[There was more than one way to kill an elephant in the British Empire. In his essay “Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell remembers his own imperial elephant hunt with overwhelming bitterness. Like Haggard, Orwell was a minor colonial official before he was a writer, an “old hand” in British-ruled Burma. “At that time,” he wrote, “I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing.” He loathed his job as a district police officer, and he loathed the empire that had put him in it. But when a working elephant ran wild in heat, and its keeper went missing, Orwell was summoned to shoot it. He knew he shouldn’t. An elephant was valuable, and despite its killing a villager and wrecking several buildings, the elephant’s heat was already passing. It could not fairly be held responsible for the death or the damage it caused.

But surrounded by Burmese villagers, Orwell called for a rifle. He was, he wrote, “only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro.” There are few essays written from an imperial perspective that capture the toxic stupidity of colonialism as succinctly as “Killing an Elephant.” Orwell’s job was to dominate, oppress, and exploit the Burmese. He had insight enough to see the British civilizing mission as it was, a racist grotesque of a morality play performed in the name of money. And yet, he played his part. He hated imperialism, but the work of imperialism had dissolved in him any space he might have found for solidarity with the colonized.

In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon remarked on the power of dissembling and secrecy as weapons in the hands of colonized people, “straws in the wind showing that something is afoot . . . silence falls when the oppressor approaches.” Orwell knew he was hated, and understood the meaning of “the utter silence imposed on every Englishman in the East.” But he still fired three times and killed the elephant.]