Lephant Song

Echoes of the Savanna: The Elephant's Song

🐘🌍 Dive into the enchanting world of the African Savanna with "Echoes of the Savanna: The Elephant's Song"! 🎶💚 Crafted by the renowned ChatStick Team, this book unveils the captivating life of elephants. Journey across vast landscapes, delve into their complex societies, and listen to their heartwarming communication. Discover the elephant's critical role in shaping the Savanna and the threats they face in a changing world.🏞️🌳 Join us in resonating the call for conservation! Are you ready to hear the Echoes of the Savanna? 📚✨

Death and Compassion

Traces the literary history of the elephant, and its role in South Africa's cultural imaginary Elephants are in dire straits – again. They were virtually extirpated from much of Africa by European hunters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but their numbers resurged for a while in the heyday of late-colonial conservation efforts in the twentieth. Now, according to one estimate, an elephant is being killed every 15 minutes. This is at the same time that the reasons for being especially compassionate and protective towards elephants are now so well-known that they have become almost a cliché: their high intelligence, rich emotional lives including a capacity for mourning, caring matriarchal societal structures, that strangely charismatic grace. Saving elephants is one of the iconic conservation struggles of our time. As a society we must aspire to understand how and why people develop compassion – or fail to do so – and what stories we tell ourselves about animals that reveal the relationship between ourselves and animals. This book is the first study to probe the primary features, and possible effects, of some major literary genres as they pertain to elephants south of the Zambezi over three centuries: indigenous forms, early European travelogues, hunting accounts, novels, game ranger memoirs, scientists’ accounts, and poems. It examines what these literatures imply about the various and diverse attitudes towards elephants, about who shows compassion towards them, in what ways and why. It is the story of a developing contestation between death and compassion, between those who kill and those who love and protect.

An Elephant's Track