Tanganyika Tuskers

TANGANYIKA (now Tanzania) was always known for elephants bearing ivory of exceptional weight. Rowland Ward’s Records of Big Game, which goes back almost 130 years, reveals among its top ten savanna elephant trophies, three from Tanzania – more than any other country.

History’s biggest recorded tusks came from an elephant shot with a muzzle-loader in 1898, on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanganyika, by a slave of the ivory trader Tippu Tib, aka Shundi. Books usually describe Tippu Tib as an Arab, but ‘Karamojo’ Bell, who knew him personally, described him as African. Shundi told Bell that he’d begun life as a “naked pagan Kavirondo” who was sold as a slave but earned his freedom by embracing the Islamic religion. These world-record tusks, weighing 226 and 214lbs, are now in the British Museum. Incredibly, they are almost perfectly symmetrical and both of their tips are pencil-pointed, showing virtually no wear whatever. This must have been a giant of an elephant to keep such lengthy tusks from scraping the ground as it walked; doubtless it would also be recorded as the tallest, had it been measured.

Rowland Ward’s new measuring system combines the