calls. When the thunder ceased, Satan had departed, leaving
the elephant lord over the land. Today the lack of elephants in
the north, due to poaching, is believed by many Turkana to be
an omen that rain will not come. The recent droughts, which
have been some of the worst in decades—can they partly
be explained by the near total disappearance of the revered
elephant from Turkanaland?
The Samburu of Kenya believe that, like the seers who can
foretell rainfall, the elephant knows when rain is coming. The
sudden appearance of elephants after many months of drought
suggests that rain is on the way. How the elephants know that
the rains are approaching is a secret even the seers do not know.
That knowledge is on the order of another language.
It was from the pastoral Samburu, whose relationship to
the elephant is perhaps unique in Africa, that we were able
to glean something of a sacred and remarkable alliance. After
many trips to Africa, in September 2007 Marie and I took our
son, Lysander, to touch the ground of East Africa for the >rst
time. We were told by Pacquo, a Samburu elder from central
Kenya, that during the peak of the elephant slaughter thirty
years ago, a herd of twenty or more elephant orphans who had
lost their entire family somehow managed to make its way to
Samburu country, having traveled for days to reach a village
where they were given sanctuary. Today the extant herd of
elephants in the Matthews Range is due to the Samburu’s
kindness and their acknowledgment of the elephant as an
extension of their own being. Indeed, the Samburu as well
as the Maasai have a concept—tenebo—which sees the coherence of elephant family dynamics as a model for human
interrelationships.
One story told by Pacquo tells of a rogue elephant who was
destroying crops in a nearby village. The elephant’s repeated
