Documenting the African elephant’s ‘last stand’: Q&A with filmmaker Cyril Christo By John C. Cannon, Mongabay.com Staff Writer INTERVIEW WITH CYRIL CHRISTO You mentioned that this film was a prayer. What did you mean by that? When we started interviewing elders and tribal people in Africa, the Southwest of the U.S., Australia and the Amazon, we had no idea we would make a film. Marie and I were most concerned about impending climate changes and the effects of globalization on local communities and their ecology. Our film is a prayer because it is an extended testimony about why animals, elephants and nature should matter to us all. It is not meant as a comprehensive study or documentation of a single event. It is less about facts than about fellowship. It does not examine the workings of the ivory trade or wildlife crime syndicates. That has been done. It is not an exposé about elephants, although their “ genocide” is the greatest single horror story of our time. “Walking Thunder” is meant as a journey and an honoring of the life force, both human and non-human, especially in Africa, but by extension, [of] tribal people and species everywhere. We did not start putting the pieces of the film [together] as a potential film until after Lysander was born. Only then did we slowly realize that his time on earth with ineffable beings was not only a privilege but the heritage of all children since time immemorial. Here was a child, frail and young, taking in the wonder of existence and being immersed in the place where humanity was born. Innocence met the harsh reality of drought [and] heat and the fantastic power of raw, real and remarkable creatures who were his peers. It is a fellowship that has been the hallmark of our species for millennia. Animals have always introduced us to life. Now it is machines that do that. It is a grave mistake we are making for the future of childhood the world over. “Walking Thunder” started to coalesce around Lysander because it is his future that was being formed. And then in 2009–2010, when our book of the same title came out, we started to learn about the ivory trade starting up again. And Lysander was only five! We were literally thunderstruck and horrified. The future of the greatest land mammal on earth and an entire patrimony was being jeopardized for the lust of trinket seekers, all because of the downswing in the global market in 2008. People wanted to find other wealth besides gold and dollars. Everyone thought that most of the ivory trade had ended in 1989, and here it was beginning all over again. The joy and awe that Lysander had felt, that we had seen on his face, [as he learned] the names of animals in Africa, was being ravaged. The world had made so much progress watching elephant populations rise after the slaughter of the elephants in the 1980s, and now the innocent beings — some of humanity’s first teachers — who led us to water throughout our evolution, whose very flesh fed us, who helped us walk out of Africa, were being destroyed again! “Walking Thunder” is a prayer because it is a concerted call to conscience, for parents, for those of who have ever been children, to salvage not just beauty but the reason for us to be on this planet, which is to be in fellowship with not just other humans but our fellow creatures, [which are] critical for the future of earth. As we have entered the Anthropocene, many experts agree that species biodiversity and extinction may [be] even more significant than climate change. They are at least on par with each other. We did not want to record just [the] facts of what is happening to Africa but also hint at the mythic base of who we are as a species. Paul Shepard, the inimitable ecologist [who wrote] “The Others: How Animals Made Us Human” in 1996, said of the other animals, “We will save them, if at all, because without them, we are lost.” He also added very eloquently, “Midway between ourselves and the colossal events in the sky, the great beings become interlocutors, whose lives sift the forces of the wind, and water and fire, seeming to say that all such phenomena ultimately are purposeful and ongoing expressions of a meaningful world.” Indeed, without the others, we will cease to be human in any recognizable form. Is that why the youth today are so fixated on videos and machines, and their parents and adults accept artificial intelligence as the new norm? If our destiny is to meld with the machine, then we have indeed left organic evolution behind. “Walking Thunder” is meant as a testimony, a way of honoring the greatest bond humanity has ever known: our relationship to nature and her species. Witness the pantheon of animal gods from Egypt [and] the species indigenous people celebrate the world over; they honor the symbolic and mythic foundation of animals. Ours is not a wildlife film or just a personal journey; it is a plea for something sacred that has always informed our body, mind and spirit. The film is meant as a reminder of the communion with species who predate us by millions of years. The others indeed helped us evolve and in the process of flaying them we have betrayed Creation. The native voice holds key aspects to our origins. Lose them and we face oblivion. Without the animals and tribal peoples connection to them, we enter a different phase of time, one in which we abandon what it fully means to be human. That is why the fixation on artificial intelligence and melding the human mind to the machine is so diabolical and a great danger: It stands us on another planet of our making without the organic ballast we have depended on since our inception. Carl Jung called animals “the priests of God.” It is how Lysander has seen the others his entire life since he first learned to walk and talk in east Africa. It is why animals were revered even if they were eaten — because they were sacrosanct and necessary for survival. Their life force fed the human spirit. “Walking Thunder” is a prayer because the single transcendent cause of our time is to save the life force of the planet. Not making bigger, faster missiles, or going to Mars or increasing market shares, or having more children, but saving us from what [Edward] Abbey warned us about [in his book “The Monkey Wrench Gang”] — “a high tech slum” with no wilderness left. The native people are the ontological immune system of earth, and they respected that which created them. Our so-called civilization is bankrupt, and not just financially. And that is why the stopping the ivory trade has become so enormous. I once called on Elie Wiesel to say something about the elephant massacre because of his connection with the concentration camps. He said there was no comparison. I kindly insisted there was, especially since it was impossible to measure pain and that in the great scheme of the universe, were any of us better than any elephants or whales? Not as far as the future of the planet is concerned. He acknowledged that to stop the ivory trade was an “urgent moral imperative.” We convinced Vanity Fair to run the biggest article of our time, “Agony and Ivory,” by Alex Shoumatoff [in] August 2011, which went viral and which galvanized the world. No one else in the media at the time was remotely interested. The world responded, but over the next seven years, we still lost a third of the world’s elephants! Over 130,000 individuals! That article, a landmark, was also a prayer to conscience. “Walking Thunder” is essentially an exploration, a journey that stems less from fact than from the impact we are having on our own soul and by extension nature. The film is a plea to salvation while we still have some time. It is a prayer because it is meant as a way forward, a way to retrieve our sanity. The title comes from a previous book that you and Marie published, right? What is the significance of the title, “Walking Thunder”? We published “Walking Thunder: In the Footsteps of the African Elephant” in 2009. To find a title that hinted at a larger way of relating to the elephant in a more than rational way was not easy. I had talked to Katy Payne, whose wonderful book “Silent Thunder” in 1998 underscores the unique discovery she made that elephants use infrasonic sounds, sounds below the range of human hearing to communicate. Naturally, we could not use her title, but I wanted to use the word thunder because when elephants trumpet it feels as it the clouds, the earth has just moved. It is an exclamation pointing to creation saying, “I am here!” One bull elephant who came very close to our car and greeted us in the Serengeti trumpeted and then walked away just as lightning struck in the distance and thunder erupted over the landscape. I wanted to give a sense of the unfathomable poetry of a being whose migration paths we have followed since our beginning and who helped us walk out of Africa many millennia ago and with whom we share an entire evolutionary path out of the Old World into the New. “Walking Thunder” is meant to hint at the nomadic splendor of a being that is increasingly being corralled into restricted ranges, a being both in Africa and Asia that is having increasing conflict with human settlement. In India the passage of elephants was seen as the coming of the rains and monsoons. Indeed the elephant’s body was understood as being related to the clouds. And in East Africa tribes such as the Maasai and Samburu watched animals’ movements as precursors to the rains. Watching the signs of the natural world has always been what made us humans and they were inscribed in story, song and dance. Where have we gone with our immersion in technology? The elephant’s thunderous walk may often be silent, but when elephants call out to the world, it is an ambulatory ritual or song, the great creature of Africa who helped create the savanna and even its rainforests through its giant strides. Walking Thunder. The film opens with a quote from Romain Gary, talking about the power of seeing elephants for the first time. Is that how you felt when you first saw elephants? The first time elephants appeared to [me and] Marie was in Lake Manyara [National Park in] Tanzania, and the lake’s edge made the Edenic landscape utterly mesmerizing. Gary’s thoughts are the most eloquent of the 20th century, and they mark a man who fought against fascism and knew about the evils of World War II. So when he rhapsodized about elephants, it is from someone who was fighting for freedom. He understood that elephants were the last individuals. In Manyara, the gem-like quality of the water seduces amidst the luxuriance of the foliage. Treeclimbing lions called out from above. The beauty of Tanzania’s vastness included close to 150,000 elephants then. So the recent loss of over 60 percent of the Tanzania’s total is fantastically sad. In Gary’s time, Africa may have had over 5 million elephants. “They’re the last individuals,” Gary wrote. Indeed, along with the whales whose paths in the oceans are also being jeopardized by shipping lanes and sound and plastic pollution. Gary talks about a prisoner who inhabited a cell in prison — “Talk about claustrophobia! So in the end I had an idea. When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I would close my eyes and think of the herds of elephants at liberty, running freely across Africa, hundreds and hundreds of magnificent animals that nothing can resist — no cement wall, no barbed wire, nothing. They rush forward over the great open spaces and smash everything in their way, and nothing can stop them. That’s liberty, I tell you! So when you begin to suffer from claustrophobia, or the barbed wire fences, the reinforced concrete, the absolute materialism, just imagine this: herds of elephants charging across the wide open spaces of Africa. Follow them with your eyes closed, keep their image inside you, and you’ll see, you’ll feel better and happier and stronger …” It is a wonder to behold them each and every time as if they were an apparition. But if we are not very careful, they may become nothing more than a memory. Their population is already a figment of their former selves and the human mist everywhere pervades the last sanctuaries. Gary’s love and conviction of their place on earth is unparalleled in the 20th century. But his words must not be the last. The elephants are the greatest terrestrial canary in the coal mine of this overheated earth. Those who still pay for trophies are ungodly. We have to make an aboutface vis-a-vis nature. The elephants and whales now are the equivalent of the glacier that sunk the Titanic. China may have shut its ivory market a few months ago, but the black market continues. The joy and wonder Lysander experienced has certainly changed. The world knows it is walking a tightrope with regard to a being who walks in our conscience like few others. For the Hindus, elephants were the guardians of the four directions. If I may quote myself, when I spoke with Lysander in front of the U.N. for the first March for Elephants in October 2013, [I said], “Civilization will stand or fall on the back of the African elephant.” Europe carved up Africa for territory and slaves and ivory. Much of the modern world was built on the back of the African continent. If the African elephant should fail, we fall off the cliff of time. The Karma will simply be too great. We are indebted to the elephant in ways we cannot begin to measure. So if we want to even hope to have happiness in the future, we have to keep the elephants on earth. Much of the film is told from the perspective of your son, Lysander. That seems like an intensely personal choice to track his growth alongside the elephants and the people you interact with. How did you make the decision to have him as a guide for the viewers? When we started interviewing elders, we did not yet have Lysander. Changing rainfall patterns and climate change in Africa and elsewhere were our main concerns. Before he was one, we took Lysander to the Arctic. He would return several times later because we needed to witness the roof of the world [and] the fragility of the ice and have Lysander be touched by the elemental realities. He had his first birthday and his second birthday in Kenya among the Maasai so at an early age he knew that the world was made up of different textures, sounds, animals and peoples. Lysander has been a guide for our priorities since he was born and we knew that Africa would be able to open up channels one did not get in the so-called “first world.” The first steps of pure innocence in East Africa, the photo of him being held by Rakita, a member of the Ndorobo tribe, a clan of the Maasai with his mouth open looking up at the sky in total awe, opens our film and informs much of the discoveries that we have shared with him. Innocence in the form of a child taking in the world, the planet, soon became a central focus of what we filmed and photographed. Most — maybe all — conservation films have centered on the ecological realities of poaching, drought and extinction. But few underscore what is ultimately at stake for humanity, the future of childhood. We wanted to join our journey with Lysander’s journey because Lysander is the future. He is inheriting a fragile earth, so his perception, his reactions, his concerns embody in many ways the concerns of all children. What will there be for me on this earth in 20 years, in half a century? Our responsibility is not about just making a film but telling a larger audience that we should all be actively voicing our concern for the most fragile era in not only human history but [also] biological and geological time. I have had some parents say, “This may be a concern of yours, but it is not a priority of ours.” How can the future of life not be a concern for the life form parents have put on this earth? Lysander is a personal choice, yes, but he incarnates childhood. His awe and marvel represent a response to life that many adults lose when they grow up. Isn’t this what [Antoine de Saint-Exupéry] underscores in “The Little Prince”? We should be reminded that the future of real childhood is up for grabs. Not only do children have Nature Deficit Disorder, in many cases, they have given their spirit over to the digital screen. The stories that informed childhood about nature, Creation stories, have taken a back seat to the information age and the cybernetic stare. Lysander’s discoveries do not have to be in Africa. They could be in acknowledging the coyotes in our backyards and the birds and butterflies everywhere. But we have to acknowledge them and their habitats. Once, we were simply staring at the water outside New York [City] and saw a cloud of birds coming toward us. They were cormorants; about 1,000 of them flew overhead. It was a dazzling vision. Parents need to remind children to respect that which is greater than us and act in ways that will be meaningful because so much of our civilization is based on money, growth, power and the seduction of technology. Nature is the only sanctuary that transcends them and reaches for a higher voice. Lysander’s voice is about holding on to that which makes us sane, the essence of the child within and most importantly engaging with those cultures that still revere beings that make this earth so unique in the universe. In many ways, he’s living a childhood fantasy that many of us had — to spend so much time among the animals and people of Africa. And yet, pretty quickly, he becomes aware of the struggles that elephants face. How has he dealt with that? Well, Lysander misses Africa so much that he can’t always respond to the overwhelming reality of what has happened to the elephants, although the crisis has taken up most of his life. He knows humanity is to blame for untold horrors and cannot forgive our species for what we have done to the wild and why any great being is killed for a few pounds of essentially worthless teeth. He is saddened by what we are capable of. In terms of protecting elephants, Lysander once wrote, “If they have to fence off elephants, fence off the whole of Africa.” Instinctively, intuitively, Lysander knew from an early age that elephants meant freedom. Lysander once said, “We have landed on the moon, but we haven’t landed on Earth yet.” That is perhaps his most eloquent line because it is not bitter and resentful towards the human species but affirms that, while we can aim for the stars, our real place is here on earth, which is what the Native peoples of the Southwest [of the United States] where we live have been telling the dominant society for hundreds of years. Lysander loves playing outside and building things likes forts and horseback riding, but he misses the raw outback of those places in Africa that have been a part of him since learning to walk. He knows that poaching is criminal, that trophy hunting is an aberration because it is not done for survival and that it is severely affecting the genetic pool of such species as lions. In the film, when he was just 6 [years old], Lysander says, “The European[s] and Americans and other people hunt to decorate their houses. It’s not important to decorate your house. The important thing is to live.” He knew even then! The remarkable Dame Daphne Sheldrick once let us speak for the first global march for the elephant, and Lysander said, “Do not do to elephants what you don’t want them to do to you.” If someone [who is] 8 years old can understand the golden rule, why can’t adults? “I feel like elephants do not need to be of the same species. It’s not about sharing the same blood; it’s how you feel about one another. It’s like meeting a long-lost friend. They make great companions because they have the ability to think and protect with love.” Lysander quickly learned that elephants and all animals are key to the larger experience of the world. He knows that animals are sacred, just like our Maasai guide says. He knows that the experience of the world cannot be measured by secondhand knowledge and book learning. He knows that school is a foundation but that when he has a camera with black and white film and is staring into the eyes of an elephant, that is something you can’t learn in a classroom. He truly becomes another person, and his joy lifts him off the ground. He is reborn! Or the time we got stuck in the middle of nowhere not far from a lion kill. We tried getting out for four hours, but the winch was too far from any tree. The walkie-talkie didn't work. Our guide thought of walking along the road and signaling with his flashlight back to camp and then quickly came back to the jeep because the possibility of lions got the better of him. We tried digging the back tire and putting rocks and branches under the wheel, but nothing worked. Then, with his flashlight, Lysander saw an elephant skeleton a few dozen yards from the car. There was a skull, shoulder blades and parts of the jaw. He also noticed the ribs of the elephant, which, it turned out, were the very items we needed to put under the back wheel like long, lean rafts that eventually got us out of our sandpit! The body of the elephant had saved us! I know Lysander will never, ever forget that lesson and why we as a species won’t be able to cope with ourselves without the mentorship, grace, power and gentleness of a titan called elephant. Lysander knows only too well that “Africa is the introduction to the alternate Self.” One of the most poignant scenes of the film involves Lysander’s discovery of a skeleton along with a set of tusks, but at the end of the scene he says he hasn’t found another set of tusks lying out in the open like that since then. Can you talk about the changes you’ve seen in the threats to elephants that you’ve seen in the 12 years of your son’s life and the 18 years that you gathered material for this film? In 2010, the world had not really understood the magnitude of what was recurring, the second phase of the elephant slaughter in less than a generation. When we went to the Selous [Game Reserve], the largest reserve in Africa in southern Tanzania in 2013, nobody could yet fathom that over 60 percent of Tanzania’s elephants had been sacrificed to the altar of greed. One is told not to ask too many questions from rangers, that one can get in trouble with the authorities. Tanzania has so much to be proud of with her people and natural wonders including the Serengeti. We were introduced to the President and met someone working for TANAPA (Tanzania National Parks Authority) about poaching, and he denied any crisis with elephants. Rangers we met in the Serengeti admitted there was a poaching problem but few in the media understood the scale of the problem. Hopefully, Tanzania will be able to increase its population now that it is has identified the poaching menace and the ivory traders. While Tanzania may want to modernize and mine for uranium in places like the Selous [Game Reserve], let us not forget what [former President Julius] Nyerere said about Africa’s patrimony: “The survival of our wildlife is a matter of grave concern to all of us in Africa. These wild creatures amid the wild places they inhabit are not only important as a source of wonder and inspiration but are an integral part of our natural resources and of our future livelihood and wellbeing.” Africa cannot sacrifice its fauna for development because her wildlife and forests and her peoples are her greatest treasures.” Few are those who can keep fast to Nyerere’s concerns. Alex Shoumatoff's tremendous landmark article, which we fought for months at Vanity Fair when no one in the media took interest in the elephant crisis, talked about an “extinction vortex.” He went in the field in late 2010. The article had to be delayed for almost a year to cover the royal wedding in England, and eventually the piece galvanized the world about the extent of the slaughter continent-wide. It was only in 2017 that a census told us that there were 30 percent fewer elephants than at the beginning of the decade. There are now a million fewer elephants than in 1980. We have to be immensely careful not just for the elephants but for the whales [and] the great apes. We may be the only species that does not give a direct dividend back to the biology of the planet. We, as a civilization, are living in our heads. That is why the Maasai say they only dance with from their shoulders up, when before they used to dance with their entire bodies. It is a tribal lesson that applies across the planet. Tensions between elephants and human settlements have started to become daily occurrences in India due to their enormous populations, and of course pastoralists like the Maasai and Samburu who need rangeland have been coming into greater conflict with elephants whose normal migration paths are being blocked or settled. The stress level we encountered in the Selous [Game Reserve] was of elephants who were extremely wary of humans, waving their heads as if to say, “Stay away, you are a menace and threat to our kind.” It was very disconcerting and stressful for them. We had spent days looking for elephants, and our first meeting was one of fear and apprehension. We have committed a grave injustice to the elephant mind across the continent. Pastoralists need more grazing land as their herds expand, and sometimes serious tensions occur like the incident in which Kuki Gallmann, in northern Kenya, was shot by Pokot herdsmen wielding weapons desperate for land and without long-term prospects. And sometimes elephants get killed over water conflicts with people trying to manage their herds on an increasingly parched land. We had heard about this in our first book, “Lost Africa: The Eyes of Origin,” in which a Turkana elder told us that the young no longer listen to their elders and use guns as a way to demonstrate their manhood. That is why they call this time, the “time of confusion,” “the noisy time” [and] the “time of deafness," when the young no longer listen to the wisdom keepers, their parents and grandparents. They have lost their role models. In drought-stricken areas, few will see the wisdom of listening to elephants. Kenya has shown a marked decrease in poaching but only because there has been a nationwide campaign and stricter law enforcement. Hands off Our Elephants, led by grassroots activists like Jim Nyamu and Paula Kahumbu, has made a big difference. In Botswana, the last great sanctuary of its kind in the world for elephants, the population there has increased because elephants from more menaced countries like Zambia, Zimbabwe and even Namibia have crossed into the [Okavango] Delta for refuge. But that increases the stress on the land, and poachers have followed some elephants across neighboring countries into Botswana and even shot them. Poaching is on the increase there. Botswana with international help has to be able to hold its own against the ivory poachers. We don’t know how climate change will impact the vital waters of the Okavango Delta. With over a third of Africa’s elephants, Botswana is the last hope of its kind in the world. There needs to be a global challenge to protect and provide infrastructure for Africa’s transfrontier park, which joins five countries. It would be the world’s largest park. The locals would benefit and so too would the elephants! It is not enough to count elephants. There needs to be a concerted effort to put money into local indigenous economies worldwide who can care for and be proud of their irreplaceable patrimony, like local pastoralist economies built on regenerative, renewable wealth, not wealth built on conquest like the modern industrial colonial model, which has wreaked havoc everywhere. The world needs to be aware that the forest elephant fertilizes the entire Congo basin. It is a very precarious time for this other exquisite species, [the forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis)]. At one point in the film, you talk about film as evidence. There seems to be something wistful about that statement — as if there’s an urgency to gather proof that animals like elephants exist. Is that the way you intended that remark? The film is meant as a journey and more than just a documentation. It is meant as a gathering for truth and a reminder of all that we should care about on this planet. One segment we did not use was when a baby elephant left its mother and came to our car and kissed the elephant drawing on the side of our vehicle as if to acknowledge who she was! She obviously knew and recognized herself. Maybe it was prompted to say help to Lysander who was 9 [years old] at the time. But as a conscious being, she knew who she was. The question is, do we know who we are anymore? The Samburu say that there is a seed of a human being inside each elephant. I would rather say that there is a seed of an elephant inside each human being. In terms of coherence and even altruism, we have so much to learn from elephants. We don’t need to prove that an elephant knows who he or she is by placing a mirror in front of her in the wild. That is just human ego wanting verification. The native peoples have known for tens of thousands of years who the other is, especially the whales and elephants. We, the so-called dominant society, are the only ones who don’t know because we are so insecure about our place on earth. We are documentarians who are parents, who wanted to share in the absolute marvel of why nature matters. The indigenous voice is one that predates modern civilization by millennia. Wildlife and nature are the transcendent realities we are beholden to for our ultimate survival. Childhood is a sacred experience, and to have childhood witness these realities is evidence of the ultimate concern, the future. Childhood is being taught academic realities in schools, but the ultimate school is that of the world. We are still teaching school as if we were in the 1960s or 1970s. But soon it will be 2030. Students will graduate and be told that Greenland’s ice sheet has melted. There is a connection between the elephant brain and ours as a Samburu man tells us. What is it? The neurophysiologists cannot tell us about the great mysteries. But they have been there since the dawn of time. Lyall Watson in his “Elephantoms: [Tracking the Elephant]” sees an elephant on the edge of a cliff in South Africa and wonders what it is looking at. Then he sees a whale. Could the elephant and whale have been communicating? Science cannot tell us that! Why on earth are we eliminating the greatest being walking the face of the earth. The world is a telluric being, and education should teach history as an environmental reality as Toynbee reminded us in his magnum opus, “Mankind and Mother Earth.” In it, he asks, “Shall we murder Mother Earth or shall we redeem her?” As the earth’s changes [compound] the stress on the planet, the geologic, ecological [and] global ethnic realities are the great testimonies of our time. We could not just experience something and let it go. One perfect example was when Lysander was just 2 [years old], and we were watching Maasai herdsmen, young men walking their cows towards a common watering hole. Behind them came a herd of elephants out of the dust. The three herdsmen had a cow on either side of them and in the distance in the back, like a mirage, a herd of elephants walking out of the dust, all of in them in perfect harmony. We shot the footage and took the black-and-white picture. We called the photograph “The Convergence of the Tribes,” which ended up in the Paris Climate Exhibition. A picture out of time because it shows the human, the domestic and the wild in perfect coherence. A very rare moment indeed. It was ecstatic. Today the tensions between all three are manifest everywhere, so the film is evidence of what is possible, but all a calling to a higher order of conscience towards the future. It is not merely about conservation as we know it; it is about meaning of why we are here on earth. The film is ultimately about communion between the human and non-human and the bond, the oral history, that unites us, [and] the tapestry that joins us and has always been the hallmark and foundation of our place on earth. We cannot afford to lose the last vestiges of that history. “On an entirely manmade earth, there can be no place for man either,” as the very eloquent Romain Gary once wrote. The film also focuses on the intense and complicated relationship that local peoples have with the elephants that they live near. In some cases, as with the Samburu, it appears deeply reverential. In others, as with the Maasai, there seems to be respect, but also tension and fear. Can you talk about the challenge of trying to understand the complexities of these long shared histories? That is one of the central questions for conservation today because it calls into question entire modalities of relating to nature [that] modern man has lost touch with. Beryl Markham, the pilot, author, and Kenyan, said it best when she wrote, “What upstart race born of recent callow century, to arm itself with steel and boastfulness, can match in purity the blood of a single Maasai morani whose heritage may have stemmed not from Eden.” And yet that Eden is increasingly parched and corruption is selling out the last great spaces to industrial society. So where will the oral history go? Years ago, we were told stories of young Maasai children playing with elephants, walking amongst them as if they were just part of the extended family. The young Maasai sometimes would try to get fruit from certain trees, and they would be thwarted by baboons. [But] then the elephants would shoo away the baboons who were rather feisty, to help the children. There was a different way of relating entirely to the larger world. In fact, the Maasai had no word for nature; they call it instead the beauty of God or the Creator. It is in fact the Western/Mediterranean mind that has caused a rift, an insufferable gulf between ourselves and the other beings and indeed nature as a whole. When we were with the Maasai at Lake Natron, a rapturous soda lake with thousands of flamingoes, we heard stories that it was the young girls who would go [to] the volcano and pray for rain. When we bumped into young Pokot boys going through their initiation ceremonies near Mount Elgon, just a few years before Lysander was born, we were privy to a fantastic ritual that honors the elephant’s place in their society. Young Pokot boys, who had been living amongst themselves in the wild for months, with their calfskin headdresses, sang and swung their heads back and forth honoring the power of the elephant! Later I was to learn that young girls could connect with the elephants on a psychic level. As Pat Robbins, anthropologist explains exclaims about the Pokot, “Parents of the first born girls ... have powers to chase away large beasts, such as elephants or lions. For instance, if a band of men encounters an elephant on the path, they will ask each other, ‘Which of you had a daughter first?’ One of them will reply, ‘I did.’ He will climb a tree, make a noise liked a hyena and the elephant will run away. If a man whose firstborn was a son tried this, the elephant might attack! The elephant knows!” When we first visited the Samburu at their sacred peak in September 2001, we did not yet know of their unique bond with the elephant. We decided to return to Mount Nyiro with Lysander in March 2011, and [we] interviewed several elders who told of the Lenges clan who could “talk” to elephants. Having come down from the Sudan hundreds of years ago [and] adopting a baby orphan elephant as part of their family, the Samburu have had time to cultivate a relationship between themselves and elephants for generations. “The elephant was like our brother … we have to live together, not hunt elephant. That’s what we say we were told at the beginning. That’s what we believe. The elephant has always been, and will always be special to us. That is why we protect it now.” Nonguta Leparashau says: The Samburu started “living with elephants as brothers and sisters even though are in the wild. The clan of the Lukumai could say something, and the elephants would move away. Or a lady could ask an elephant to bring her firewood. We are really glad when others come to see our elephants. We are not ready to lose our elephants. When children go look at their livestock they know how they can easily go to the side of the elephant and mingle with them. They are friends. Elephants don’t kill if no one tends to threaten them, if you don’t trouble them. That makes us love elephants. During droughts elephants can sometimes kill acacias, the branches fall down, the grass grows under those branches and those can benefit us because the animals can feed on those grasses. Now when the acacias are producing pods, the elephants can shake the tree, the pods fall and when we graze, our animals can graze on the pods and the animals are very happy. That’s why we love elephants! When it rains, the elephants go to the dry river beds and dig small holes and when our animals pass by, they drink the water. Even if you go very, very close to them, you just go slowly by, they will not harm you.” Different from the pastoralist ethos of the Maasai, Samburu or Pokot, the Waliangulu elephant hunters depended on elephant meat to survive but were equally respectful of the human-elephant bond. They only took what they needed. Hunters were allowed only a certain number of elephants throughout their lifetime; otherwise they would get spiritually sick. One of our favorite guides in all Africa, Koni, explained: “That comes from greediness of money and lack of spirit from the earth. In the old days, we didn’t know about the tusks, the only thing we needed was meat not tusks. Somebody who gave you meat from the elephant was a friend. By keeping the elephant, we keep the bond between us and our ancestors. The spirit of our ancestors lives in the elephants. In the old days the Arab could send other tribes called Garama found on the coast, those were the ones who could take the tusks. Because they could keep cows, sheep and goats and because they could trade tusks for the oil of the sheep. That’s how they lived. The Waliangulu never knew tusks were being taken to sell; they knew that tusks were made into necklaces but not that they were worthy of any money. I believe 100 percent nothing will be left under the sun, if you cannot stop the Japanese and the Chinese who are buying the ivory, the elephant will be past and history, just like a long time ago. The elephant will not be present anymore. The greediness, the selfishness of money has entered people’s spirit, they don’t see the beauty in the elephant and the goodness of having an elephant. They even don’t need the meat, which is 100 percent [worthier] than that tusk. Today's peoples, today's men are the worst generation ever. If they could stop it, things could be better. The Waliangulu believe if you don't stop doing something it will come back one day and knock on your door asking you why you did you do it and you shall not have an answer for it. Get ready to face the consequences. “We have one belief, that if you killed a lot of elephants when you reached a certain number you will start shaking your legs and your body all the time for no reason … you will be running mad automatically … you start talking to yourself because you will have gone beyond the limit number you are supposed to kill. We believe the elephant's spirit needs revenge and by avenging themselves, the spirits are making you mad! “The Waliangulu also believe that even after the death of the elephant those who killed more elephants than they were allowed, they are already mad, the very old men, even to date, they are out of their minds. They say we killed elephants, look at how we are, please Stop killing, you continue killing you will be like us or even worse than us. We have learned a lesson. We did it, we celebrated, but today we are crying! All of them stopped killing elephants, they don't even want to see anybody else killing elephants. “What spirit can we put in people's heart that they can stop buying ivory? The spirit I would like to put into people's heart is the same heart and spirit that is from my family. I am asking peoples to bring the heart of their ancestors and bring it to themselves and know that our ancestors lived in peace and harmony with these elephants and the elephants is the beginning of mankind because, from my clan and family, we believe that the elephant was one of our own, the clan did something bad to the gods and the gods were so upset that they changed them to be one of the peoples who was pushed into the bush and become elephant. Without the spirit of our ancestors, know that they are our brothers and sisters, they are not just animals, but they are one of our own. Let the spirit of our own live with us. They are our brothers and sisters. The same thing you feel when you kill your brother, let the same spirit of killing an elephant come live in people, because elephants are like humans. They are just like one of us. The heart, the spirit in an elephant is the same as the heart and spirit of humans. As we live, let them live. As we survive, let them survive. As we need tomorrow, they also need tomorrow. And tomorrow is in our heart . If the spirit of knowing and living in them is in us, they will never ever end. They will be with us this generation and the coming generation. That spirit, that heart, that belief, is what is us and let the same spirit and heart flow out to people.” I asked Koni what would happen if we lost the elephant in 2014. “That would affect all Kenyans [and] the wildlife, including elephants. If they are all being poached and killed, the tourism sector will be finished, and many Kenyans with their dependence on the tourism industry,” he said. “The children will lose schooling fees and food … it is a very serious issue. A lot of elephants are killed, it is reported to the authorities, we don’t see anything big being done because the poacher will run away! We don’t see the government taking this as a serious issue. It is not good at all to be making powder out of the ivory. I want this issue to be stopped completely. Kenya is trying to stop the corruption, but it is a very big battle. We can win the battle, if we fight.” I asked Pacquo, a Samburu elder, about humanity’s future if we lost the greatest land mammal on earth: “People too will be finished. There will be nothing to return to. The only thing left will be to kill one another. We will lose our minds.” Is the public missing something about the role that indigenous groups can and perhaps should be playing in conservation? If so, what do we need to do to encourage that? The world’s mega-diverse regions are all places where indigenous people are trying to survive and hold onto to their world. Their economies were self-sustaining and regenerative before the onslaught of [the] gross domestic product and the folly of perpetual growth unleashed the juggernaut of the modern economy. The ones who have profited from this globalized economy need to help sustain the livelihood of those bioregions for the next seven generations, for their children’s sake, for the sake of the future of life on earth. When certain conservation groups violate indigenous groups such as the Batwa pygmies in Central Africa all in the name of conservation, that is a human rights violation and this also devastates the ecology of the region. Who on earth knows more about caring for animals and plants than its indigenous groups? We worry about the future of the forest elephants. If we took care of the pygmies, wouldn’t the forest elephants have a better chance of surviving? We plunder the Congo for gold and coltan, a material used in our cell phones, and wonder how tens of thousands of women get raped every year. Shouldn’t the modern world invest in the future of the second-largest rainforest on earth rather stripping it of its lumber for industrialists in Europe, America, Canada and Japan? We had the privilege of meeting with Roy Sesana, the head of the First Peoples of the Kalahari in Botswana. We were concerned about diamond extraction in a country that is the last stronghold for Africa’s elephants. And yet the human rights violations against the oldest peoples on earth have been enormous. His peoples have been shot and abused because they were living off the land, hunting antelope and doing what they have been doing to survive for well over 2,000 generations. They have been made victims of the craze for diamonds and cattle ranching and the financial system that profits only the few. He said, “We are the diamonds of the desert.” All over the world, the native peoples have been saying the same thing: In Borneo, ‘Stop cutting the forests!’ The world has lost 100,000 orangutans in the last ten years. In the Arctic, the Inuit who prophesied that there would be people who “would change the weather and who would burn the polar bear.” That is our so-called civilization! In South America, the Kogi who see in us the younger brother, the people “who would sell the clouds. Now, we will have to work together. Otherwise the world will die.” There may be those who say that amidst all the human suffering in the world, in the Middle East, in Ukraine, Burma and even in Africa, why should humanity care about elephants? We heard the answer in New Mexico where we had the chance to meet a charismatic elder, a rebel soldier [named] Christian Bethelson from Liberia who was involved in the revolution against, and who fought the regime of, the dictator Charles Taylor. He tells the remarkable story of 1,200 men who fought Taylor’s forces. They were taking a bypass to get to a town called Jonestown. Someone said look up there, “a huge creature just eating ... like a wall between the government’s forces and the rebel forces.” [Because] he was born in 1958, [Bethelson] had never seen an elephant. “It was so astonishing! The master-general said, ‘This is a sign of peace.’ So all 1,200 men all lay down their arms right there! Seeing an elephant was a sign of peace. The elephant brought a ceasefire and total peace. Some people did not believe the elephant was peaceful. Some of our men ran. One of the men who left us went to another front in another part of the country to fight and in the process got killed! The elephant is so connected to us. When I went to Tanzania, many elephants came close to our vehicle. I could see elephants in a social way, which was so profound for me. I believe the elephant saw the tears of our women in the war and prayed for peace to come. Both sides did see the elephant. We lay down our arms. We need not disturb the peace of the elephant. We need to protect the land. We need to have a profound relationship with the elephant. Let’s see how we are connected. The sense I got was I felt the elephant did care for our suffering, that women and children had been killed in war. The elephant said OK it’s over and from that time on, not a single bullet has been fired at all in Liberia!” With regard to the Ebola pandemic that caused worldwide concern in 2014, much of the outbreak was in Liberia where forests were badly decimated and where bats lost their home and where elephants found themselves without forests. Bethelson told us a very personal account of why the elephant matters to him: “We have to preserve our forests so we won’t get crazy. When we disturb the peace of the elephant like in the Ivory Coast, what happens, total chaos! Because the elephant was no longer friendly with the people. We had a lot of elephants in Liberia. What happened? We disconnected ourselves from nature. But now we know the significance of elephants. “How can you take the tusks of an elephant? In reversing the process of global warming, we have to stop hunting elephants! They mourn their dead! The younger ones respect their elders. We can’t destroy the life of the elephant. I’m begging the world, I’m begging Africa, to protect the elephant. If they can listen to me, can cease hunting, we will have a vibrant, peaceful Africa because of the peace of the elephant. How will Africa survive? In Liberia, the antelope [and] the chimpanzees have come back. Liberia used to be a very beautiful country of peace. There is no way we can survive without the elephant. There is no way we can ostracize the elephant from the face of the earth! This act of killing elephants is not acceptable for a civilized society. The elephant has a right to live. No one has a right to kill elephants. It’s always human rights, human rights, human rights — what about the rights of the elephant? It’s always the human race, but the human race is destroying the planet! Why can’t we start in a global sense to advocate for elephant rights and see how the world will turn?” Koni, our Waliangulu friend, summarizes the elephant’s place in the human heart: “What spirit can we put in people’s heart[s] that they can stop buying ivory? The spirit I would like to put into people’s heart is the same heart and spirit that is from my family. I am asking peoples to bring the heart of their ancestors and bring it to themselves and know that our ancestors lived in peace and harmony with these elephants … The elephant is the beginning of mankind because from my clan and family, we believe that the elephant was one of our own, the clan did something bad to the gods and the gods were so upset that they changed them to be one of the peoples who were pushed into the bush and become [an] elephant. Without the spirit of our ancestors, know that they are our brothers and sisters, they are not just animals, but they are one of our own. Let the spirit of our own live with us. They are our brothers and sisters. The same thing you feel when you kill your brother, let the same spirit of killing an elephant come live in people, because elephants are like humans. They are just like one of us. The heart, the spirit in an elephant is the same as the heart and spirit of humans. As we live, let them live. As we survive, let them survive. As we need tomorrow, they also need tomorrow. And tomorrow is in our heart . If the spirit of knowing and living in them is in us, they will never ever end. They will be with us this generation and the coming generation. That spirit, that heart, that belief, is what is us and let the same spirit and heart flow out to people. “One day, one time, a man and an elephant will be one being. A long time ago, I stood near an elephant, the elephant would never run away; they could come close to the people. You could stand just behind a tree, or stand somewhere on the plain, an elephant would come [and] smell, this is a human, and he would leave and go. Let’s hold that spirit of bringing together as one and always an elephant will take care of us, if we take care of them too. “If we as humans think we have the right to live because we own the world, we have to know that before us, they were there! So we are the very last to be created, and if we were the last, then why are we destroying what was given to us as a gift? We should take care of them, we should look at them, we should know they are precious to us. It’s not just an elephant, but they are a gift to us. Let’s not destroy our gift! “Because if today, our generation will let them live, the coming generation will always know and follow their own path. It’s up to us to set the pace, the path and the generation to come will know the way, they will not look for the way because we will have already set the pace and the path. Poaching in our day is a very serious issue. If the government does not take any measure to protect the elephant, in the future there will be no more elephants.” I asked Koni what would happen if we lost the elephant in 2014: “That would affect all Kenyans, the wildlife, including elephants. If they are all being poached and killed, the tourism sector will be finished and many Kenyans with their dependence on the tourism industry. The children will lose schooling fees and food … it is a very serious issue. A lot of elephants are killed, it is reported to the authorities, we don’t see anything big being done because the poacher will run away! We don’t see the government taking this as a serious issue. It is not good at all to be making powder out of the ivory. I want this issue to be stopped completely. Kenya is trying to stop the corruption but it is a very big battle. We can win the battle, if we fight.” What is the role of indigenous peoples — as it stands now and as it might be in the future — in tackling the poaching crisis? In the Hands off our Elephants movement, local people everywhere made Kenya the most vocal and successful country in limiting the poaching onslaught. Jim Nyamu, whom we had the honor to meet at the ivory crush in Denver, has simply walked hundreds of miles for elephants. [In] the simple act of walking, [he] … brought along waves of supporters as he went on his crusade in Africa and even the United States. He breathes and dreams elephants. His voice is stalwart but calm. For Jim, there is no Africa without elephants. His voice, albeit very different from Christian Bethelson’s, comes from a place of speaking truth to power, truth to criminal ivory syndicates, truth to hunters who would stalk an elephant and blow its brains out for fun and even truth to those aristocrats in Europe who are not noble and who cherish the carcass of a slain being to decorate their home. They are [the ones] who should know better and who should carry a certain nobility in their vision and who still try to influence policy and keep elephants off [the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora] Appendix 1 [list], the maximum protection elephants can receive. How will the life force of the earth sustain such perfidy? Do they love slaughter for its own sake more than their own children? This is why we tried to compose a poem to life in a slightly different vein. One that showed why a being of barely five can say, “The Europeans and Americans and other people kill to decorate their houses. The important thing is not to decorate your house. The important thing is to live.” Trophy hunting is not a sport. Elspeth Huxley called it murder, and it does impact the genetic pool of a species, the best example being the lion. There is enough money to spend so that native people don’t have to depend on a few thousand dollars from hunting. The billionaires of the world have to step up! Conservation and climate change awareness the world over should go hand in hand. Species extinction may be even more serious than climate change as a whole. Native people have the chance right now to save the tiger, as they are trying to do in Bhutan and Nepal in tandem with conservation and law officials. They are standing up to the pillaging of the jungle in the Amazon and elsewhere. But two or more activists are being killed every week to save the environment, many of them native people. Paul Ehrlich wrote a piece in The Guardian emphasizing that civilization has two decades before collapse. If we do, it will not be the Arandas fault, it will not be the Dine’s fault, or the Samburu’s or the Inuit’s or the Kayapo’s. The native people such as the lion guardians of Kenya are made up of Maasai who know that their land, their livelihood will come from having lions. Where they used to pit themselves with nothing but spears against lions for clan prestige and bravery, [that energy] has been channeled into something much more noble — to secure the voice of the lion for posterity. In the process, humans also will maintain a part of the lion’s essence in their being, in their very sleep, and be able to hear the roar that answers the thunder like no other creature. Foreigners want to see lions. Space everywhere is being homogenized and pasteurized as Isak Dinesen wrote almost a century ago. Lions are now down to 15,000. In the process, the Maasai are saving something of the wilderness and the wild in their own souls. Those who were slayers of lions are becoming their redeemers. The dominant society will be judged in how we save the “priests of God” from extinction as Carl Jung called animals. A film is a film, but if it can add to the dialogue of conservation, activism, and beauty that is the fabric of Africa, we will have attained our goal. We need to speak out more and invite multitudes to join in the fight for what is left of the planet and this century. A man of vision, Werner Herzog said in his book “A Guide for the Perplexed” [in] 2014, that he didn’t want to live on an earth without lions! That is a vision that goes beyond the human construct. He is underscoring the ability not only to cherish a species and its voice, but also the sheer capacity to experience anything at all in an age of silicon and prefabricated distractions that cut us off from the cosmos. Africa is our place of origin, but everywhere where the organic still sings is a place of origin and wonder. Listen to the native peoples stories, and you will be changed forever. They are the messengers in human form of the planet! What else would you like people to know about your work with the peoples and wildlife of Africa? Alone amongst the continents, Isak Dinesen wrote, “Africa will teach it to you that God and the Devil are one.” We are looking for life in our solar system as far away as Pluto but here on earth, one species, humankind, is challenging not only the megafauna of second-largest continent, Africa, but the entire global immune system of the planet and countless species. Economic and environmental scourges are straining the social fabric among traditional tribes and pastoralists as never before. In our first book, [Lost Africa: The Eyes of Origin], we listened to elders voice their concerns about climate change and the ravages of globalization are still upon us. Foreign investment in Africa, particularly from China, are coming at a great cost. Oil exploration, lumber extraction, such as that which threatens the Selous [Game Reserve], and the bushmeat trade menace the rainforests across the continent. Many peoples are losing their connection to the earth and its animals upon which folklore, myth and their connection to the ancestors. Animals, which were considered as messengers and intermediaries from the world of the spirits, are being threatened as never before. The bedrock of human origins, the anima and organic tapestry invested in life’s myriad forms incarnates a much more integral and coherent relationship to existence than the mesmerizing yet shallow network of the computer generated reality that so dominates our lives. It was Brian Eno in fact who said something that many would consider quite startling: “There is not enough Africa in the computer.” In Africa our connection with the larger foundation of who we are in the world is unique on earth. It is not a more primitive continent. Africa is still a place where humanity’s anchor to its past provides a millennia-old looking glass into prehistory and the organic template that formed us. It is the place that even Leonardo da Vinci in his ineffable prophecies and his concerns for man’s relationship to nature wrote about when he exclaimed, “All men shall find refuge in Africa.” After the devastating wars of the 19th century, Europe saw fit to turn to and carve up the secondlargest continent, just as the Industrial Revolution was exploding and the great explorers of the Victorian Age were exploring its deepest secrets. It is no coincidence that Africa provided a refuge, a little know alien planet in the mind of modern man. Now China has been added to the mix and continues to carve it up for the “benefits” of the capitalist juggernaut. The search for oil in the great lakes region of Africa, specifically in the Virunga [mountains], where the Britishbased oil company Soco is looking to dig for reserves in fragile mountain gorilla habitat, is indicative how ruthless modern man’s lust for commodities has become. We are sacrificing the “first things of life,” the very soil that makes meaning and life irreplaceable for the vanguard of things that have no greater value than what the money system can confer. But these things we are so fixated on like oil and money and diamonds are limited in their supply. Ultimately, we have to ask, what is the source of life? For the indigenous peoples of the world, it was and is a relation to Creation. Not by smashing atoms into each other, but by the seeing into the matrix of existence with the heart. Several years ago in South Africa, after seeing the famed white lions of Timbavati [Game Reserve], we met an elephant researcher. She had been examining vegetation and elephant diets along their migration paths for years. One night after the great privilege of seeing a white lioness and her cub eating a kudu in the wild, we returned to camp and spoke with [biologist] Michelle Henley. She told us of her concern for the elephant’s future back in 2010, before the world got wind of the elephant crisis. She believed that our ability to save what remains of [the] earth lies with a poetic understanding of the world, with an emotional connection to life and not just with science. Facts, figures, statistics and algorithms were but a small part of reality and not the answer to the human dilemma, that some rangers and politicians in Africa are willing to sacrifice the very wildlife they are paid to protect for money exemplifies the divide in the human heart, that some presidents are willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of its indigenous peoples to so-called progress, for modern dams, [for example], typifies the perfidy of human rights violations across the globe. [Photographer] Mirella Ricciardi wrote a lovely statement for us in “Lost Africa” that should serve as an admonition [about] what is at stake: “Until Africa finds her 21st century identity, until her new form emerges, her people and her land will first have to pass through the birth pangs of purgatory. The agony will last as long as is needed. In the confusion and disorientation of readjustment, human and wildlife will lose their direction, and many perish, the earth will be badly damaged, and those who survive will be changed forever.” In the recent second phase of the elephant slaughter that took hold around the time of the global economic recession in 2008, some in China saw fit to make ivory emblematic of their new found status in society. The Chinese demand for ivory [and] the Vietnamese demand for rhino horn have ravaged what is left of an imponderable continent. The hunger for lion bones in Laos and Vietnam desecrates the lion across the continent as well as [the] tiger across Asia. What the economic Moloch of modern industrial society has done in the last decade is to eradicate much of what was once the great miracle of the world — Africa’s wildlife. Every time we have been to East Africa, the cover of Time magazine has highlighted the advance of robots and, in one piece on singularity, underscored the possibility that human mind and machine would meld by 2040. Is that the kind of world we want when we know next to nothing of life on earth? There are so many questions about life that would boggle Darwin’s capacity for wonder. Can elephants and whales truly communicate? As we discover radical new questions about the organic world, why are we becoming more violent towards the natural world? Everywhere we turn we are systematically unraveling the organic web of existence. The “magic mirror” van der Post offered as a definition of the role Africa holds up to the rest of the planet is being shattered. Without Africa’s great apes, without the Bushmen cosmology, the world’s oldest, without the pastoralist ethos in surviving some of the harshest lands on earth, we face a robotic future of synthetic information without roots, without spirit, without soul, without meaning. Charles Lindbergh, in his “Autobiography of Values” wrote about his journeys with his plane around the world, opening up entire corridors of trade that have led to globalization as we know it today. He explained his life’s mission to a Maasai elder in East Africa, and after pondering his message for a brief while, the elder simply responded, “We have known a freedom such as you have never known.” This thought was not lost on Lindbergh who understood the need to salvage the aboriginal spirit of humanity. So too would he have understood [zoologist] Bernhard Grzimek’s intonation that we must save the Serengeti and not let a permanent road ravage the world’s greatest wildlife corridor or cut down Africa’s immense rainforests for lumber syndicates in Europe, or let oil companies desecrate the Virunga Mountains, the last refuge for the mountain gorilla, and sacrifice all the treasures of an immeasurable continent for the wanton mercenaries of global commerce and short-sighted diplomacy. Something resides in the Africa that makes it more than a player in the global economy; it is an essential strain, a seed about our origin and original homeland that becomes a lifelong quest for meaning, a fever that drives one to return to one’s original home. The films, books [and] images [that children] consume about Africa’s wildlife, about the idea of safari, life’s journey, about those who cherish something deeper in the foundation of their being, resides in Africa’s rhythm and music and dance like nowhere else. The mal d’afrique, so well described by the French language, is not an affliction; it is on the order of an existential longing, a desire to return to the source of one’s self and the wellspring of humanity’s original being. There is no artificial, alternative, synthetic semblance or simulated, animated substitute for the symbolic and cellular memory she harbors, the oldest in the world. “Africa,” as Lysander once aptly said, “is the introduction to the alternate self.” Where can people see this film? Hopefully in as many venues as possible, and we hope to bring it to Africa soon. This interview has been edited for style and length. Read the full transcript edited only for style here[tklink]. -Bullet points: