of Town, even though Sapolsky can clearly tell he's right there. After strings are pulled in Nairobi, permissions is granted to take up to three baboons out the park... but when Sapolsky arrives at the gate, a guard pretends to believe that the permission is only for exactly three baboons, to get a bribe from Sapolsky. (Meanwhile the baboon he needs to transport alive to Nairobi for the tests to run is dying among all these delays).

It turns out the turberculosis is not the regular air-borne kind, but caught by eating meat. And it turns out that meat is from tuberculosissed cows, which the local Massai sell to the tourist lodge. The tourist lodge has a Meat Inspector, who gets bribed to look the other way. The chef who bribes him is a beloved community figure, who Sapolsky genuinely likes in general, but who is causing all his baboons to die. Sapolsky indirectly confronts him – he can't accuse him directly – and the chef says the incredible line "it is impossible for the meat to be bad. The meat inspector is a good man. He checks the heart, brain, lungs, etc of every cow, and if it is not good – he will not let me kill it."

(The same chef and meat inspector had previously got the whole lodge sick by accepting a cow that was already dead when it arrived with them, and the response of the community was... weirdly muted, nobody was mad at them, and when Sapolsky asks people about it and whether they aren't worried that e.g. their children could die from poisoned meat, they say "no, that wouldn't happen, they learned their lesson, they won't do it again." And in a sad reflective moment Sapolsky writes that... well, how much can he blame the meat inspector or the chef when their community has this amor fati attitude to their behaviour?)

Sapolsky has dreams of outing and shaming the tour-lodge company, including of writing to Queen Elizabeth (who had visited Kenya recently) saying "Your Majesty might be interested to know that in your recent visit to Kenya you may have been fed tuberculosised meat." But his superior in Nairobi quickly disabuses him: this is a country where the rich/powerful control everything, including the tour-lodge company; where one of the government minister's wives is widely known to be in charge of all the poaching; and where you absolutely will not, under any circumstances, try to shame the company for serving tuberculosised meat.

What follows is, for me, one of the first times I've seen someone describe accurately an experience that I think is incredibly common: being fucked over by more powerful forces, knowing there's nothing you can do about it, and yet stewing over it for years and years and years. It's clear that this was on his mind all the time for many years, and he wasn't allowed to tell anyone about it, and he just sat and suffered with it. He had to watch his baboons die, needlessly, so that somebody could make a few bucks. And my heart goes out to him, and thanks him for writing this down, because I think it's hard to explain what it's like to have your brain kidnapped by this kind of thought-cycle, and he does it beautifully.