As you travel through Africa your heartland, the wild voices of our African Animals become your guides …
Once there was a Forest.
Once, before the tyranny of money and guns and political maps, the Albertine Rift Mountains in central Equatorial Africa supported a spectacularly vast ecosystem.
This was a forest so vast and lush, so deep and compact, it was said to be impenetrable...
MOUNTAIN GORILLA
Key word: LEADERSHIP
Element: WATER (Symbolised the COOKING POT)
Expressing the MALE quality of THE CHALLENGE
[excerpts from GORILLA’S message in the book Wild Voices: Messages from the Soul of Africa by Anne Keating]
Eons before, shifting tectonic plates had poured out molten rock forming this range with its jagged relief of steep cliffs and plunging valleys, of peaks high and cold, and sloping plateaux scattered with boulders.
Millions of years later the early Hominoids moved into her depths; it is here on this specific volcanic mountain range, and here only, that the Mountain Gorilla (Gorilla beringei) can be found. They live nowhere else in the world.
It is estimated that there are about seven hundred of them left...
Gorillas are threatened by loss of habit: acre after acre of forest has been cleared for the production of lucrative coffee, tea and pyrethrum, or for grazing beef cattle. The Gorillas have been forced higher up the mountains into the mists where the damp and cold cause lung infections never known to them before. Add to this the illegal logging –which opens new roads, raping the forest as they plunge deeper and deeper into her mystery. Now the copper ore and tungsten mines thrust further into her valleys and sacred groves. The diverse flora which supported this vast rich system disappears by the minute. These new roads make way for even more poaching; ancient ferns and other rare plants are hacked out, exquisite birds are netted, until finally the most lucrative prize of all, the Gorillas themselves are captured. Dead or alive Gorillas are taken for sale to zoos, circuses, pet shops or laboratories, or Gorilla parts for potency medicines. Finally, the roads open the way for marauding militia who make base camps and kill Gorillas for bush meat.
How do we cope with this story of annihilation and death that fills us with a grief so deep we are sick to our souls? How do I hold all this pain for our planet in one body we ask each other?
We need this pain to alert us – it tells us where we must put our attention. Firstly we need to speak out about our despair; we need to share our outrage with each other. Consciously sitting with and feeling the pain (not trying to escape it, but deeply feeling it) helps us to move through it to a place where we are no longer in its thrall, no longer its victim. Now we can become the extraordinary, ordinary people who stand up, who can face the insatiable industrialists, the armies and rapacious politicians, the zoos and ridiculous circuses.
Gorilla challenges us to heed the pain we feel for this world gone crazy; the pain we feel is our wake-up call.
[Gorilla beringei beringei (Mountain Gorilla) – due to poaching, agricultural encroachment, mining and warfare, habitat loss has reached a Critical Status. Gorilla b. beringei is listed as a Critically Endangered species on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List.
Some authorities list it as the third most endangered mammal in Africa.
The Global 200 is the list of eco-regions identified by the World Wildlife Fund as priorities for conservation. The Mountain Gorilla’s habitat is listed here as Critical.]
Let us take action!
Inspired by MOUNTAIN GORILLA I understand that …
I acknowledge the pain I feel for the destruction of our planet; I share these feelings with others.
I am challenged to act in ways that will alleviate human pressure on the planet.