Exploring Elephants in European Hunting Narratives from Nineteenth-Century Southern Sudan

European accounts of elephant-hunting in nineteenth-century Africa have been primarily used by historians to explore the construction of the idealized male imperial hero and his increasingly monstrous elephant-foe. This paper asks what happens, however, if we see the elephants in such sources not only as symbolic representations but as living creatures with the capacity to communicate across species. Undoubtedly, the elephants who appeared in nineteenth-century hunting literature were distorted by cultural imaginaries, but this paper argues that they were nevertheless the product of interspecies encounters in which elephants could be experienced as extremely powerful antagonists. Hunters are, by necessity, the keenest observers of animal behaviour and the most likely to experience close bodily encounters with their prey. The elephants knew (or were learning) how to loom larger than life or how to disappear into thin air: their own behaviours and strategies produced the fantastic beasts in these texts as much as the authors’ imaginations. By reading their accounts in dialogue with indigenous oral sources and more recent research on elephant behaviour and with attentiveness to the emotional, embodied, and even empathic aspects of hunting experiences, we can attempt to discern the intentions, messages, and impacts of elephants. This paper suggests that at least some of these behaviours likely arise from a specific historical context of unprecedentedly intense elephant-hunting in nineteenth-century Southern Sudan. It argues therefore that the aggressive, vindictive monsters of European narratives were produced not just by the authors’ imaginations but also by the effects of their hunting.