A Training School for Elephants: Retracing a Curious Episode in the European Land Grab for Africa

In 1879, while the Great Powers were scrambling to carve up Africa, Belgian king Leopold II came up with the “bizarre idea” that sending four Indian elephants to the continent would give him a competitive edge, explains journalist Roberts (Pianos for Siberia) in this riveting, sumptuously written account. Leopold, today well-known for his cruel reign over Congo, believed that if African elephants could be trained to work in the manner of Indian elephants—which bore huge loads and carried out much labor in the Indian subcontinent—it would speed up the extraction of Africa’s resources. For this task Leopold dispatched Irish sea captain Frederick Carter, who had little experience with Africa, or with elephants for that matter. Throughout Roberts’s reporting, which takes her from the archives in Brussels where Leopold’s records can be found to Carter’s trail in Zanzibar, she is attentive to the lure of permitting the colonizers’ “fantasy” of Africa to dominate her own impressions. The reality, Roberts shows, was instead riven with maniacal avarice and both human and animal suffering (Carter obscenely loaded the elephants with seven times the amount they were supposed to carry). In Roberts’s artful telling, the folly and brute madness of subjugating the African elephant serves as a searing symbol for the conquest of the continent itself. It’s a tour de force. (Apr.)