A Training School for Elephants, Sophy Roberts, Doubleday, £22.

‘The independence of Congo is the end result of the work started with the exceptional personality of King Leopold II, which he tackled with determined courage.’ Thus declared Baudouin, King of Belgium, on June 30 1960 in a speech in Kinshasa, as the small European country ended its rule of the biggest state in sub-Saharan Africa. What is now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that day became the Republic of Congo. For 52 years until 29 June, it had been the Belgian Congo and, before that, the Congo Free State. This last name, for a territory that is larger than western Europe, was especially ironic.

Between 1885 and 1908, when he was forced to sell it to the Belgian state, the territory was owned by Leopold II. He had secured it for himself at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, where Europe’s powers divided the ‘magnificent African cake’ between themselves. None of his peers thought that Congo, perceived by contemporaries as a sprawling land mass at the heart of the ‘dark continent’, was especially attractive, so Leopold succeeded in quickly taking it off the negotiating table. It went on to be witness to the deaths of millions – as well as rape, famine, disease and widespread exploitation – as the monarch imposed forced labour in a tyrannical push to capitalise on his private possession’s abundant supply of natural resources, notably rubber and ivory.

By Baudouin’s logic, however, the rise of one of the most violent regimes in the history of Africa was a necessary step on the road to Congo becoming a self-governing state. Reader, I for one can’t follow it.

Much has been written about the history of Leopold’s misadventures in Congo, which took place, in a sense, at one remove, since he never visited. Good starting points include Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost (1998) and David van Reybrouck’s Congo (2015). In A Training School for Elephants, Sophy Roberts’ focus is narrower but no less illuminating. She draws us back to before Berlin, tracking across 12 well-illustrated chapters ‘the forgotten story’ of an 1879 expedition funded by Leopold as he sought to sketch out a critical element of his ‘march to empire’: recruiting elephants and training a school of the largest land animals on Earth, so as to enable journeys deeper into the continent and easier control of it.

As the first chapter outlines, Leopold’s travels throughout the British Raj and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in the mid-1860s inspired his decision to commission teams of explorers to go out and establish an empire he could call his own. After much public emphasis on the ‘civilisation’ that he would bring Congo, Leopold secretly recruited Henry Morton Stanley to enter Africa from the west. Irishman Frederick Carter, who had escaped workhouses at home for Mesopotamia and spoke fluent Arabic, would front the public expedition.

A lack of ready-tamed beasts in Africa meant that two male and two female Indian elephants – Sundar Gaj, Naderbux, Pulmalla and Sosankalli – were conscripted for Carter, who met them in Aden, and the book follows the long, back-breaking progress of his caravan as it came up against local rulers, illness, hyenas and bad weather, and was touched by rivalry between individual explorers from different parts of Europe. All the elephants died, but they served Leopold’s purpose: a training school was set up at Gangala-na-Bodio in the mid-1920s, its overworked captives ‘decorating Belgian Congo banknotes and stamps’ within a few decades.

What makes this book so readable is that Roberts, a travel journalist, takes the reader back in time by taking herself on the expedition as best she can in the present. Inspired to follow in Carter’s footsteps by an encounter with a map in a Donegal cottage between Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, she is an excellent reporter, gleaning important details from descendants of people named in or adjacent to the historical record. Roberts is also frank about the challenges of making such a journey and the ethics of telling it, noting, for example, that she has ‘done [her] best to avoid unnecessary repetition of offensive words… not to diminish the depth of colonial perversions but out of a writerly belief that we must let some words die without overlooking the ideas those words represent’.

In this way, her approach recalls that of her debut, The Lost Pianos of Siberia, which painted a portrait of the political and cultural past of a region of the world synonymous with hostility through the stories of individual musical instruments. Here, the impression feels more powerful, though in part because her subjects were once alive.

‘When they weren’t sweating off a malarial fever, they [the colonisers] were filing trunkfuls of official reports, field journals, letters and newspaper articles to their consuls, editors and benefactors’, Roberts observes, making for a rich archive to plunder. Her cast of characters is considerable, running to almost 60. Yet she manages them deftly, capturing their idiosyncrasies and motivations, and how even the white Europeans were in effect captive to Leopold. Within hours of Brussels receiving news of Carter’s death, for example, ‘all payments of his salary – previously sent straight to his foster mother – ceased’. As one Belgian prime minister noted, Leopold treated ‘men as we use lemons… when he has squeezed them dry he throws away the peel’.

As that last sentence evinces, Roberts’ selection of material is astute and well-judged, and her prose is replete with novelistic turns of phrase. In Donegal, clouds are ‘balls of bog cotton quivering in the mizzling rain’, while dog walkers ‘slid like shadows between the trees’ in Park van Tervuren in Brussels. She was wise to make most of them endnotes and allow the reading experience to remain largely uninterrupted, but Roberts’ later defence of footnotes as ‘the narrative underdogs that can’t quite find their place in the dominant record… they can provoke a diversion or encourage a slightly shifted gaze’ is the most creative and accurate gloss on this kind of paratext that I have yet to come across.

‘When Leopold II embarked on the great work that is being crowned today, he did not come here as a conqueror but as a bringer of civilization’, Baudouin told his audience in 1960, reiterating the apparent link between his predecessor’s imperial ambition and Congo’s celebration of its independence. If there is one piece of evidence in Roberts’ arsenal that above all others proves his statement to be perverse, it is her main characters: elephants, then and now.

Between 1889 and 1908 the tusks of around 94,000 African elephants arrived in Antwerp from Congo, Roberts observes, with ivory used to make everything from piano keys to sex toys. While ‘we used to depend on elephants to survive’, in that their movement across land led early humans to food and water, ‘now we only take their tusks’, she adds coolly, evoking the ‘scene of mutilation you can’t unsee’ when an animal has been poached.

The World Wildlife Fund estimates that there are about 415,000 African elephants left in the wild today; in the early 1800s, they numbered as many as 27 million. Such a precipitous decline is not the result of a civilising mission but greed. Leopold’s misadventures might have ended more than a century ago, but they still cast a long shadow.