Aaron Barlow 216 Maple St. Brooklyn, NY 11225 718-856-7323 barlowaa@earthlink.

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Sambiani and the Elephants

Thick Harmattan dust flows south from the Sahara in December, fogging Mounts Bombouaka and Nassiet, making the twin ridges look like the bottoms of real peaks. They spring up separately a few kilometers south of the market village of Bombouaka and fall abruptly to the savannah a little farther north. When the rains come in April or May and clear the air, their red cliffs sparkle, for a season, under green foliage caps. There arent many Moba, the people who live amongst these ridges and beyond, perhaps 100,000 spread over the northwestern tip of Togo and the adjacent stretch of Ghana. In traditional African ethnic geographical terms, which make more sense than do the colonial borders modern Africa has inherited, the Moba and their hills are bordered, on the north and east, by the Gourma, and by the Mossi, for a bare bit, northwest. To the west, their neighbors are Kusasi and Mamprissi. To the south, live the Tchokossi, long the scourge of the Moba, and the Konkomba. The Tchokossi arrived from the west two hundred years ago, bearing guns and establishing a base at Mango, forty kilometers from Bombouaka, where they still dominate. Once mercenaries for a kingdom in Ghana, they continued their old ways by raiding Moba stores. Lacking guns of their own, the Moba took to building hidden granaries high in the escarpments crossing their lands. Some of these could be reached only by climbing down from the tops of cliffs. The Tchokossi never found these

Sambiani and the Elephants -- 2 hideaways and eventually settled into their own farming, though they continued to exact what tribute they could from the Moba. A little less than a hundred years ago, the Germans colonial rulers of Togoland finally made it up past Mango, where they had previously established a school. They demolished whatever remained of Moba autonomy, effectively driving ethnic rivalries underground. Traditional power structures were thrown into disarray, chiefs who had resisted the wishes of the Germans were deposed and foreignpicked chiefs were installed in their places. In 1914 the German rule ended: British and French forces took Togoland and divided it, with Bombouaka and a good part of Moba country ending up in the French sector. After the war, the French finally appeared in the northern part of their new possession, and with specific demands. They had even more guns than the Tchokossi, so the Moba acquiesced and built bridges and roads as they were told, and planted the crops the French required. Since independence in 1960, the national government, dominated by southern and mid-country groups, has paid attention to the Moba only when it wanted something from them. From a Moba point of view, therefore, the independent governments havent proved much different from the French. Government representatives might speak Kabye or Ewe as native tongue instead of French, but they were still foreign, and they still tried to get from the Moba more often than they gave. At some point, those leaders in Lom, like most leaders of countries with beaches and forests, began to realize that tourism could become an important revenue source. They saw how Kenyas game preserves drew so many Europeans and so much money and they decided to establish a couple of parks in Togo. They put these parks far in the north of the country, where peoples complaints would be less heard. The Fosse aux lions, just north of Bombouaka, was a little older than those parks, having been established by the French in the mid-1950s. In those days it wasnt much, merely a small, low, wet area where animals tended to congregate. Liking to hunt, the French had wanted to keep animals coming through. On declaring the preserve, they confiscated the land, including a few rice fields belonging to a man I got to know thirty years later, Mateyendou Sambiani, the traditional Moba chief of Bombouaka. Though he was still young when the French took his rice fields, Sambiani had been chief more than a decade. By the mid-1990s he had become the most powerful and longest-lasting traditional chief

Sambiani and the Elephants -- 3 in the country, though he didnt move as quickly as he had even a few years before, when I had lived in his region. He had developed his practiced and slow gait, however, as a young chief, when he may have felt the need to walk slowly to augment his dignity. His would not have been an easy position, then: to his people, he likely seemed young and untried, and increasingly meaningless in face of the colonial bureaucracy. To those colonialists who registered his existence at all, he probably appeared only as a minor tool for effective governance, and not an interesting one, at that. The loss of his fields must have galled him and insulted his dignity in the eyes of his people. But there would have been nothing at all he could have done about it, not then, at least. By sheer determination, Sambiani forced himself to become more important than other Moba chiefs and forced the countrys rulers to pay attention to him. In the late 1950s he was selected to be part of a delegation to the United Nations in New York putting forward the case for Togolese independence. After independence, he managed to gain the ear of the national government when it came to affairs of the north, though he came from an unimportant ethnic group and a small town. Vestiges of insecurity remained with him, however. He knew that many foreigners, and those Africans who slavishly take foreigners leads, look down on the entire institution of chief. Sambiani never relaxes with any new acquaintance until respect for the chiefdom and for him, as representative of the institution, has been clearly indicated. At some point, Sambiani had a large cement throne constructed and painted white next to the flagpole in front of his house. First sight of the throne can be startling. It reminds one, however, that Sambiani has managed to negotiate his two worlds, the traditional and the modern, without completely forsaking either. Normally Sambiani himself ignores his throne. He can be found, more likely, sitting behind a table under a paiotte (a thatch-roofed gazebo) nearby. There, he keeps a telephone. There, he accepts petitions and adjudicates disputes. According to Moba tradition, his duties also extend to protection of shrines and oversight of annual religious ceremonies, but, in the years I knew him, I saw no sign of Sambianis involvement in any of this. He was, after all, a modern man even when young: as a member of the chief clan, he was sent to school in Mango, probably forced to go by the French, and educated early on in the ways of Europe.

Sambiani and the Elephants -- 4 He told me, while we were sitting under the paiotte, when I last visited him and had asked for a history of the Fosse aux lions and the elephants that once lived there, that elephants first (in his lifetime, at least) began visiting the Fosse around 1946. He reminded me of a couple of early incidents Id heard recounted in the villages, such as when the people of Pana, a village a few kilometers to the northeast of Bombouaka, tried to kill one that was eating their crops. The elephant turned the tables on them, picking up one of its attackers and swinging him against a tree. The people didnt much care for the elephants even then, for wild vegetation didnt satisfy the animals appetitesthey also wanted to eat the new type of millet the farmers had started planting. Creatures that eat several hundred kilograms of food a day can make a huge dent in a harvest. In the fall of 1948, a Frenchman shot and killed three elephants in Bombouaka. Chief Sambiani was there, and related the story to me, with occasional contradictions and addenda by one of his contemporaries and by a younger man, a history teacher at a nearby school. The story, as they told it, had little to it but bone: This Frenchman and his wife. A colonel. No, a doctor. In the colonial service, anyway. In the fall of 1948. No, forty-seven. No, hes right, forty-eight. When the elephants were coming, he climbed up a tree that stood right there, where that house is now. No, it was farther up this way. No, that way. Anyway, he shot one, then the other two. When he climbed down, the first got up again, to attack him. His wife shot it this time, and for good. In my imagination, the story goes something like this: In the fall of 1948, Dr. Henri Bontemps, whose service with the Free French had left him the rank of Colonel and a position in the revitalized French foreign service, took a trip with his wife Marie-Claude, from Lom, where he had been recently posted, up country. The purpose of the trip was two-fold: first, he was surveying the health needs of the region. Second, he hoped to do a little hunting. The trip was delayed for almost a month almost at its start: the road north of Atakpam, was impassable, they were told, due to late rains. The train had taken them that far, but the tracks went no farther. An old military transport truck loaded with canned food, tents, cots, portable stoves and baths, and even the chinaware that Bontemps had requisitioned, was waiting for them there, along with a Mina driver, a Kabye guide, and an Ewe cook on loan from the prefet. An escort of soldiers, Togolese in French service, would accompany them in another vehicle.

Sambiani and the Elephants -- 5 While waiting for drier weather, the Bontemps stayed with the Atakpam prefet, taking time out to look at the sights and forests in the area, including the famous waterfall at Badou, and even more time out for Henri to try a little hunting. He had scant luck, though his guide did catch a monkey. He presented to Mrs. Bontemps, who, not liking the chain constantly clanking from around its waist, politely refused it. The prefet, a hunter and animal enthusiast, added the monkey to his own collection. In the evenings, he entertained the couple with tales of hunts and habitats of animals. He loved the animals he killed and wanted others to love them as well. To him, there was no contradiction between natureconservation and hunting: only a poor hunter would kill too often or too many. Responsible hunters kept the herds to manageable size and assured, through their interest in promoting hunting preserves, that the lands the animals needed would be maintained. Bontemps, who very much wanted to kill a lion or an elephant, who wanted to be seen as a real hunter, too, said he agreed wholeheartedly. Finally, by the second week in October, enough dry days had passed in a row for the Bontemps to safely venture north. The road they were on, the National Road, was really little more than a dirt track, though kapoks had been planted along it where it passed through the larger villages, giving it, sometimes, the hint of boulevard, providing a quaint and almost provincial French feel to the approaches. In general, the road followed the course of the older German road, but the French had widened and straightened it during the period between the wars, making the trip up country a lot less the trek it had been before. Their high-riding, old military truck could slog through just about anything, and it almost had to, even though the road was a great deal drier than it had been just a week before. Still, they got stuck three times the first day out, in each instance having to ask their escort to conscript villagers to push them out of the mud. At the end of two days of rough driving, they made it to Mango, where they stayed with another prefet. During conversation their first evening, this prefet mentioned that elephants had been seen around Tandjoar, a village about forty kilometers farther north. Never having seen an elephant outside of zoo and circus, and now even more avid to hunt one, Henri would have hurried out and pushed on that evening, but he finally deferred to the better sense of his wife. She was tired from two nights of sleeping

Sambiani and the Elephants -- 6 under the heavy canvas tent, and wanted to relax a little in the relative luxury of Mango, though she, too, wanted to be a hunter, wanted to try for an elephant. The next day, and quite early, they did set out for Tandjoar, leaving as soon as both Henri and Marie-Claude had cleaned and oiled their weapons. It had been drier here for longer, so the going was easier, though the road up the long hill to Tandjoar had been washed out by the recent rains and they had to stop several times while their retinue shoveled rock back onto the road. In Tandjoar where the road split, one branch going to Ghana and the other heading north to the rather new and fast-growing town of Dapaong (Newmarket in Moba), they asked where the chiefs house was. They were told that Chief Sambiani had recently moved his family and administration to Bombouaka, five kilometers further up the Dapaong branch of the road. By the time they arrived in Bombouaka it was past noon, time for lunch and the afternoon siesta. Sambiani wasnt in town, having walked to a nearby village to handle some crisis or other brewing there, but he was expected back soon. Marie-Claude ordered food prepared and tents erected. The cook went off to find where he could light his fires without causing himself too much trouble and where it might be best to pitch the tents. Someone sent a child running to the chief to make him aware he had visitors. Henri and Marie-Claude waited in the shade of a large tree within sight of Bombouakas market, now nearly empty, for it was not the villages market day. They sat on wood-ribbed canvas folding chairs while they awaited the chief, and sipped wine from glasses surprisingly unbroken after days on the bumpy road. Marie-Claude instructed the cook to carry over her radio, a large, wooden thing that ran on nine-volt batteries. Perhaps, she thought, she could pick something up on the short wave. The gathering of children which had been eyeing the Bontemps quietly from a respectful distance, jumped back when Marie-Claude found a station, and words started coming from the box. One in the group, perhaps one who had been to school in Mango, explained something to the others in Moba, but neither of the Bontemps could understand. The children, however, nodded and now looked at the radio merely with curiosity. Marie-Claude turned up the volume for them, though she suspected none could understand the French coming through the static. Sambiani arrived soon after, accompanied by a couple of elders, and walked directly up to the Bontemps. He was dressed, as always, in a long white robe and a skullcap, but carried no sign of office

Sambiani and the Elephants -- 7 beyond the respect obvious in the carriage of those walking behind him. Stopping in front of the Bontemps, he waited for them to speak. Bonjour, chef. Henri rose as he spoke, as did his wife. In need of the chiefs assistance, Henri wasnt going to play any games about who should speak first to whom. Sambiani smiled and extended his hand. Henri explained who they were and gave the putative reason for their visit. He then told the chief, But we really came here today because we heard in Mango that elephants had been spotted near here, and I really would enjoy the hunt. The chief laughed, Your timing couldnt be better. Yes, there are elephants, and they are walking this way. I have just been down where they are, trying to head them away from the mango trees. We had to detour coming home, for they had decided to stop and demolish a tree by the path we were taking. How many are there? Henri motioned for Marie-Claude to hurry to the truck and get their guns. Three, replied the chief. All females? It was unlikely that a full-grown male would be with a group. Two females and, I think, a young one, but almost grown. I dont know if it is male or female. Perfect. Tusks? Not great ones, but the two adults do have them. Could you find out for us where they are now? I would certainly appreciate that. Sambiani clapped his hands once and pointed at a young man who bowed and listened to the chiefs instructions in Moba. He tore off immediately after, back down the direction from which the chief had come. Two other youths arrived carrying a chair and a stool. The chief sat down, put his feet up, and said something to one of them, who turned and walked quickly away. The youth returned almost immediately, carrying a small clay pot and three calabash (gourd) bowls. Will you drink a little tchakpa? Its a millet beer, and quite good. Henri, who had sat when the chief did, nodded. And madam? Marie-Claude was approaching, followed by the cook carrying both rifles. Shell have some, too, I am sure.

Sambiani and the Elephants -- 8 The chief held out one of the calabashes for the youth to fill from the jug, tasted the beer, nodded that it was all right, then spilt a little out on the ground, for the ancestors, as they would say. Henri and Marie-Claude let their bowls be filled then sipped cautiously at the frothy, sweet liquid. Neither had tried any of the African brews before. They were surprised that the drink was not, in fact, that bad, and that the calabash actually had a pleasant feel on the lip. Neither Henri nor Marie-Claude even considered whether or not the Africans might want them to shoot the elephants. They didnt bother to think in terms of African needs or desires and would have been surprised at the suggestion. But such was the caseSambiani and his people did want the elephants removed. Once he had heard that the Bontemps awaited him, and had divined what they wanted, the chief had given orders that the elephants be herded, as much as possible, that they be encouraged to head towards Bombouaka, straight for the Bontemps and their rifles. A group of men and boys was pelting the animals with stones from slings; others were making sure the route to the village was quite clear and free. By the time the tchakpa was finished, the first youth had returned, panting with information for the chief, who smiled, nodded to the kid, and sent him off. Soon after, he stood, clapped his hands once again, and started addressing various of the people standing around. The children vanished, the women following. The men started picking up things, including Sambianis chair and stool, and carrying them away. So, whats the situation? Henri didnt want to interrupt the chief, but he couldnt stand not knowing. The elephants are headed this way. You might even be able to see them now, if you climbed this tree.... And, actually, that might not be a bad place to shoot from. Yes. Marie-Claude, he turned to his wife, hand me my rifle, would you, when I get up there. Yes, Henri, but where shall I be? Hmm. Good question. Chief, where are they likely to run, once we shoot? I dont know that they will. They have probably never before heard rifles, and will be confused. All right then. Marie-Claude, why dont you wait in the back of the truck, ready to come out when you can, when its safe. You can see from there, and even shoot. We can both try for these elephants, but please let me shoot first.

Sambiani and the Elephants -- 9 She nodded, waited while Henri climbed the tree then handed up his rifle. She handed her own rifle to the cook, and climbed into the back of the truck. He handed it back as soon as she was inside. When it was clear that the elephants would end up near the tree and the truck, close enough for the Bontemps to shoot them, the Moba who had been trying to herd the animals vanished. They didnt feel that the Bontemps needed to be aware of their role. When he first sighted the elephants, Henris finger tightened around the trigger of his rifle, but he steeled himself to watch until the elephants were well within range. He was getting greedy, perhaps too greedy, he told himself, remembering the words about hunting of the prefet in Atakpam. But, well, this might be his only chance, ever, to shoot elephants. Still, he waited, waited until the largest was almost under the tree where he hid. Finally ready, finally sure he could get a shot off at each, or two, even, he fired. The lead elephant jerked, started to lift its trunk, then slowly collapsed, its right-side legs going down first. The other elephants, startled by the retort, looked around in confusion, then at their dying companion. Henri shot one as it lifted its trunk and started a mournful roar, then the other, thin plumes of smoke marking each retort. The second didnt fall right away, so he shot it again. This is too easy, he thought. But he was shaking from adrenaline as he lowered his rifle, dropped it to the ground, then climbed down the tree. Marie-Claude, he saw, had gotten out of the back of the truck and was turning to retrieve her gun. As he bent to pick up his, he heard her shout. Straightening, he saw that the first elephant had managed to get to its feet and was starting towards him. He turned and ran for the safety of the truck. Marie-Claude raised her rifle as he passed her and carefully shot the elephant once more. Again, it took its time falling. This time it stayed down. Thats the story as I imagined it from what Sambiani and his cronies told me. Though a few more elephants were killed after that, they were soon declared protected by the French colonial authorities. There were too few for any hunting to make sense, especially with so many hunters wanting to kill elephants. Few had proven even as sensitive as that prefet in Atakpam. Most were like the Bontemps, or like the Moba population, the former seeing the elephants only as sport for now, the latter viewing them exclusively as serious pests.

Sambiani and the Elephants -- 10 Though people with a little more sense than the Bontemps eventually came to make colonial and independent conservation policies, no one ever bothered to give the Moba, the people who had to deal with the elephants from day to day, reason for protecting the elephants. They probably didnt even realize how instrumental the Moba probably had been in most of the elephant killings in their region. The Bontemps surely werent the only elephant hunters surreptitiously helped. Elephants appeared more and more frequently as the years passed, though other animals faded from the scene. Lions were long gone by the 1950s and hippopotami had disappeared by the start of the next decade, for the most part. By 1980, about all that remained were the elephants and wild boars, whose low bodies, fierce tusks, and bobbed tails made them look as silly as the elephants were grand. In the mid-1970s, when it was establishing its other parks, the Togolese government decided that the Fosse aux lions needed major expansion. The people of half-a-dozen villages were told they had to leave their homes and were given two weeks to complete the moves. New boundaries were firmly established and gendarmes were assigned to patrol, making sure no farming took place in the park and that no animals were touched. Chief Sambiani and neighboring chiefs were forced to accept the displaced into their villages. They were as helpless against this governmental authority as ever they had been against the French. By 1988, the Moba chiefs had quietly accomplished an astonishing task: no outsider could tell who had been displaced and whose family had lived in the newly-expanded villages for generations. In all observable ways, the move of population and the integration into the outer villages had been seamless. Ten-thousand people had been relocated. Sambiani and the other chiefs had made sure they found arable land for those who had lost their homes, even when it meant curtailing the plots of others, and had located reasonable spots for building homes. The assimilation seemed complete and successful, and appeared to have taken place without resentment on the part of those who had to make room. The chiefs had shown, if anyone cared to see, that the traditional structures could work, that they could manage, in times of need, to find real solutions, though these ultimately proved only temporary. After expansion of the park, the elephant herd within it grew as rapidly as an elephant herd can. That's not too fast, given an almost two-year gestation, a long childhood and the fact that a mother rarely gives birth to more than five offspring in her sixty-year life. But, by 1990, the boundaries of the park

Sambiani and the Elephants -- 11 could no longer contain the local herd and the elephants who happened to be passing on their way to Ghana, Benin, or Burkina Faso. The people of the surrounding area, constrained by harshly-enforced law from harming any wild animals, were nearly helpless when the elephants decided to roam. Difficult enough normally there, where the land gets more and more arid each decade, their lives too often reached the point of impossibility when additional problems like elephants in the fields appeared. So they left, crowding into the already-over-packed villages and towns farther from the park. Like those who had been forced from their homes a decade earlier, they had become refugees from elephants. Those who stayed all knew, as they planted their crops, that they might never harvest them. Though fatalistic, they still attempted to protect a lifestyle and ancestry now attacked on one side by the modern life of the towns, on the other by the elephants. The modern town may eventually destroy the village life of the subsistence farmer, but the elephant seemed the more direct threat. More traditional healers, magicians, and animist priests lived and practice in the area around Bombouaka than in any other villages I knew of. Yet few of the compounds in bigger, more developed Bombouaka itself contained ancestor shrines. All compounds did, in the smaller, more threatened, outlying villages. The needs of the park seemed more likely to destroy traditional Moba culture than any threat from the modern world. The ancestors, the shrines, all seemed powerless to protect the villages from the elephants, whose protectors (the tourists and the foreigners alarmed by the drop in elephant populations) apparently had much greater power. The little villages would eventually have to be abandoned. There didnt seem to be anything that could be done. The power of money and the interest of the world outside would insist upon the ascendancy of the elephant and, by default and lack of knowledge, upon the destruction of the villages. Or so I once thought. Like so many others, though, I had underestimated the Moba. By the time of my last visit with Sambiani, the situation had changed, the tables turned. While the central government in Lom had been struggling to survive against unrest in the south, the politicians forgot to look to the countrys northernmost region. There, seeing their chance, the Moba had asked their cousins in Ghana for the loan of rifles. Using these ancient weapons, almost blunderbusses, they slaughtered over forty elephants, effectively destroying the herd in less than a year.

Sambiani and the Elephants -- 12 Afterwards, all of the villages that had been demolished in the park were rebuilt, and all the people moved back home. There was nothing, Sambiani said to me, spreading his hands, his voice deadpan, that he could have done to stop it. I didnt ask how his rice harvest had been.