Until recently, gorillas were legendary creatures; giant apes with bodies covered in hair who kidnapped women from African villages and abused them. Gifted with supernatural strength, they faced the sharp spears and machetes of the warrior tribes with ease. Thus the tale continued to grow until, in the mid-19th century, the American missionary Thomas S. Savage appeared at the mouth of the Gabon River to put an end to the legend. It can be said that it was he who eliminated the gorilla from African bestiaries and hoaxes.
However, gorillas would never lose their dimension as fantastic creatures. Without going any further, in 1858, the sculptor Emmanuel Fremiet (1824-1910) will present his sculpture entitled Gorilla kidnapping a woman, a work that was rejected by the Paris Salon and whose second version – dating back to 1887 – can be seen in Nantes, in the Museum of Fine Arts. It is the bronze figure of a gorilla abducting a woman struggling to escape the beast’s arm. A whole representation of sexual violence that is connected to ancient fairy tales where repression and morbidity are categories to take into account. Now, if we stimulate the legend of Beauty and the Beast Together with the aforementioned giant primate fables, we have as a result king kong, one of the most real fantasy creatures in cinematic history, occupying a special place in our imaginations whenever we recognize the Empire State Building. And fiction has the ability to act intensely on the brain, assimilating it as a representation of real life. This is why fairy tales are powerful.
Another example – without leaving the African continent – we owe it to the American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950), who created one of the most iconic characters of all time: Tarzan, monkey king. Burroughs created the story of some Englishmen with noble titles who get lost in the jungle where their child will be born, a child who will soon be orphaned and adopted by the monkey. Kalanaming him Tarzan, which in monkey language means “White Skin”.
Tarzan stories have traveled around the world many times and continue to travel today. During one such journey, Tarzan reached the dark days of post-war London, where a girl dared to imagine that she would travel to Africa and become friends with apes like her hero. Jane Goodall’s work was inspired by reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’ books. For this reason, aware of the power of fiction, during childbirth the recently deceased ethologist published a series of stories on the Internet, sharing virtual readings from her home in Bournemouth (England), thus sharing stories about chimpanzees whose purpose, in addition to entertaining, was to ensure that the symbolic images of the beasts became familiar and part of the imagination of boys and girls; who would come to understand that science is nothing more than a fiction of reality.
