AMONG THE HUNTER-GATHERERS of Kenya, whose last remaining forests are in jeopardy due to deforestation, the Ndorobo, or Ogiek, share tales about their people having followed the migration paths of elephants for centuries. They tell of olden days when elephants used to live peacefully with humans. This was a mythic time, when the Ndorobo would eat the olerondo fruit in imitation of the elephant and boil acacia bark for its sugar. Tales of being given milk from elephant cows in times of drought, and of the Ndorobo giving the elephants honey as part of their family, are part of the lore of the first peoples of Kenya.
I first went to Kenya in 1975, for four months in the wilds of Nakuru. I studied vervet monkey behavior, climbed Mount Kenya, and, en route to the Indian Ocean, crossed the volcanic Chyulu Hills and the haunting red sands of Tsavo, where tens of thousands of elephants overwhelmed the landscape, causing one of the singular ecological holocausts of the twentieth century. I experienced the last vestiges of old Kenya, before the elephant hunting bans were put in place, when the Waliangulu still hunted elephants with poisoned arrows and Kenya felt like one of the last great frontiers on Earth.
Shortly after 9/11, my wife, Marie, and I went again to Kenya's north, to visit the Turkana, who insist that the droughts have only manifested since the first appearance of the white man in East Africa. A medicine man-a seer-told us, "In the old days, there was always rain and the Turkana lived peacefully." Today the rains no longer come when they used to. The Turkana believe that the elephant is next to God and that the sighting of an elephant signals rain is imminent. When Satan and God quarreled, they say, thunder and lightning shook the ground. Since God could not materialize he had to ask the elephant to go in his stead to respond to Satan's thunder with his trumpeting 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?