Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (44 page)

These recently discovered skills are all part of the clever ways elephants organise themselves, both in groups and wandering alone through the savannah and forest of the upper Nile region. ‘Elephants are far more intelligent than chimps,’ said Carl, swigging on a Nile Gold beer. ‘In fact they’re more intelligent than humans.’

He told me of an experiment which had previously been designed to test the reasoning and creativity of chimps. The test required two elephants to solve a mechanical problem by pulling ropes to get food. If there was only one elephant it wouldn’t work. They needed to cooperate to win. Not only did the elephants co-operate, some didn’t even bother to try until the second elephant was released to help them. And one prescient pachyderm worked out how to stand on the rope and get food that way – something even the experimenters hadn’t thought of.

Elephants with specially daubed marks on their faces have been paraded in front of large mirrors. In a show of intelligent awareness, or perhaps nascent vanity, the subject very ably used the mirror information to rub the mark off with its trunk. That is, when they can see the mirror clearly: elephants have notoriously poor eyesight. Hunters report being missed by an elephant they are in broad view of not six yards away. Upwind, of course, the elephant’s sense of smell is capable of whiffing danger over a mile away, which along with their specially developed hearing means they are well defended.

African elephants exist in two species – forest and bush elephant. These can interbreed but rarely do so. Bush elephants are considerably larger and have one toenail fewer, a small enough difference, but
enough to earn them different-species status. A large bull bush elephant can weigh up to ten tons. And the blood within him is 10 per cent of his weight. So killing an elephant can literally release a ton of blood.

Elephants use their intelligence to avoid this bloodletting in many surprising ways. Hunters report groups of female elephants protecting a large bull by forming a pack around him and moving in sympathy, this way denying the hunter a shot at the valuable ivory-bearing male (female African elephants also have tusks but they are smaller and more curved than male ones).

Modern textbooks report that African elephants live in female herds with mature males living alone or in temporary bachelor herds. But this may well be an intelligent adaptation that has occurred in the last hundred years due to the mass killing made possible by the repeating rifle. Aviatrix Beryl Markham wrote of flying in the 1920s over vast herds of elephants with several males among the females. She speculates that changing behaviour to lone males and all-female herds – which were less attractive to hunters – improved the chances of elephant survival.

One hopes they can come up with something new to defeat the latest weapon waged against them: helicopter hunting. Though the Ugandan government receives millions of dollars from the US to hunt down Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony (more on him later), there have been substantiated reports that helicopters have been used both to shoot and to transport the ivory of elephants in Uganda and southern Sudan. Kony has been accused of funding his decades-long children’s army rebellion with ivory that finds its way via Khartoum to China. Certainly the recent explosion in illegal elephant killing has received an impetus from Chinese commercial involvement all over central Africa: it makes it that much easier to ship the stuff home. Workers are counselled (via Chinese websites on getting ivory) to wrap their ivory in tinfoil to thwart airport X-ray machines – in Africa rather than Beijing, one suspects. Will the African elephant go the way of the northern white rhino – whose horn sells in China for $30,000 a pound, more than the price of gold? The white rhino is virtually extinct in the wild, whereas there are said to be between 689,000 and 472,000 elephants in Africa, though of course it is hard to say exactly how many.

Hunted from helicopters, they may not stand much chance, but on the ground the elephant – it’s the world’s largest land animal – is a pretty dangerous beast. It can outsprint Ernst the Norwegian Nile runner, managing a good 30mph when it charges. Hit by something
weighing over six tons doing thirty is like being hit by a very heavy truck, one of those low-slung vehicles carrying bottles of Coke perhaps. Every year there are deaths in zoos, at least two and often up to four a year, stretching back to when we started keeping wild elephants in zoos. Man-killing elephants are no longer executed, though they were in the past. Some were shot and some were hanged in some kind of strange anthropomorphic rite, but the most bizarre was the fate of ‘Four-Paw Topsy’, who stomped a visitor to death during an animal show in 1903 in America. The killer elephant was about to be hanged when Thomas Edison jumped in and offered to electrocute it, at Coney Island. His rationale was that it would show how dangerous AC current (used in electrocutions) was compared to the DC current his company supplied. Fed cyanide-laced carrots just in case Edison’s machine failed, 6,000 volts and a few minutes later the creature was dead – the whole thing being filmed by the newly formed Edison Film Company. You can see a copy of this gruesome snuff movie on YouTube, though you’re warned it could be disturbing to some viewers. Old and murky, it
is
disturbing.

Being thrown to the elephants was a fate for the gladiator who drew the short straw in Roman times. Josephus, never one to miss a good story, tells us that Ptolemy IV, who ruled in Egypt from 221 to 204
BC
, wanted to enslave and brand all Jews dwelling along the Nile with the symbol of Dionysus. The Jews refused and were dragged into an arena full of trumpeting elephants, to be stamped to death. Josephus reports that a miracle occurred; angels intervened and the Jews were saved.

That elephants from Africa get called Jumbo or Dumbo is not surprising – their name in Swahili is
tembu
, quite unlike the Arabic which is
fil
. However,
tembu
when I heard it first used made absolute sense: the ancient Egyptian word for elephant is
yebu
, which also happens to be the name of a village on Elephantine Island in the Nile at Aswan.

16
•
The island of elephants

Time is what finishes an elephant and makes its ivory expensive
.
Nubian proverb

At Elephantine Island, the African Nile gives way to the Egyptian; the people are Nubian and their ancient trade was ivory. In fact the word
‘ivory’ is one of the few English words of ancient Egyptian origin.
Abuw
or
yebu
, just mentioned, means ‘elephant’ in ancient Egyptian; when the Romans arrived in Egypt this became their word for ‘elephant tusk’ –
ebor
– which, with the usual
b
/
v
equivalence, became ‘ivory’ in English.

Yet the multiple twistings of elephant lore don’t stop there. By a kind of doctrine of signatures, Elephantine was destined to be: the island itself is curved and tusk-like. The ‘new’ name of Elephantine (the old one is Yebu, still reserved for the main village on the island, as we have just seen) comes from the Greek word for ‘tusk’ –
eliphas
. Along the shore the giant grey, rounded granite boulders look exactly like bathing elephants – so much so that a guide will tell you that this is why it is really called Elephantine Island. Add to all this that Elephantine is the last, or first, trading post before the impassable (to trading boats) cataracts and Africa – source of all ivory – and you can see why it just had to be.

It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited sites along the Nile, and 6,000 years ago would have been surrounded by elephants – specifically the now extinct, but intriguingly named, north African flaccid elephant. Perhaps it was an elephant island even before ivory started coming downriver. I had seen for myself on boulders in the desert, hundreds of miles inland from Aswan, engravings of elephants.

Elephantine is just across from Aswan; indeed Yebu used to be more important than Aswan in ancient times. Aswan is, as Eratosthenes proved, directly below the Tropic of Cancer in midsummer, which again seems mysteriously to make it the centre of something important. You begin to see why the priests told Herodotus that this was where the Nile originated. There always have been temples on Elephantine – the one to the ram-headed flood god Khnum is beautifully exact – the tawdry Mövenpick Hotel on the island has tried to emulate its design in its monstrous tower: it is a failed architectural tribute, which, as I said earlier, looks more like a giant air vent, or perhaps a theme-park garbage bin just waiting to be stuffed to its gills with burger boxes and Coke bottles.

I sat in Aswan in the Yebu Café, one of the cheapest eateries, marred only by its direct view of the Mövenpick tower. A fellow diner interested me when he tried to haggle the exceedingly low price for dinner even lower. He was a backpacker – not surprisingly – and he was French,
but what his artful blond dreadlocks did not give away was that he was also an ivory trader.

The idea that a world ban on elephant-tusk trading would make it go away – after 6,000 years – was admirable but somewhat hopeful. Of course it has made a big dent, though some would argue it is habitat destruction that will end the elephant’s wild tenure, not the pursuit of its tusks. No doubt they go hand in hand. It is certain, however, that once guns started to be used the elephant’s days were numbered. As far back as 1831 over 4,000 elephants a year were being killed for their tusks. The craze for the pianoforte drove the need for ivory ever higher. It is thought that the utter collapse of the huge Kenyan herds in the twentieth century was caused by American keyboard demand. Despite the similarly high demand in China for pianos, the keyboards are plastic; now the Chinese want ivory for luxury items, carvings, inlays, chess sets.

My French-hippy ivory trader acquaintance told me of worse atrocities: the recent slaughter uncovered in Chad, the fact that in 2011 over thirty tons of illegal ivory were seized (requiring the deaths of 4,000 elephants). But Fabrice was unmoved by pleas of ecology or even anticruelty. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it will always happen. The Chinese make it happen. I don’t make it happen. All I do is find people who love ivory and make the connection to poor Africans who bring ivory to sell.’ He told me that several trucks a week crossed the Egyptian border from Sudan loaded with refugees. Some brought ivory with them to pay their way to Europe – in Aswan they could find buyers, like Fabrice. I did not ask how he smuggled it out. Well, I did – and I received an incredulous look of Gallic scorn. But he did tell me he always flew on Eastern European cheap flights to Luxor, and I imagined the Moldovan or Bulgarian customs were less interested in ‘camel bone’ artefacts than the staff at Charles de Gaulle Airport.

Fabrice spoke longingly of the so-called Schreger lines in pure ivory, which enable you to tell its provenance and worth. Camel bone – which is often passed off as ivory – has no such markings. Tusks from extinct mammoths – which, in the slowly unfreezing permafrost of Siberia, is a major source of ivory – have tightly curved Schreger lines, while those from African elephants are more rounded. ‘More beautiful,’ whispered Fabrice.

17
•
Slavery

My slavery forbade me to speak; the truth forbade me to keep silent
.
Sudanese proverb

A hundred and fifty years ago at Elephantine there would have been mountains of ivory, not the handfuls that Fabrice dealt in. And instead of tourists being herded around and sized up for their worth to the nearest penny, there would have been a sorrier human cargo: slaves.

Aswan and Elephantine are at the end of the Forty Days Road, the desert route through Sudan used to avoid the impassable cataracts on the Nile. Along the Forty Days Road were brought slaves from the regions of the upper Nile, bound for Cairo and the Ottoman Empire.

It was while walking with camels along the upper section of this route that I came across grinding-stone stations – large bowl-shaped
murhaga
stones seemingly discarded, always with a few rounded granite pebbles near by. These were for grinding corn. Very sensibly, instead of carrying such heavy items, or such messy stuff as flour, desert travellers, from ancient times until recently, have camped at such stations to grind corn for the bread they need to eat. Which would not have been much when the travellers were hunters or nomads. But when people settled, then their bread requirements increased. (The Bedouin I travelled with sometimes took the stones home to serve as knife sharpeners.)

Georg August Schweinfurth, an explorer we have met already and will meet a few times more, makes an interesting point about the proliferation of slavery in the Nile regions of Africa. The
murhaga
method of grinding corn, whereby a large flat stone works as the mortar and a smaller hand-sized stone as the pestle, can, after a day’s hard labour, produce only enough meal for five or six men. When the economy moved from one based more on hunting to one based on agriculture, with the migration of Arab Sudanese to the south of Khartoum into the
seriba
territory (a
seriba
is simply the thorn fence surrounding a village, but it came to mean the settlements established by the northern migrants), the need for people to spend all day grinding corn increased. Who would do such a loathsome job? A slave. According to Schweinfurth every Nubian settler possessed around three slaves. The migrations of the nineteenth century provided reason enough to perpetuate
slavery within the Sudan; it was also an entrepôt for the export of slaves to the world outside, to the Middle East and beyond.

Slavery may have increased with the settlement of the Sudan by the Arabs of the north, but it was not invented by them. Slavery in the regions of the upper White Nile is mentioned in the Greek
Periplus of the Erythraean Sea
, a first-century
AD
account of trade in the Red Sea complete with sailing directions. Burton speculates that African slavery in this region was the result of ancient trade with southern Arabia. Its origin, though, is ‘veiled in the glooms of the past’. But by the nineteenth century slavery was almost universal in the country between the Nile and the Indian Ocean. Not all tribes exported slaves from the interior to Arab lands; many were importers and users of slaves themselves.