Taming African Elephants?

 

a review of A Training School for Elephants – Retracing a Curious Episode in the European Grab for Africa, by Sophy Roberts, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 2025.

         This is an intriguing book. It tracks two efforts to domesticate African elephants.  One was marginally successful and the other a failure. Both had Belgian antecedents.  The first try was commanded by King Leopold who in 1879 ordered domesticated Indian elephants be transported to Africa to be used to capture and tame wild African beasts. The idea was to utilize elephants as pack animals for the transport of goods, especially ivory. Most of the book relates that story – the trials of ocean transport from India to Africa, a difficult landing near Dar es Salaam, the months long trek across the interior of then-Tanganika territory along caravan routes ultimately to Lake Tanganika. The trek was replete with hostilities, leadership squabbles, disease, lack of food and fodder, bad water and challenging terrain.  Author Roberts uses excerpts from diaries, letters, reports and other documentation to describe the effort. The nineteenth century observations are counterbalanced by comments by Roberts as she and two colleagues retraced the old caravan route.  Of course, for them much had changed; vehicles, roads and rail provided better access, but the terrain remained the same. Even so, modern day adventurers could sense the difficulties and frustrations earlier travelers experienced, especially those herding four ungainly elephants. Ultimately, as one might suspect, this was the failed venture. I enjoyed the fact that Roberts took time to sit down with contemporary chiefs and leaders to tap their community’s memories of events a hundred and fifty years old.  

The successful effort to tame African elephants was mounted in the Belgian Congo in the 1920s at a place called Gangala-na-Bodio. There, several dozen elephants were tamed enough to permit riding and hauling.  However, the utility of using animal labor for such tasks was already being overtaken by machines.  Ultimately, without economic rational, the training effort just faded away. 

This book is well researched and written. It brings little known bizarre efforts to light. Readers can’t help but admire the grit and determination of those involved even while recognizing the folly of the undertaking.