The Last Elephants, compiled by Don Pinnock and Colin Bell, Hardie Grant Books, 2019.
I have had this book for a long time and don’t know why I haven’t got to it before – possibly I worried that it would be depressing and heart-breaking (the title is less than optimistic) but that turns out to be far from the case or, rather, it is so much more than that. It is stunning.
From the first eight chapters I have been awestruck by the photographs, deeply moved and inspired. The design, paper and printing are top echelon. Every contributor of text and images made their work available for free because of their passion for the cause.
Elephants are my favourite animals and I get more upset by their mistreatment and slaughter than just about anything else.
The book opens with a quotation from naturalist and conservationist Brian Jackman:
“Africa changes you forever, like nowhere on earth. Once you have been there you will never be the same. But how do you begin to describe its magic to someone who has never felt it? How can you explain the fascination of this vast, dusty continent, whose oldest roads are elephant paths?”
This chimes exactly my feelings on returning from Tanzania, clumsily saying to friends that it is impossible to describe the experience of a safari, the only way to understand what it is like is to go there. All of the photographs here are from that trip.
Next a quotation by Wangari Maathaĩ:
“The generation that destroys the environment is not the generation that pays the price. That is the problem.”
So few words to say so very much. The tilde over the last “i” is interesting, denoting a Gĩkũyũ vowel.
She was a Kenyan “social, environmental activist who founded the Green Belt Movement, an environmental non-governmental organization focused on planting trees, environmental conservation and women’s rights. In 2004 she became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.” (Wikipedia). I feel mortified that I had never heard of her.
The foreword is by prince William and I have to admit it’s pretty good, although I have written before, following Mark Avery’s thoughts, that associations with the royal family by wildlife organisations is usually unwise.
The preface by the compilers warns of the awful possibilities – elephants could become extinct. In some countries in West Africa they already are. Just 100 years ago there were between 3 and 5 million African elephants; in 2016, according to the Great Elephant Census, there were fewer than 450,000. “Let us not have to bear witness to the last wild elephants. That would cause a terrible, unforgivable hurt to the Earth’s living fabric. And in a deep, ancient way, the loss of such intelligent, thoughtful minds that have been with us throughout the existence of our species [and for millions of years before that] would leave us so lonely.”
Dr Ian McCallum writes: “It is time to take a long hard look at ourselves. It is time to renew our language and with it, our sense of connection and relationship to our wild kin. Let’s never again refer to them as non-human. They are human-others … other than human. Large, small, scaled and feathered, they are in our blood and in our psyche. Who and what would we be without them?”
The first chapter, ‘Counting elephants’, by Dr Mike Chase and Kelly Landen, founders of Elephants Without Borders, is about the Great Elephant Census, the methodologies and the results, complete with graphs, maps and tables.
Any statistics are of course only ever going to estimates but since the book was published in 2019 I have looked into the current situation. The total African elephant population looks to be about the same but could total 550,000. That’s African Savanna Elephants and African Forest Elephants, which are two distinct species.
The population in South Africa is stable and perhaps increasing, in East Africa recovering, in Central Africa precarious and in West Africa critical. Ivory poaching has decreased but habit loss and the human-elephant conflict have not.
This might not sound too terrible, but still between 55 and 100 elephants are killed for ivory every single day. That’s between 25,000 and 30,000 annually. This can be construed as one elephant every fifteen to twenty minutes.
The peak was in 2011 but the Chinese ban on ivory trade and tougher law enforcement in Kenya and Tanzania have helped to slow the rate of slaughter. But there are many places where that rate exceeds the birth rate. Furthermore elephants are also killed for their skin (used in traditional medicine) and in retaliation for crop-raiding.
When law enforcement leads to improvement, in some countries, organised crime syndicates simply turn their attention elsewhere. In conflict zones insurgent groups which use ivory for funding making the jobs of the rangers especially dangerous.
Two to three rangers out on the frontlines are killed every week.
The second chapter, ‘Why elephants matter’ by Dr Ian McCallum opens with a poem he wrote for the authors of the first chapter:
To wake up to the web of intelligence,
to the wild origins of sentience,
to find your voice and raise it,
that other mays raise theirs
for elephants.
He writes of the work of American neuro-scientist Jaak Panksepp from which we can confirm the obvious (to me at least): the neuro-circuits in our brains responsible for such emotions as rage, fear, nurture and lust as well as emotional circuits relating to play – we share these with all mammals. “It’s why we become voices for the voiceless … The outrage of an angered elephant or lion is no less potent than ours. The despair of an animal with a broken spirit is no less saddening than that of a human being with a broken spirit.” We are part of them and they are part of us.
Chapter 3, ‘Imagining Africa’s elephants’, by Dan Wylie concerns the representations of elephants in literature and visual art. Basalt etchings in Wadi Mathendous, Libya date back to around 6000 BC. He also touches on the use of elephants in war (one of the few scenes which jars terribly with me in both the books and films of The Lord of the Rings). Tolkien calls them “oliphaunts”. McCallum mentions Gomphotheres, ancestors of modern elephants. Then those terrible ‘tales of derring-do’, hunting accounts of the nineteenth century when the huge numbers of animals seemed inexhaustible. “Like the bison and the passenger pigeon in North America, they were not.” He describes these narratives, amusingly, as “numbingly detailed” and self-serving.
More pleasingly and profoundly, this is an extract from the poem ‘Elephant’ by Zimbabwean poet N.H. Bretell:
Slowly the great head turned,
And the late sunlight slept on massive flanks
Like the still slabs of riven krantz,
Immovable, and nonchalantly bearing
The burden of the old enormous lies,
The load of legendary centuries …
There’s a quotation from the Lithuanian novelist Romain Gary in which he describes elephants as clumsy – they are of course not that at all. But there’s another quotation from him between this and the next chapter against an extraordinary background of a photo by Scott Ramsay showing a lone elephant at the White Umfolozi Rver in South Africa:
“Everything is not yet lost, the last hope of freedom has not yet vanished completely from this earth and, who knows, if we stop destroying elephants and save them from extinction, we may yet succeed in protecting our own species.”
There’s another almost at the end of the book:
“I defy anyone to look upon elephants without a sense of wonder. Their enormous size, ther gigantic stature, represents a mass of liberty that sets you dreaming.”
Chapter 4, ‘Eavesdropping on elephants’, is by the great Will Travers OBE (of Born Free fame). “I once thought the international ivory trade ban, secured in 1989, would ring lasting peace. I once thought our leaders had learnt something. But I was wrong.” He points out something I mention very often: the remarkable resemblance between the ears of an African elephant and the shape of Africa. They are “continental” ears. Between 1979 and 1989 50% of African elephants were lost. He quotes the author of my absolute favourite book about wildlife, Laurence Anthony’s The Elephant Whisperer (passim):
“Perhaps the most important lesson I learned is that there are no walls between humans and the elephants except those that we put up ourselves and that until we allow not only elephants but all living creatures their place in the sun, we can never be whole ourselves.”
Travers has devoted himself, amongst many other things, to the often despair-inducing CITES conferences. To their eternal shame, the World Wildlife Fund, an organisation I instinctively distrusted even as a child, were one of a number of wildlife organisation who opposed the petition launched by him, Daphne Sheldrick, David Shepherds, Ian Redmond and others, signed by 600,000 people, which called for an end to the ivory trade, alongside a mountain of evidence and reports.
He also writes of the ‘one-off’ sales of ivory by auction, of which there were two, in 1997 and 2008, which inexorably resulted in a surge in demand. How could we? “The crash of the gavel must have reverberated like a rifle shot across the plains of Africa.” The second was supported by the British government.
Patricia Schonstein contributes Chapter 5, ‘Ritual elephants’, in which she writes of her own collection of small wooden elephants which sounds much like my own, except that I have also bought, in various parts of the world, elephants made of gold-coloured metal, silver and even lapis lazuli, that beautiful deep blue semi-precious stone flecked with gold. A quick count this morning revealed that I have over thirty examples, ranging in height from an inch to around ten inches. I would have used them to illustrate this post but they do not easily photograph well. My only rule is that the pieces must not include anything that suggests servitude or exploitation of any kind, although I have been given some with the best of intentions where that is not the case. Someone told me that for good luck their trunks should always point towards the door. I once bought a canalware painted horseshoe but ended up throwing it out not long afterwards. Neither horseshoes nor enslaved elephants are what I am about.
One of my favourite pieces of elephant art though is a large print by the illustrator Adrienne Kennaway, who was partly raised in Kenya, which she was kind enough to give to me in person (as a favour to her literary agent, Lesley Pollinger, who is a friend of mine). Quite different from her illustrations of children’s books, delicately drawn, it shows a huge animal rising towards the viewer across sand dunes. She seems to me female, a matriarch, with deep sadness in her eyes. There is also something terrifying about her.
I have a silver elephant around my neck at all times and when a keyring with a silver elephant’s head, a gift from my older daughter, finally broke, I fixed it to the dashboard of my car, a constant reminder and perhaps for protection. The song ‘Elephants’ by reggae legend Burning Spear from the Mek We Dweet album springs to mind and I am listening to it now:
I saw the elephants today …
And they were defending each other …
Why can’t east, west, north, and South Africa
All stand up as one?
The elephants, they move as one …
So, Africa should live as one …
I saw the elephants today …
Side up, side up, Africa, side up, side by side …
Move up, move up, Africa, move up, move up as one …
I saw the elephants today
Schonstein suggests that we are not so much Homo sapiens as Homo guerre. She too refers to the dreadful loneliness we would experience if elephants were to be annihilated. “Without these majestic beings there will be an unimaginable void.” What can be worth that? Ivory ornaments and trinkets? “We’d better wise up before it’s too late and forge a new attitude, one of homage and respect for creation. We are just travellers passing through. We have no right to murder our fellow species; the killing of elephants represents impending, irrevocable speciecide. It would be sad beyond measure if all that was left was herds of little wooden elephants.”
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