Dancing the Cultural & Environmental Tune in Kulet's The Elephant Dance

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It is uncommon to come across a text with a title such as “the elephant dance”. But Kulet has done so in his latest novel. Published by Longhorn through its subsidiary Sasa Sema, The Elephant Dance appears to perfect Kulet’s desire for environmental and cultural conservation. This is a fete he had attempted to accomplish through Vanishing Herds. I liked the latter text but now as a reader I am compelled to take sides and thus, I cast my vote for the forma as a better read – I just can’t tell what that text did to me!

In The Elephant Dance, Kulet’s writing has attained a more complex demeanour and a sense of refinement on the part of the writer. I would without a doubt refer to this text as Kulet’s acme as a creative writer. Kulet is able to synthesise a multiplicity of issues in a deft manner such that the reader is not consciously worried of keeping track of the same: environmental conservation, the genealogy of Ogieks and other indigenous communities in Kenya, insecurity, poaching, corruption, courtship, education among others.

This is a story of contemporary business empires and an illumination of how some of them are constructed through money laundering, corrupt business deals and generally with disregard for morals – humanity. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego (SMA) are the owners of a thriving business empire driven by the desire to amass wealth at all costs even if this means a total decimation of wildlife. They connive with a local minority community by enlisting the services of ilmorok…. to camouflage their evil pursuits of elephant tusks and rhino horns among other illegal wildlife trophies.

It will take the courage of a young teenage boy, Reson with his elder brother Sena and their uncle Pesi with the help of a feared officer Regina Naitore and her assistant Leah Naipande to rout their bloated egos and cripple their poaching syndicate. What begins as a simple effort for recognition on the part of Reson as a renown hunter in his indigenous community grows into a respected image of the self when he discovers the poachers and leads his brother and uncle to their hideout and to the discovery of the massacre of their beloved animals. The culmination of the arrest of the poachers is symbolic of his coming of age as a young man within the context of his community but it is also the coming of age of the patriarchal structures of his indigenous community.

With a fine stroke of the pen, Kulet remains true to his calling of cultural and environmental preservation. Perhaps afraid of the global trends of the destruction of flora and fauna in the characteristic wantonness of men, the writer hopes that his fiction will serve as a clarion call to tame the insatiable appetite of humans. Infused in this story is a subtle struggle for women emancipation. Although it is not openly articulated, the reader discovers that the young ladies in the story have a raring spirit that makes them daring enough to declare their feelings for the young men in a tradition where it is assumed that such open demonstrations would appear taboo. On the contrary, this attempt at women affirmation is dampened by the competition between two girls who are seeking for Sena to cast a benevolent eye on them. It depicts them as desperate whilst appearing to make the man come across as indispensable.

This text highlights how international syndicates connive with corrupt local individuals to rob local communities their cultural heritage and wealth. Such individuals are driven by a selfish ambition to amass wealth at all costs. Indeed, they would not think twice even if the environment was decimated in a day. The way the poachers massacre the buffaloes and the elephants is an indication of such human greed. They butcher more buffaloes for meat than they would be able to consume and even when they consume, it is with the intention to waste as opposed to the local community’s policy of hunting to meet basic needs.

In this text, the reader is able to see the culpability of local communities when they are lured into a business they know little about. The Ilmirisho are proof of this when they get engaged to hunt on behalf of SMA. A long tradition of deprivation and discrimination appears as a catalyst for the motivation to engage in unscrupulous activities when the local people are provided with ‘modern’ clothes and other paraphernalia in the name of civilisation. They abandon their mores and unknowingly participate in activities that threaten the core of their very being. With no alternative means of survival, it is almost given that once the community destroys the forest, then they sound the death knell of their very existence. 
A hearty congratulation to Henry Ole Kulet for wining "The Text Book Centre Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature 2017" Adult Category for this novel.