“If elephants didn’t exist, you couldn’t invent one. They belong to a small group of living things so unlikely they challenge credulity and common sense,” Lyall Watson writes in an opening chapter entitled “Seeing the Elephant”.
According to the Oxford dictionary, “to see the elephant” means in American slang “to get experience of life, to gain knowledge of the world”. Watson has spent the past half-century trying to “see the elephant”, literally and figuratively. This book is an account of what he has learnt — about elephants, and about life.
His conclusion? “Fortunately, common sense is coming back, intuitive understandings are no longer so easily dismissed as naive or illusory, and we are beginning to include information transmitted through unofficial channels.”
His quest for this knowledge began when he was a young boy. One month of his school holidays was spent with a gang of other boys who called themselves the Strandlopers, living in a ramshackle hut on the Eastern Cape coast without adult supervision. During one of these holidays Watson saw a magnificent white elephant bull staring out to sea. This was the beginning of a lifelong passion to understand and appreciate elephants.
“We were a motley collection of young boys, all white, all brought up in a society which wore blinkers. One which clung desperately to the idea of empire and supremacy of our northern race, loving Africa but holding it at arm’s length, never letting it get too close, afraid of what might happen once we dropped our guard.”
Watson’s saving grace was the hut on the beach, his time spent with the Strandlopers and the lessons he learnt from an early mentor, a Khoisan named !Kamma.
Another of his mentors was a woodcutter named Kroos Arend who lived in the Knysna forest. Both these mentors talked to him about white elephants, or spirit elephants.
During his research, he discovered that the cult of the white elephant goes back to at least the 12th century BC, and has recurred in many different parts of the world — Thailand, China, Bali, the Sahara, Nigeria and in the rock paintings of the San of Southern Africa. Watson explored the history of elephants and their relations with humans over the ages. He developed a great empathy with these intelligent creatures: “It is hard not to describe their behaviour in human terms, to see ourselves and our foibles in them,” he writes.
Watson is a South African zoologist and naturalist who has worked with some of the world’s pre-eminent scientists. He spent many years working with South Africa’s renowned archaeologist, Raymond Dart.
He was a producer and presenter of science programmes for BBC Television when he wrote Supernature: A Natural History of the Supernatural. He has a fascination for the “soft edges” of science, for the questions that have no answers.
Supernature was a huge success, selling about seven million copies around the world. Watson says what he learnt about the paranormal in writing Supernature and the 10 books that followed made sense of some of the elephant mysteries.
The “elephantoms” in the title of the book come from a paper about elephant evolution, written in 1911 by American scientist and scion Henry Fairfield Osborn.
Following Osborn’s evolutionary theme, Watson ends his book by designing in theory a new kind of elephant — “one that might survive even our depredations and excesses”. So he invents an elephant that could be more than a phantom in the new millennium: lose the tusks; become less obvious and visible; work out ways to conceal droppings and dead bodies.
It’s a delightful ending to a personable, thought-provoking book. Hopefully, the elephants and elephantoms will take note of his suggestions.