Captive gorillas in Africa, 1918-1985: colonialism, captivation, conservation

This thesis explores captive gorillas in colonial Africa, using gorilla biographies constructed
from a range of sources to consider their experiences, their relationships with humans, and the
involvement of gorilla capture and captivity in colonial racial hierarchisation. This research
focuses on gorillas and the humans they encountered from 1918 until 1985, also considering
the impact of decolonisation on gorillas’ lives. Disparate sources were accessed to track the
lives of individual gorillas across colonial boundaries, including colonial governmental archives,
personal correspondence, photographs, and the preserved remains of gorillas. Following
gorillas through the archives highlighted their development of a diversity of interspecies
relationships, gorillas forming a commonality between people across a range of gendered and
racialised statuses, while being used to reinforce the colonial hierarchies at play among them.
Gorilla capture involved violence and the subjugation of gorillas, and the exploitation of
African labour in dangerous environments. Some gorillas were temporarily cared for in colonial
homes as pets and adoptive children, subjected to repression of their natural behaviour, while
receiving colonial luxuries denied to their African carers. Others were acclimatised to captivity
in commercial or governmental collectors’ camps, before their export from Africa and sale to
overseas zoos. The welfare of captive gorillas was prioritised over that of colonised people in
each of these contexts. In post-colonial Africa, primatologists altered their own behaviour to
provide gorilla-centric environments for captive gorillas who had come into their care, aiming
to increase the chances of reintroducing the gorillas into the care of wild gorillas. Distinct
interspecies intimacies which emerged between captive gorillas and their carers in post-colonial gorilla captivity share echoes with pre-colonial perceptions of the closeness of gorillas
and humans, before its disruption by colonialism.