BIG READ: The age of the Failed Great Ape

On a visit to the Virunga Mountains in Rwanda once I found myself clinging to thick nettle bushes covering a steep slope, trying not to wake a huge gorilla, which had built itself a nest in the forest to take a nap, flat on its back.

Its one hand, huge and covered in what appeared to be padded calluses like that of a worker in one of the coltan mines on the other side of the mountains in the Democratic Republic of Congo or of a convict in a work detail in an American movie, lay to one side, looking from another perspective more like a sensitive sculptor’s, or a writer’s, though needing an extra large typewriter in the latter case.

I had written before about this gorilla and how human its hands seemed to be, with subtle gestures that might carry meanings only he and his ilk would understand. The picture was completed when, despite our attempts at skulking past it to watch its troop of females and infants further on, it woke up with an almighty shriek.

All of us in the group were wearing macintoshes despite the heat, and ruddy garden gloves to protect us against the nettle stings, nettles being the gorillas’ favourite food. The leading member got such a fright he fell backwards, setting off a toppling domino-like avalanche of human bodies down the slope. It took some time and skill from the game wardens to bring calm to man and gorilla again.

I thought back to that shriek when I learnt last week about the death of Frans de Waal, the primatologist who had devoted his life to researching the social lives of primates since the 1980s, completely changing the way we look at our evolutionary cousins. I had known and admired his work before that trip but had always looked at primates through the lens of his first book, Chimpanzee Politics.

It was only when I came across Herman Lategan’s ode to De Waal in Vrye Weekblad last week that I realised an even more relevant lens to look at his life’s work are his findings on the sex lives of the primates — which could be summed up in one phrase from the West’s raging culture wars: apes are woke. Lategan, writing about gay chimps, said in an aside to a quotation he would like to see a camp chimp one day.

Well, Herman, I can offer you one better: go to Virunga, find a sleeping silverback, wake it up with a tug at its toe or a pail of cold water, watch those hands flutter and listen to that shriek — more effeminate or more camp you won’t easily find outside San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ bars. 

De Waal’s interest in primates started as a student when he was still trying to find his true calling. He was working at the Arnhem zoo in the Netherlands with its large primate collection when he noticed how excited the male gorillas became whenever a human female walked past their glass-sided enclosure. In his first experiment he and a fellow worker donned women’s clothing and wigs — but the gorillas flatly ignored them.

He was hooked. His studies of chimpanzee power games earned him a PhD and that first book of his, which brought him instant fame. Its detailed descriptions of the social manipulations and ordering in chimpanzee societies were revolutionary at the time, not only for showing how close to humans they are but also shining a light on what drives human politics.

It was a good news story. Yes, alpha males get to dominate troops with aggressive behaviour and constant scheming, which De Waal likened to Machiavelli’s writings and which you can see reflected in men such as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. But the big message from Chimpanzee Politics is how the social welfare system natural to chimps entails bringing their own alpha and omega potentates down — even killing them — and replacing them with more beta ones.

The trouble we humans have in attaining peace and the months and years it takes to embed it is a vast regression from the ways of other primates

De Waal and his interns meticulously recorded every single relationship change among the three dozen primates. Two observations he wrote about still stand out after all these years. One is the pre-emptive strategising of the females in disarming fighting males by carefully and delicately removing the stones they gather in their hands to bash each other with — and how the males allow this. The other is how after a fight a male would literally kiss and make up with his adversary, as would all their supporters.

We like to think that peacemaking and reconciliation are exceptional and require Nobel prize candidates to pull off. But they are part of our primate genes and, if anything, the trouble we humans have in attaining peace and the months and years it takes to embed it is a vast regression from the ways of other primates.

In these times of burgeoning human populations and the skewed redistribution of resources, the way the chimp society at Arhnem was organised seems particularly relevant. The director, Jan van Hooff, had discovered that any politics at all seemed impossible during the usual arrangement at zoos, which allowed maximum contact with humans who fed them titbits all day long. The rest of their required caloric intake would be given at a central point.

Van Hooff ensured that a large expanse with a moat in the middle separated the Arhhem troop from human visitors, who were strictly forbidden to feed them. The chimps were also given proper meals at a range of points they could choose themselves. In the previous arrangement there was such constant fighting for the titbits from humans and the central stash that instability and unhappiness reigned. In the new dispensation, there was little conflict over food and the complex social structures quickly arose that De Waal could so fruitfully research.

After Chimpanzee Politics, De Waal produced much work on the sex lives of primates. His conclusions were a mix of grassroots common sense and extreme broad-mindedness, an opposition not uncommon among other people of Dutch descent. We humans have two basic sexes because the vast majority have either vaginas or penises, and the mechanics of sex with each organ are different. Because we give things names we call the one biological set-up male and the other female. Different physiologies accompany each sex in clear, distinctive ways.

“We live at a time [when] a group of people — for ideological reasons ... think we can shove biology aside, that everything is culturally constructed, and we can act like biology doesn’t exist. That’s not going to work ... We are biological organisms, equipped with brains, genitals and hormones. We cannot ignore reality.”

He also believed that certain female behaviours were hard-wired into female biology. He did experiments with primates in which he gave male and female infants trucks and dolls to play with — the females played with the dolls and the males tried out the trucks before they went off wrestling and mock-fighting. 

“Obsessive mothering is seen in all 200 primate species we’ve studied, and in human society. The mother-child bond can be traced back in mammals for over 200-million years. It’s supported by a whole system of chemistry and brain processes. You cannot break it. The mother-child bond is ... a beautiful thing, we shouldn’t mess with it.”

But that’s as far as De Waal’s ostensible support for reactionaries stretched. Calling himself a feminist, he believed the culture wars were based on a semantic confusion peculiar to English: it uses the word sex to describe both the physical activity and our gender. He addressed these issues in his late work from 2022, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist.

Whereas biology locks us into our sexes, bar a minuscule range of in-between genital variations such as those of hermaphrodites, gender is a very fluid concept that gives rise to many permutations. It can be selected as opposite to one’s sex from a young age, said De Waal. And the fact that this fluidity is widely found among the great ape species suggests that it is just as “natural” as the genitals we are born with.

Genetically, the bonobos of the DRC are our closest cousins, and they exhibit the greatest gender fluidity of all primates. Most are bisexual and are more interested in positions than sorting out gender — hence their nickname of “Kama Sutra apes”. When conflict arises, they resort to sex; and whereas chimps, for instance, are xenophobic and may kill strangers, bonobos invite anyone over for a party, even other ape species.

Yes, they are woke, and humans should emulate them, said De Waal. “So we have all these exceptions, all this variability, and ... the big difference with the human society is that they have generally no trouble with it. I don’t find the kind of intolerance we have in human societies.”

His prescription was that the debate should be brought back from ultimately pointless arm-wrestling over gender identities to the real problem: inequality. Great injustices are still being perpetrated all over the world against non-males, he said.

De Waal believed we all have two inner apes, the bad one being the bully trying to dominate and the good one who, like the bonobos, believes in making love not war. One can see why the world is in such a state.

An evolving future

After my visit to Virunga I returned to the Rwandan capital, Kigali, where I happened to attend the African premiere of the movie The X-Men. It was not so long after the 1994 genocide — 30 years ago this month — and the city was still recovering, which meant the only place where movies were shown was the lounge of one of the three hotels operating. But someone had somehow got a reel from the US, where it had just opened, and a fold-up screen was set up against a wall.

A pall of depression fell over the audience draped over armchairs and sofas when the first scenes showed an inmate using his magical powers to escape from a German concentration camp during World War 2. He would become Magneto, the villain of the piece due to his distorted hatred for humans capable of such horrors as the Holocaust, trying over many X-Men sequels to kill them off. 

His special target are certain mutants, people who like him have discovered they had supernatural powers, whether they like it or not, but who have gone over to the human-friendly mutant master, Xavier. Through subversion of the US political system Magneto sets off a witch-hunt against them. 

This was uncannily similar to the mindset that gave rise to the initial Interahamwe plan for Hutus to hunt down all Tutsis and have them killed. Indeed, the Hutus regarded the Tutsis as mutants in a way, those fractions of the Rwandan population that had been assigned superior status in colonial times, had a superior education and, after several cycles of massacre and mass exile, now had superior weapons and means of returning and reclaiming the land in the Hutus’ “Apocalypse”.

“Cockroaches”, the Tutsis were called in Interahamwe propaganda. Just like the French aristocracy had to be exterminated during the French Revolution, Tutsis had to be killed off to alleviate Hutu backwardness. The generals and political rulers in the audience sat dead still, giving no sign that they saw a message for them in the movie. 

Later, on encountering the ideas of Donna Haraway, I became fascinated with other aspects of the X-Men conception. At the start an aphorism is spread across the screen against a cosmic background: man has evolved over a long time, but sometimes things get speeded up. 

The X-Men are supposed to be the result of such a speed bump in evolution. Most are really cyborgs, half-human, half-robot, their supernatural powers expressed through flesh-embedded prosthetics. Most of us already are proto-cyborgs, we have help from glasses, hearing aids, artificial knees, stents and our cars with their personalised interiors. Our individualised cellphones and much other tech are edging us towards another stage of evolution.

Haraway believes this transition will bring out the animal in us and that we should also go the opposite way — see ourselves as having large overlaps with lesser beings, even insects, which in many ways have superior senses, for instance. She sees a future in hybrids of animals, humans and robots.

Haraway’s ideas are too radical for most, but they should not be discarded forthwith. If the future is to be dominated by the machine, which runs along much more reasonable lines than humans and is not hobbled by illness, madness, hubris, inferiority complexes, sociopathy and perversity, how will it regard us non-machines? As watery bags of flesh, bones and organs sparked into fight-or-flight reactions by hormones, which also goad us into copulation for the sake of copulation? Would it make an exception for us humans, because we can read and write?

It would probably observe that our similarities with the great apes disqualify us from being regarded as rational enough to be trusted and welcomed into the higher realms of existence of the future. After all, when we succumb to the good ape in ourselves and like the bonobos and chimp females rather sue for peace, it remains biological and is not based on the incorporeal, pure ethics machines would be capable of. 

It will also take note of that regression of the great ape “peace” genes; humans ended up making arms that can destroy the earth many times over and invented genocide, a deeply perverse attempt at “purification” that was only strengthened, not diminished by, human advancement. 

The enormously powerful influence humans have on our ecologies and habitats are described in theories about the Anthropocene age, but should it really be called the Primatocene, because it is characterised by failure to our great ape genes? Even better, the Deficiprimatocene, the Era of the Failed Great Ape? 

After all, our family of mammals evolved over 200-million years, and the about 10,000 years, or even less, that the Homo sapiens offshoot could be said to control the earth is a very small fraction of that. Set against the duration of a nap taken by a gorilla on a nest of nettles, it would be equivalent to a twitch of its fingers while it dreams.