back to our prehistoric roots, when human and giants roamed together in constant communion, fear and understanding; back to a time of pure survival, when it was essential for us to know intimately the ways of the beasts.
Elephants have been around for far longer than human beings, and all throughout our own evolution and history we have been in their company on the plains and in the forests until very recently, all around the world. But before we go on to look at where these creatures came from, it’s important to think about why they are important, and how our relationship has intertwined.
You may have heard the parable of the elephant and the blind men. It tells a cautionary tale about six blind men who encountered this strange animal and decided they must learn what it was like by touching it. Each blind man felt a part of the elephant’s body, but only one part, such as its legs or ear or tusk. They then had to describe the beast to the audience based on their limited experience. Their descriptions of the elephant were, of course, wildly different from each other.
The first man, whose hand landed on the trunk, quite naturally remarked, ‘This being is like a thick snake.’ Another one, whose hand reached its ear, said it seemed like a kind of fan. As for the third person, whose hand was on its leg, he thought the elephant was a fat pillar, like a tree trunk. The blind man who placed his hand upon its side believed the animal was ‘a wall’. Another, who handled its tail, described it as a rope. The last one stroked its tusk, claiming that the elephant was hard, smooth and pointy, like a spear.
In some versions of the story, the blind commentators each suspect that the others are being dishonest and they come to blows. The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their own limited, subjective understanding and are prone to ignoring other people’s experiences, even though they may be equally true.
The nineteenth-century poet John Godfrey Saxe wrote:
It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind
And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right
And all were in the wrong!
He concludes:
So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
In the modern era of polarised politics, antagonistic populism and fake news, perhaps it’s worth taking a moment to learn something from the humble elephant.
When I was little, I was treated to my own particular version of the parable, when I used to visit my Grandad Curzon. The ‘elephant graveyard’ became my favourite childhood game. It was a particularly gruesome bit of child’s play that involved my grandfather blindfolding me and telling me the story of a blind explorer who got lost in the jungles of the Congo, sightless perhaps after having caught malaria or some other nasty tropical disease.
I would revel in excitement as he walked me hand in hand around the garden, and through the ‘jungle’ (rhododendron hedge), past the lethal acacia (rose bushes) and taking care not to wake up the sleeping hyena (the neighbour’s dog). When we passed through the caves of doom (the porch), I knew we were almost reaching the secret destination of our mission, because, despite my blindness, I could feel the warmth of the volcano (the hearth fire).
This was the infamous elephant graveyard, where all the African elephants go to die. It was here that I’d be put through a series of ordeals to test my manhood. I would hold out my hand and be guided by my grandfather to reach out and grasp an inanimate object and have to guess which part of the rotting elephant carcass it was. There were the bones (rack of lamb), the eyeballs (a squishy tomato), the guts (long party balloons), brains (a wet sponge), teeth (his false teeth), and of course, the tusks, in the form of a sharpened cucumber.
If I guessed correctly, then I was able to navigate my way out of the dreaded place, claim my treasure from the grotto (a shiny new 50 pence piece), and regain my sight before bedtime . . .
Elephants have existed in our collective consciousness for as long as we humans have been roaming the African plains and living alongside them. Even in the cities and towns of Europe and the Americas, where elephants were hunted to extinction long ago, the beasts still survive in the form of hearsay, myths and legends.
In many African cultures, the elephant is revered as a creature that embodies the human virtues of intelligence, wisdom and physical strength. The Kamba tribe in Kenya believe that elephants were once human beings. As an old myth goes, there was a poor fellow who set off to find a wealthy and generous man known for his wisdom. The poor man desperately wanted to discover the secret to being rich. After a long journey, the poor man arrived at a beautiful house surrounded by fertile pastures with abundant herds of cattle and sheep.
Here, the wise and rich man generously offered the poor man a hundred sheep and a hundred cows, but the poor man refused, demanding not charity, but the rich man’s secret to success. So instead, the rich man gave the poor man an ointment and told him to rub it on his wife’s front teeth.
The poor man left and somehow convinced his wife to participate, because it would make them very wealthy. Soon after, her teeth began to grow and grow and toughened into ivory tusks the length of a man’s arm. On seeing the incredible spectacle, the poor man imagined untold riches and pulled the tusks out of his wife’s mouth and sold them for a lot of money.
After that, emboldened and excited, he began rubbing the ointment on his wife’s teeth again. But this time when his wife grew tusks, she understandably refused to let her husband touch them, and then, before either of them knew what was happening, her entire body started to change. She became fatter and fatter, and her skin became wrinkled and baggy and grey, and, as if to add insult to injury, her nose got longer and longer until she became a fully fledged elephant. Her husband was so alarmed by her that she ran away deep into the forest where, after a period of lonely sadness, she gave birth to their sons and daughters – the first line of elephants.
Elephants and humans have coexisted in Africa for hundreds of thousands of years, and elephant wisdom is seen as sacred. In Gabon in West Africa, the three great animal chiefs are the leopard, deemed powerful and cunning; the monkey – malicious and agile; and of course, the elephant – wise and strong. People from Ghana and Sierra Leone regarded elephants as past human chiefs and deceased ancestors. One Zulu legend from South Africa tells of a young girl, outcast from her tribe, who in her wanderings, finds a kind and hospitable elephant and marries him; their children, who benefitted from the magic of the beasts, in turn gave birth to a line of powerful chiefs and eventually the forerunners to the royal family.
But not all myths are
