Unlock the digestive of free editor
Roula Khalaf, the FT editor, chooses her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Traveling with anyone for a long time, even a ghost, tends to wake us up in their defects. In the late 1870s, Frederick Carter, a navigator of Irish origin, became well, found himself settled in Basra, Iraq, as a “kind of British official official”. After being set up in the Deputy Consul, he was shocked to find the rapidly drawn promotion. Thus the Empire era gave another “man set with a damaged ego” after Sophy Roberts puts it in her new absorbent book, A training school for elephants.
This injury made an invitation to lead an expedition to the irresistible African “interior” – double so when it came from no figure smaller than the King of the Belgians. This trip that Roberts, a travel journalist who also writes for ft, trace of mandatory.
Anydo confession of a journey in the footsteps of another is forced to be stylish, but rarely an elegance has been so enough with drama and Patos. In May 1879, by order of Leopold II, Chinura Steamship sailed from Mumbai to Zanzibar, holding four softened Asian elephants connected to Tanzania. Traveling more than 600 miles from DAR ES Salaam in Lake Tanganyika, the Carter expedition would lead to prove the durability of animals as busy animals – and bulldozers – to open the continent in the extraction of Belgian resources. Trained African elephants were so little at the time that Asian elephants were to be used, but Carter had instructions to create a school for captured training African elephants for the same goal, to reach Lake Tanganyika.
It is natural for an interested book with elephants to deal with memory. One way people can try to recover the lost events in time is to go to the places where those events took place. But Roberts is not engaged in pilgrimage. Its instinct as a writer is to “weave a story written with stories told by living people.” Throughn through the words of those she meets – a secret of the church, a local boss, a preservation ranger, a nun – the world of Carter can be drawn to the light. His trip becomes “Roberts’ passport in the oral memory of a region”. Its offer to design its path to a premature one, however, as such pursuits are prone – “The links would not hold between my journey and the passage of elephants through unknown land.” But if Carter’s tracks and his elephants have long disappeared, the legacy of the attack they warned remains fierce. Roberts is “haunted by what (missing)”: ICT and mahogany trees that were abundant on Carter day are all but have not disappeared, no lions or rhinos, and rivers are drowned with invasive water hyacinth.
Carter’s expedition was a strict failure, due to not only the absurdity of his son’s patent, but his son’s hubris. However, the novel of his enterprise, the man himself turns out to be nothing more than an ordinary colonial type, one of the thousands of “daily legs driven by a blow to imperial exception”. When, in Ugalla, Roberts meets a chief of the nyamwezi chiefs who mimic the sound of a dying elephant – a “long haunted groan” – “It was as if a colossal weight was somewhat crushed in the air. I could feel it spreading like storm clouds – the call of the death of the Elephant, but also in the desert. 1879, Carter discovered that the African elephants he had been in charge of capturing and training had disappeared after they had already been shot or spooky by the ivory hunters who had preceded him. We are not the first to travel among the ruins.
A training school for elephants By Sophy Roberts Doubleday 22 £, 432 pages
William Atkins’s latest book is ‘Migrants: Three Journeys to Island’ (Faber)
Join our online Facebook book set at Ft brown books and follow the ft weekend Instagram AND X
