The Elder
Dust drifts around him — a quiet storm of memory and time.
He stepped from the thicket like a thought made visible, slow and certain. Light spilled across the plain, catching in the folds of his skin, silver tones shifting with every breath. A hush followed him. Even the wind seemed to hesitate. Beneath his feet the dry earth loosened, fine dust lifting and curling around his legs before dissolving into the pale air. For a moment he was both still and moving, a relic of a wilder age walking through the quiet of morning. I sat low against the light, my camera braced at eye-level, waiting for that breath between movement and stillness when everything aligns and the story seems to reveal itself.
From what I heard after, they call him ndlopfu leyikulu — “the great elephant” in Tsonga. The name carries weight, the way old stories do. His tusks, uneven yet beautiful, spoke of years beyond counting: one full and sweeping like the bend of a long river, the other worn and broken from times sued possibly to testing the marulas. When he appeared that morning, pressing his trunk against a tree, his movement seemed to carry no urgency. Each gesture was deliberate, as if time had long since bent to his will. Even as we sat watching, our scent drifting toward him, he seemed in no hurry to acknowledge us. He pressed again against the bark, testing, listening.
Eventually he turned. His eyes found us, unflinching, calm, and unreadable. There was no challenge in that look, only understanding and perhaps peace — a quiet measure of our place in his world. I kept the camera dead still, letting the moment stretch, aware that one misplaced motion could break the fragile trust of distance for this shot. He lowered his trunk and resumed feeding, pretending disinterest like a seasoned actor who knows the scene is his. When he finally moved on, he did so with a slow, assured grace, brushing the dust into spirals with each step towards and then past me.
Older bulls like this one carry more than the weight of their tusks; they carry memory. They travel alone, following paths worn into the continent over centuries — moving between rivers, salt pans, and shade, keeping to ancient rhythms. The great tuskers, those whose ivory exceeds forty-five kilograms, are now the rarest of their kind. Fewer than a hundred remain across Africa. In Kruger National Park, where I encountered this bull, only a few can still be called tuskers. Their kind once roamed unhindered from Mozambique to Botswana, crossing invisible borders with the seasons. Today, they navigate a smaller world — a patchwork of reserves, fences, and human noise.
And yet, they endure. These giants are bridges to a quieter age, to a time before ivory became currency. Their presence is more than biological; it is ancestral. Each one that survives reminds us that wilderness is not just a place but a continuity — a story still unfolding, even as its pages grow fewer.
He moved off at last, the sound of his steps folding into distance. The dust he stirred hovered briefly, a soft cloud suspended in the light, before settling again as if the earth itself sighed in his wake. When silence returned, only his tracks remained, two deep impressions pressed into the soil, holding the last glimmer of morning light before the wind smoothed them away.
He was gone, but the moment endured. The calm he carried, the slow rhythm of his passing, lingered like memory itself — patient, unhurried, eternal.
About The Raw Africa Collection
The Raw Africa Collection is a series of fine art wildlife photographs capturing the untamed beauty, power, and diversity of Africa’s animal kingdom. Each image tells a story — moments of stillness, bursts of movement, and the raw essence of life in the wild.
