Searching for Africa’s ghost elephants
A decades-long quest reveals the remarkable truth about how these giant creatures have remained so elusive.
Abraão António Luhoke pressed his palm into a shallow indent in the soil as big and flat as a serving platter. Cracks and striations left by thick weathered skin crisscrossed its surface. Ghosts aren’t supposed to leave tracks, but here I was staring down at one, clearly marked on the eolian sand of Angola’s eastern highlands.
It was a pleasant dry-season day in late June. Luhoke, a 41-year-old Chokwe former soldier, local hunter, and father of 10, had been breaking trail for our six-man group all morning in pursuit of a secretive and rarely glimpsed herd of elephants—one that had been lost to science for decades.
Behind Luhoke strode South African ecologist and National Geographic Explorer Steve Boyes, 46, and three other Angolans, including fellow Explorer Kerllen Costa, 39, the country director for Project Lisima, a program within the Lisima Foundation, which Boyes co-founded. The team was attempting to document, study, and protect this cagey group of pachyderms. We were on the trail of perhaps 20 of the animals, but Boyes estimates that around a hundred still move through the region.
On a previous expedition, a community leader from a village called Chinjanga told Boyes about an elusive group of elephants that he called “ghost elephants.” It would take months living in these valleys, he said, to see one. The name stuck because it fits. These elephants live differently from almost any others on Earth. They inhabit highlands at roughly 4,000 feet, move mostly at night or in twilight to avoid people, and travel silently despite their large size. Boyes believes it’s a behavioral adaptation forged by generations of violence. They’re so adept that no one’s certain if, over the past several decades, they left the region completely and have only recently returned or if they were always here and simply hiding out. Either way, Boyes sees a conservation opportunity. If the ghost elephants can survive undisturbed for even a few years, they’ll slowly rehabituate to humans and revert to more typical elephant behavior.
(Elephants are learning to live with us. Can we do the same?)
The ghost nickname is apt for another reason: To Angolans indigenous to the eastern highlands, the giant bodies of the elephants contain both their ancestors and the animating spirit of the landscape. The belief persists, even as the animals and the people here in Angola are in constant struggle for scarce resources.
Boyes’s vision for this mission goes beyond finding the elephants. He wants to support local leaders in their efforts to protect the elephants, hopefully creating a force of up to 400 rangers who will monitor and protect the beasts. His great dream is to convince the elephants that humans have changed and can be trusted again. “I want to rehabituate them to human presence and then convince people that they can come here to see the elephants,” says Boyes.
First, though, Boyes and his team needed to find these elephants. After several days in the field and scores of miles into the backcountry, this footprint was the first definitive sign that we were closing in on the herd. Ghosts, indeed.
(Steve Boyes traces life to its source in the Angolan Highlands.)
It’s no coincidence that Angolan elephants began to vanish while the country endured 41 years of nearly continuous war, first during the struggle for independence from Portugal that lasted from 1961 through 1974, then in an exceptionally brutal civil conflict from 1975 to 2002. Hundreds of thousands of people died, and the fighters extensively used land mines that still pose a threat. Humans and wildlife alike fled the violence, running into Namibia, Botswana, and Zambia. The country’s southeastern region, where we were searching for the elephants, had been the stronghold of rebel leader Jonas Savimbi until his death in 2002. Savimbi’s resources unit also killed elephants for their ivory.
The “full impact of the civil war on elephants is uncertain,” wrote ecologists Michael Chase and Curtice Griffin in a research paper on the animals. Anecdotal reports from the 1980s describe some 100,000 elephants killed for ivory to fund the war. A 2015 survey found just 4,000 living individuals in southeast Angola.
Around the same time, Boyes began exploring the region with a broader conservation agenda in mind. In 2015, he paddled the Cuito River to understand how Angola’s water and wildlife connect to the Okavango Delta, Botswana’s great inland wetland, which had long been Boyes’s obsession. On that trip he realized the Okavango’s health depends entirely on Angola, where its water originates. “If you want to save the delta, you have to protect its source,” he told me.
The local Luchazi people call the region Lisima lya Mwono, meaning “source of life,” a name that inspired Boyes’s Lisima Foundation, which works to map, protect, and restore Angola’s ecosystems while employing local people as guides, researchers, and rangers. On that first trip, he discovered a clearing—he called it an elephant garden—that seemed to have been tended by a bull elephant. A resident population that far north would be a huge discovery.
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He returned in 2016 by motorbike, determined to find the elephants themselves. “We started to smell them,” he said, “but never saw or heard them.” Camera traps turned up leopards, porcupines, monkeys, and bushpigs—but no elephants. In 2019, Boyes tried again, this time chartering a helicopter to search the miombo forest ridges and peat bogs that form the headwaters of three great river systems: the Okavango, the Congo, and the Zambezi. Still nothing. To the outside observer, it might have appeared that Boyes, with his unruly mop of graying hair, wild blue eyes, and trusty carved walking stick, was starting to tilt more Bigfoot seeker than modern-day David Livingstone. Then Luhoke appeared.
“In 2021, I was hunting and knew some of my friends were already working with Steve,” he said through Costa. “When I saw elephant signs, I messaged [Costa] saying, I think you’re looking in the wrong place.”
Luhoke suggested they narrow the search to the area around Cangamba, a small town in the eastern highlands. Once he joined Lisima, everything changed. Within months, they began capturing a few fleeting camera-trap images—and in September 2024 one shaky but unmistakable cell phone video.
That’s how Luhoke came to be walking across the highlands, pointing out a trail of smashed saplings. An hour after he spotted that first track, the forest suddenly opened as though cleared by a drunken bulldozer operator. Young Brachystegia trees as thick as my leg had been uprooted and stripped of their cambium. “This time of year they’re eating wood,” Boyes said, “which sucks for them.”
And then there it was: a fresh turd the size of a soccer ball, still glistening with mucus. Ghost elephants may be stealthy and nocturnal, but they still have to poop. Boyes and the Lisima crew have a partnership with Stanford University and the University of Chicago, where genetic testing of the DNA-rich cells from the mucus will allow comparisons with known savanna and forest populations to see how these ghosts fit within the larger elephant family tree.
Boyes unscrewed a collection vial and prepared to take a sample from the still-warm pile. Seeing the elephants would be nice, but this was a welcome consolation prize.
After almost a decade of searching, conservationists within Angola have learned that their most valuable resources are the local leaders who see and hear everything that goes on in their forests. And so the morning before we set off into the bush, Project Lisima director Costa crouched his six-foot-two-inch frame low at the courtyard gate of Regedor Kaketche to perform a traditional ritual: clapping his cupped palms softly in deference to the man who would be receiving us. Boyes and the rest of our crew followed his lead. Regedor Kaketche, leader of the Nkangala (a Ngangela subgroup), occupied a walled compound on the outskirts of Cangamba. He welcomed us into his mud-walled throne room, wearing a mix of synthetic leopard print clothing and at least three actual leopard skins.
(Kerllen Costa amplifies community-led conservation across Africa.)
If a cassava farmer lights a brush fire at the wrong time of year, Regedor Kaketche hears about it. If an elephant gets shot in his regedoria—a colonial-era administrative district—he hears about it. The regedoria system was once how the Portuguese projected power over the Indigenous; since independence, regedors have become more akin to cultural liaisons or local chiefs who keep watch over their traditional lands.
“When we want to work somewhere, we first ask for authorization from the traditional leader,” Costa assured Regedor Kaketche about Project Lisima’s plans. The leader gave his blessing, and then asked Costa to help the community figure out how to build two bridges in some of the most inaccessible parts of the territory. He also stipulated that Lisima use locals as trackers and wildlife guardians to keep watch over the elephants. “They are not real elephants but human beings,” Regedor Kaketche explained through his interpreter.
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To drive home this sacred connection, he told us the myth of an elephant hunter who went to the Quembo River and came upon a herd. The hunter hid in a tree, and though the elephants passed beneath him, he didn’t shoot.
“Then, behind those elephants, there was another lonely elephant. When it reached the river, it removed its clothing—elephant skin—and started bathing. It was a human being now. She was a beautiful lady. The hunter climbed down and destroyed the elephant’s skin [so that the woman could not change back]. ‘Don’t kill me,’ she begged. ‘From now on, I’ll be your wife.’ The hunter took the woman to his village.”
The story speaks to the elephant’s importance in Indigenous Angolan culture. That idea was reflected in another meeting we had while searching for elephants, when we stopped near Luena and met with Kuvakane Mucumbi Livamba—better known by his ceremonial name, Mwene Chivueka VI, king of the Luchazi people. In his 70s, he oversees a territory that includes a 1,200-square-mile regedoria called Tchimbindi that is part of the elephant habitat under study.
Mwene Chivueka, seated on a throne that used a lion skin atop a leopard-skin rug, explained at length how his ancestors had settled Angola, coming from the eastern portion of the African Great Lakes amid the Great Rift Valley. His forebears, of the Luchazi, were the first to cross the Kasai River, which forms modern-day Angola’s northeastern border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Like Regedor Kaketche, he confirmed that the elephants were human ancestors and that they would show themselves when they were ready to be seen. “If they were just elephants, then I could give you authorization, send a spiritual message to the animals, and let you see them. But that is not the case,” he told Costa.
Though the team couldn’t rely on a spiritual intervention, it could at least bring modern technology into the mix. A month earlier, Dutch photographer and National Geographic Explorer Jasper Doest had planted half a dozen camera traps in a roughly 300-square-mile zone where Luhoke and the other local hunters said the elephants were most active. After meeting with Regedor Kaketche, we headed into the bush to check the cameras and see if the elephants were ready to reveal themselves.
We set off for the five-hour motorcycle rally to bush camp looking like the world’s least threatening biker gang. Gunnysacks of rice, tins of sardines, potatoes, and cassavas were piled high and lashed down to Chinese 125-cc Keweseki motorbikes using spent inner tubes. I clung to the waist of Marcos Mussole, 41, who shouted unintelligible warnings at me in Portuguese for five hours as my shoulders and face got whipped by fingerling hardwoods.
At the Cuando River—two hours down the sandy trail—it became clear why Regedor Kaketche wanted a bridge. The current ran fast and clear through its peat channel. Boyes assured me it was safe to drink. The Angolans disrobed and shouldered their 300-pound bikes across with ironwood poles. Mussole’s bare back revealed a 7.62-bullet scar from a raid near Cutiti in 1999. Elias Kalueyo, once a wartime ferryman from that same village, shuttled our supplies in bark canoes kept submerged near the bank.
We camped beside the Quembo River, a clear stream slicing through dead sedges that function like a giant sponge, storing and releasing water with the seasons. The next morning we passed hornbills, bushpig dung, and snare traps made from vines and bark. An old hunter’s camp held sun-bleached elephant bones and a single soccer cleat. Near a tree stand, we found empty hulls of Spanish buckshot. The bureaucrats in Luanda had required local hunters to trade their Kalashnikovs for single-shot Russian 12-gauges—more lethal for duiker antelope than traditional poison arrows but not by much.
Luhoke once hunted duiker and sold the meat at market. After the war, he tried life in Luanda, cultivating a city style. “At that point we missed our families,” he said. “We knew the bush, so we slipped away and found them at the refugee camp.”
The bush was also where the ghost elephants were taking refuge. Conflict was inevitable. The years after Savimbi’s death were as hard on elephants as the war itself. During the fighting, the rebels controlled ivory under the central resources unit. Afterward, the forests filled with armed, unemployed men who had few options besides hunting for meat and tusks. Luhoke himself killed an elephant near Cangombe, then sold the tusks to a Congolese trader in Luena for a mere 360,000 kwanzas (about $400), only to quit when he realized hunting the animals brought more suffering than gain.
By midafternoon, Boyes was sampling pile after pile of woody elephant dung for shipping to the geneticists. We bivouacked in the open, only to realize we’d forgotten rice or pasta for the 18-mile return. Night temperatures dropped into the 30s. Luhoke lit a fire for warmth. At dawn, he picked up the elephants’ trail almost immediately.
Tracking creatures as big as elephants still requires keeping an eye out for subtleties. Hair and mud rubbed into bark 10 feet up a tree highlighted a scratching post. At a crossing of the Tchalamba River, the men huddled with Boyes and agreed: The tracks indicated that the larger herd of 20 we’d been following had met a group of 24 more elephants. The two groups socialized before the group we’d been tracking moved upriver. And they were upset, dragging their front feet to show they knew they were being followed.
Tracking is one of humanity’s original sciences, built on inference and empathy. It “requires fundamentally the same intellectual abilities as modern physics and mathematics,” wrote Louis Liebenberg in The Art of Tracking. The trackers must project themselves into the elephants’ minds, reading intent from pattern. These elephants move like a herd that has been hunted. A grown elephant has no natural predators, but this group displays an extreme fear of humans, now behaving like wary antelope, feeding at night and seeking cover by day.
Boyes paused at a peculiar pile of dung pinning a curved wreath of Brachystegia greens to the ground. He speculated it was a communiqué from a bull: a warning to others. It sounded like superstition, but the wreath did look deliberate, and elephants often behave in mysterious ways.
Finally, we reached the first of Doest’s camera traps. It was destroyed, the tree uprooted. Boyes sat down, looking defeated, and rolled a cigarette. Costa opened the camera’s battered case and scrolled through the memory card: only black swamp and dark night. The ghost elephants had torn down the camera without stepping in front of it.
These elephants are genetically distinct from anything else we’ve sequenced. It seems they’ve been isolated for centuries.Katie Solari, conservation geneticist, Stanford University
A few days later, Kalueyo went on a walk to retrieve all the other memory cards from Doest’s cameras, swapping in fresh cards and batteries. Among 10,000 frames of blowing leaves, roan antelope, and inky darkness, there were only a handful of photos of a single middle-age elephant. She looked at the camera, then waddled out of frame. DNA and dung samples were sent back to Stanford, where researchers helped answer at least one question. “A hundred percent savanna elephant,” determined ecologist Jordana Meyer Morgan, who runs the genetic testing program. “We have a population that we didn’t even know existed that high up.”
Yet the preliminary analysis showed that “these elephants are genetically distinct from anything else we’ve sequenced,” said conservation geneticist Katie Solari, who is working with Meyer Morgan on the project. “It seems they’ve been isolated for centuries.”
The findings suggest these ghost elephants survived Angola’s war by never leaving—adapting instead by becoming invisible. “I need to see where those elephants were,” said Meyer Morgan. Mapping their location and movements will help determine which migration corridors need protection.
After our two-day transect, Boyes left and the team rallied back to the airport in Luena to collect Doest, who was thrilled to have captured any elephant photos at all.
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We decided next to visit Kalueyo’s home village of Cutiti, 220 miles south, at the confluence of the Cuando and Quembo Rivers, to investigate just how widely the elephants had vanished and to try to learn what the future may hold for the animals. The two-mile-wide floodplain is rich with wildlife, including cheetahs, crocodiles, and antelope, but elephants, which once roamed in large herds, had all but disappeared. The trip took 15 hours in a Land Cruiser packed with 10 people and their gear. Luhoke, a Christian, led the crew in hymns but grew frustrated when they missed their harmonies.
At the river crossing, a team of businesswomen from Luena had just finished trading with local fishermen. They stacked 38 gunnysacks of dried catfish and tigerfish—six tons in all—plus one monitor lizard. Angelina Kafuti, 37, and her friends chartered a cherry-red Soviet GAZ truck to haul their goods back to Luena. Government-subsidized fuel prices had just jumped, squeezing margins to almost nothing. “When you need to survive,” Kafuti told me, “you find what must be done.”
Wherever you walked, there were animals, elephants everywhere. They didn’t run from you … Now the animals know to hide.Gusto Luis Kavolo, Cutiti elder
The limitations of local trade helped keep the ecological impact small. Terrible roads and low-tech harvest methods allow only sustainable small-scale farming. With better infrastructure, bigger trucks could strip the floodplain bare. The same logic governs fishing. A few nylon gill nets across a narrow channel can wipe out entire runs. One reason pockets of the country are still a haven for wildlife is that there isn’t an easy way to pursue large-scale economic exploitation of the natural world.
Fisherman Jorge Ngunga has worked this river for 20 years now. His niece, Rosa Kasueka, said their catch had stayed steady—proof that the war’s interruption of development had created small opportunities for conservation. The question is whether small opportunities are big enough for elephants.
Crossing the Cuando-Quembo confluence required a five-mile slog through grasses and oxbows. Kalueyo poled a 14-foot mussivi dugout, fast and narrow enough to slice through the reeds. He’d been conscripted as a boy ferryman during the war, carrying supplies for the rebels. In 2004, he saw his first elephant—a bull his father had shot both to protect crops and to feed the village. After the war, he also tried life in Luanda, working as a plumber and electrician before returning to Cutiti.
“This valley was always full of elephants,” he said through Costa. “During the war, hunting was controlled. They would take the big ones for tusks, and the meat went to chosen villages. After the war, everything changed. For a while elephants were still here, but [then] they disappeared.”
While Kalueyo sped ahead, the rest of us poled a fat white fiberglass boat, passing traditional woven fish traps beside miles of nylon gill nets held afloat with cut-up flip-flops and Astro Cola bottles. Costa freed a purple heron snarled in one of the nets as malachite kingfishers flashed between papyrus stalks. A green bee-eater darted through the reeds.
Cutiti, a village of about a hundred people, isn’t on Google Maps. There’s no cell signal, no internet, not even a radio. News arrives only when someone comes back from town, two days away. We arrived on a Sunday as the boys changed from church clothes into soccer uniforms. Christianity and older animist traditions shape daily life. Kalueyo’s cattle lounged under Brachystegia trees. His youngest daughter ran to greet us.
An elder, Gusto Luis Kavolo, 56, remembered the old days. “Wherever you walked, there were animals, elephants everywhere. They didn’t run from you. Hunting was controlled. Not everyone could hunt. It was managed.”
He gestured toward the forest. “Now the animals know to hide.”
Whether the ghost elephants of Angola were hurt more during the war or afterward, it’s clear that they’re on the brink. They’ve retreated as far as they can go, beyond the two bridgeless rivers, upstream into the hinterlands known in Portuguese as the terras do fim mundo—lands at the end of the world—where few people live.
Boyes’s dream of protecting the animals and making them comfortable around humans again coincides with the rise of a new kind of conservation model. In wonky policy circles it’s called OECM—“other effective area-based conservation measures”—and it focuses on conserving wildlife habitats and ecosystems without formal governmental protections, often by putting them under the oversight of Indigenous peoples and local communities. In a place like Angola, the reemergence of a native apex species like Loxodonta africana, the African savanna elephant, once prevalent in the region, would be the most visible sign of a healthy ecosystem. And OECM involves the kind of coalitions that Costa has painstakingly built through his outreach to different rural communities for the past decade.
At the same time, the country has other priorities in rebuilding. Twenty-three years on from war, reconstruction in larger cities like Luanda is only just getting up to speed. Range Rovers and shiny Lexus GX 550s share the roads with Kewesekis stacked high with mattresses and white Land Cruisers plastered with demining NGO logos. Glass-and-steel skyscrapers rise by the dozen. Last summer the city hosted the U.S.-Africa Business Summit, with 12 African heads of state in attendance, their jets lined up on the tarmac. And China recently built the Angolans a gleaming new terminal—Dr. António Agostinho Neto International Airport—at the edge of town. But it remains to be seen if wildlife conservation will become a focus of Angola’s renaissance.
By the last day of our expedition, still not having sighted any elephants, we regrouped on the banks of the Cuando to make one final camp. It being Sunday, Luhoke was off by himself reading his Bible. Kalueyo had stayed with his family for the evening and would meet up in the morning. I faded early after a long day on the river.
The middle of the night brought the sudden sound of shouting and chanting and then something about snakes. A venomous puff adder had slithered under Costa’s tent, squirming against his bare leg.
Thankfully, he wasn’t bitten. We were still two days from help.
The nonprofit National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world, funded the work of National Geographic Explorers Steve Boyes and Kerllen Costa featured in this story.
