The Blood on the Keyboard

In his 1947 book The World and Africa, W.E.B. Du Bois remarked that a society built on capitalistic exploitation doesn’t see the “blood on the piano keys.” Throughout his lifetime, piano keys with their ivory veneers had been created through a noxious system of consumption that affected the lives of millions of people and elephants. Still, pianos were seen as symbols of moral value, becoming so popular that by the early 20th century, they outnumbered bathtubs in the United States.

By the 1400s, when Portuguese traders became the first Europeans to get involved in the African ivory trade, many African societies — including the Yao, Kamba, Ngonde, and the Kingdom of Benin — had been using and trading ivory for centuries. Swahili people on Africa’s east coast sold ivory to Arab and South Asian traders, in addition to using ivory for musical instruments and decoration. But before the 17th century, no African society’s economy depended solely on ivory. 

In the 17th and 18th century, Europeans started importing more elephant ivory, using the material for scientific and navigational instruments due to its waterproof nature. “Any African society which took ivory exports seriously then had to re-structure its economy so as to make ivory trade successful,” wrote Guyanese historian Walter Rodney in his 1972 book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. That “in turn led to excessive and undesirable dependence on the overseas market and an external economy.” 

As elephant herds dwindled on the coasts, the ivory trade was transformed into a long-distance caravan trade. Many of these trade routes followed pre-existing paths that had previously supplied various regions with resources like iron, salt, copper, and cattle. Some societies adjusted to this new economic reality by becoming long-distance traders; the Kamba brought ivory from Kitui to Mombasa, and the Nyamwezi moved ivory from Tabora to Bagamoyo. Others, like the Waata, primarily hunted elephants and didn’t engage in long-distance porterage. Among Nyamwezi, long-distance porterage was considered a rite of passage for men, and caravans included entire communities, including women and children who were responsible for making meals and preparing camp sites along the route. Although ivory was often traded along the same routes used for moving enslaved people, prior to the 19th century the enslaved people weren’t widely involved in ivory porterage. In South Africa, the only place where Europeans themselves were hunting ivory, the trade was run by the Dutch and British East India Companies.

In the 18th century, the ivory trade was once again transformed by the invention in Italy of a new stringed keyboard instrument: the pianoforte. Initially, a variety of materials were used to top the piano’s keys: tortoiseshell, mother-of-pearl, and cow bone. It’s not exactly clear how ivory became the default, given that “piano manufacturers, by and large, loathed it,” as Miles Chapin wrote in his 1997 book 88 Keys: The Making of a Steinway Piano. Brittle ivory morphed in changeable weather and was liable to break, but pianists reportedly preferred its porous sweat-wicking properties. The ivory veneer that covered the piano keys was quite thin, and between 40 and 100 keyboards could be made from a single tusk. 

Hardly anyone had a piano in the 18th century; the instrument cost at least a year’s wage for the average worker in the U.S. and U.K. It wouldn’t be until 1798, when Phineas Pratt in Connecticut invented a machine to cut ivory for combs, that ivory products became accessible to the middle class. Ivory came into the United States through Essex, Connecticut, and by 1880 was being processed in such quantities that an entire factory town was known as Ivoryton. Over the course of the 19th century, pianos transformed from a luxury item into a staple of middle-class living. 

In his 1975 book The Age of Capital: 1848-1875, British historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote that “no bourgeois interior was complete without [the piano]; no bourgeois daughter, but was obliged to practice endless scales upon it.” As it became easier to manufacture piano keys through ivory-cutting machines and sheet music became widely available, more people sought to show off a piano in their homes as symbols of education, status, and good values. A piano in the room was used to signify financial success and cultural status. In 1867, American historian James Parton maintained that “almost every couple that sets up housekeeping on a respectable scale considers a piano only less indispensable than a kitchen range.” 

By the end of the 1800s, American-made pianos dominated over half of all piano sales worldwide. The instrument’s image was inextricably linked to that of ivory — and to the people involved in its extraction. One ivory catalog from 1865 exemplified this connection. It features a dark-skinned African man holding an elephant tusk and a white woman sitting inside a living room parlor with her piano. This link may have proved too explicit; in the following years, images of African people in ivory advertisements were replaced by those of elephants, removing any suggestion of human exploitation in the ivory trade.

For African societies on both the coasts and inland, the ivory trade had a range of impacts, ranging from the boosting of food production to the undermining of the textile industry. Some pastoral societies such as the Orma and Maasai were compelled to trade in ivory when cattle herds were depleted due to raids or epidemics. But as elephant populations started to decline in the 19th century, it became clear that the ivory trade wasn't exactly a stable business either. By the late 1800s, trade routes to the coast that had been dominated by indigenous societies were overtaken by European, Omani, Indian and Swahili caravans. Forced porterage and chattel slavery became more common, especially among these start-up caravans, which relied on indigenous knowledge while “relegat[ing] African porters and caravan organizers to [a] marginalized status as hired and enslaved labor,” per anthropologist Alexandra Celia Kelly’s 2021 book Consuming Ivory: Mercantile Legacies of East Africa and New England. 

Indigenous caravans also began to use enslaved people as labor during this time, although the status of an enslaved person wasn’t as hard lined as it was under European and American slavery. Enslaved porters among the Waungwang sometimes “reached positions of high status within the caravan trade as wage-earning entrepreneurs and blurred the boundary between enslavement and freedom in 19th-century East Africa in elaborate ways,” Kelly wrote. The porters who were ostensibly paid blurred that boundary, too. By the late 19th century, many of the porters along the East African coast were receiving paltry wages and were trapped in a circle of debt by Indian shopkeepers who advanced their wages with high interest rates and recouped up to half of their payouts before the journey even began. Meanwhile, the price of ivory saw a tenfold increase between the late 18th and early 19th centuries. 

By the end of the 19th century, important ivory trading centers like Zanzibar had fallen under British rule, as did much of the ivory trade itself. Long-distance caravans for ivory dwindled. Colonial administrations regulated indigenous hunting so intensely that elephant hunting was effectively allowed only for Europeans, imposing colonial control over who had the right to trade elephant ivory. Those with licenses and firearms were given the legal right to hunt while indigenous people were hindered from owning firearms and indigenous hunting practices were banned. Porterage was especially exploited during the colonial rule. During an ivory hunting expedition in 1909 in the AEF or French Equatorial Africa, led by Russian Price Demidov in the Haut-Oubangui region, 13 indigenous porters died due to brutal conditions. And while Price Demidov was fined for the deaths as well as for evading the ivory tax, the tax evasion fine was higher than the fine for manslaughter.

During this time, piano sales in the United States exploded between 1890 and 1930s, peaking at 350,000 pianos per year. By 1913, more than half of the ivory in those pianos came from King Leopold’s Congo, where atrocities against indigenous people were common. Belgian Congo administrators even made it illegal for indigenous people like the Lega people to own ivory in order to confiscate their ivory artwork and ceremonial objects. Meanwhile, Steinway & Sons, which produced high-end pianos, made a gross profit of $1.1 million in the United States in 1916 alone — equivalent to almost $29 million today. The ultimate irony is that many of the pianos decorating homes across the United States weren’t played. They were just a piece of furniture, a show of status, rendering the use of ivory for its tactile benefits irrelevant. 

Ivory importation to the United States came to a halt only in 1988. As journalists Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank wrote in their 2005 book Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, “nascent environmentalism was less a cause than were the extraordinary difficulties of getting a reliable supply of ivory from Africa” after the early 1950s as African nations began to assert their independence, cutting off Western control of the resource. Suddenly, Western conservationists started pushing a narrative of saving the elephants and just a few decades later, in 1989, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora banned the commercial trade of African ivory. The ban included both hunted ivory and ivory stockpiles, rendering the trade of what had been a colonial cash crop completely illegal. There’s no denying that elephant populations were at an all-time low when this ban was installed, but conservationism has not seemed to be as strong a concern when it comes to mining operations, a current source of elephant habitat destruction.

There have been many changes in the world since Du Bois published The World in Africa. One thing that hasn’t changed is the invisibility of the human suffering caused by the creation of our cultural commodities. Where once it was ivory for pianos, now it is cobalt for cell phones and laptops and anything with a rechargeable battery, siphoned out of central Africa like the ivory of a century ago. The working conditions for cobalt miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been described as modern-day slavery, leading us once again back to Du Bois’ observation that blood remains all over the keyboard. The current supply chain perpetuates a cycle of maximum extraction and profits in exchange for minimal payments and continues to reward violence, and the materials that humans use — natural and unnatural resources alike — are not objects plucked out of the vacuum of Eden. Every material has a journey from its raw state to our lives and that journey is always propelled by the labor of countless human beings. The question is how much that is valued.