by Mark Bowden
The scouts dined on mshima, of course, and dried elephant meat. They had continued happily to eat the elephant meat, undeterred by the similarity of its odor to the heavy stink of dead elephants they had encountered earlier. This would be their last night of camping. After their meal, John S. Phiri rolled pencil-thin chamba (marijuana) cigarettes, and the men smoked for the only time in their patrol.
“I only smoke chamba one time each month,” Abraham said, smiling. Buoyed by the beauty and crispness of the evening, and, perhaps, the chamba, the men talked softly long into the night.
Matteo Mwanza, the thoughtful twenty-five-year-old who recently had married, was interested in American marital politics.
“What present must an American make to the father of the woman he would marry?” he asked me.
In the custom of his tribe, the gift a bridegroom makes to his wife’s family is meant to demonstrate his worth and means. It is what makes him, ostensibly, the acknowledged leader and provider for the new household. Mwanza found it most peculiar that the custom in America was for the bride’s family to pay the wedding expenses.
“Does that not make the woman boss of the house?” he asked.
“Sometimes that is so, Matteo.”
He and the others shook their heads gravely, genuinely sympathetic to the hardships imposed by such an ill-considered cultural tradition.
Paulo Mwale, a twenty-one-year-old carrier who was alternately sullen and mirthful throughout the patrol, entered this line of questioning by approaching the campfire with clownish fanfare. He stood very erect, tugging at the lapels of his blue jacket, once a sportcoat in some previous incarnation, but now just a loosely fitting, torn, flapping rag with barely enough shape to stay on his skinny frame. His pants were equally tattered, and his feet were bare.
“Bwana, Bwana,” he implored, “what am I to do? What American girl will marry me? I have no nice clothes.”
The others laughed. Abraham rebuked him. “Do not worry, Paulo,” he said. “No American girl will marry you. You are too ugly.”
Paulo Mwale was a favorite with the scouts. Several months ago he had dropped his burden to help chase a fleeing poacher and had brought the man up short by aiming a set of field glasses at the man like a weapon and shouting, “Freeze!” The poacher thought he was being threatened with some exotic new weapon. The scouts laughed and laughed about the incident. Ever since, they have considered Mwale exceptionally clever. Before becoming a carrier for Phil Berry, Mwale had worked in a textile mill. He was earning only about two kwachas a day for each long, hard day of patrol work.
“Why did you leave the job at the mill?” I asked.
“I was dismissed,” Mwale said with a bright smile, “for loafing and absenteeism.” He announced this cheerfully, as though his move from the factory to hauling a heavy burden through the bush barefoot was a promotion.
Scientific David Mulanga had his own interest in America.
“Did those men, those astronauts, really walk on the moon as it is said?” he asked, and expressed pleasure and surprise to hear that this was true.
“And are these men still alive?” he asked, as if the astronauts might have been expected to perish by the sheer magnificence of the deed.
Finally the men discussed their own work in the valley. Mwanza had the most to say. It worried him what was happening, he said. It was not just the poaching, but the apparent involvement of officials in the Zambian government. Berry’s men have arrested a number of government game scouts for poaching, and they are demoralized by the lenient penalties given to the men they risk their lives to catch. Matteo Mwanza said he believed the killing of rhinos and elephants was a serious crime against Zambia, because the country’s wildlife was worth money to the nation in tourism. But he was bothered by it for another reason.
“And what will the Americans and Europeans think of African people if all the rhinoceros are killed?” he asked.
Abraham, who had seen more of the world, answered.
“The Americans and Europeans already think that Africans are a stupid people,” he said. “To kill all the animals, all the beauty in our land to sell for twenty kwachas or fifty kwachas, this, they will say, is just what you would expect these Africans to do. The African knows nothing. This is what they would say.”
THE URBAN GORILLA
MAY 1982
I think it was my experience in Africa that prompted my curiosity about animals in captivity. The Philadelphia Zoo is the oldest in North America, located on a sliver of land between the railroad tracks and the Schuylkill River. Its most famous resident was Massa, an ancient gorilla who had lived his entire life in captivity. He was a magnificent creature, although much diminished by age, and a familiar character to generations of Philadelphians. When I heard that the zoo was planning a state-of-the-art facility for its apes, I thought Massa’s long life would be a good way to examine changing attitudes and philosophies in zoos. Massa died three years after this story ran. His lifespan is still the longest ever recorded for a gorilla.
Day settles softly down from the skylight over Massa’s bare confinement like some dim memory of sunshine. Alone he squats day after day, the old ape, the ancient ape. Massa is like no other gorilla the world has ever seen.
He has lived too long. Gone is the monster frame, the hairy arms thick as trees, the torso that bulged like the bronze relief on a medieval suit of armor. Age has withered this old brute to almost half his youthful bulk, a transformation that intensifies the alarming resemblance to his slender cousin, Homo sapiens. His jet-black skin hangs in long loose folds at each joint and in chevrons down his shrunken chest and belly. His gray coat is tattered from decades of hair-plucking, a habit long ago identified as a symptom of pathological boredom.
At fifty-one, Massa is the oldest gorilla in the world. He is older, quite likely, than any other gorilla has ever been.
In his cage at the Philadelphia Zoo, this ragged and toothless figure waits out the steady procession of days and nights with implacable, gruff dignity. He is the zoo’s most famous exhibit, still one of its premier attractions. Massa’s longevity pays silent tribute to the skill of the keepers who have nurtured and fed him through his lifetime of captivity. When he arrived in a crate on December 30, 1935, captive gorillas rarely survived longer than six months. By the standards of his day, Massa is a supreme triumph. But the standards have changed. Massa, beloved senior resident of America’s oldest zoo, is an embarrassment.
Especially now, as the zoo’s new management is poised for a total transformation, one they hope will make their institution at Girard Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street a model for small, urban zoos everywhere. They are working at fashioning a new kind of zoo, one that reflects the sensibilities and concerns of a planet in ecological crisis. Instead of collecting exotica, they are building an ark.
Survival for many threatened wild species already depends upon captive management and breeding programs, and the tragic acceleration of pressures on wildlife the world over will make such programs even more important in the future. The newly defined goals of the Philadelphia Zoo mostly concern developing techniques to enable rare animals to thrive in captivity. Zoo officials see themselves as part of an international network of zoos and parks, a conspiracy to save the Earth’s wild heritage from the crush of civilization.
The other part of their mission is to give city-dwellers, on whose concern depends the world’s wild places, a taste for the exquisite joys and mysteries of the natural world.
Today, almost all of the zoo’s forty-three acres are for people—animals are caged in only about 5 percent of the space. The new zoo will gradually, over the next decade, turn that ratio around. Plans call for a smaller number of animal species to be displayed, but for vastly improved living conditions for those that remain. Cages will be replaced by spacious, creative “habitats,” naturalistic enclaves that instead of displaying animals like exotic museum pieces on a shelf will allow tigers to be and behave as tigers, and apes as apes.
Massa’s sharply circumscribed, unnatural lifestyle contradicts the whole approach.
Yet each year Massa’s record-setting birthday draws more attention to the zoo than any other event. The zoo’s publicists aren’t sure whether to be delighted or dismayed. At the same time that Massa makes the zoo look good, the surly old fellow makes it look bad.
“Look at it this way,” says Bill Donaldson, the zoo president. “If a group of little green men from another planet asked to learn about human beings and were taken to see an old, old man who had lived his entire life in a dimly lit cave in solitary confinement…what would they learn about men?”
Massa’s stark quarters, where he has lived on display now for more than forty years, are in the Monkey House, which sits precisely on the site of the zoo’s planned $4 million Primate Center (the terminology alone is revealing). The Monkey House was built in 1895, and represents state-of-the-art for what one zoo official described as “the old Capture-the-Savage-Beast-and-Put-It-Behind-Bars philosophy of zookeeping.” Even the more modern Rare Mammal House, where the zoo’s active, breeding family of young gorillas romps behind a glass wall in relative felicity, is hopelessly outmoded by New Zoo ideals. Robert Snyder, the zoo’s research director, disparagingly refers to displays in the Rare Mammal House as “the bathroom cages,” because they were designed with what he considers an undue and single-minded preoccupation with sanitation.
The Primate Center and an innovative new Children’s Zoo are the first big steps into the institution’s brave new world. Half of the money needed for the Primate Center has been donated by the Glenmede Foundation, and preliminary plans have been drawn. It is described in the zoo’s project proposal as follows:
“The facility is envisioned as consisting of a gently sloping green vista bordered by the lake…. Animal housing will consist of a series of twelve to fifteen separate, but potentially communicating living units associated with servicing facilities for food preparation and cleaning. Wherever possible, these maintenance and other non-exhibit facilities will be located underground. The living units can be thought of as condominiums, each designed according to one of perhaps four or five different plans, all in a ‘soft’ unobtrusive architectural style. Each pattern will be designed to satisfy a very specific set of environmental and spatial needs shared by several of the primate species chosen to be their inhabitants….”
Not for old Massa will life be this way, unless gorilla heaven corresponds with the zoo’s master plan. Even if he is still alive in five or ten years (which is only slightly less likely an assumption today than it was in 1972) when the Primate Center is ready, Massa is just too old and fixed in his solitary ways to adjust to such a liberal lifestyle.
Besides, Massa doesn’t know how to get along with other apes. He exists in a kind of suspended position on the evolutionary scale, certainly not man but not exactly ape, either. Raised by a devoted rich woman in Brooklyn, cared for all his life by human keepers, Massa is a true urban gorilla. He no doubt finds other apes as curious and threatening as people do.
“Ole Massa’d just die of a heart attack if they tried to change the way he lives now,” says Ralph McCarthy, the keeper who has cared for Massa these last twenty years. But it hurts to see him there, intently picking at a wad of hay held between two fingers directly before his face, rolling his baleful black eyes vacantly around the familiar edges of his world. The image says zoos are bad places, cruel places, places where creatures of profound beauty are caged in bleak isolation from the glorious landscapes of their creation.
“The ideal thing would be to somehow preserve Massa’s cage and routine exactly as it is today, and just incorporate it into the new facility,” mused Mary Scott Cebul, a young wildlife researcher who wrote the zoo’s new philosophy and master plan. “It would be a good way of showing how far we have come from the old idea of a zoo. But there would be a lot of expense involved, and I doubt Massa will be around to see it anyway.”
Massa usually sits on the lower of the two levels of his indoor cage. His cell is about ten paces long and five wide. His water pan is on one side of the upper level in the rear. On the opposite end of the lower level is a pile of hay. Straight up from the center of the cage, up from where the gorilla’s regular urination has badly rusted the metal front of the back platform, a support beam connects to the slanted bars below the skylight. Suspended from a chain tied to these bars is a tire. Ralph, his keeper, hung it up there because it seemed like the thing to do—“you know, just somethin’ to occupy his mind a little.” But the tire is a failure. Massa ignores it except to swat it every now and then in what Ralph interprets as disgust.
Sometimes, aggravated, he will still do what Ralph calls “his Jackie Gleason shuffle,” a sort of sideways dance across the cage, slapping the tire and ramming the bars. Time was that the full force of his three hundred and fifty pounds would rattle the whole Monkey House, but the shuffle ain’t what it once was. He has resorted to more subtle gestures of contempt. After forty-six years in this same cage, Massa still hasn’t gotten used to people staring at him. When visitors squint in at him too intently through the heavy glass pane and the wire fencing and bars, Massa will gravely stand and turn his back on the gapers to greet them with shriveled, calloused, gray buttocks. He will stand there like that until they leave.
Left to their own quiet ways, gorillas are good at minding their own business. Native to the equatorial forests of central Africa, these giant primates live in small bands led by one dominant male. They are extraordinarily shy creatures, vegetarians who pass their days in search of food, building new nests each night on the ground or in trees. Contrary to the old King Kong image of ferocity, gorillas are creatures who frighten easily and would almost always prefer, when threatened, to run away.
The book Inside the Animal World relates the following story of an attempt at capturing a wild gorilla:
In the days when gorillas and other great apes were hunted for zoos and other scientific institutions, a handful of scientists engaged a group of local African hunters to net a gorilla. It was a task that Africans were used to carrying out in the adjacent rain forest. The time chosen was night, at a point where the local hunters were confident a family of gorillas would pass the following morning when they awoke.
The long net was in position, held up by stakes pushed into the ground. The scientists had little to do but wait, and they were astonished at the way the local hunters carried out the task in complete and utter silence.
By daybreak all was ready and complete silence still reigned. Then the gorillas could be heard crashing through the undergrowth and calling, heading straight for the net. Suddenly, they were silent. They had evidently noticed something suspicious and the suspicion had been communicated by some means to every member of the family, judging by the suddenness with which all sounds ceased.
The hunting party waited and waited. Nothing happened. Then they spread out to search for the gorillas, who had escaped as skillfully and silently as the hunting party had set their trap.
Wildlife researchers who spend extended periods observing gorillas in the wild typically come away with a deep reverence for the reclusive gentility of this gravely endangered species. Scientists generally recognize two types: lowland gorillas (like Massa) of west Africa from Cameroon to the Congo River, and the mountain gorillas of the highland forests of east-central Africa. Demand for samples of these rare creatures by zoos and scientific laboratories was a major factor in tragically decimating their numbers in the wild. There are now thought to be fewer than eight thousand remaining.
The story of Massa’s capture and journey to America as an infant has been told so often and is based on such hearsay that the specifics of it long ago lapsed into the realm of the apocryphal. It is enough to say that the lowland gorillas of Cameroon are often killed by farmers when they are caught raiding plantation crops. It is likely that Massa’s mother was killed in such an incident, and that area natives took him in as an infant—it was well-known in t
hat part of the world in 1930 that a baby gorilla would fetch a good price on the animal market.
Little Massa arrived in the United States in 1931, an exotic cargo shipped with six baby chimpanzees aboard the West Key Bar, a trading vessel. According to an account of Massa’s early years in a book about the famous circus ape, Gargantua, by Gene Plowden, the baby gorilla was crippled with pneumonia and near death when the ship’s captain sold it to Gertrude Lintz, a Brooklyn animal-lover whose marriage to a successful physician gave her the financial and medical support to pursue her fascination with wild animals. She named Massa and nurtured him back to health, spoon-feeding him and even chewing his food herself before feeding it to him. She rigged an exercising device to strengthen him when he suffered infantile paralysis. Gradually this pitiful, nearly hairless little creature regained its health and strength.
Massa spent four years in the Lintz household, growing into a robust, one-hundred-and-forty-pound young gorilla. He and his childhood companion, a gorilla whom Mrs. Lintz named Buddha, lived in basement cages in the spacious Lintz household. Mistaking Massa for a female (gorilla genitalia are too small to be readily distinguished from even a short distance, and they do not readily submit to a more careful examination), Mrs. Lintz often dressed him in little girls’ clothing.
It was this mistaken identification of Massa’s gender that originally brought him to the Philadelphia Zoo—that and the realization that mature gorillas cannot make tame house pets. Mrs. Lintz, a heavyset woman who cared for a menagerie of wild pets throughout her life, faced up to this inevitable truth only after Massa attacked and seriously injured her. As the story goes, Massa was on loan for display at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933. He was visiting Mrs. Lintz in a house in that city when his kindly stepmother got in a tugging match with him over a kitchen mop. Massa apparently lost his temper and lunged at her viciously, inflicting wounds that took sixty-five stitches to close.
