Page 25 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

thrown to us turned out to be an elephant thighbone. Surely he must have known whose.

The deliberateness of his actions was unmistakable. It took our breath away.

And so, and now, how shall we live?

While in Liberia some weeks later, we made offerings to the elephants in the forest and

told them of our visit to their cousins in Botswana. The following year, just before

Thanksgiving, I received a call from Liberia that elephants had arrived in all of the

villages where offerings to the elephants had been made. I rushed back to hear the

stories in person, wondering whether the Botswana elephants had, indeed, put out the

call to their Liberian kin.

In the village of Womanor, when the elephants came, the elders fanned out into the

forest and read certain passages from the Koran out loud. They explained that this had

been customary in the old times, to let the elephants know that the people recognized

their presence as a sacred event. Since the appearance of the elephants the village had

not been troubled by poisonous insects or snakes. The elephants had come in a small

group, led by a large and very old bull. It was thought that this individual had escaped

from a zoo during the war, and had walked several hundred kilometers to safety in

neighboring Guinea, and recently returned. One day, a woman met him while farming

her small plot, coming face to face with the huge old bull elephant just as he was about

to pull up one of her cassava plants. She looked him in the eye and said: I’m a woman

and I grow this food for my children. My husband was killed in the war. Please, be sorry

for me, and leave us something to eat! The elephant unwound his trunk from the

cassava stalk and disappeared into the forest. A short time later, that elephant died. The

people brought out his massive skull to show us.

We accompanied our friend Karmah Jallah, an elder from the Lorma tribe, to the

Mandingo village of Kuluka. Though the Mandingos and the Lormas were historically

very close, during the Liberian civil war they were, literally, at each other’s throats. Now,

two years after the war had ended, there was still much bitterness and animosity

between them. Because the elephants had come, Karmah Jallah convened a council at

Kuluka, which was held at the gravesite of the founding elder of the village. There,

Karmah Jallah recounted the history of their two peoples and the deep and loving

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