Ivory irony

I was buying toilet paper this past weekend and the woman asked me “Unaomba tembo au waridi?” Did I want the elephant roll or the rose roll? What a silly question, I thought. “The elephant roll!”

Elephants are highly regarded in marketing here. A popular Tanzanian cement company is called “Tembo Cement.” The local bank calls their credit card the “Tembo Card.” And the logo of the Hilltop Hotel features a giant elephant with massive ivory tusks – a creature which seems as likely to walk the hotel's grounds as a woolly mammoth.

The elephant image appears to be successful at marketing a variety of products associated with size and strength. But it is an unfortunate irony that elephants haven't been more successful at marketing the intrinsic value of elephants.

The last elephant near Kigoma town was probably killed at least two decades ago, during a time when they were associated less with toilet paper and more with wrecking gardens and ivory payloads. Today some elephants live in the southern part of the Kigoma region, but only a few remain, and they are getting fewer.

I spoke with a colleague about this over tea this morning. “Burundi is the number one exporter of ivory on the black market,” he told me, “and that’s a problem because they don’t have any elephants left in Burundi. So that means they are coming down to Kigoma, killing our elephants and then hiking back through the forests to Burundi with the tusks – hiking for weeks at a time if they have to. You’d be amazed at how quickly someone can hike with a huge ivory tusk over his shoulder.” It seems the heavier the tusk, the lighter the poacher is on his feet.

I attended (and presented at) a series of meetings last week that discussed the challenges and opportunities for conservation in an area south of Kigoma. I learned that the population of people in that area is still relatively small and disbursed, and that it is possible to help these communities live in harmony with the animals in the region, including elephants. But a proposed road has the potential to change all of that, slicing through the ecosystem and bisecting the migration routes elephants have used for generations.

Are elephants in the region being replaced with Tembo Cement? And if so, will the children of tomorrow know that elephants once roamed where concrete is being poured today?

My colleagues seem to think it is possible to meet the community's needs and to save room for wildlife, such as elephants - but we don't have time to waste. As strong as elephants may seem on a bag of concrete, they are not stronger than homemade shotguns or the will of consumers to collect ivory (on the international scale) or to buy meat (at the local market). So until a shotgun replaces elephants as the marketing symbol for strength, elephants will continue to be driven off their land by the very products their image is helping to promote.

I am not a Tanzanian, but I do think there needs to be a place in Tanzania for elephants beyond cartoon images on cookie boxes. If that is going to happen, a lot of work needs to be done to market elephants for the sake of elephants. And if that doesn't happen, I fear that one day Tanzanian students will sit in a concrete classroom eating elephant-shaped cookies and open their textbook to find these magnificent beings sharing a page with their woolly ancestors.