White gorilla’s life
parallels story of Africa

Guinean animal lived as an exploited captive of Spain

sara miriam nso i roca

Once upon a time, when I was a child, I went to Africa. I entered the freshness of the shadows of the jungle; I followed the whisper of the African patriarch through the path of race and fell asleep with the song of a hidden creek.
The walls of the tiny room vanished in the darkness, and the story of the African fable that my father, an immigrant of the African Diaspora, used to tell to my brothers and me as a legacy every night haunted our senses with the strength of the dream.
Once upon a time, as a child, I dreamed of the Africa that only lives in the legendary words that the elders guard in lost villages, and that fights against forgetfulness in the scattered memory of the Africans. Right there is where Nfumu Ngi, the White Gorilla, lives. And in a little country in the Gulf of Guinea, previously called Río Muni and baptized by the Spanish colonizers as Equatorial Guinea, his legend came alive.
In 1966, a baby gorilla of clear skin and white hair was captured in the Guinean jungle, the only albino specimen ever known of this species. A local hunter killed its family and sold the extraordinary animal to a primatologist named Sabater, who worked in the Center for Animal Experimentation of Ikunde, a possession of the Barcelona Zoo.

The white man, seduced by the legend of Nfumu Ngi — a colonizer who infuriated a powerful sorcerer and received a curse that metamorphosed him into a animal — took the gorilla to Spain to turn it into a monster in a freak show, changing its name to Little Snowflake. However, nobody paid any attention to him until the Americans rediscovered him and turned him into the cover story of National Geographic, as told by the Catalonian Tony Salas in his novel The White Gorilla.
Nfumu Ngi incarnates the sad story of Africa, still wounded by its colonial past. The wonders of the infinitely vast continent are still the object of contraband and exploitation. Daniel Zamora, an expert on Africa, noted the key to this kind of domination: “The pyramids in Egypt, the ruins of the Great Zimbabwe and all those ruins built in stone that are located in any part of Africa are attributed to extra-African individuals, logically Europeans. Some, as the Count of Gobineau, in his book ‘The Racial Problem,’ say so, forgetting that those who have nothing can give nothing, hence if the Eurocentric has not built pyramids in Europe, it’s crazy to think he built them in Africa and America.”
The disregard shown to Nfumu Ngi by his visitors has not ceased to be a wound to those who understand and respect the reality of wild nature. After almost 40 years as a prisoner, his spirit sleeps.
The legendary gorilla is now facing a skin cancer that reportedly will not allow him to live much longer. Nfumu Ngi has outlived seven of his 22 children with his three female companions. None of them inherited his white skin.
Once upon a time, as a child, I was in the African wonderland where the miracle of Nfumu Ngi became possible. That land of magic, prosperity and ancestral legend has nothing in common with the agonizing Africa of today, wounded in the deepest of its spirit. According to the Polish journalist Ryzsard Kapuscinski, some native Tanzanians taught him “the spirit of Africa always incarnates in an elephant, because no animal can beat the elephant.” Today the spirit of the continent can be seen in the sad decline of Nfumu Ngi, an exceptional animal that never received the respect he deserved.

This article was written shortly before Nfumu Ngi’s death on Nov. 24 in the Barcelona Zoo.

Sara Nso is a Spanish journalist whose father is an immigrant from Ecuatorial Guinea, one of two places in Africa where Spanish is spoken. She is a founding reporter of Adelante.