In May 1879, King Leopold II of Belgium launched an ambitious plan to plunder Africa’s resources, by cracking open the continent, its elephants – if only he could train them.  So he commissioned the charismatic Irish adventurer Frederick Carter to ship four tamed Asian elephants from India to the East African coast, where they were marched inland towards Congo. The ultimate aim was to establish a training school for African elephants. 

The steamship Chinsura sailed from Bombay to Zanzibar, carrying four tamed Asian elephants bound for Tanzania. Travelling overland more than 600 miles from Dar-es-Salaam to Lake Tanganyika, the expedition Carter would lead was intended to prove the viability of the animals as beasts of burden – and bull-dozers  – to open up the continent to Belgian resource extraction. Trained African elephants were so few at the time that Asian elephants had to be used, but Carter had directions to create a school for training captured African elephants, for the same purpose, on reaching Lake Tanganyika.

She meets a Church sexton, a local chief, a conservation ranger, a nun – that Carter’s world may be drawn into the light. His journey becomes Robert’s “Passport into a region’s oral memory”. If Carter’s and his elephants’ footprints have long been swept away, the legacy of the onslaught they heralded remains stark.  Roberts is “haunted by what is missing”: the teak and mahogany trees that were abundant in Carter’s day are all but gone, there are no lions or rhinos, the rivers are choked with water hyacinth.

When in Ugalla, Robert meets a Nyamwezi chief of chiefs who mimics the sound of a dying elephant – a “long haunting groan” –“ it was as if a colossal reverberating through wilderness where I’d seen none”. But even in 1879, Carter found that the African elephants he had been tasked with training were gone, shot or spooked by the ivory hunters who preceded him. 

Acclaimed author of The Lost Pianos of Siberia, Sophie Roberts followed four 19^th century elephants marched from the East African coast towards Congo, and travels to Belgium, Iraq, India, Tanzania to give us a heart-breaking story colonial trampling. The storytelling brings to life a compelling cast of historic characters and modern voices, from ivory dealers to Catholic nuns, set against rich descriptions of the landscapes she travelled.

She reveals after digging into historic records to reckon with our broken relationship with animals, giving us an enduring story of colonial greed, ineptitutde, hypocrisy and folly.

A Training School for Elephants by Sophy Roberts, Doubleday £22, 432 pages.New Spy Thriller with cliffhangers