The well-known story of King Leopold II of Belgium’s violent theft of what’s now the Democratic Republic of the Congo is told by Adam Hochschild in his seminal 1998 book, King Leopold’s Ghost. But there’s another, lesser-known narrative, a footnote linked to the seeds of Leopold’s initial colonial ambition, which caught my attention four years ago.
In 1879, Leopold dispatched four Asian elephants and their mahouts from India, a region which had a tradition in working elephants, to Africa, which did not. Leopold’s ambition was to reach Lake Tanganyika—then a threshold of Congo’s so-called Ivory Frontier—and start an elephant-training operation using the Asian elephants to test a new form of transport in Europe’s Scramble for Africa, aimed at extracting its valuable resources, including ivory and rubber.
