No cake, but a special meal of tomatoes, beets, leeks and lettuce. With this sober and silent celebration, Fatou celebrated her 69th birthday at the Berlin Zoo, where she has lived for over sixty years. A birthday that the whole world has come to know, year after year, as a fixed appointment with longevity and wonder, but which brings with it a much more complex and much less festive story than the newspaper headlines tend to tell.
The origins of Fatou
Fatou is a western lowland gorilla, the subspecies scientifically known as Gorilla gorilla gorillaamong the most widespread but also among the most threatened due to the destruction of equatorial forests and poaching. She was born free, in the wild, probably in 1957, somewhere in West Africa that no one has ever been able to identify with certainty. The date of April 13th is symbolic, chosen to give her a birthday to celebrate, because there is no documentation of her early life, only the traces of a story that begins with violence.
The capture, the killed mother, the bartering in a tavern
When she was about two years old, Fatou was captured and separated from her mother, a step that for gorillas is equivalent to a brutal tear: these animals remain with their mother for at least three or four years, and the bond that develops in that period is fundamental for their psychological and social growth. The mother, in all likelihood, was killed, as systematically happened in captures of that historical period: to take a live cub it was necessary to eliminate the adults who protected it. Fatou ended up in the hands of a French sailor, who bartered her to settle a bill in a Marseille tavern. It was then purchased by an animal dealer, and finally sold to the Berlin Zoo in 1959, since which time it has never moved again.
How zoos got their supplies: animals as goods
What Fatou’s story tells with a clarity that is difficult to ignore is the mechanism through which European zoos were supplied for decades: wild animals torn from their habitat, families exterminated, puppies transported like goods across oceans and borders to become attractions or curiosities to be exhibited to the paying public. A practice that today appears unacceptable, but which for a long time was considered normal, even admirable, a form of rapprochement between man and the natural world. Fatou is the living witness to that world, and the fact that she is still there, at nearly seventy years old, makes that testimony even more powerful and even more uncomfortable.
In the wild, western lowland gorillas live on average between 35 and 40 years. Fatou has almost double that, thanks to constant veterinary care, controlled nutrition and an environment protected from any predator. Today he lives in a separate area of the zoo, away from the other gorillas, due to his advanced age and health conditions: he has lost his teeth, suffers from mild arthritis and has reduced hearing. However, its custodians say, it retains a decisive and recognizable character. That longevity that everyone celebrates as an extraordinary record, however, brings with it a question that no zoo press release bothers to ask: how much does an entire life spent within the walls of an enclosure weigh for an animal born free in the African forest?
Fortunately, things have changed, the capture of great primates in the wild is now prohibited by international regulations and by the CITES Convention on trade in endangered species. Modern zoos mainly host animals born in captivity, specimens seized from illegal trafficking or rescued from degraded situations, and participate in conservation programs with recognized scientific objectives. Over time, Fatou herself has become the symbol of this transition, the point of demarcation between a before in which wild animals were objects to be traded and an after in which, at least in their declared intentions, zoological institutions aspire to a different role.
However, that implicit question remains that accompanies every birthday, every cake replaced by a plate of vegetables, every photo released by the zoo’s press offices with the institutional smile of someone celebrating a record. Fatou lived 69 years. She spent 67 of them in captivity, far from the forest, from her family group, from the territory where she was born. His longevity is real, and it is also the direct result of that imprisonment. How we choose to tell it, whether as a triumph or as a story that deserves deeper reflection, says a lot about how we continue to look at wild animals and the place we believe we have in them.
