Also by John Frederick Walker
A Certain Curve of Horn: The Hundred-Year
Quest for the Giant Sable Antelope of Angola
for Elin
An African slave belonging to Shundi, the Kavirondo ivory trader and dealer in human chattel, killed the ancient elephant on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. That much is certain.
Shundi's slave was a Chagga tracker, and when he came across the elephant's trail he knew the impressive footprints—each two hand spans across in the soft earth—had been left by a large bull. The crumbled dung piles of half-digested forage spoke of the worn molars of a m'zay, an old one, weary and slow-moving, the kind that often carried good ivory. Shundi would want to know if that was so. The Chagga slipped quietly through the sparse bush and kept the wind in his face.
Not long after he found dung mounds still warm to a probing finger, he spotted the bull's gray bulk, humped like the shadow of a hill in the growing dusk. From bush to tree to bush and back again the Chagga drew close and saw how wizened with age the elephant was, his back sloping like a hyena's to his hindquarters, the withered hide sagging over his knees, his temples deep, dark hollows. In this shrunken state his thick tusks, which swept all the way to the ground, looked enormous. The old one swung his trunk listlessly at the grass and ripped up a clump, then paused as if trying to remember something before raising it slowly to his mouth.
As the sinking sun gilded Kilimanjaro's snowcap, the tracker took the one chance he had left in the dying light. Fumbling with his muzzleloader, he clicked back the hammer and pointed the shaking barrel at the bull's turning head just as its ears flared to fix the sound. At the shattering blast, dust spurted in a jet off his forehead, monkeys and birds shrieking as he turned rigid, trunk flung up in a questioning curl. The Chagga dropped his smoking weapon and ran in a lather of terror, feet racing over the grass, daring to slow only when no trumpeting scream rang out to signal doom about to overtake him.
No one really knows how the elephant fell. Had he been shot in the chest he might have stumbled for a mile or more before crashing to earth in a final exhalation, legs bent as if trying to swim sideways. If the thumb-sized lump of lead had punched through the skull he might simply have collapsed where he stood. Then the old one would have sunk back on his hindquarters as his head dropped, burying the tusk points in the earth and assuming the posture of a sphinx; the heavy brow would have been propped high by the ivory posts, trunk flopped lifelessly between.
The slave, heaving for breath and slick with sweat, surely must have been sick with fear for leaving behind a firearm doubtless more valuable to his master than his own miserable self before reaching camp and flinging himself at the feet of Shundi to gasp his tale. We know that the next morning he led Shundi and his men back to the slopes of the mountain where the ancient elephant lay, watched by vultures waiting in the branches of nearby trees for other scavengers to breach the tough hide. Over the next several hours the men chopped at the head with hand axes to free the two tusks, supreme examples of the great natural treasure that had been sought since ancient times. Shundi had the thick white crescents carried to the coast by slaves staggering under their weight and transported by dhow to the ivory market of Zanzibar.
The year was 1898. Photography had come to Africa by then, and a formal portrait was taken of the immense pair of tusks, posed together in a tall ornately carved doorway in Zanzibar City's old quarter. Two Africans in fezzes and white tunics steady the upright curving columns of ivory that tower over them, their tips turned outward in an enticing splay implying the continent's extravagant and seemingly inexhaustible riches. They would come to be known as the Kilimanjaro tusks and remain to this day the largest pair ever recorded. Their size makes it difficult to think of them as elephant teeth but that is what they were. The bigger one weighed 236 pounds; the other 228. Each was more than ten feet long and as thick as a man's thigh.
From their tips, worn smooth from ripping tree bark and gouging water holes, to the thin, chipped edges of the deeply hollowed bases that once held each tusk's nerve pulp, a palimpsest of stains, nicks, and fissures told of a long life in the bush. All this long-burnished, mysterious braille would have felt cool to the hand, even in the African climate, for ivory absorbs sweat.
The carved doorway where the tusks were photographed was the entrance to Nyumba Pembi—"Ivory House"—a high-walled American compound that housed in its courtyard a giant scale for the weighing of elephant teeth. Over the years, many who shaped Africa's colonial history walked through those doors: explorers and adventurers, including Richard Burton, John Speke, and Henry Morton Stanley, the infamous slaver Tippu Tip, Arab traders, Indian merchants, and a succession of American consuls who helped secure the lucrative trade. There, the agent for Arnold Cheney and Company, the powerful New York ivory importing firm, purchased the Kilimanjaro tusks for ￡1,000 sterling—almost $5,000—then the highest sum ever paid for a pair of tusks.
This photograph is worth study. It sums up not just a moment at the end of the nineteenth century but a cusp in the time line of this seductive substance that is apparent to us only now. The proud door of Ivory House was the gateway for much of the global trade in elephant tusks at the time; Zanzibar was the central market and Americans dominated the business. Millennia of commerce in "white gold" had come and gone before these tusks made their appearance, and prior to the twentieth century there was little talk of dwindling elephant herds affecting the supply of ivory.
We now know that the photograph was taken just before the apex of the long and troubled history of the worldwide desire for this uniquely sensuous material, a desire fanned by its availability. The ivory trade—despite the human cruelty and animal slaughter required to satisfy it—made that possible. In 1898 none foresaw that less than a century later the appetite of uncontrolled commerce would threaten to consume the bulk of the remaining sub-Saharan herds that supplied it; back then, elephants in the yet to be exhausted interior were said to be as thick as flies.
THE STORY OF ivory is nearly as old as the human story. Universally coveted for its beauty, color, scarcity, and ability to be finely carved, ivory has always been imbued with symbolic importance. Though ivory has been a single thread in a far greater pattern, its creamy-white gleam is woven through the fabric of human history, and helped to shape it. The presence of and passion for ivory have been remarkably ever present, openly garish in some cultures, subtle and subterranean in others. Each age, each culture, from prehistoric times to ancient Rome, India, China, medieval Europe, and the Muslim world to nineteenth-century America and Victorian Britain to modern Japan, has found its own uses—artistic, religious, decorative, functional, extravagant, frivolous—for the remarkable treasure that comes from the teeth of elephants and a few other mammals.
The power of this organic substance resides in its sensuousness, its ability to awaken material desire. Long before gold and gemstones held allure, humans were drawn to ivory for crafting amulets, beads, spear points, and figurines. By the beginning of recorded history mammoth ivory and later the similar ivory of elephants had long been a key item of trade, often supplemented by so-called lesser ivories—walrus, hippo, and boar teeth.
Ivory became a synonym for both preciousness and luxury, privilege and perfection. Solomon, Ivan the Terrible, and a succession of Danish kings reigned from ivory thrones. Egyptian and Chinese carvers, Greek sculptors, Byzantine and baroque craftsmen, and Japanese netsuke masters found ivory unmatched as a carving medium for small figurines. For Europeans and Asians, ivory's resemblance to pale skin tone remains an irresistible comparison, repeated in literature from the Old Testament to Shakespeare and the Pre-Raphaelite poets.
The desire to find new sources of ivory spurred the exploration and exploitation of Africa by Arab and European traders who sought it along with gold and slaves, and the ivory trade became linked to the slave trade. Each tusk, some said, cost the life of an African man, woman, or child, so brutal were the months-long marches of chained captives used to transport ivory from the interior to the trading coasts. Ivory's connection to slavery was accepted by Arab and Indian traders, ignored by most European powers, and denied by the staunchly abolitionist nineteenth-century American manufacturers whose growing fortunes depended on an endless supply of elephant tusks.
By then the appetite for this precious substance was insatiable. The development of the lathes required to carve fantastically intricate ivory sculptures from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries contributed to the technological advances that were critical in the industrial revolution in the nineteenth, which itself was partly spurred by American and British efforts to find ways to mass-produce ivory items. This vast commerce in ivory became one of the early successes of the industrial age, and the material itself became virtually the plastic of its time, used for everything from buttons to scientific instruments to billiard balls to geegaws. Along with ivory combs and letter openers, drawer pulls and pistol grips, New England firms supplied ivory keys for piano makers such as Chickering, Steinway, and dozens of others, who made the United States the largest piano manufacturer in the world, with production reaching 350,000 instruments a year by 1910.
With the abolition of slavery, attention finally fell on ivory's other dark cost. Before World War I ivory had become a global business that required the annual demise of some forty-four thousand elephants. By the end of the 1970s the once-routine slaughter of elephants the trade depended on came to threaten the very existence of these extraordinary creatures. Poaching, funded by African and Asian smugglers who hired impoverished rural people and equipped them with military weaponry left over from local conflicts and civil wars, operated openly under corrupt governments. By the end of the 1980s the killings reached record levels in East Africa, provoking a global outcry that led to listing the African elephant as endangered and to a worldwide ban on international trade in ivory.
As a result, many today think of ivory as a tainted substance, faintly stained with blood no matter how carefully polished. But unless we allow ourselves to appreciate its nearly universal allure and the regard in which it has always been held, we will neverly understand why there will always be a powerful attraction to it, one that will be answered by either open trade or the black market. In any case, by now we could not rid ourselves of the global cache of ivory, even if we tried. There is simply too much great art that has been made from it, and too many beautiful things that have made use of it, and most of them are objects we rightly treasure.
The story of ivory is far from a closed book. As long as there are elephants, more ivory is added to the world's store each year, raising the question of what should be done with it now that global trade is banned. Little wonder that the role of ivory in elephant management is one of the most bitter issues in contemporary conservation. Beleaguered as some elephant populations are, there are others whose burgeoning herds threaten to denude their habitat and turn overcrowded African parks into treeless wastes. Fearing for the creatures' survival, and yet all too aware of elephants' inability to coexist easily with agriculture and human settlement, conservationists argue while stockpiles of ivory grow.
How did it come to this? And what will follow from it? This book is a response to these questions. Part 1, "Shapes in Tusks," spans prehistory through the eighteenth century, from the discovery of the luster and touch of the material to its global spread and the creation of countless ivory art objects. Part 2, "Ivory Under the Saw," looks at ivory's industrialization during the nineteenth century and through the mid-twentieth century and what that transformation cost in human and animal life. Part 3, "The Elephant Dilemma," begins several decades ago, when the elephant had finally become more important than the treasure it supplies and stepped out of the shadow of its own tusks to face an uncertain future.
It all started long ago, in the ice age.