When you thought the BBC-Kiswahili journalists would cap off their news on Tanzania with a report on the ongoing general election campaigns, they turned to "Vita vya sokwe vilivyodumu miaka minne” (Chimpanzee war that lasted four years).
The news clip was short and without detail but it left the newsreaders laughing themselves into a lather. You too, if you are Kiswahilophone and were tuned into the radio last October 8th, were definitely not left mirthless, much as the news was sad.
In truth, the journalists were quoting observations of British primatologist Jane Goodall who lived among and studied the primates of the Gombe National Park, Tanzania. The "civil war” in question pitted two males against a dominant grand old ‘chap’ otherwise considered to be the undisputed paterfamilias of a unified family.
Over time, however, Goodall started to notice that two males, apparently brothers, were keeping a group in a different part of the park and more and more keeping away from the original group. But as she saw all this, never did she detect anything untoward except that it was the usual youth habit of preferring to hang out with particular individuals.
Until one day she was jolted into "reality check of the wild kingdom variety”!
From the northern part of the park, Hugh and Charlie, the two ‘youths’, accompanied by their group, came charging, all pumped up with their hair on end, looking truly menacing. Humphrey, the alpha male, on seeing them gave out a war cry and led his group into charging back and thus began the ‘civil war’ that would drag on from 1974 to 1978.
A period of bloodletting that Goodall had never thought imaginable.
Humphrey and his group ended up triumphant and the ‘Young Turks’ and their group licking their wounds but the split or "fission” was now permanent. The blood-spill counted tens of bloodily lacerated fatalities and hordes wounded on both sides.
A protracted chimp warfare, if ever there was one!
It’s a shame that these chimps have not learnt from the peaceable and peaceful humans among whom they live: the ever calm and collected Tanzanians.
Because the same things that fuel deadly clashes in humans were at the root of that bloodletting: power, ambition and jealousy.
Interestingly, there is another primate community that’s not marked by this barbarity; it has evolved beyond this stage. The bonobos of the D.R. Congo, a matriarchal society, are non-violent and passive, preoccupied only with caring for one another. Not for them self-inflicted violence nor plotting it on other communities.
When you reflect over the aforementioned, it makes you sit up and think.
Our neighbouring human dominant males, if they cannot evolve to the level of Tanzanians and now the Congolese, albeit with a few misguided elements married to archaic beliefs among the latter, why can’t they make an effort to evolve to the lower point of bonobos?
Why don’t they hang their hunger-for-power boots and put their matriarchs in charge? If they cannot partner with others for collective progress, why can’t they learn to live and let live?
Indeed, these alfa males are a shame to this region, the continent and the wide world. Behaving exactly like those chimps, they seem to have let evolution pass them by.
Instead of thinking shared infrastructure, shared trade, shared emancipation generally, you hear a leader urge his people to seek out anybody speaking a neighbouring dialect. For arrest or for execution, don’t ask me.
The ‘dominant’ male has many terrorists of the dialect-speaking stock by his side for his security, as if his own community is incapable of securing his peace.
So, it can’t be the dialect that offends him, or else he’d not accommodate those terrorist goons.
Whatever it is, those many belligerent incursions onto this territory that came to nought – if not to a sticky end – that he sponsored, why not take time to really prepare and try again?
He should pump himself up and raise his hairs as his kind do, then charge again! Who knows, he might have his chance yet. Well, good hunting, Charlie!
While he sweeps across this territory from our south, Hugh, his comrade to our north will swoop in from the sky and they can rendezvous here in Remera, Kigali. What a triumphal entry! The partnership-seeking people of this territory will forever have their tongues tied!
Hoping that our neighbouring dominant males will not find themselves staring in the radar before they can even set off for their rendezvous!
It’s sad; it is. Other East African countries and the continent at large are talking infrastructure, technology, innovation, trade, et al, and creation of common markets for advancement so as to catch up with developed countries. Meanwhile, what preoccupies our males’ minds?
Raising shackles against a partnership-pursuer so as to exercise the power of dominance. Or to satisfy the ambition of being the sole bull(s) around this kraal. Or to bury the jealousy against a neighbour that talks and the world listens.
Well, kings of the jungle, a war without a cause is a lost war!