Sometime after the independence of Ghana but before the fall of apartheid, a war broke out amongst Chimpanzees in the forests that shielded Lake Tanganyika from the outside world. To give it a starting point, one day an enterprising young chimp hungry for the way things used be, sat alone in the forest, inspecting the sway of the branches and the unfolding patterns of the shrubs. The chimp was named by human scribes the day he was born. Every chimp’s voice was different, every eyeball its own unique shade of the selection of colours that chimp eyes could be, each heartbeat its own idiosyncrasy beneath fur and ribcage. No chimp had ever needed a name, but in their practice of naming all things, they called him Goliath.
The king of Kasakela had been deposed. His own given name was Ferdinand. He took it well and handed the reins to the one called Figan. But not every chimp liked that.
On the day Goliath was reading the leaves for signs of distress, six chimps who had once been known to him as brothers and uncles chanced on him. He should have heard their movement through the grass but was too distracted by his findings. They saw him before he saw them, and began to jump up and down, to growl and beat their chests. Goliath did the same. He tried to stand his ground.
Why have you done this, brother? One of them asked him. Why have you broken into two what has always been one?
Breaking branches from the ailing trees to use as weapons, they formed a circle around Goliath, held him down, beat him badly, but stopped short of killing him. Goliath recovered his bearing, stood to his feet with a determined whimper, and limped away.
—
Somewhere, somewhen, somehow, somewhat, God began to weep into an empty formless nothing. In the beginning, He was, and His heart broke with the loneliness that abounded around, between and within Him. In so far as the world remained unconceived, He agonised and grieved, slipping between here and there, now and then. He dozed and woke and dozed again, sparking thoughts and sorrows into being, threading through the fabric of a darkness that spaced and stretched in all directions and none. Even though He shattered as He went, being God, He was of the impression that everything would work out in the end.
—
In Kasakela, there were no stories about things that could not be touched or seen. They never thought to look skywards to behold God’s sorrow. And so, the humans laid absolute claim to Him, to His power, to His mercy and kindness, His love and intervention. Not that any chimp in Kasakela cared. Too busy were they picking each other’s fur, singing each other’s praises, watching their infants swing through the trees as though their nimble jumping was more beautiful than God Himself.
Such also was the tenderness that Figan and Goliath used to share. They used to love each other steadfastly, their soul-deep rapport making other chimps stop and marvel at the intimacy of their friendship. Then, one day, without meaning to, Figan saw something indescribable that Goliath didn’t see. He shook and pulled at Goliath and begged him to look. Over there beyond the river, it looks like a volcano in transit.
Goliath had just gotten busy with a fresh batch of berries, and nothing of such great consequence had ever happened in Kasakela to teach these Chimps how to worry. Without a frame of reference, without something familiar to liken the large, angular, shiny, colourful volcanoes to, Figan failed in convincing Goliath of the danger that was coming. He thought that Goliath owed him the benefit of the doubt, but Goliath thought Figan’s claims were too strange.
Figan went to Ferdinand on his own. He described what he saw in as much detail as he could, praying Ferdinand’s wisdom to be a saving grace. After listening, Ferdinand told him to sleep for a few hours and drink some rainwater from large canopy leaves to cleanse his system. Such things had never been seen or heard of in Kasakela. When Figan responded by challenging for the troop’s leadership, Ferdinand became frightened by the sudden seriousness of the matter. He put up his best fight, but his more agile days were far behind him. He lost. Goliath arrived to find that Ferdinand had been ousted, and began to stew with such a discord that his fingers and toes trembled as he walked.
Feeling it as a personal betrayal of his trust and confidence, Goliath considered their friendship to have died. He told a few other chimps that Figan was mad, there were no moving volcanoes that swallowed trees, and if there were, someone other than Figan would have seen it too. What sort of danger could only be described, not seen? He led a group to the southernmost parts of Kasakela to prove this absence, and they stayed there to tend to each other in the intellectual comfort of their shared dissidence.
And so, an invisible tear began to form, alienating north from south, creating Kahama from Kasakela in a process of balkanization so ordinary and crude, so informal and thoughtless, that no one realised it was happening until it could no longer be helped.
—
The story goes that God came across the thought of creating an escape from his isolation into a world of possible somethings. To achieve such an innovation, He split his fate into many places, fashioning each one of them with the ashes of His despair, moulding them into what He could only imagine was His likeness.
He made the earth, specifically for them. Blanketed it with a patient and enduring source of life, and populated it with the sort of things He imagined would have salved His pain. Things that grew and lived, that ran and flew, that slithered and swam. The earth, young and overpowered by the cover of darkness, heaved a great sigh of life. He heard their joy, their praise, their adulation, and, for the first time, as fortune or tragedy would have it, He thought to create the day.
It happened in a flash and bang, and when the dust settled, when the world became finally uncovered by the light, their nakedness made him shudder with something that might have been remorse. Their vanity, their carnal, vulgar obsession with things they thought beautiful, forced Him to avert His gaze and weep. The world boiled with his penance and in His rage, He ordered it to end, remembering new ways to tend to his everlasting solitude.
Till today, you can still find in the records where the humans wrote that their worlds ended, trying all they could to atone for His anguish.
The chimps that survived were traumatised by the sea, by the thunder and the lightning storms, and it filled them to the brim with such disdain for God’s collective punishment. It was for their safety, and that of all the innocents trapped in that tiny boat, that they mastered the failure to remember. They abandoned their memories, their dreams, their disaffections, everything that anchored them to the lost past. And when they stepped back on dry land, they resolved to only love one another and forget how to think of or do anything else. Life was too short; who knew when next God would take grave offence?
—
Figan set himself the task of finding the snaking volcano that fed on trees. Already losing the words to describe what he saw, he needed something concrete to put an end to the troop’s doubt. But the beast moved at an alarming speed, only leaving in its wake large clearings incapable of sustaining life. The clearings were not evidence enough to quell all dissent, so he held steadfast to his rule. He thrashed in his sleep, pursued by nightmares of those circles of death, and woke up sure that one day, it would make its way smack into the heart of Kasakela.
Goliath had begun to tell everyone he was mad, so anything Figan said was met with hesitance. The chimps in Kasakela already knew that Goliath held truths about Figan. They knew that Goliath went with Figan, and Figan with Goliath, so they listened with rapt attention, and many of them internalised Goliath’s fears.
To make bad matters worse, Goliath led six chimps south to tend to each other in isolation from the troop, the first of many waves of defections, and the humans promptly started calling them the Kahama faction. Offers of peace were made and rebuffed, and the chimps of Kasakela grew increasingly restless as the love they had for each other continued to wane. They would later forget how the war began, but the human scribes who were there to witness it, in their arrogant callousness, committed it to a memory more everlasting than the mind.
—
To save Him from Himself, the humans began to bow before God in worship. They learnt to love the land and trees and waters and skies, to demonstrate that their love was earnest and sustaining. Taught themselves to die so that they could hold Him in their arms. Conquered mountain peaks, sailed seas, crossed deserts, scattered far and wide, searching for grand ways of gesturing their eternal devotion. They began to create things themselves: to draw lines, to count beads, to build, to preserve, to defend.
But God continued to abide only in quick flashes, moments of paused heartbreaking encounter, some recorded, some destroyed, some mostly or partly made up. Space continued to grow between Him and His children. It was almost as though there was nothing they could do to unbreak themselves in His eyes.
Helpless and out of options, they turned on each other with blame. Some amongst them must be doing it wrong, they thought, creating sin by mistake. Those who thought themselves more pious than the rest assumed the responsibility of forcing the whole world into a new order. The first committee of scribes set to work, trying to write the impetus for such a project. More were set up to oversee the harvest and exploitation of trees for this civilising mission. The men appointed to these committees had the choiciest trees uprooted for study, dissecting them part by part to understand all their secrets, but refused to accept the most fundamental one. They published their findings, stripping trees of their divinity, so that the balance of the world shifted out of place, tilting heavily against those who still remembered their oath to the sacred and pure, the green and the mundane. All those who refused to forget were herded into colonies that killed, protectorates that enslaved, or were forcibly converted, whichever was most handy, most convenient. Armies formed for the first time, and God watched them stop at nothing to win glories they could never make last. It took a little bit more everything each time. But, during the intervals of peace, they danced in a way they hoped would be pleasing in His sight.
They created more things, each time wanting something better, more resistant to damage, as pleasing to sight as rare beauty could be. Entire forests were uprooted in the pursuit of shiny things, rivers and streams taken captive to help make life easier, to free up time for the things that were really important. And when they saw the earth’s aggressive reaction, when they heard the thunder of her cries, they set up their cameras and promised to observe and record.
—
The war in Kasakela ended with the disbandment of the Kahama faction. After four years of bloodshed, unity was finally restored, and everyone agreed that the threat was there, even those who were yet to set eyes on it. More scribes arrived, wearing vests that failed terribly at camouflaging them as dead leaves. Emboldened by the carnage they had witnessed, they swiped the underbrush of the forest away with sharpened cutlasses, felled even more trees and set up even more cameras. Figan grew depressed with sadness, feeling the forest grow smaller with the presence of more scribes. They set up permanently in Kasakela, willing a repeat to happen, for non-human war to break out again. Having assumed for themselves the responsibility of remembrance and record, they sought out repetition in even things that should never have been.
—
As one example, some fatherless sons whose mothers were killed in a colonial war built a little settlement somewhere off a little river that snaked through a powerful forest that bordered an undiscovered grave of prehistoric trees. They took wives who no longer remembered the names of their villages, though they were sure it had village squares at which children gathered on dry nights when the moon was full. Together, they built little hamlets, up in the hills, to keep them hidden from the view of plantation ships. They thought they could love God there, but even those quiet hamlets eventually fell to the scribes of the English Queen, there to watch and document, so that when there was nothing left of such a people, there would be evidence that it was no one’s fault.
The children born to them were called Igbo, in the hopes that the valleys and deltas would keep them fed and happy. But they refused to get used to the constant observation of the scribes, refused to herd the cattle or plant the farm with cash crops, and refused to offer appeasement when the land hardened in retaliation for being ignored. They spat on the floor, at the shrines, and at the ancient wooden symbols housed inside them.
Why can’t God ever love back? They tried to say through their tears, already growing too old and heartbroken to hold on to such a painful question.
The scribes wrote about it, coined more words to describe this half-aborted rebellion, refusing them even the privacy of their own sorrow.
More things were determined about trees. It was discovered that they continued to be a life force long after they died, capable of generating enough energy to do the work of a thousand people. The World Tree Order was formed, to follow the scribes into the farthest reaches of the world where superstition and ignorance still prevailed, and teach those there all the wonders they didn’t know they could squeeze out of trees. Ancient tree graves were torn up, and turned into mines. The desecration was so vulgar that even the trees that still stood living lost their will to continue. As the forest shrank, the chimps and the spot-nosed monkeys that ensured its fruit seeds were dispersed were forced to journey from forest to forest in search of seeds that needed help with dispersal. The chimps travelled farther than the monkeys, unsatisfied with the types of fruit they found, until they arrived at a reunified Kasakela, just as the war had ended.
On the journey, they had to teach themselves to remember, so that they would not continue to lose their way. It took them decades, so that by the time they arrived Kasakela bearing bitter truths, all the original members of the pilgrimage had died and been buried along the way.
The world was ill, they announced on arrival. It was heaving with grief and that could only mean one thing: The humans had committed another grave sin.
King Figan welcomed them, gave them fruits till they overfed to their satisfaction. Then he tried to break the news to them.
A war broke out within our troop. His head was bowed in shame. A few amongst us decided to go their own way and in rectifying that, it was we who disrupted the balance of the world.
The travelling chimps were aghast, but they had seen quite a lot to know that the truth was deeper and more uncanny.
Something on a great, bigger scale has happened. The humans have fragmented into slave and scribe, and the strong has learnt to enslave the weak, they said, even as they gathered up their things. Greater is the threat upon this world than whatever happened here.
They left without any more delay, refusing to stay and be poisoned further. The stench of such a sustained and systematic violence was not something they thought could go well with a trained memory. They tried to trace their way back, but their memories, weakened by time and death, proved less than adequate. Who knows where they ended up, or if scribes were there to witness it for the historical record.
—
Because the travellers entered Kasakela from the North, Figan became convinced that Goliath had sensed a danger from that direction without having the words to explain. He assembled the entire troop and told them that the time had finally come. They were to journey west till they arrived at the Great Lake. And then south after that, till they arrived at the Congolian rainforest, which the travellers claimed was overflowing with peace and abundance humans were yet to discover.
They made a ritual out of their preparations for departure. Caressed fond spots where the sun’s shine had been especially warm, tree nooks that had been extra comfy to lounge in, the places that would be swollen with their memories if such a thing were possible.
The humans noticed the increased activity and decided to build a fence around Kasakela, just in case. Straying far from their habitat could be bad for them, even fatal. They made it so that the fence zapped to the touch and glinted like a reflecting stream. The chimps started to sense danger when the fence continued to stretch and stretch, until it could be seen in every direction from the tallest tree crowns. The first chimp that touched it was zapped unconscious; only then did the status of their captivity become apparent.
It struck such a panic in the heart of every one of them, driving them into vicious frenzies. They breached the small artificial forests the humans set up to disrupt the natural clock of germination and yield and uprooted as much as they could. The humans brought guns and shot about seven of them dead before the rest dispersed.
Figan fell in that battle, and the mantle was picked up by another chimp the humans were yet to name.
—
That new leader had even stronger ideas, up each night agonising over concrete strategies, and all day broaching it in normal daily conversation as the troop groaned with bitterness and humiliation.
The cameras, the leader would say. The cameras hold the secrets to their powers. Don’t you think so?
But the humans control the cameras, another would counter.
They take them down, clean them, exchange their parts, another said, Nothing that powerful could ever need that much tending.
The camera, the fence and the gun all smell the same, another said.
It is so indeed, the leader replied, without doubt, they smell of the same death.
Their patience and strategy paid off. It took some time, but it became such a popular idea to attack the tools of the scribes that no one gave the order. They set on everything that looked like a camera, tore up wires, smashed through libraries and film labs, and only after they had affected as much damage as they could, did they stop to wonder why they received no resistance.
In the distance, they heard the fences collapse to the ground with a loud thud, and scattered into the cover of trees as the dust cleared up to reveal a crowd of humans, brown as the soil, armed with guns and the memory that a fence should never have been there. They inspected the facilities of the WTO that the chimps had just smashed up and salvaged any valuables they found. Then they set the building ablaze, keeping watch over the huge flame to make sure it didn’t harm surrounding trees. The chimps watched them watch the building raze to the ground, leaving only the charred walls standing. One of them took a can of spray paint and wrote boldly on the wall: The WTO is Not Welcome!
That was how the chimps figured that more people were on the way to read the message. That same night, the sound of gunfire woke them from their sleep. Bullets rained from tanks and choppers. More chimps died in the furore of that gunfight than in the four years Kasakela was at war. The forest floor was littered with bodies, and the inscription on the charred wall had been painted over with Conservationists are Terrorists!
That time around, the chimps made haste as they packed up to leave. It split them in two again. Most of them were too scared that the wrong sort of humans would return, but a few chose to remain, too weathered to commit to a journey to the unknown. No war of unity was waged to keep anyone from staying or going.
—
Not so long after they set off for the Congolian rainforests, the Kasakela chimps were captured by poachers who had been searching in vain for black rhinos. They used the same darts on them, and the heavy dose put them to sleep for days. When they regained consciousness, the poachers had put them in cages and loaded them one atop the other in trucks. They woke up groggy and tired, so that the helpless frustration running through their veins found no other outlet but through tears.
I didn’t know chimps could cry, one of the poachers said, How much do you think the Europeans will pay for crying chimps?
They were moved under the cover of night, the truck stopping each time dawn approached. All they could do was look at each other in wordless sorrow. They survived only on the rations of rotten bananas and water their captors occasionally gave them. They watched the world go by in shadows, illuminated only by moonlight. And they began to commit the things they saw to memory.
The poachers were killed by rangers in a gunfight, giving the chimps the impression that this was the most common way humans died. The rangers unloaded their cages from the truck to take blood samples. They gave the blood to a doctor who returned shortly, distraught with pity at their malnourished condition.
We have to feed them immediately, the doctor said.
Just a minute, one of the rescuers replied, we are picking lots to decide who gets to pick names first. You can join us. Have you ever named a chimp, doc?
It’s really an urgent matter, the doctor said, Their condition is critical.
You conservationists are always being alarmist, the ranger said, Go feed them yourself, see if they love you back this much.
The doctor kept his distance. The rangers proceeded in naming all the chimps, deciding to give them names local to where they were to be sent. They got most of their ideas from their phones, so their pronunciations were inaccurate, sometimes by a lot. But that did not stop them from baptising their captives with Ikem, Anayo, Ngozi, Onyii, Zimchi, and so on. Then they fed them the most delicious nuts they’d ever tasted and gave them meat and some palm wine.
See how happy they are with the palm wine, one of them said. Let’s hope the conservationists in Biafra believe in giving animals wine.
The rangers bred them without any recourse for tenderness or affection, grooming or whispered kisses. But they submitted to this mechanical process so that the memories they had accumulated would not be lost.
And when they arrived in Biafra, the conservationists there, famed throughout the continent for their extremism, took them to an open space and broke the cage doors with a recklessness that made it clear they did not intend to reuse them. In the panic that followed, the chimps scattered into the trees, still cursing as they ran. They still remembered to climb the trees but found it difficult to sway from branch to branch. The first two that tried, fell back down with heavy thuds, and the conservationists shook their heads with sadness at their motionless bodies. Those heartless monsters, one of them said, What have they done to you innocent things?
—
The conservationists in Biafra were not always so straightforward in their approach. In fact, shortly before war broke out in Kasakela, it ravaged Biafra. And even after it ended, the conservationists in Biafra remained timid and uncoordinated, scattered across universities and villages that met at very few junctures. Trees continued to be uprooted, and those that were spared, died with sorrow, and with them all the little wonders of life that depended on them for sustenance.
By then, animosity towards the WTO had grown into a global phenomenon. Committees of conservationists were set up to create a counterweight to their influence. It barely worked, so the committee united in an international body. And even then, the world’s stock of trees continued to deplete. The International Committee drafted a list of all WTO offices and found that they had a presence in every nation of the world. They had scribes in every institution of education and record. And that they had representatives in every government. It was at this point that several local conservationist committees opted for armed struggle. All of them were expelled from the committee, including Biafran conservationists who did not yet have a single gun to their name.
There are so many ways to skin a cat, the international committee insisted through a communique. Bloodshed can never be the answer.
That tamed Biafran conservationists like water tames fire. They set themselves the mission of planting replacement trees and took to chaining themselves to old ones to stop them from being felled, many times dying even before the logging machines tore them to pieces before continuing to fell more trees. It turned them into something of a martyr in the public consciousness, so that even Nigerians who weren’t Igbo felt that their cause was worthy, even if unrealistic and childish.
Even then, the international committee, which they no longer belonged to, impressed on them to maintain the peace. The line was held till the seas engulfed swaths of Lagos and Port Harcourt, pulling the proud, tall buildings there into the deepest parts of its belly, so that they disappeared without trace. Millions of Igbos who had witnessed that destructive rage first-hand flocked back home, seeking the safety of the Igbo hinterlands. And they confirmed the first prophecy of the conservationists, that the sea, whether out of protection or vengeance, was on a march to claim all trees. It created a wave of new conservationists and emboldened the movement to new extremes.
All the more peace-minded Biafran conservationists were removed from positions of influence, and a unified movement was relaunched. And in place of Conservationists in Southeastern Nigeria, a moniker better suited for the spread of gospels and legends was adopted: Biafran Conservationists.
War is already being waged! they insisted. On the very things that make it possible for us to live.
They went door to door, to everyone who loved trees, or animals, or food, or life itself, and reintroduced them to the word ‘secession’, claiming the government was too beholden to the WTO, that it was killing trees on behest of foreign masters too numerous to be named.
They grew in such staggering numbers, bolstered by the returnees from the coast, and whipped themselves into such a frenzy that the next Earth Day that came around, they stormed the zoos scattered across Igbo land, pulled down their bars, and released all the captive animals that belonged in the wild. Driven by traumatic memories of guns, the freed animals killed every person they found who was wielding one. The conservationists picked up the guns from beside the dead bodies of the police officers and soldiers and declared the nine Igbo majority states of the southeast a conservationist commonwealth.
They made it an abomination again to buy or sell land, convinced it would give the forests a fighting chance. Put such an immediate stop to the activities in the mines that it crashed the export economy. And marked so many oil wells for environmental review that the dockworkers in what remained of Nigeria sat idle half the day, discussing rumours that Biafran conservationists had issued a declaration that no one should do wage work for a whole year to heal from the generational horrors of the environmental crisis, and to celebrate the beginning of its end.
—
The Kasakela chimps heard it too. At a stop in Nana-Mambéré, their truck was denied passage and held up for days, and in the host of all the rescued animals headed for the commonwealth, they heard that Biafran conservationists did not feed animals, did not shelter them and that they had returned Igbo society to a long-forgotten tradition of worshipping trees, declaring war on God Himself, who they despised as an agent of invasion and record.
But knowing what they knew of the world, having come as far they have, having endured all they suffered, the Kasakela chimps did not fear these conservationists. They no longer feared anything. They simply bid their time and dreamed of their lost freedom.
After they dropped from the trees, finding that their fingers had gone too weak to hold on to branches, they stayed up there, determined never to be caged again.
The humans brought a sack full of assorted fruits and emptied it on a patch of cut grass to lure them down. In the shade of the trees, they set the old cages up against the trunk so that they created platforms to step on, but they made no attempt to climb the trees. Instead, they picked the bodies of the two dead chimps, and without thinking of giving them names, buried them in separately dug graves.
About the Author:
Ani Kayode Somtochukwu is a writer and queer liberation activist from Enugu, Nigeria. His work explores themes of African queer identity, resistance and liberation, and has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies across Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and his debut novel, And Then He Sang a Lullaby, was a finalist for the 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work (Debut Author) and the 2023 ANA Prose Prize. It also won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and was Gold Winner for the 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award (Literary Fiction).
Feature image by Dave Hoefler on Unsplash