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 so reverent: in Namibia, the story goes that the elephant got its long trunk because it was so slow and clumsy that it couldn’t fend off a crocodile, which bit the docile animal and stretched its nose into the now trademark trunk.
In the Congo, legends have persisted for centuries that witchcraft can turn people into animals, and even today many villagers will blame their neighbours when elephants run amok and raid crops or kill people, saying that it was down to voodoo or magic, which is often a convenient way to bad-mouth an enemy or have an excuse to plunder a nearby village.
Whether good or bad though, elephants have featured heavily in cultural symbolism, art and storytelling around the world since ancient times. I remember being rather surprised when walking across the Sahara Desert in Sudan to discover prehistoric etchings on a rocky outcrop depicting all sorts of animals, including elephants. They date back thousands of years to a time when North Africa was a lush, green savannah, like much of the rest of Africa. In the Tadrart mountains, on the border of Libya and Algeria, lies some of the best-preserved rock art in Africa, including a remarkably well-proportioned picture of an elephant that’s 12,000 years old.
North African elephants have been extinct for 1,500 years, but their legacy lives on in Mediterranean culture. The Biblical behemoth that features in the Book of Job is described as a fantastical monster, which sounds suspiciously like a pachyderm:
Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox.
Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly.
He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together.
His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron.
He is the chief of the ways of God: he that made him can make his sword to approach unto him.
Surely the mountains bring him forth food, where all the beasts of the field play.
He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens.
The shady trees cover him with their shadow; the willows of the brook compass him about.
Behold, he drinketh up a river, and hasteth not: he trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth.
He taketh it with his eyes: his nose pierceth through snares.
In Ancient Egypt, elephants were prized as both war machines and status symbols, dead and alive. Elephants featured in hieroglyphics as a testament to a time when their range was on a global scale.
In Ancient Greece, too, the elephant found its way into popular culture after Alexander the Great encountered war elephants on his travels to India, and subsequently incorporated them into his own army. When the ancient sailors dug up the skulls of prehistoric dwarf elephants on the island of Cyprus, it’s easy to forgive them for thinking that they must have belonged to the remains of the mythical one-eyed Cyclops.
Then, of course, Ancient Rome had its own encounters with the beasts when the North African leader Hannibal brought an army of war elephants halfway