He was ‘a symbol of loyalty’ and a ‘true patriot’ according to a lengthy White House X tribute, posted on the tenth anniversary of his death yesterday. This all-American hero was a 17-years-old western lowland gorilla. Harambe, a gorilla at Cincinnati Zoo, was shot ten years ago after a then-three-years-old boy climbed into his enclosure. The Zoo justified the killing ‘in order to save the life of a child’. The event quickly turned into an internet meme. As with many far-right internet references, the White House’s post may have a deeper, sinister meaning.
Neither the internet nor the White House discovered a newfound passion for primatology, and Harambe’s online sensation did not emerge from a vacuum. The shooting was done by an authority, in which case the management team of Cincinnati Zoo, against an animal native to central Africa. Despite showing no certain intention – according to famed primatologist Jane Goodall – of harming the child, the Zoo shot Harambe out of fear for the boy’s welfare. A footage filmed by onlookers appeared to show Harambe behaving in a non-threatening manner.
In retrospect, the analogy between Harambe’s killing and the excessive use of force by American law enforcement against civilians – commonly referred to as police brutality – was never subtle. Moreover, as evidenced by one of the president’s since-deleted X reposts, the White House, as well as some of its followers, have a habit of depicting the African American community as gorillas. Police brutality disproportionately leveraged against the African American community, even before Harambe’s killing, was a point of popular anger from many liberal-identifying Americans. Almost exactly four years after Harambe’s death, the killing of George Floyd in 2020 would lead to nationwide protests against the police, which was deemed a racist institution with no public accountability.
The White House, by paying tribute to Harambe, seems to make a mockery of those who paid tribute to Floyd or other victims of excessive force by US law enforcement. Indeed, the Washington Post ten years ago picked up that ‘the more intense and more sincere-seeming the expression of mourning [of Harambe] is, the funnier the joke’. What exactly, then, was the joke? It was an unspoken – though certainly not unknown – assumption amongst the jokesters that demanding justice for the victims of police brutality and institutional reform in regards to law enforcement, was ludicrous. It was as ludicrous as mourning a dead African gorilla whom, supposedly, no one should have cared about in the first place.
Making sense of Harambe as Harambe misses the point. If anything, the White House post, and every other parody tribute to the gorilla, serves as a distraction from – and at times a trivialisation of – the systemic bias against the African American community in the United States. Moreover, it seems to denigrate global populations as existing below the colonial-era construct of a ‘standard of civilisation’, a view which is alive and well amongst the president’s policymaking entourage today. It seems highly problematic that a gorilla receives such a laudatory treatment from the White House when Donald Trump has derided human beings from Africa as coming from ‘shithole countries’. Taken with the president’s views on African countries, then, the Harabe tribute suggests that people with darker skin deserve less political recognition than animals. His words resemble colonial views of Africa, such as those of nineteenth-century jurist James Lorimer, who described humanity as either ‘civilised’, ‘barbarian’, and ‘savage’.
There is genuine outrage from animal lovers who were provoked by the treatment Harambe received. Many of them were uncomfortable with seeing the racial hierarchy that was weaponised against the Black parents of the boy who climbed and fell. Yet the current occupant of the White House found it more useful to pay tribute to a gorilla than to certain groups of human beings. Indeed, as The Independent asked, would a 17-year-old African American boy shot on the same day have received a presidential tribute? If not, then none of this absurdity was really about the gorilla.
The writer is using a pen name.
Image Credit: Christina Langford/Upsplash