Gray Thunder: Listening to Elephants - Breaking the human/nonhuman divide

Cyril Christo, Orion magazine
May/June 2008

AMONG THE HUNTER-GATHERERS of Kenya, whose last remaining forests are in jeopardy due to deforestation, the Ndorobo, or Ogiek, share tales about their people having followed the migration paths of elephants for centuries. They tell of olden days when elephants used to live peacefully with humans. This was a mythic time, when the Ndorobo would eat the olerondo fruit in imitation of the elephant and boil acacia bark for its sugar. Tales of being given milk from elephant cows in times of drought, and of the Ndorobo giving the elephants honey as part of their family, are part of the lore of the first peoples of Kenya.

I first went to Kenya in 1975, for four months in the wilds of Nakuru. I studied vervet monkey behavior, climbed Mount Kenya, and, en route to the Indian Ocean, crossed the volcanic Chyulu Hills and the haunting red sands of Tsavo, where tens of thousands of elephants overwhelmed the landscape, causing one of the singular ecological holocausts of the twentieth century. I experienced the last vestiges of old Kenya, before the elephant hunting bans were put in place, when the Waliangulu still hunted elephants with poisoned arrows and Kenya felt like one of the last great frontiers on Earth.

Article at the following link: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2960/
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