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King Leopold's elephant expedition: a story of colonialism in Congo
00:34:37
Sophy Roberts shares the story of an 1879 expedition that aimed to introduce Asian elephants to central Africa
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Ellie Cawthorn
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. In 1879, King Leopold of Belgium commissioned an expedition to transport Asian elephants from India to the African interior with a vision of using them as working animals to unlock the continent's resources. Journalist Sophie Roberts has retraced the root of this ill conceived journey for her book A Training School for Elephants and I spoke to her to find out more. So to start us off, Sophie, I wonder if you can introduce us to this little known story from 1879. Why was there a mission to transport Asian elephants to the Middle of Africa, when I think, as most people will know, that continent already had elephants of its own.
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Sophie Roberts
Yes. At the beginning of the 19th century, it had something like 26 million elephants of its own. Not the case now, of course, but huge, huge, huge herds. So why bring in four elephants and from India? And the basic, most simple explanation is that there wasn't a tradition of working elephants in Africa. There was, of course, many centuries of tradition in India and Asia. So that was the motif for bringing in those animals from then known as Bombay, now Mumbai, of course. But the purpose was because King Leopold II of Belgium wanted to find out if he could create a transport system to extract the continent's resources. And elephants were a possible solution so long as they could withstand the sort of fatal bite of the tsetse fly, which is, of course, what fells horses south of the Sahel, which is that desert Sahara Strip. So if elephants could survive the tsetse, these working elephants, that would change the game, because it would mean that the Europeans who wanted their piece of Africa wouldn't have to rely upon the old slave trading routes that had been used for centuries by the Arab Swahili, set up all across that central region. So that was the motive, of course. It was full of many, many, many venal, hidden, and very disturbing motivations under that cover. But effectively to create a transport system to extract the continent's resources.
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Ellie Cawthorn
Yeah. So we've got this incredible story of this journey against the odds, really set against this background of colonialism. But I think most people listening I'll take a gamble, will not have heard of this. I certainly hadn't before I'd come to your book. How did you, as a travel writer and an author, come across this story?
- [05:12]
Sophie Roberts
Well, I was working in the northeast Congo in an area called Garambo, as a journalist. In 2015, I traveled up from the Virungas, which. Which is that line of volcanoes right in the middle of Africa where Africa's almost pulled apart, the Rifting the valley. I traveled up from there into the northeast, where Garamba borders what is now South Sudan and Uganda. And I was working with a conservation agency who were trying to create a peaceable environment for conservation and community to thrive. And it was a tall order. You still had Joseph Kony, the Lord's Resistance Army, a militia, very strong militia groups working up there. It was pretty lawless. And of course, elephants were under enormous threat, being shot in the back by helicopters. So the evidence might show. And when I was there, I was poking around the story, as you do, and I took a missionary plane to get in. It was hard to get in. And I went into this kind of area called Gangala Nabodio, which was. We had to fly in because of security. And it was an extraordinary moment because it was like an island of green palm trees, longer grass, stray bougainvillea. It was very odd. And there were a few people around, not many. And there were these abandoned bungalows that were slowly being done up by the conservation agency. And then there was this line of stones in the long grass, a line of stones that looked little like a Belgian boulevard. And they were huge stones. And it was where elephants were tethered, held by chains. And it was where King Leopold II of Belgium had started a training school for elephants in the early 19th century, in the hope that if you could train the African species, he'd have a workforce to extract the continent's resources. And I found it haunting. It was like a sort of piece of history that was being literally overgrown, lost, disappearing. And that felt significant to me. I'm interested in lost history, and I'm interested in trying to recover lost history, not just through archives, because I'm not a historian, I'm a journalist, but through oral memory. Oral memory is so powerful to me. It's the part of history that makes me laugh, it makes me cry, it connects me. And that's why I ended up going down a lot of rabbit holes.
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Ellie Cawthorn
Yeah, in the book, I mean, it's more than a rabbit hole. You go on this kind of epic quest to retrace this expedition, this journey, and I want to ask you about some of those experiences later. But before we kind of get into that, I wonder if you could give us a bit more historical background. So in the 19th century, what was happening in this region in Central Africa that we need to kind of understand to get to grips with this story.
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Sophie Roberts
The expedition takes place in 1879. And importantly, this expedition was a first, a first attempt. The training school I saw in Garamba Gangala, nobody in northeast Congo came 25, 30 years later. So this 1879 one was the really hidden history had been completely forgotten. But what was happening in 1879? It's the preamble to the scramble for Africa. Okay, that's really important. So what's happening on the ground? You've got lots more Europeans making that first grab for souls. The missionaries, resources. Ivory, gum, copal, beginnings of rubber. That's interesting. You've got the final days of the Arab slave trade. And I use that word, Arab with caution, because, of course, the trade was heavily tied up with Swahili communities because of centuries of mixed blood along that Indian Ocean. Literal, you've got Africans were also complicit, but Arab became the default signifier. But it's not as simple as that. That trade in slaves out the East African coast was huge, huge. Over 13 centuries, something like more than 9.8 million Africans exported as enslaved people to Arabia, various Indian Ocean islands. But we don't hear about it so much. We hear about the transatlantic trade. So that was still going on. The last market for enslaved people closed in Zanzibar in 1873. So it's all this decade of real flux. You've also got a lot of foreign influence coming in Oman. That's the strongest because Oman had moved their court to Zanzibar in 1840 from Muscat. So there was this wonderful saying. I think it was in a Richard Francis Burton book. But when you play the flute at Zanzibar, this is the saying. All of Africa as far as the lake stances. So those Omani Arabs in Zanzibar controlled the caravan routes into the interior. You've also got lots of Indian merchants coming in, opening commercial houses, stations along the same caravan route, because you need barter goods, beads, cotton. You've got these Europeans knocking at the door. The explorers, consuls are beginning to arrive. They're all kind of rubbernecking, wanting to get a piece of the action. They don't quite know what it is yet, but they know there's something they want. You've also got this huge change in technology and infrastructure. The Suez Canal, of course, it opened in 1869. That reduces the journey to the East African coast significantly. You've got regular steamships. That's changing everything. The speed, speed of comms and trade is changing everything. And you've got the first telegraph opening in 1879, linking Zanzibar to Europe. So there's an amazing moment of connectivity.
- [11:49]
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- [13:15]
Ellie Cawthorn
So we've got this patchwork, really, of foreign influences, this idea of a region in flux and. And into this comes a figure that you've mentioned, the Belgian King Leopold ii, who's got a pretty infamous legacy in this African interior. Can you tell us more about Leopold and his ambitions in the area?
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Sophie Roberts
They were frightening from the start, but they were very well hidden. He was heir to a small country, Belgium, squeezed between these huge European great powers. He was extremely ambitious. He wanted his piece of cake in the age of empire. He wanted to beautify his cities. His father was also obsessed with finding a colony. He tried to buy Crete, Cuba, even a chunk of Texas. He poked around the Faroe Islands, the Caribbean, Guatemala. I think he made something like 51 different attempts in 34 years. Now, Leopold II, his son, he was cut from the same cloth. He was smart, really smart. He knew that you didn't make a colony by sitting around. You had to watch for that moment, that perfect moment where you could get in. And he was very fast. During the 1870s, Congo was beginning to be spoken of in European geographical societies for its unspeakable riches. You had explorers coming back with reports. It was frothy with excitement because of all the ivory. By the end of 1875, Leopold's got his eye on it. I intend to find out discreetly whether there is anything doing in Africa, he wrote to one of his henchmen. He was clever because he shielded those venal motivations by positioning himself as the kind of European king who wanted to save Africa from itself. He used the slavery, the Arab Swahili slave story as his cover. So he started to seed a master plan. He called a huge geographical conference in Brussels in 1876 he brought in all the big explorers, various players across Europe, all men, all white men, build it as an international forum, as what was called a high moral intervention. Kind of extraordinary. And that was the beginning of him playing this smoke and mirrors game that we're going to go save Africa, when in fact he was going in for the kill.
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Ellie Cawthorn
And part of this mission, as it were, of Leopold's, is this expedition that he decides to launch with the elephants. The man that he tasked with this challenge was an Irishman called Carter. Can you tell us about Carter and the initial plans for the expedition?
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Sophie Roberts
He wanted much bigger, more famous explorers, but none of them were signing up to Leopold's mission, which was sort of overtly to create stations along the caravan road to give safe passage to explorers and missionaries. You know, all very gentle on the surface. Of course, that wasn't the case at all, but gentle on the surface, few. He went to Charles Gordon, who at that time was working in Equatoria, now Sudan. I think Charles Gordon could smell a rat, said, no, they fished around for others. He had Stanley in hand for another, more secret mission going in from the Atlantic coast. So he had the big guy. He had Stanley coming in from the Atlantic coast, coming up the Congo River. He needed somebody who was going to be agreeable, somebody who was an Arabic speaker, which this Irishman, Frederick Carter, was, because he was working in Iraq, Mesopotamia, and he was a very brilliant negotiator with the Arab sheikhs on that river system of the Tigris and the Euphrates. So he hired Frederick Carter, a kind of completely lost to history. And I had, you know, it was real fun kind of digging out his biography, but lost to history. And so he came in.
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Ellie Cawthorn
Can you tell us a bit about the route that Carter took and the route, of course, that you followed?
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Sophie Roberts
Yeah, the route was the bit that was really exciting to me because I'd originally seen parts of it on a map and it was incredibly hard to line up old place names, new place names, mistranscribed place names, small places with a contemporary journey, because I deliberately follow it. I deliberately weave the contemporary encounter with the historical because I wanted to compare my time and theirs. I wanted to bring in contemporary voices to try and understand a little about the impact of colonialism and some of the main themes, like what's happened to wildlife and ecology and all the rest of it in that intervening period. But the route effectively was the elephants were brought in from, as I've said, from Bombay, Mumbai. They came across the top of the Indian Ocean, they flew, picked up Frederick Carter Aden, and then sailed down that Somalian coastline to Zanzibar. The elephants were not disembarked in Zanzibar. It was considered too much of a hassle. So they stayed there while Carter on the ship, while Carter got his expedition in order. And then they arrived on the African mainland just a little bit north of Dar es Salaam, at a place called Moussasani Bay, where the elephants were swum to shore. And then from there they walked. They walked all the way to Lake Tanganyika and the places in between, effectively, Sasani, Dar es Salaam and Lake Tanganyika is a huge, huge interior with some incredible history, but they're not places that are well known or remembered, yet they were on one of the most important roads in 19th century Africa.
- [19:38]
Ellie Cawthorn
It's this absolutely mammoth journey, as you say. It's kind of hard to imagine what were some of the central challenges at that time of making that journey.
- [19:49]
Sophie Roberts
Food and water. Those elephants were carrying 500 kilos each. That's huge. You need food and water to keep elephants going. You need quite specific food as well. That was a challenge. That meant their route was slightly different from the mainstream caravan route that others took. Other challenges, terrain, you know, the mountains. Carter described some of the mountains as steep as the side of a house. I can stand by that. It's extraordinary terrain. He was having to cut down enough wood to what he said would build the whole Brussels just to get passage wide enough for elephants. You got dangerous animals, you know, fear of hyena, picking the porters off at night. You've got this really, really important, really quite problematic, practical thing of managing a transit tax. It's called hongo, which is the beads and cotton cloth that you would trade locally with each chieftain in order to get passage through. It was like a transit tax then you had terrible communication systems coming up and down the caravan trails. I mean, much quicker than I was expecting. When I started to look into it, it could be quite quick, but it's also got to go all the way back to Brussels and back into the African interior. So that created problems because of disconnects in time. Really bad blood with the Europeans. They've been behaving wicked. You know, you had a mission engineer just before they arrived. He was, like, left for dead, skinned like a rabbit. According to the records, you have goods being confiscated. You know, the local tribes were bothered by all these Europeans coming in. And so the politics and bad blood were running really, really high. And you've got a couple of really, really strong leaders Especially in the western side of the region between Tabora, which is a big Arab Swahili center, and the lake, you had some really strong indigenous power. And that was problematic. And then it's just the case of holding a caravan together, 100 plus people, fever and insurrection. How do you keep four elephants alive, crossing those kind of differences that are not from that part of the world? And also, Frederick Carter may have been a gifted Arabic speaker. He may have been good at negotiating his way through. He had, he had the gift of the gap. He was pretty charismatic. But he knew nothing about elephants. Nothing, Nothing. It was so arrogant, the entire idea. And it was full of pomp and ceremony. You know, they wore their velvets, they carried Leopold's flag. It was full of pomp and ceremony. At the time. It was quite a well known expedition. It was feeding back into European newspapers, full of kind of flair and excitement because it was a PR job. You know, here's King Leopold, a Belgian king going in to save Africa.
- [22:47]
Ellie Cawthorn
Well, that's something that you do really evocatively in the book is talk about the experience of the elephants themselves. I wonder if you could say a bit more about that.
- [22:57]
Sophie Roberts
The four elephants were. They were interesting for me because I spent some time in Poona, India, where these elephants originally came from. They all had names, they all had dedicated mahouts. And the mahout's relationship with an elephant is for life. So as I started kind of dig into it, I could find a connection there that started to carry me emotionally as I progressed on this kind of long journey for myself. And they suffered, they suffered. It is a story of suffering. And there's the animal suffering, of course. There's just huge, huge, huge human suffering.
- [23:47]
Ellie Cawthorn
It would be good to kind of talk about landscape. How much has that changed in more than a century since Carter and his expedition made its way through it?
- [23:58]
Sophie Roberts
The expedition landscape has changed hugely. By which I mean, right in the middle of the route that I took, there's an area called the, the Atigi Thicket. And the Atigi Thicket is this thorny forest that all travelers loathed because the thorns strike you at eyeball height. And it went on for days to cross this thicket. And now, I mean, I had to really go look for it. It's tiny. The one thing that did really surprise me was I was expecting wildlife. I was expecting wildlife. Incredible descriptions of wildlife at the time from various missionaries and in places, in protected areas, I found it. But it's gone. Everyday wildlife encounters have gone and that really Surprised me how kind of bleak actually some of those areas were. There's nothing so little left. At the time I was expecting in the 19th century records for there to be a lot of elephant, but that was already getting eviscerated by the ivory trade. So in fact, Carter didn't see elephant for a very, very long time on his journey. That was the same for me. It certainly got worse, in fact.
- [25:31]
Ellie Cawthorn
So ultimately, after this expedition, how successful was the effort to make elephants this great labor force, this great kind of force of colon colonialism in Africa? Did Leopold's plan to open up the continent using elephants pay off?
- [25:47]
Sophie Roberts
No, it didn't. It didn't. It paid off from a PR point of view. During the colonial period, those captive elephants that he had getting trained up in Gangala Nabodio in Garamba, they were all over. Banknotes, stamps, postcards. It was a mark of Belgian pride. They brought over Congolese mahouts to the World Fair in 1958 in Brussels as part of a congarama, effectively a human zoo. So it was all pr, pr, pr. It looked good, but it wasn't real. I mean, yes, they worked and they worked on roads and they worked on construction and they cleared forests, but it wasn't in significant numbers. And then it all fell apart anyway with Congo's independence in 1960, another attempt was made because the captive elephants, you know, they're captive, you can't, you can't rewild them. So another attempt was made in 1980s to, to use the surviving elephants for elephant backed wildlife safaris. And it relied on, I think there was four left. They'd survived decades of colonial and post colonial violence. And then in 2010, the last habituated elephant died. She was called Kiko and she was the daughter of an elephant that was captured by Leopold's Men in 1912. So again, it's like how history collapses. But no, it wasn't a success. He used men. He used men. Once he got his Congo, he used men. So what does that tell us about colonialism? That it's not over. Because the records are largely in Europe, the memories are in Africa, the memories are there. And that was where I found my feet on the ground, retrieving very sort of sideways into that, that past, if you like. I mean, there was one incredible encounter really early on that gave me confidence when I was lacking it. And I was in Zanzibar. I was just beginning to get into the start of the expedition. And I was in the Zanzibar archives, which is very rich actually. The Zanzibar archives. And I discovered in this old mission diary that the elephants had arrived in Zanzibar on the day that the first black East African Anglican deacon was being ordained. That was interesting. It was just a tiny little note from the bishop. And so I ended up going out to the bishop's base, which was a mission on the other side of the island, just to see what might be there, just to be able to maybe write a paragraph of description about the smell, the taste, all those things. And there was an older gentleman sitting outside doing his Washington, and I asked if I could go inside the church. And he said, of course, brought back this big brass key, little tiny church without any glass in the windows. And I said to him what I was doing. He said, oh, that's interesting, because I was raised when I was a small boy by that black East African Anglican deacon, John Swede. And it was incredibly powerful because he was formerly enslaved, that deacon, he'd been released from slavery, and he was like the star of the show, if you like, down at that mission back in 1879. And the fact that I was in that church with a man that sat on the knee of somebody who'd been right there the day those elephants had arrived, that carried a story of being enslaved by the Arab slave trade was just extraordinary to me. It felt like history just kind of collapsing into a present moment, and those sort of things repeated themselves in different ways with a different emotional resonance the further I went. I think it's important to say why I followed effectively this footnote in history. Four elephants crossing Africa in 1879, before the Big scramble that everyone knows about. I did it because I wanted to find a narrative way in to a story where lots of voices are missing, obviously missing. And so this book tries to find a balance by using contemporary voices in some way. It can never rectify it, ever. But what it can do is create a greater empathy about the crimes that have been committed by colonialism with those who suffered as a result of it.
- [30:40]
Ellie Cawthorn
That was Sophie Roberts speaking to me. Ellie Cawthorn. Sophie's book recounting her journey along the route of Carter's expedition is a training school for elephants.