''African Silences'' is a 1991 book by
Peter Matthiessen published by
Random House
Random House is an American book publisher and the largest general-interest paperback publisher in the world. The company has several independently managed subsidiaries around the world. It is part of Penguin Random House, which is owned by Germ ...
. It recounts journeys through Equatorial Africa to study the situation of elephants and other wildlife and is a meditation upon the natural world and mankind's relationship to it and effect upon it.
Content
The book recounts two sets of journeys: firstly, trips in the 1970s to Senegal, Gambia, and the Ivory Coast (with the primatologist
Gilbert Boese Gilbert may refer to:
People and fictional characters
* Gilbert (given name), including a list of people and fictional characters
* Gilbert (surname), including a list of people
Places Australia
* Gilbert River (Queensland)
* Gilbert River (Sout ...
) and secondly a 1986 trip to Gabon and Zaire. In different areas he explored different animals - for example, in Zaire, he was concerned primarily with the
Congo peacock
The Congo peafowl (''Afropavo congensis''), also known as the African peafowl or ''mbulu'' by the Bakôngo, is a species of peafowl native to the Congo Basin. It is one of three peafowl species and the only member of the subfamily Pavoninae nati ...
. Matthiessen observed that the situation in terms of animal populations and their sustainability was often far worse than anticipated - in certain cases "the animals are so scarce that they have no reality in daily life." The silence of the title refers to the silences caused by the absence of animals on the one hand and the growing absence of verdant forest away from the greater and greater proliferation of human urbanisation.
One element of slight optimism amongst the rather despairing reports of the 'silencing' of nature (which has an echo of
Rachel Carson's ''
Silent Spring'') is the discussion of moves for an international ban on the ivory trade, which Matthiessen thought were influenced by the study conducted by him in collaboration with the ecologist
David Western regarding the population of the
forest elephant.
The book also has a political subtext, since Matthiessen also commented on the brutality of certain governments in the region, as well as discussing the environment and the natural world. Certain human groups are described in far more glowing terms, such as the
Mbuti pygmies in the
Ituri Forest.
References
1991 non-fiction books
Books about Africa
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