“The more you learn about the dignity of the gorilla, the more you want to avoid people.
“Gorilla are almost altruistic in nature. There’s very little of any ‘me-itis.’ When I get back to civilization I’m always appalled by ‘me,me,me.’”
Dian Fossey
“If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow brethren in pain, disease, suffering and famine — our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements — they may partake of our origin in one common ancestor — we may be all netted together.”
Charles Darwin
To see into the eyes of gorillas is to be reminded that “our identity is a dream,” as the remarkable writer Loren Eiseley reminded us. To navigate the brambles, vines and forest to finally lay eyes on these beings is one of the most enthralling and transcendent moments on Earth. Local farmers who raise their crops adjacent to where gorillas live rarely come into contact with this greatest of all the great apes, and most have never seen a gorilla, one of 300 primate species on earth, over half of whom could vanish in our lifetime. It should be very humbling to know that our closest living relatives, chimps, share 98.8 percent of our DNA and gorillas 98.4 percent. Yet as Dian Fossey made brilliantly clear in her legendary study of gorillas, they are “one of the most maligned animals on Earth.”
They weren’t always seen as charismatic, these uncanny apes who can reach almost 500 pounds. The prevalent view among Westerners was that they were killers and would attack humans at the slightest provocation. It was only with Dian Fossey, with her seminal work with gorillas in the 1980s, that that myth was shattered for all time.
Paul de Chaillu in the mid 1850s was perhaps the first white man to see a gorilla in West Africa. In his book “Stories of the Gorilla Country,” de Chaillu writes, “We stood, therefore, in silence, gun in hand. The gorilla looked at us for a minute or so out of his evil gray eyes, then beat his breast with his gigantic arms — and what arms he had! — then he gave another howl of defiance, and advanced upon us. How horrible he looked! I shall never forget it.”
There was even a time when de Chaillu running out of his Western food had one of his guides hunt a gorilla for food. “I remember that when my gun bearer shot the huge beast the man rushed upon it and tore rather than eat it up, to stifle with its loathed flesh the hunger which was gnawing at their vitals.” Reminiscent of the vivid prose Conrad used to describe the dismemberment of Africa by the European colonizer, de Chaillu also underscored not just the sheer brutality of the gorilla but also how he “longed heartily… for the day to come when the glorious stream will be alive with the splash of paddlewheels and its banks lined with trading and missionary posts.” Accounts of eating our closest kin should give us pause because now we are cannibalizing the entire primate order across the planet.
The mountain gorilla has done well in relative terms since we first saw them 20 years ago when there were about 400 of them. In the early 1980s, little more than 250. Now there are about 1,000. It is perhaps one of the most remarkable conservation successes of our time. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent to preserve their habitat and increase their population. The rangers in the Congo, Rwanda and Uganda have been among the most dedicated in the world, fending off poachers and dedicating their lives to salvaging along with the chimpanzee, bonobo, and orangutan mankind’s closest living relatives. The steps necessary to save them for posterity needs international care now, more than ever.
Photo credit: Cyril Christo
The lowland gorilla population could have reached as high as 100,000 perhaps a generation ago. Today there may be no more than 4,000 left. Loss of forest habitat, and the bush meat trade have exacted an enormous toll on the gorilla. And loss of tourism revenue due to the coronavirus is having an impact on all ape species. There are only about 250 mountain gorillas in Virunga National Park in the DRC. And only abut 600 in the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda. The rest are in Rwanda. Can a species so very vulnerable to human whims hang on this century, let alone the coming decade? De Chaillu once wrote, “While the animal approached us in its fierce way, walking on its hind legs and facing us as few animals dare face man, it really seemed to me to be a horrid likeness of man.”
Thoughts about the savagery of gorillas coming from the Victorian era have been handed down to our time. But today we know the horror belongs wholly to man. These generally extremely gentle beings are the ones wholly coherent with their world, a world of primary forest we are uprooting faster than we can name the novel species we are still discovering every year.
There have been those who say the world was made for man. And those who say only man creates. But Bill Wallauer, the videographer at Gombe Falls, has seen chimps and their uncanny rain dance. No one on Earth can say that wonder and awe and maybe a sense of something much greater, such as reverence is not at play. But whatever mankind has created whether they be temples or extravagant cultural displays are more than matched by his desecration of habitat and species all over the world. We are at a defining moment for salvaging what is left. Maybe mankind’s greatest achievement will be to salvage what is left of Nature. The meat markets of the world, some of whom contain the great apes, need to stop. Whatever evil we have projected onto the other, came from the heart of darkness we still own. The humanism of the last two centuries since Darwinism destroyed God is destroying life. The gorillas are the most proximate mirror along with the great apes to our own inchoate face. Looking into their eyes completes our place in the world. Without them we will be crippled beyond recognition.
As Andre Bauma, a zookeeper who works at the Sekwekwe Center in Virunga National Park, says in the Academy Award-nominated documentary “Virunga,” “You must justify why you are on this Earth. So if it is about dying, I will die for the gorillas.” Not many of us can harbor such utter compassion and resolve to safeguard our fellow beings. Andre exclaims, “Gorillas have something in their soul very close to humans.”
On the other side of Uganda’s Lake Edward and Lake Albert, an actual war zone has wreaked havoc in the Congo, and continues to challenge the future of the mountain gorilla. Aggravating the civil war that has cost the lives of thousands in this region, so rich in minerals such as gold and coltan used for devices so dear to us like cellphones, are the multinational groups like Total and the British oil group SOCO, that have had their eyes on the oil in the region for years. SOCO had wanted to run seismic tests and finally decided to pull out of this volcanic World Heritage site of ineffable forests. Bowing to public pressure, Desmond Tutu, the British government and world conscience, SOCO decided it was not in its best interests to desecrate one of the wonders of the world. Virunga, Africa’s oldest national park, set up in 1926, may yet be saved, but poachers capitalizing on the corona pandemic which could infect the apes, are infiltrating the park. International funds and anti-poaching units are needed as never before.
One of the great primatologists of our time, Ian Redmond, who worked with Dian Fossey, kindly shared his thoughts when I asked him about gorillas. “Sense of wonder and awe — well, maybe a sense of beauty — one of my most memorable moments was being surrounded by Group 4 all fast asleep in the sunshine during a day-rest period on the side of Mt Visoke. Then one of the adolescent females climbed up onto a stump and settled down to look at the view — not in a look-out way watching for danger, just really relaxed and surveying the miles of forest… we can’t know what was going through her mind but it seemed to me she was enjoying the view.
“And curiosity — I was once watching juveniles bouncing on an overgrown springy log, and with each bounce there was a high-pitched squeaking. Eventually they stopped bouncing, parted the tangle of vegetation and peered in, then moved off to play elsewhere. I went over and peered in where they had looked, and there was a bird’s nest with nestlings who squeaked at the movement, hoping to be fed. The image of three hairy little faces gently peering in to satisfy their curiosity made a lasting impression on me — they were so gentle and didn’t damage or grab the baby birds, just looked in apparent wonder then went to play somewhere else — seemingly respecting the birds’ safety and welfare.”
The orangutan, which shares 97 percent of its DNA with humans, on the Indonesian islands of Borneo and Sumatra may have once had a population of almost 250,000. They have lost over 150,000 of their population in the last generation due to deforestation. Giant palm oil plantations from Indonesia and Malaysia have helped raze tens of thousands of hectares of prime orangutan habitat. Each death of a great ape is the demise of a unique being. The remarkable video of an orangutan trying to stop a bulldozer from destroying the rainforest should firmly be embedded in our minds as the Tiananmen Square moment for the conservation movement. If we were to lose the great apes, man would stare in the mirror and see reflected back to him only half a face for the rest of his earthly existence. It is with giant telescopes and other tools that we listen to the stars hoping against hope that we are not alone in the universe. But if our distant cousins should be silenced by the corruption and perfidy that often prevails in the human strain and with it now the coronavirus, an abject loneliness would cry out to the stars for the rest of our time on Earth. As Emerson once wrote, ” The entrance of nature into his mind seems to be the birth of man.” The exit of nature and the possibility of losing the gaze of the great apes looking back at us would signal the beginning of our unraveling. It is the definition of our time to prevent this from happening.
Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans have been living for hundreds of thousands of years in their forest, living fantastic lives, never overpopulating, never destroying the forest.
Jane Goodall
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Learn more about Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson’s work at their website.
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