In Brightest Africa

by Carl Ethan Akeley

She asked me how I was, and I said that I was all right. I noticed a peculiar expression on her face. If I had had a looking glass, I should probably have understood it better. One eye was closed and the forehead over it skinned. My nose was broken and my cheek cut so that it hung down, exposing my teeth. I was dirty all over, and from time to time spit blood from the hemorrhages inside. Altogether, I was an unlovely subject and looked hardly worth saving. But I did get entirely over it all, although it took me three months in bed. The thing that was serious was that the elephant had crushed several of my ribs into my lungs, and these internal injuries took a long time to heal. As a matter of fact, I don't suppose I would have pulled through even with Mrs. Akeley's care if it hadn't been for a Scotch medical missionary who nearly ran himself to death coming to my rescue. He had been in the country only a little while and perhaps this explains his coming so fast when news reached him of a man who had been mauled by an elephant. The chief medical officer at Fort Hall, knowing better what elephant mauling usually meant, came, but he didn't hurry. I saw him later and he apologized, but I felt no grievance. I understood the situation. Usually when an elephant gets a man a doctor can't do anything for him.

But this isn't always so. Some months later I sat down in the hotel at Nairobi with three other men, who like myself had been caught by elephants and had lived to tell the tale. An elephant caught Black in his trunk, and threw him into a bush that broke his fall. The elephant followed him and stepped on him, the bush this time forming a cushion that saved him, and although the elephant returned two or three times to give him a final punch, he was not killed. However, he was badly broken up.

Outram and a companion approached an elephant that was shot and down, when the animal suddenly rose, grabbed Outram in his trunk and threw him. The elephant followed him, but Outram scrambled into the grass while the elephant trampled his pith helmet into the ground, whereupon Outram got right under the elephant's tail and stuck to this position while the elephant turned circles trying to find him, until, becoming faint from his injuries, Outram dived into the grass at one side. Outram's companion by this time got back into the game and killed the elephant.

Hutchinson's story I have forgotten a little now, but I remember that he said the elephant caught him, brushed the ground with him, and then threw him. The elephant followed him and Hutchinson put off fate a few seconds by somehow getting amongst the elephant's legs. The respite was enough, for the gun boy, by this time, began firing and drove the elephant off.

In all of these cases, unlike mine, the elephants had used their trunks to pick up their victims and to throw them, and they had intended finishing them by trampling on them. This use of the trunk seems more common than the charge with the tusks that had so nearly finished me. Up in Somaliland Dudo Muhammud, my gun boy, showed me the spot where he had seen an elephant kill an Italian prince. The elephant picked the prince up in his trunk and beat him against his tusks, the prince, meanwhile, futilely beating the elephant's head with his fists. Then the elephant threw him upon the ground, walked on him, and then squatted on him, rubbing back and forth until he had rubbed his body into the ground.

But elephants do use their tusks and use them with terrible effect. About the time we were in the Budongo Forest, Mr. and Mrs. Longdon were across Lake Albert in the Belgian Congo. One day Longdon shot a bull elephant and stood watching the herd disappear, when a cow came down from behind, unheard and unseen, ran her tusk clear through him and, with a toss of her head, threw him into the bush and went on. Longdon lived four days.

But although the elephant is a terrible fighter in his own defence when attacked by man, that is not his chief characteristic. The things that stick in my mind are his sagacity, his versatility, and a certain comradeship which I have never noticed to the same degree in other animals. I like to think of the picture of the two old bulls helping along their comrade wounded by Major Harrison's gun; to think of several instances I have seen of a phenomenon, which I am sure is not accidental, when the young and husky elephants formed the outer ring of a group protecting the older ones from the scented danger. I like to think back to the day I saw the group of baby elephants playing with a great ball of baked dirt two and a half feet in diameter which, in their playing, they rolled for more than half a mile, and the playfulness with which this same group teased the babies of a herd of buffalo until the cow buffaloes chased them off. I think, too, of the extraordinary fact that I have never heard or seen African elephants fighting each other. They have no enemy but man and are at peace amongst themselves.

It is my friend the elephant that I hope to perpetuate in the central group in the Roosevelt African Hall as it is now planned for the American Museum of Natural History—a hall with groups of African animal skins mounted on sculptured bodies, with backgrounds painted from the country itself. In this, which we hope will be an everlasting monument to the Africa that was, the Africa that is now fast disappearing, I hope to place the elephant group on a pedestal in the centre of the hall—the rightful place for the first animal of them all.

And it may not be many years before such museum exhibits are the only remaining records of my jungle friends. As civilization advances in Africa, the extinction of the elephant is being accomplished slowly but quite as surely as that of the American buffalo two generations ago. It is probably not true that the African elephant cannot be domesticated. In fact, somewhere in the Congo is a farm where fifty tame elephants, just as amenable as those in India, are at work. But taming elephants is not a sound proposition economically. Elephant farming is a prince's game, and Africa has no princes to play it. An elephant requires hundreds of acres of land, infinitely more than cattle and sheep and the other domesticated animals. So it is that as man moves on the land, the elephant must move off.

Moreover, African settlers are making every effort to hasten the process. Wherever the elephants refuse to be confined to their bailiwicks and annoy the natives by raiding their farms, the Government has appointed official elephant killers. The South African elephant in the Addoo bush was condemned to be exterminated several years ago. Here, however, the hunters sent into the bush to kill them off found the elephant too much for them and finally gave up the attempt. Now they are being shot only as they come out to molest the natives, with the result that they are able to persist in the bush in limited numbers. Uganda also has official elephant killers wherever the elephants make trouble in the natives' gardens. In British East Africa and in Tanganyika a similar situation exists. The game must eventually disappear as the country is settled, and with it will be wiped out the charm of Africa.