The Concise Oxford Dictionary is a sober little book. It squats there on my shelf, modest, quiet, unassuming, always willing to render what is asked of it; never more and rarely less. Except, that is, when you reach ‘Gorilla’. Here it falls into the pit: ‘Gorilla, n. Large powerful ferocious’ it says. Large they are and powerful – but rarely ferocious, rarely a serious threat to humans.
Since World War II our knowledge of the ways of the great apes has increased enormously. The acceleration is mainly due to a realisation that, by studying the primates, we are studying a facet of ourselves. This in turn probably stems from a realisation that, if we are to discover where the human race is going, then it is best we find out from whence it came.
When you look through the whole gallery of modern apes and monkeys, it is the gorilla that most impresses, probably because of its size, and for this reason a great number of misconceptions have grown up around this enormous parody of man.
Sir Richard Owen, a 19th-century British biologist, succumbed to popular fiction when he wrote: ‘Negroes when stealing through the shade of the tropical forest become sometimes aware of the proximity of one of these frightfully formidable apes by the sudden disappearance of one of their companions, who is hoisted up into the tree, uttering perhaps, a short, choking cry. In a few minutes he falls to the ground a strangled corpse.’ This image of a massive, chest-beating, man-strangling ape persists today in many people’s minds. In fact the gorilla is a shy animal whose great displays of ferocity are a bluff, and unless it is driven beyond the point of endurance it will beat a noisy retreat when it sees a human. If its family is endangered it will charge repeatedly, beating its midriff with his open hands, but if a person makes a stand the gorilla will pull up short, scream with rage and frustration, and rush off into the undergrowth.
It is hard to believe that such a fierce-looking ape, which can weigh up to 500 kilograms (1 100 pounds) in the wilds (more in zoos), can be so scared. Could it be perhaps that the old explorers were right and that the gorilla used to be a dangerous animal, but now, after being persecuted by man and his gun, the last of the gorillas have learned they cannot win? According to recent observations of gorillas in the wild, they are scared of no other creatures, not even the leopard. There exist few reliable accounts of any dangerous acts perpetrated by gorillas and involving humans (apart from attacks by wounded or cornered animals). Its habitat shows that it is not a particularly adaptive animal. In fact, it is so specialised that it is doubtless doomed to extinction within a few generations.
Gorillas are found only in two parts of Africa: in the dense forests around Cameroon in West Africa (this race is known as the lowland gorilla – Gorilla gorilla gorilla) and in the dense, wet forests in the region of the Albert National Park between the misty Virunga volcanoes and the Ruwenzori Mountains in Central Africa. The latter area is the home of the Gorilla gorilla beringei, the mountain gorilla. The differences between the two races are negligible but 1 300 kilometres (800 miles) and probably many generations separate them.
In those damp mountain forests, where the last mountain gorillas feed upon bamboo shoots and other vegetation, a local game guide named Rubin, who was employed by the University of the Witwatersrand primate research unit in the mid 20th century, survived three potentially dangerous experiences with gorillas. It is an indication of the gorilla’s geniality that this man, who for years was in almost daily contact with gorillas, experienced only three troublesome incidents. On one occasion he was following up the blood spoor of a wounded gorilla – the gorilla had been fighting a rival on and off for several days – when he suddenly found himself facing the animal. The enormous silver-back (as old bulls are called) came straight for him. Now Rubin knew the rules as well as any man: never run from a charging gorilla, but turn and face him and he will run. At the same time, Rubin could see that this gorilla was so badly wounded that he could not be counted upon to remember his side of the rules. So Rubin compromised: he began to dance wildly and loudly. The astonished gorilla stood rooted to the spot before turning and fleeing. On another occasion Rubin was watching from very close quarters a female gorilla that had been spurned by the local patriarch and was in a towering rage. She suddenly saw Rubin and charged up to him. Rubin, taken completely by surprise, struck her with his panga. The female bit him. Rubin then kicked her in the stomach. The gorilla retreated into the undergrowth. The same female threatened Rubin again two days later, but he shouted and the frustrated ape withdrew.
When a villager is wounded by a gorilla, he may be mocked on his return because it would be assumed he fled instead of standing his ground.
George Schaller, who spent practically two years living in gorilla territory in the Eastern Congo (Zaire) with the purpose of studying them, did not carry a gun until his wife, Kay, prevailed upon him. He ended up carrying a harmless starting gun, but never had cause to use it. Instead, he found his subject ‘reserved and shy’1. Schaller said that on the rare occasions when gorillas do attack men they tend to bite and run. In one case a gorilla seized a hunter (who had just wounded it) by the knee and ankle and tore away his calf.
Fred G. Merfield, a hunter in West Africa, found the race of lowland gorillas there much the same as Schaller’s gorillas: secretive and extremely nervous. These gorillas, protected since the 1930s, are still hunted by locals in the most ruthless manner. Merfield described some appalling hunts where gorillas are trapped and then speared until they resemble porcupines, and yet even then attacks were not common. Merfield, who put this theory to the test many times, says: ‘Of course there are exceptions to this. If you happen to tread on a gorilla’s toes in the forest, you can expect to be torn to pieces, but even then the gorilla will be more concerned with getting away than with killing you. His action will be to sweep you aside with his powerful arms and hands.’
This actually happened to Merfield.
Merfield claims that female gorillas ‘are completely harmless’. He describes how hunters, having killed the bull, will gather around the female and beat her over the head with sticks ‘and it is most pitiful to see them putting their arms over their heads to ward off the blows, making no attempt at retaliation’2.
The extroverted chimpanzee – far stronger than a man – which roams a wide area of Africa’s rainforests, is shy and decidedly nervous in the presence of man in the wilds. Apart from an astonishing but possibly not unique case of man-eating, it cannot fairly be counted as a dangerous animal.
In March 1957 in the Kasulu district of Tanzania a woman carrying a baby was attacked on a forest path by a large chimpanzee. The incident happened near the shore of the Lake Tanganyika north of Kigoma. The inquest papers carried the following evidence from the African woman: she was carrying the baby on her back when ‘suddenly from the bush came a chimpanzee. We were in the bush and the village was far. I was tying up my faggots. I ran away and the chimpanzee hit me twice. He was about 4 feet [1.2 metres] tall. I fell down. Then it caught the child who was on my back. I made a great deal of noise and other women came. Then we saw the chimpanzee eating the child’s ears, feet, hands and head.’ Medical examination revealed five depressed fractures of the skull caused by the teeth, the scalp was missing and so were the hands and half of one foot. The coroner ruled that the child had died from misadventure and found that it had been ‘eaten by some animal’3.
Jane Goodall watched chimpanzees in Tanzania eating the flesh of monkeys that they had first killed. This local species, Pan satyrus schweinfurthii, the long-haired or eastern chimpanzee, is the popular one is zoos and circuses. It grows to almost the size of an average man, in weight if not in height, and its diet comprises fruit, plant shoots and occasionally eggs.
In 2002, in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, where Jane Goodall carried out her chimpanzee studies, a large male chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), known as Frodo to those based at the nearby research station, killed a 14-month-old infant, having removed it from the back of a terrified 16-year-old girl who was walking along a public path with her mother. It took the toddler up a tree and fed on it. The 26-year-old chimpanzee was, to the chimp community he ruled, a mighty hunter. Jane Goodall, says he ruled ‘with an iron fist’4. Chimps, as Goodall famously discovered, habitually hunt monkeys and baboons and eat them. An infant human being carried on its mother’s back would be about the size of a big chimp’ s prey.
Allan Fallow in National Geographic commented on the report by Shadrack Kamenya, director of chimp research at Gombe Park, on the incident that appeared in Pan Africa News.
Around 11:20 on the morning of May 15, 2002, the wife of one of the park attendants was following a forested public footpath through the park near Lake Tanganyika’s shore. Her destination: the Kasekela research camp … Walking behind the woman was her 16-year-old niece, who carried her aunt’s 14-month-old baby in a sling held firmly to her back.
The trio had just crossed a dry streambed when they surprised Frodo feeding on oil-palm fronds only 12 feet (4 meters) from the path. As the spouse of a park employee, the mother probably knew that park rules bar children under 12 from visiting the park, and she almost certainly was aware of the mortal danger posed by chimps. Her shock and terror must therefore have been unimaginably extreme as she watched the 121-pound (54-kilogram) Frodo draw near, wrest the baby girl from the niece’s back, and disappear into the forest.
By the time help arrived from the research team, Frodo had scrambled up a tree and was holding the limp form of the baby, which he had begun to eat. Lacking the defensive support that the larger group would have lent him, Frodo was easily scared off, and the baby girl’s dead body was recovered.
While representatives of the Tanzanian National Parks Department debated euthanizing Frodo, the Gombe research team weighed alternative courses of action and struggled to put his behavior into context. Pressed to clarify the circumstances surrounding the assault, Dr. Kamenya furnished the primatologists’ perspective: What we see as murderous conduct, he explained, is standard for chimps in the wild. Characterizing Frodo’s attack as the ‘natural hunting behaviour of chimpanzees,’ Dr. Kamenya pointed out that the animals regard human babies ‘just as they view the young of other species such as colobus monkeys and baboons—as potential prey.
‘This was not the first case of human babies being taken by chimps in the Gombe area,’ Dr. Kamenya elaborated. (Abductions resulting in child deaths also occurred in 1987, 1984, and in the 1950s.) ‘But it was the first within the park, and the first involving a habituated chimp of the research community.’
This is not to suggest that the Gombe region is the only one where such incidents have occurred. Other cases of chimpanzees seizing human infants were reported in the Congo in the 1950s and in Uganda in the 1990s.5
The only other potentially dangerous primate and the only other terrestrial primate apart from ourselves is the baboon but, by and large, even the biggest of them have the intelligence to give man a wide berth. In fact ‘man’ is the operative word, for some baboons – notably South Africa’s chacma baboons (Papio porcarius) – are much less afraid of women and will even approach them, making threatening gestures. This same species has also learned to distinguish between gun-carrying men and unarmed men and will allow the latter to approach much closer than the former. If you are carrying a gun they will begin running, in their loping, four-legged gait, when you are still as much as 300 or 400 metres (328 or 437 yards) away. There are several cases recorded each year in South Africa of baboons attacking humans, but in almost every case the culprits are pet baboons. Attacks in the wild are very rare. My own experience of chacma baboons, with fangs every bit as impressive as a leopard’s, is that they are, in the wilds, probably the least nervous of Africa’s various baboon species but will, nevertheless, retreat if an unarmed man approaches within, say, 100 metres.
Chacma baboons along South Africa’s Western Cape Coast, and especially the Cape Peninsula, are becoming less and less nervous of tourists – especially as some inadvisably and illegally feed them. They raid houses when the inhabitants are away and have learned to break into cars and frequently enter parked cars whose windows are left open, in search of food. It seems a matter of time before somebody is attacked.
A large male baboon was shot by the police in the Cullinan district near Pretoria after people had complained that it had thrown stones at them and had repeatedly threatened them over a period of two years. The police discovered that this same baboon had, two years before, chased two girls, aged five and 13 respectively, over a cliff to their deaths6. In Sutherland in the Northern Cape it was reported that a labourer named Fred Visagie had practically all his clothes torn off by a big baboon that attacked him on the farm Rooiwal while he was looking after sheep7. The man was badly bruised and scratched. He claimed that as the baboon was attacking him the rest of the troop gathered around to watch. Two months later, in Fish Hoek on the Cape Peninsula, a pair of baboons terrorised a mother and her two children when they tried to break into their home. The mother told the police (who shot both animals in the garden) that the baboons had been banging on the doors and windows for some time. I wondered after reading the report whether the mother had not misinterpreted the baboons’ intentions because the incident was reminiscent of an episode described by Eugène Marais in My Friends the Baboons. Marais, who lived for three years in a hut among a colony of baboons in the Waterberg Mountains in today’s Limpopo Province, described how one night the baboon leaders came down and began banging at the windows. He saw their faces at the windows but he knew the troop well enough to realise that something was radically wrong. He went outside and they made off up the mountain, looking back and waiting to see if he was following. Marais did follow and they led him to the rocky outcrop where they slept at night and there, by the light of his lantern, Marais could sense something was wrong. He soon discovered what it was: eight babies had died. He carried their bodies down the mountainside to his hut and the mothers followed in silence. He took the corpses inside but it was clear that they were indeed dead and that they had died for want of good diet (there had been a famine). For hours the mothers waited but when they saw Marais could do nothing they turned and filed back up the mountain ‘wailing mournfully’8.
The yellow baboon, which is found from Zimbabwe north into Central Africa, has a similar record of rare attacks upon humans. P.J. Pretorius tells of a large, solitary male early last century, which killed and partly ate a small child. It operated at the side of a swamp in the Ruvuma River area of Tanzania and apparently rushed out at passing villagers (if they were alone) and disembowelled them with its fangs. Then it would break open the skull by using its teeth and eat the brains, leaving the rest of the body. The locals were so terrified of the animal that in the end they abandoned their village. As this was on a major Arab slave trail that had been in use for four centuries, it is possible that this was another instance of an animal reverting to a past habit, stemming from when wild animals came across dead and dying abandoned slaves and fed off them.
The biggest of Africa’s baboons is the mandrill, Mandrillus sphinx, which has a face as fierce as it is colourful – sky-blue, red and orange. But, apart from one or two attacks by rogue males, they live in fear of man and are extremely difficult to approach.
Humans remain the most enigmatic and dangerous of the primates.