YEYE B&W

She stood protectively, her family herding around her as they prepared to move onward.

Yeye means “she” in Swahili.

They had just come from the local waters nearby. The late sun, leaving the soft brown hues of its settling heat, had allowed them to enjoy their brief respite in the nearby pool. It was a welcome break from the previous days of their long journey westwards across their ancestral lands, where for thousands of years, if not more, they had traversed as the seasons changed. She had arrived here ahead of them all and sensed our presence from the light breeze. She stood observing in our direction, but after a short while, she felt we were not a threat to her family and trumpeted a call, inviting the others to come out and join the group. They formed a small circle, and hidden amongst them, a calf briefly appeared, pressing towards her in search of her mother's rich, nutritious milk. They stood for a little while, allowing the little one to finish her short feed before signaling to each other, and, as one group, slowly began moving onward to continue their journey west.

One of the marvels of the animal kingdom is its sense of history and place. Those thousands of years set with the imprint of life’s forces and stories continued into recent times. But in just a matter of a few decades, this has all changed. Most routes in the wild, such as these, are now gone. Their spaces are smaller, and their place of safety is increasingly under pressure. For me, this is such a sad indictment of our human species. Our preamble now seems to be about shifting into the vortex of accelerated growth in populations across the world and our unquenched demand for access to more and more to support this. We have created a new narrative that is all about ourselves, forgetting all those others who share this world with us. Our demand for land, food, water, and energy is simply forcing many species to change their millennial history and spin into a decline in their existence in favour of our yearning for growth. Even in these few remaining truly wild places, poaching and hunger by humans are everywhere. Our battles here are now for the sake of saving what remains. The incessant desire by some to eat or luxuriate in the ownership of the increasingly scarce and threatened, if not soon-to-be extinct, animals makes me realise no one is really listening nor wanting to see this truth anymore. The digital world is the new wilderness to occupy our minds, and when we talk, we mostly talk or chant about ourselves, our rights, or our so-called human dignity. Even our sense of self is being re-defined by avatars that transfer us casually into new digital dimensions to help us forget about the pains of our present one. So, unlike the elephant who observed me for a while before accepting I was not a threat, I feel she ought to have seen what I really represent - the most dangerous of all species on earth. Perhaps she did.