Touching Trunks: Elephants, Ecology and Compassion in Three Southern African Teen Novels

Abstract

SummaryNothing may be more crucial to the future of animals within ecology than appropriately educating our children. In this article, the author explores the question “How do we educate children about wild animals?” through an examination of three teen novels about elephants. All three novels are set in southern Africa, and so can be contextualised (indeed, contextualise themselves) tightly within quite specific socio-political, racial, economic and ecological conditions. Two of the novels – Dale Kenmuir's The Tusks and the Talisman (1987) and John Struthers's A Boy and an Elephant (1998) – are set in Zimbabwe's Zambezi Valley. The third novel, Lauren St John's The Elephant's Tale (2009), was written by an ex-Zimbabwean but it is set in Namibia and South Africa. While all three novels are richly grounded in ecological specifics, and evince awareness of the geo-political dimensions of the region's elephant management programmes, the relationships between children and elephants also owe something to the “fairytale” human–animal relations so often portrayed in readers for younger children. Central to such relations is the question of communication, and this article focuses on the role of communication between child and elephant as a basis for a specific mode of compassion. The stories reflect, in effect, on philosophical questions of animal “mind” and emotions – now extensively discussed in ethological, philosophical and even neurological disciplines – of the place of fiction in attitudinal education, and of the role of language and of physical embodiment. Finally, the author questions to what extent such individualised contact (what Acampora calls “corporal compassion”) is sustainable – as opposed to the pursuit of more abstract ecological or “management” goals – and returns to the ambiguity of the opening question: not only how we have taught our children up to the present, but also how we ought to teach them in the face of an ecologically insecure and increasingly non-wild future.