Full Circle Digital Magazine February 2014 | Page 16

C O N S E R VAT I O N • R E P R E S E N T I N G E L E P H A N T S

Representing Elephants
by Adam Criuse

W

e have been incorporating elephants into
our lives since humans first became…
well…humans. The earliest known San
rock paintings depict elephants, and so do the cave
paintings throughout Asia and Europe. There are some
75,000 prehistoric sites worldwide depicting elephants.
The ‘primitives’ believed animals were people, but that
they represented the best and noblest of human traits.
To them elephants, (as we believe even to this day)
symbolised strength, intelligence and loyalty. They were
incorporated into belief systems as benevolent deities,
an early human behaviour that still manifests in most
religions today.
Hinduism and Buddhism are the two beliefs most
associated with elephants. Asian elephants are
represented at the moment of Creation when Indra, the
Lord of the Universe, rides into the world on the back
of an elephant named Airvaya. Then there is the arrival
of the corpulent elephant-god Ganesh, the Remover of
obstacles and the most popular of all the Hindi Gods.
Following on from the tradition of the San, almost
all Sub-Saharan African cultures have too embraced
the elephant as a significant and important symbol of
their cultural and religious fabric. Professor Dan Wylie

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of Rhodes University notes that elephant motifs have
adorned ‘stools and masks, flywhisks and drums,
tobacco pipes and calabashes’ and for various clans
the elephant became their totem symbol – the Ndovu in
Tanzania, the Ndlovo in Zimbabwe, while the Zulu kings
from Shaka onwards are known as ‘Great Elephants’.
In Zambia’s Barotseland the Lozi King at coronation is
carried along the Zambezi in an elephant-like adorned
royal boat, while dozens of other representations
have at various times represented the rulers in West,
Central and East Africa, all with the theme of being
elephants. Elephants are mentioned often in Islamic
texts, and depictions of elephants in Christian churches
throughout Europe were popular, especially among
Gothic cathedrals.
In art too, from Da Vinci’s renaissance to Dali’s
surrealism, elephants have formed part of the abstract,
the mythical and the blessed, while literature is full of
anecdotes and stories or representations of the mighty
elephant. Even Charles Dickens, in the dank and dark
pages of Hard Times uses elephant imagery to describe
the awesome puffing power of steam engines.
There is the prose of Victorian explorers and their
colonial successors where elephants were described
always from a hunter’s perspective - Cornwallis-Harris,

February 2014