Sophy Roberts

‘The Scramble for Africa’ was once a feature of school history books. It described the process by which in the late nineteenth century the European powers divided Africa between themselves. It used to be seen as a heroic double act of exploration and colonisation, of rugged explorers and army officers wading through swamps, tramping across deserts and hacking their way through impenetrable jungles before planting the Union Jack in another far-flung part of Africa. With the flag, so the story went, came all the benefits of European civilisation: Christianity, the rule of law, education, railways, trade, prosperity, even cricket. It’s seen rather differently nowadays. So all-consuming was it that by 1914 ‘Europe had devoured the continent to the extent that only two independent states remained: Liberia and the territory that is now Ethiopia.’

Sophy Roberts’s A Training School for Elephants tells the story of an expedition which took place in 1879-80, the early years of ‘The Scramble for Africa’. Organised under the patronage of King Leopold II of Belgium, it was designed to demonstrate that Asian elephants could be used in Africa as draught animals for expeditions. The potential benefits were obvious: ‘If these creatures were able,’ Roberts writes, ‘to shoulder two hundred and seventy kilograms each … that would be the equivalent of hiring nine porters, who were not only constantly at risk of disease, but often deserted’.

In 1876 Leopold had staged an international geographical conference in Brussels to shine a light on the ‘Dark Continent’. The hope was that, animated by the ‘spirit of charity’, Europeans would open up Africa and thereby, as Leopold put it, ‘pour upon it the treasures of civilisation.’ With this in mind Leopold founded the International African Association (IAA), appointing himself president. The first step towards achieving this lofty ambition was to establish a line of communication across the middle of the continent with Lake Tanganyika as its fulcrum. The unacknowledged - at least publicly - object of the expedition was to assert Leopold’s and Belgium’s claim to a colony in equatorial Africa. From 1885 Leopold ruled the Congo Free State (as it was known) as his personal fiefdom until he was forced to transfer it to the Belgian state in 1908, whereafter it became known as the Belgian Congo, gaining independence in 1961.

Leopold now needed an experienced, reliable figure to command his expedition. His eye alighted on General Charles Gordon (subsequently immortalised as ‘Gordon of Khartoum’) but he declined the king’s overtures. The choice fell on Frederick Carter, an Irishman who had made his name organising passenger and commercial river and maritime traffic in Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf and beyond. Carter had no direct experience of Africa but did speak fluent Arabic which Leopold perceived as a great advantage as it would smooth his passage with the Arab merchants who dominated the trade routes of the east African hinterland.

Meanwhile, Leopold procured four elephants - two males and two females - from the Indian government’s stud at Pune. They were marched the hundred miles to Bombay where they were loaded onto a ship bound for Zanzibar, the expedition’s gathering point. On 31st May 1879, Carter’s party landed at Msasani Bay on the East African mainland and a month later, on 2nd July, set off westwards from Dar-es-Salaam into the bush. It was, Roberts writes, ‘a curious medley’: six Indian mahouts, six other Indian attendants, ten Zanzibaris, eight soldiers, four guides and over seventy porters marching under the Belgian flag.

The basis of A Training School for Elephants consists of interwoven accounts of Carter’s 1879 expedition, taken from his diary, and Roberts’s journey along the same, or as near as possible the same, route with her two travelling companions. ‘As we retraced Carter’s steps, our views each day were his,’ she writes. Folded into the mix are passages of reportage, describing, for example, her experiences in the Ministry of Information in Dar-es-Salaam and chunks of history. The book is beautifully written; Roberts certainly has a knack for the eye-catching phrase. Describing a day in the archives, she writes ‘The Arabic manuscripts looked like they were written in crushed diamonds, each sparkling letter suspended in hardened loops of a glossy gum.’ On the shores of Lake Tanganyika, she walked along a beach past ‘the shadow of a swollen hull, the planks like the expanding pleats that form the throat of a gulping whale.’

Carter’s expedition could not be counted as a success. Although it did reach the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, all four elephants died in the process while Carter himself and many of his party were killed on the way back to the coast, inadvertently caught in an intertribal conflict. The book has a good deal to say about the heart-wrenching cruelty of the ivory trade and the devastation it wrought upon the elephant population. In the late nineteenth century, up to 30,000 elephant tusks were being shipped out of Zanzibar alone every year. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were up to 27 million elephants in Africa; now there are just over 400,000.

A Training School for Elephants is Robert’s second book. Her first was the widely-acclaimed The Lost Pianos of Siberia which was a Sunday Times Book of the Year and has been translated into eight languages. She will be talking about her new book at the Sherborne Travel Writing Festival on Saturday 12th April. It promises to be a fascinating event.