A Training School for Elephants
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
An informative, well-researched retracing of a colonial-era African expedition that brings alive the preposterous “grab for Africa,” from the acclaimed author of The Lost Pianos of Siberia
In 1879, King Leopold II of Belgium launched an ambitious plan to plunder Africa’s resources. The key to cracking open the continent, or so he thought, was its elephants — if only he could train them. And so he commissioned the charismatic Irish adventurer Frederick Carter to ship four tamed Asian elephants from India to the East African coast, where they were marched inland towards Congo. The ultimate aim was to establish a training school for African elephants.
Following in the footsteps of the four elephants, Roberts pieces together the story of this long-forgotten expedition, in travels that take her to Belgium, Iraq, India, Tanzania and Congo. The storytelling brings to life a compelling cast of historic characters and modern voices, from ivory dealers to Catholic nuns, set against rich descriptions of the landscapes travelled. She digs deep into historic records to reckon with our broken relationship with animals, revealing an extraordinary — and enduring — story of colonial greed, ineptitude, hypocrisy, and folly.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
