The Rabbit and the Elephant

In the season when the grass stood taller than a man and the rivers of KwaZulu ran full and brown, there lived an elephant so enormous that when he walked, the ground remembered his footprints for a full year afterward. His name was Indlovu, and he had grown so used to being the largest creature in the veld that he began to believe largeness itself was a kind of law.

One morning Indlovu gathered every animal at the great flat rock beside the river — the lions came, and the buffalo, and the zebra, and the long-necked giraffe, and even the birds settled in the marula trees to listen. Indlovu planted his enormous feet and raised his trunk high.

"Hear me," he trumpeted. "I am the largest of you. My footprint could swallow ten of the hyena's dens. My shadow could cover the whole cattle kraal. From today, I am king of every creature, great and small, and none shall drink from this river before I have drunk my fill."

The animals shuffled and lowered their eyes. The lion, who might once have argued the point, only flicked his tail and said nothing, for even a lion respects a creature who can crush a tree by leaning on it. The buffalo grunted their agreement rather than be trampled. One by one, every animal at the rock nodded, until only silence remained beneath the marula trees.

Except for a small rustle in the long grass at the very back, where Unogwaja the rabbit sat cleaning his long ears, apparently unbothered.

"Does everyone agree, then?" boomed Indlovu, pleased with himself.

"I have a question," said a small voice.

Every head turned. It was the rabbit, sitting up now on his haunches, his nose twitching in the sun.

"Speak, small one, before I forget you are here," said Indlovu, and a ripple of nervous laughter went through the crowd.

"Great Indlovu," said the rabbit, "you say you are king because you are the largest of us. Tell me — were you always this large?"

Indlovu blinked. "Of course not. I was a calf once, small enough to hide beneath my mother's belly."

"And when you were that small," the rabbit went on, "did the jackal have the right to drink before you, and the tick-bird the right to eat from your skin without asking, simply because they were larger than a baby elephant?"

A few animals began to smile behind their paws. Indlovu's ears flattened slightly.

"That is a different matter," he said.

"Is it?" asked the rabbit. "Or is it only that the rule changes depending on who is largest at the time? If size alone makes the law, then the law is not wisdom — it is simply whoever happens to be biggest today. And what happens, great Indlovu, on the day a creature bigger than you wanders down from the mountains? Will you bow to him gladly, the way you ask us to bow to you now?"

The silence that followed was different from the first silence. It was not the silence of fear. It was the silence of animals thinking, perhaps for the first time in a long while.

Indlovu opened his mouth to trumpet his fury, and then closed it again, because he realized that everyone — the lion, the buffalo, even the smallest dung beetle at his feet — was watching to see what he would say, and no answer he could give would sound like anything but the truth the rabbit had spoken.

"You ask a hard question for such a small mouth," Indlovu said finally.

"My mother told me," said the rabbit, "that a question is not measured by the size of the one who asks it, but by whether it is true. Ubuntu does not ask how large your body is before it lets you sit at the fire. It asks only whether you have brought something worth sharing."

The lion, who had been silent all this time, let out a low sound that might have been a laugh. "The rabbit is right, Indlovu. We followed your size, not your wisdom. But a kraal ruled by fear of the largest body is a kraal waiting to be ruled by whoever grows largest next. Let the river belong to whoever is thirsty, in the order they arrive, as it always has."

Indlovu looked down at the small rabbit for a long moment. Then, slowly, for an elephant does everything slowly, he lowered his great head and stepped back from the water's edge.

"Drink first, small one," he said. "You have earned it more than my size ever did."

And so it was that from that day the animals of that river did not choose their leader by the size of his shadow, but gathered in council beneath the marula trees whenever a hard question needed answering, and it was always the smallest voices that were asked to speak first, because the herd had learned that wisdom does not grow only in large bodies, and that the bravest thing an animal can do is ask, out loud, the question everyone else is too afraid to ask.

To this day, when a Zulu grandmother sees a child stay quiet out of fear of a loud voice in the room, she tells this story, and reminds them: it was the smallest animal at the river who taught the largest one what a king really is.