December 7, 2024 • 52 mins
When confronted with a home invasion, Max the gorilla brought international fame to the Johannesburg Zoo and briefly became the city's most famous crime fighter. He received numerous endorsements, and a statue was erected in his honor. But what brought Max to this level of celebrity? In this week's Classic episode, Ben and Super Producer Max -- not the ape -- explore the story of a crime-fighting gorilla that became a symbol of justice in an intensely troubled South Africa.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome Ridiculous Historians to this week's classic episode. If you're
hearing this when it publishes, welcome to December seventh, twenty
twenty four, Joined as always with my super producer, mister
Max Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
I'm guessing I am going to be the second most
famous Max on this episode.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
I don't know, man, don't you know what history is? Weird?
Speaker 1 (00:25):
And dare I say ridiculous? It's Ben Bullen here with
Max Williams, our faithful correspondence. Mister Noel Brown is adventuring
and Max, I am so glad that you are here
with us. In this intro to our classic episode, we
were talking about it a little bit off air. This
(00:48):
is the story of another Max.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Yeah, this one's interesting because I've heard this one referenced
a lot, so you know, this is before I worked
on the show. But this is what This is our
cutoff time right for stories. If it's after this, it's
not We can't consider it history right.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
That is a decision I made arbitrarily, and we've just
sort of gone with that for quite some time. It
goes back to the philosophical question of what counts as history.
History is a living thing. It's an ongoing conversation. If
you are a fan of history, then you probably have
(01:30):
dealt with the same dilemma you have wrestled with this
idea what counts as history, what counts as the present?
Why is why is postmodern literature such a magabadger, such
a pickle when it comes to the idea of experience.
We're talking today about a primate named Max, not to
(01:55):
be confused with our super producer, mister Max Williams. We're
talking about a guy who was once upon a time
the most famous crime fighting gorilla in all of South Africa. Now,
our buddy Max here is a Western Lowland gorilla. He
was at the Johannesburg Zoo and in nineteen ninety seven
(02:19):
he was shot and he was wounded, and he became
a symbol for larger tensions and social issues within the
nation of South Africa. And to your point, Max, in
this episode you will hear a pivotal moment for us
on ridiculous history. This is the episode wherein we determined
(02:45):
our cutoff for the past versus the present. Anything that
happened before nineteen ninety seven counts as ridiculous history for us.
Anything after that, well, negotiable.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
Yeah, I know.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
I'm excited for this. Let's get into it.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome to the show,
(03:35):
fellow Ridiculous Historians, friends and neighbors, US residents and citizens
of the world alike. We are going on a journey
today to a different part of the world, and what
better way to get into it than to open with
a question, Noel, have you ever seen a gorilla in
(03:56):
real life?
Speaker 3 (03:57):
Yes? At the Columbia Zoo in Colombia, South Carolina, they
have a gorilla situation. There, a gorilla situation. Have a
gorilla sitch? Yeah, now silverbacks, I believe. Oh and I'm ben. Oh,
of course you are.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
And we have to, of course give a shout out
to our long suffering super producer, Casey Pegram.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
He's still in the wind, but he's here in spirit.
In fact, today we are kind of producerless and peek
behind the curtain. It is Memorial Day and we are
here in the office making this episode just for you,
just for you, specifically you.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Yes, if you're listening, you're thinking we're talking about a
general to you.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
No, we don't do that.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
No, it's specifically you. And what better way to start,
we thought today than to talk a little bit about gorillas.
These are amazing.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
Creatures they are, and they are majestic and also quite powerful.
Oh yeah, a lot of upper body strength. They got
those big old forearms and those tiny little legs. But man,
I would not want to run into one in a
dark alley or you know, accidentally end up flung into
its pen.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
Yeah, they're the largest living primate. Males are about twice
the size of females, so a male gorilla can weigh
up the four hundred pounds.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
And they.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Have opposable thumbs just like us, right, so they can manipulate,
hold and carry things. They're also really really smart and
they are fun. Fact, although they look like they might
be ferocious carnivores, they're not.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
You remember Coco Cocoa, the sign language gorilla, right, heartwarming story.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
There still still a little controversial in the science. But
I don't know, man, that that stuff can break your
heart because it feels like it's having very human, self aware,
sapient interactions.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Well, if you want going to double down on the heartbreak, Ben,
there's actually a picture of Robin Williams kicking it with
Coco and it will jerk some tears right out of
your ey eye holes if you look at that.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
One eye holes. Oh, the Rick and Morty reference that
we're just gonna leave there, what is it?
Speaker 3 (06:07):
Terry flaps? Yeah, texted me. But on the way up
and you were downstairs and you you asked me if
I wanted to touch your terry flaps.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Yes, that is a that is a reference. Don't go
calling hr on us, folks. That is a reference to
Rick and Morty. But but the the statement of eye holes, yeah,
it's it's true. It will hurt your eye holes and
your heartholes to see Robin Williams with that, that lovely gorilla. Now,
Coco has something in common with our with our protagonists,
(06:38):
or a tragic hero of today's story, because Coco is
a type of gorilla called a Western Lowland gorilla. Western
Lowland gorillas are the primary type of gorilla that you
will see in a zoo across the world. There are
some exceptions. There's an Eastern Lowland gorilla that lives at
the Antwerp Zoo, and there are some mountain gorillas that
(07:01):
live in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And I
mean zoo gorillas, not gorillas in the wild. So typically,
if you are imagining a gorilla exhibit you have seen
or a preservation you've seen here in the States, then
it is going to be it's going to be a
home to western lowland gorillas. They're generally lighter colored than
(07:25):
Eastern gorillas, but in terms of behavior, they're still the same.
They're very intelligent, they're tremendously strong, They're calm until they're
not well.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
They're highly territorial. They will protect their turf and their
own if you come up upon them and oppose a threat,
they will go to great length to defend themselves and
their loved ones.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
And occasionally these stories pop up in the news like Harambei,
the gorilla who was tragically put to death.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
A little kid fell in the pen.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
When a kid a human child something sounds so creepy
and David Bowie esque and Labyrinth saying human child.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
Yeah, Well a.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Kid fell in and as a result, Rombey was put
to sleep.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
And today's story centers on a human man, a human man, yes,
who was once a human child, and a gorilla named
Max who lived at the Johannesburg Zoo.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
So, as the story goes, a guy was fleeing the police.
He had robbed some houses. He was on the lamb,
he was on the run, and he vaulted a fence.
I'm trying to picture how this happened, Like, did he
know what he was getting into? Was He's like, that's cool,
I'll figure this out. Anyway, vaulted defence, running from the cops,
(08:49):
ended up inside Max's gorilla pit. Yeah, that he shared
with his life partner, Lisa.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
His mate, his better half. So this guy, this criminal,
Isaac Mofokang, jumps into the zoo as he said, Noel,
and Max, as we had established earlier, being a gorilla,
is thinking, who the heck is this? This is not
a zookeeper. This is not one of the people that
I know. And so he defends his territory. What we
(09:22):
mean by that is he displays signs of intimidation and
he moves toward Isaac Mofo Kang and Mofo Kang. Unfortunately
for Max was.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Armed, Yeah, and he put a few slugs and old
Max didn't he He.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Shot him in the chest, but that was not enough
to stop a four hundred pounds angry gorilla. So Max
bites Isaac, and you know, we try to be a
family show. But bites him in the butt essentially, and
it sounds hilarious now, but that is a grievous wound.
(10:04):
So he has Isaac Muffulken bitten in the buttocks. He's
pinned him against the wall. This man is about to die.
Police intervene and in the process of rescuing Isaac, the
police officers, at least two of them, are also injured.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
By Max, He's not having it well. I mean, you know,
he can't differentiate at this point between friend or foe.
He's already been threatened. And then these other schmo's show
up trying to apprehend the suspects, and to Max, they're
just another part of the problem. They are trespassing on
his land and he's been shot. Well, got shot in
(10:41):
the chest and then in the neck, right right, yeah,
through the neck. But I think the one in the
neck passed right through, I want to say, luckily. And
then the one in the chest was not a mortal wound, thankfully,
And in fact, I think they actually left it in.
They left the bullet in because it would have been
more traumatic for Max if they had had to digger
and do surgery to get it out and they put
(11:01):
them down. Yeah, under anesthetic rather, but we are getting
ahead of ourselves.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
We are getting a little bit ahead of ourselves. There's
just a bit more color we should add to the
story here, because in many other countries and many other
points in time, this may have been a story that
you hear as a three to four minute piece on
your evening news right you turn it, you tune into
(11:29):
channel eleven whatever, and people are saying, strange story from
a local Columbia zoo or something. However, this was Johannesburg,
South Africa in the late nineties. People were tremendously concerned
about crime in the city and so Max became famous
(11:50):
for this.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
Yeah, something of a symbol you know, of I don't know,
maybe rule of laws not the right term, but just
the idea of pushing back against criminals that were just
everywhere the wave of crime. This is awful, and you know,
we're gonna get a little more into this, but we
also haven't really talked about the fact that this is
the nineties and our show's called ridiculous history and the
(12:11):
notion of the nineties. It seems a little off even
for us. We were like, is this really historical, but
man was at a different time. It was a very
different time.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
And the way that we decided to approach this was
to look at what we would call a cutoff date, right, like,
at what point does something become history even though we're
creating it every single second of our lives. I think
we can all agree that right now two thousand and eight.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
Would still be a little too recent. I think so.
But nineteen ninety and not to mention the history surrounding
this time in Johannesburg and South African general, we forget
I certainly forgot that apartheid, this this institutionalized racist government
that own owned South Africa for decades, had only just
(13:05):
ended and there was severe fallout. You know, they had
democracy for the first time after the end of apartheid.
This again institutionalized segregation of the majority black population of
the country and by the minority white government of the country.
(13:25):
We can get in a little bit more specifics about
that in a minute, but that's the that's the atmosphere here. Yeah,
and the crime, you know, the non political violence is
there's no rule of law. It's like a free for
all in the street. It absolutely as a total powder
k and this idea of Max, I think it could
be argued was sort of a beacon of hope that
(13:47):
was very quickly latched onto by the community. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
One thing that may be useful by way of comparison
for American listeners is to think of McGruff the crime dog.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Do you remember McGruff? Noll I do, But he was
a cartoon and he was pretty inspiring. Just as a cartoon,
This was a real life gorilla that had weathered this
chaotic environment.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
And the reason the reason I bring up the McGruff
comparison is because Max becomes this very useful symbol for
the police, as we said, and he has merchandise that
comes out. We've got stuffed Max dolls.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
Well, and McGruff would take a bite out of crime.
Max took a bite out of the butt of crime.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Yes, and Max was also as you had said, Max
was real. This was a real incident. But he didn't
just get stuffed animals made in his likeness. He became
a celebrity. And I don't know if you had ever
heard this word, but this was my first time reading
the word spokes beast.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
Was he a pan sexual, non threatening spokes thing? Remember
that from mister show pit pat. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
spokes beast. He was the spokes beast for Labombo Bananas
and he actually got paid with a year's supply of
free bananas. They literally made it rain bananas on Max Catching.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
A computer company hired him to pose in ads for
its new software.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
Yeah. I wonder what the software was called. I couldn't.
I couldn't find any specifics about that, but it was, Yeah,
you have a gorilla kind of chilling your software for you.
That's that's interesting. He must have really been beloved. There
was There was a drink, an energy drink, which I
love the name of. It's just called Energade or Innergade.
I was wondering, is it interrogate or energy as well.
(15:39):
It's sort of like a Gatorade equivalent. I guess they
they signed up Max after they learned that that was
Max's favorite drink for taking antibiotics at the zoo. The
zoo keepers would slip his meds into a nice refreshing
bottle of energade.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
And so he thought he was having a juice party,
which you know that I can easily see that happen
because if Innergate or Energade is anything like Gatorade or
power Aid. Then it's probably very sugary.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
Right.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
So a bank and a construction company also sponsored Max,
meaning that they contributed money to the zoo for his upkeep,
medical bills, feeding.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
Et cetera. Yeah, like upgrading his pen, things like that,
the infrastructure. Because again, he was like a local He
wasn't a national treasure, you know, a local hero. We
got to tell the newspaper story. This is great. Yeah,
the Saturday Star paid twenty two hundred bucks for a
photo or I guess for a photo shoot where Max
was browsing the paper and they got the photos.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
After they got the photos, because Max clearly is a
professional at this point, after they got the photos, he
went ahead and ate every.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
Page of the paper. He was a fan. He was
a fan. He was trying to take it all in
through osmosis.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
It's similar to what more Sendak called the highest praise
he had ever received, the children's.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
Author of Where the Wild Things Are. Uh.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
He said he received a note from a fan who
did they enjoyed his book, reading it, and they also
wanted to eat it.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
My girlfriend asked me the strangest question the other day.
She said, have you ever eaten paper to keep someone
from getting it, like like a note. And at first
I was like, what do you talk? What do you mean?
And she you know, I mean like, if you have
a teacher caught you passing a note in class, rather
than having her confiscate it and see what horrid things
you were writing, I'll just eat it. Yeah, I'm like,
(17:37):
it's that as.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Baller, that sounds like something people should not admit to doing.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
Well, I'm sorry for throwing her under the bus, but
you guys don't know. Oh did she did she admit it?
She admitted it. Yeah. I mean it's resourceful. I think
so too. But what was she possibly writing that would
have been like worth consuming right there in front of
the teacher?
Speaker 1 (17:56):
Overthrow the teacher. The revolution is now.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
I think so.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
Speaking of which, Yes, speaking of which, we could go
on a list some of Max's sponsorships, but it's more important,
we feel, to explore why this occurred. Once this came so,
we mentioned, we mentioned apartheid, we mentioned the distinction between
(18:21):
political and non political crime, and unfortunately we could do
an entirely different show on the systemic causes of apartheid,
the process of combating it, and the ramifications of apartheid
that remain in Johannesburg in the modern day. But we
(18:43):
feel the cultural ecology from which Max's celebrity arises is
as important as the details of that moment in the zoo.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
Oh for sure, dare we say much more important. But
Max being like like a batman esque figure like and
Johannesburg and South Africa being the Gotham city, everyone needs
a hero they can look to, they can believe it,
they can believe in And as silly as that sounds,
and you know, we're editorializing a little bit here, but
I can't help but think that's what caused this gorilla
(19:17):
to reach such heights of celebrity. You know, just a
bit of background, because I did not know quite how
far back this stretched. Apartheid became law in South Africa
in nineteen fifty. Things like marriages between white people and
black people were forbidden, any kind of sexual relations. The
(19:41):
idea was to separate not only black people from white people,
but black people from each other and like sectionalize them
into different They called them, you know, tribal factions or whatever,
and it kept them from organizing and kept them from
fighting back and having political power. Right, they had to
(20:01):
carry papers. It was like Nazi Germany. And this again,
this did not really fully come to an end, at
least on the books until nineteen ninety three. Right.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Yeah, this process of setting aside territory and for black
inhabitants of South Africa at the time was the things
they were making were known as Bantustans and ten of
them were established in South Africa to concentrate members of
certain ethnic groups, making those groups, in the opinion of
(20:35):
the ruling party, ethically homogeneous and making them nation states.
But it also it also, as you said, had the
clear effect of removing or stymying the ability of people
to band together in a larger force to combat apartheid.
Apartheid was based on the principle known as boss cop.
(21:00):
Now neither Noel nor I speak this language, but boss
cop with two a's two s is was this. It's
this concept that translates from Afrikaans to something like boss ship,
like being the boss or domination. It's it's essentially it's
white supremacy. And the idea of the National Party at
(21:25):
this time was very much solidly based in the old
concepts of colonialism. The idea that there is some sort
of a stab, there's some sort of inborn superiority, depending
on how one defines a race or whatever. And we
(21:47):
must also point out that these kinds of concepts, this
white supremacy stuff is not is not a just a
general all white people are better, because there are also
levels in their white supremacist ideas that certain white people are,
you know, somehow better than other.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
White people, et cetera. And these concepts go back to
the very founding of South Africa as an independent nation.
In nineteen thirteen, this thing called the Land Act was
passed that began this segregation of Black Africans and the
minority whites and also deprived Black Africans of the ability
(22:29):
to work as sharecroppers and they were you know, denied
a means of an income essentially.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
Yeah, absolutely, And this again, this applied not just to
people that the governing forces characterized as black. It applied
to people that they characterized as non white in any ways.
So this also included what would be described as South
Asians or people they would have called Indians at the time.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
And it would split up families because a mother, for example,
could be considered black or Bantu. And then a child
or a spouse could be classified differently, and it would
literally break up these families.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Yeah, yeah, that's spot on. Through the dual use of
bureaucracy and brutality, they attempted to and in some spheres,
succeeded in taking this insane notion and enforcing it or
bringing it to a horrific reality on innocent people. These
(23:36):
are not you know, it's not like a weird punishment
they made up for soldiers. These are civilians, these are children. Yeah,
and we see already an unsustainable situation. Things like what
we see historically. What we find is that in cases
of discrimination, which always always exists, cases where this sort
(24:01):
of execrable suppression and oppression of people occurs, there is
almost always going to be a backlash.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
Yeah, instant opposition in the form of the African National
Congress as early as the nineteen thirteen Land Act, that
controversial law that was passed. And this is the party
that would be like if we're talking rebels versus you know,
the Empire, these are the rebels right in star Wars
(24:34):
parlace here. And it wasn't until the late forties that
the idea of apartheid actually began. The African or National
Party actually won an election using this. This the first
time you started seeing this word apartheid, which means separateness.
There's a fantastic rundown of all of this in the
(24:54):
timeline of Apartheid on history dot Com that I recommend
checking out. For sure. It gives you a pretty deep
dive into some of this. And we're not going to
go into the minutia of all of it, because it's
a whole, like you said, been a whole story unto itself.
But from the very start you have this opposition and
a culture of violence, a culture of war essentially.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Yeah, So the precedents for these racist beliefs existed for
a long long time. They were codified in the late forties.
But the history of the African National Congress, as you said,
doesn't start just there in the forties.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
The origins go back.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
You'll hear people report that the African National Congress really
starts or it's the first inklings of this begin when
a fellow named Pixley Saka Seme says in nineteen eleven,
forget all the past differences among Africans and unite in
one national organization. It's also really important to say this
(25:58):
that during the time of colonialism, many of the borders
that were established in the modern states now were created
to purposefully divide existing communities. So now it doesn't matter
if for time immemorial you and you and the rest
of your community have lived in this one area. Right
(26:23):
once the national lines are drawn by these European powers,
all of a sudden, you are different states.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
Almost like a more extreme version of something like gerrymandering,
where you're sort of rigging the game against people to
ensure that they have no voice politically.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Right from the perspective of the pro apartheid National Party,
the activities of the National Congress are terrorism essentially, that's
what they're That's what they are are perceiving it as.
(27:01):
That's what they're portraying it as in the international media.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
But you gotta fight fire with fire, Ben, I mean,
these is essentially a fascist regime, you know, that is
trying to utterly crush any kind of resistance with violence,
and the only way to fight back against that is
with more violence, And unfortunately a lot of the time,
I mean, that's the thing. The history of this country
(27:25):
is so rooted in conflict, just constant conflict from the
beginning until apartheid came to an end in the early nineties. Well,
the conflict's change, perhaps, that's what I'm saying, Even the
notion of it coming to an end in them establishing
real democracy. That does not happen overnight, especially when you've
(27:46):
just had constant struggle for decades and decades, it becomes ingrained.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
You know, in nineteen sixty seventy black demonstrators are killed
in Sharpville and the African National Congress is officially banned,
just just like ten years after the government comes to power,
they classify everybody by race. Oh, they also banned the
Communist Party as well in nineteen fifty. Let me go
(28:13):
back for a second. In nineteen fifty, Nelson Mandela is
responding to the banning of the Communist Party, these racial
classifications and such by launching a campaign of civil disobedience.
But when the ANC is officially banned in nineteen sixty
one year later, Nelson Mandela in nineteen sixty one heads
(28:36):
the African National Congress's new military wing, which launches sabotage campaigns,
and these become you know, these become on the ground operations,
so no more civil disobedience. These are acts to meant
to purposely in some way cripple the function of the government.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
Absolutely, I mean they are in open rebellion. And Nelson Mandela.
After many of the leaders of the movement were jailed
or executed, Mandela was in prison, as you know, for
quite a long time, from nineteen sixty three until believe
just nineteen ninety and they kind of bounced him all
(29:18):
over town, didn't they been. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
He was originally jailed in Marshall Square Prison in Johannesburg.
He along with his co defendants, admitted that they had
committed acts of sabotage, but denied that they were waging
guerrilla war against the governments. Of course, there's sentence to
(29:40):
life in prison, although the prosecutor demanded the death sentence.
Mandela is eventually transferred to Robin Island.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
Where he is.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Forced to live for the next eighteen years. And at
this point he's thinking, you know, I may be in
jail for the rest of my natural life. He gets
transferred to a couple of different prisons. There is also
a free Mandela protest taking place at that time. The
politics don't stop because he is imprisoned, and he in
(30:13):
many ways becomes a symbol for the fight against apartheid.
He gets transferred to a prison in Cape Town called
Pollsmoor Prison and the conditions they are a little better
than they are at Robin Island. But then he gets
transferred to Victor Verster Prison near a place called part
and he eventually, going back to what you said, he
(30:37):
eventually in nineteen ninety is freed.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
He is freed and hem in league with the current
President FW de Clerk, who was the head of the
government at the time. They work together to repeal many
of these apartheid laws that have been on the books
for so long and establish a new constitution which gave
(31:02):
African black citizens the right to vote democratically and other
racial groups that were also discriminated against as you mentioned
non whites, and all of this went into play in
nineteen ninety four, they started free elections and essentially laid
(31:23):
the groundwork for having a free and democratic society.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Right the ANC campaign to ninety four, their slogan is
a better life for all and there's a focus on development.
This is around the time that the world, much of
which was already against the pre existing system of apartheid.
This is when the world also starts to actively support
(31:50):
Nelson Mandela and the A and C through the soft
diplomacy of international accolades and awards, most particularly the Nobel Prize.
Speaker 3 (31:58):
Yeah, he shared that with the clerk.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
And the campaign was meant to not just break the system,
but to build a better one. They had and continue
to pursue as we're going to find noble goals. One
such would be the idea of building a million houses
in five years, free education, access to water and electricity
(32:25):
because many people went without it.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
And this constitution was insanely forward thinking, had so many
protections built into the language, protections that we don't have
on the books that we fight for daily in this country.
Protection for gays and lesbians, leading to the being called
the Rainbow Nation. Rainbow Nation exactly. Not only that, some
(32:50):
of those very progressive ideas of how to establish good
housing for the poor, the idea of basic human rights,
to education, to healthcare, workers' rights, access to information again, women,
gays and lesbians, children, environmental protections. And then there's this
(33:14):
thing that I thought was so cool. It's called the
principle of the ratchet. And this was language built into
this constitution that said, essentially even if the government can't,
with the resources currently available, give all of these things
like schools, housing, clean water to every community all at once,
it has to convince the courts that they are working
(33:36):
towards it in a fundamentally real way.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
Which is fantastic because it's a baked in accountability right.
And while we are rightly praising the anc for doing
a thing that many people around the world once thought
was impossible, we do also have to acknowledge that the
way they got there did involve what you know, did
(34:03):
involve more than non violence and more than sabotage of
industrial stuff like in There's an article in The New
York Times from nineteen ninety seven that examines how senior
officials of the African National Congress later after taking powers,
said that they had, if not actively participating in some
(34:31):
of the guerrilla violence that Mandela had been accused of
and his co defendants, they could have at the very
least done something to stop it. They were tacitly aiding
people who were perpetrating these events. Again not all on
not all on just you know, soldiers of the pro
apartheid side, but again men, women and children.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
The line becomes so blurred because so many of these
groups are little independent offshoots, independent rebel grips, militias that
are armed, because apparently in nineteen ninety four you could
buy an AK forty seven on the black market for
what would equate to about fifteen dollars American. There's this
incredibly moving and disturbing article in The New Republic from
(35:16):
nineteen ninety four called South Africa's Violent Road to Real
Democracy and it mentions some of these statistics about the
AK forty seven and how supposedly at the time you
could order a hit for that same amount fifty rand.
And this article centers, at least in the early part
of it, around this hospital called Bara gowan Off Hospital
(35:37):
shortened to the Barra, which is in the Soweto township
of Johannesburg, and it just shows a lot of the
comings and goings and interviews a lot of the doctors,
and it just you know, you're seeing stabbing victims coming through,
people with these very telltale wounds from a particular weapon
(35:57):
called a panga, which is like a machete that the
members of the Zulu faction would carry, and it just
the sense of desperation that comes across in this article,
like they refer to the Doctor's Trauma ward as the
pit and it just I can't imagine the chaos. And
(36:18):
it does a really good job of kind of differentiating
between the political violence that had a death toll of
more than fifteen thousand over a span of four years,
but the majority of the violence that outshine even that
insane number was just criminal violence.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
Right, yeah, And I'm glad you're bringing this up, although
it is a disturbing thing. In two thousand and seven,
the South African government contacted the Center for the Study
of Violence and Reconciliation to figure out why this crime
occurs or what the tone of it is, the systemic causes,
and one of the things they found was that the
(36:59):
courts were inefficient and that violence had become normalized.
Speaker 3 (37:06):
So this was expected.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
And this is also tying in, of course, the vulnerability
of young people, high levels of inequality. From these various factors,
we see hard numbers arise. I think in the same
article you mentioned sites, at least in that time, South
Africa's murder rate was ten times that of the United States,
(37:30):
which you know has a national image of a country
with a cartoonish murder rate.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
Here at the US. Yeah, and of course you know
with this chaos, the African National Congress was constantly at
war with the police and their goal, according to this
article and everything else we've seen, was to make these
various areas, these townships ungovernable is the word they use here.
And so you're dealing with this just decades long struggle
(37:59):
that never quite comes to an end even after apartheid ends.
You can't just turn that off with the passage of
the law.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Right, it's very difficult to address all of the contributing factors,
the old enmities, because we can't forget that many of
the pro apartheid individuals that were active in the government
were also tremendously financially influential, right or socially influential.
Speaker 3 (38:30):
So some of those means.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Of not to sound like a banned Communist Party member,
but many of those means of production were still owned
by the forces of apartheid or portype.
Speaker 3 (38:44):
People allow money to be made with constant conflicts, right,
and this.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
We know that this sounds like disturbing stuff. But while
we're painting this picture, we don't want to gloss over
the fact that South Africa as a nation has made
tremendous progress, but that progress still continues today. South Africa
as recently as twenty fifteen have been characterized by British
(39:15):
papers like The Guardian as a country at war. There
were the murder rates sword to nearly forty nine people
a day in South Africa overall, and of course that's
not going to be evenly distributed. A lot of that
happens in the urban centers. But despite all of that,
(39:38):
this progress continues the legacy of the African National Congress continues.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
It's interesting, though, because Johannesburg is subject to something that
we are seeing quite a lot of here in Atlanta,
which is rabid gentrification. A lot of these formerly uninhabitable
or very very highly dangerous places, burnt out buildings, abandoned locations,
have now been cleared out of squatters, you know, very
(40:08):
low income homeless people that are living there illegally. They
have all been cleared out to make way for developers.
There is an area, as an article on CNN called
Johannesburg's crime hotspot transformed to hipster hangout that's very familiar
to where we're sitting right here, in a place called
Pont City Market in Atlanta on a street called Ponce
(40:29):
de lay On that used to be very dangerous and
a lot of crime, and now it's kind of a
lot of that's been swept away and replaced by bougie
hipster malls, and that same thing is happening in Johannesburg.
Speaker 1 (40:44):
Activists are referring to this as spatial apartheid and calling
for occupations of Cape Town. There's there's another article from
the Guardian, whom I found had a lot of great
reporting on this by Alice mc cool that examines how
these housing activists are taking over a nurses home, a
(41:06):
hospital and attempting to gain national and international recognition of
the housing problem, both in terms of affordability, in terms
of gentrification, and in terms of historical land theft, which
is you know what happened?
Speaker 3 (41:23):
Well, of course I saw a thing in this article
from CNN about how these developers are now looking at
Johannesburg as a super hotspot for buying up real estate.
One developer in particular, who is doing a project called
Arts on Main in a precinct called the Mobonang which
means place of Light, talks about these stats. He says
(41:47):
it's paid off financially, but it will pay off more
in the medium to long term. And this is a
developer by the name of Jonathan Leebman who is kind
of making this his a big project of his. Apparently,
apartments now can get one between the range of two
hundred and eighty thousand RAN or about twenty eight thousand
dollars American to three million RAN, which is about three
(42:08):
hundred thousand and Libman says that these prices in Johannesburg
are skyrocketing so he can buy up buildings. He said
he used to be'd pay one hundred euros a square
meter for a building, and now because of the efforts
of guys like him, the prices are going through the roof.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
And in twenty eleven the government tried to combat this
by ruling that local councils local governments essentially are required
to house anyone evicted to make room for a private
or public development. But the problem is, according to activists,
that the authorities who are charged with this responsibility only
(42:45):
provide overcrowded blocks where families are still forcibly split up,
or squalid slums essentially, and even those only meet a
fraction of the demand.
Speaker 3 (42:57):
So we can.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
See with this, with the ecology the environment in which
these events occur, we can see how injustice becomes a
daily part of almost every human being's life, right at
least for that time. And so of course there is
something tremendously powerful and cathartic about seeing justice done. Both
(43:24):
for oddly enough the speculation, but both the pro apartheid
racist forces, the authoritarians or the empire from your earlier comparison,
and the rebel forces or the people fighting for equality
both saw something in Max the gorilla because they saw
rule of law.
Speaker 3 (43:43):
Right.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
If you're pro police, you're seeing like, oh, look, rule
of law. The authorities won. If you're anti police, you're saying, oh, look,
finally someone who can do the job. And because of this,
for a time, Max becomes this universally lauded figure. And
(44:07):
Isaac the unfortunate, Isaac Mofolkung who goes to jail he has.
Speaker 3 (44:13):
Captured a forty year sentence, got a forty year sentence.
A judge referred to him as an unguided missile, a
loose cannon, a time bomb, because he had had just
a rap sheet, a very thick one, let's say that.
Speaker 1 (44:27):
Yeah, And he eventually passed away in a psychiatric hospital.
But you and I were talking off air about this nool.
There were some suspicious circumstances to his death.
Speaker 3 (44:38):
Yeah, Supposedly his sister got a call I believe it
was his sister from somebody from the facility saying that
he had passed away after vomiting and collapsing. But then
when they got to the hospital, the story changed to
this idea that he had stolen a fistful of another
patient's medication. When they come around with those trays, I
(44:59):
guess with the pills and the cups and gobble them down,
attempting suicide and succeeding. But the circumstances are a little murky,
and it's this The whole story is a little strange.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
Yeah, And you have to put yourself in the family's position.
How else can you react but with suspicion when someone
tells you one story about your loved one's death and
then they tell you a completely different story.
Speaker 3 (45:25):
So there remains.
Speaker 1 (45:28):
From that family's perspective and unsolved mystery regarding the shooter.
Speaker 3 (45:33):
Of Max the gorilla.
Speaker 1 (45:34):
Regarding Isaac, we should also say Max's story doesn't end
when he gets those endorsements. We have more news about
Max the Gorilla Well.
Speaker 3 (45:47):
He was voted Newsmaker of the Year for South Africa
for nineteen ninety seven the Johannesburg Press Club. He was
twenty six years old at the time. We should mention
name this national gorilla hero. It's new Maker of nineteen
ninety seven, and they presented him a giant trophy a
meter high made of cake and fruit that he devoured
(46:08):
on camera like promptly right, super good photo op.
Speaker 1 (46:11):
Max went on to live at the Johannesburg Zoo as
a symbol of justice, a symbol that something could be
right in the world until the age of thirty four,
which was pretty good for a gorilla. Not ben where
he passed away in his sleep in two thousand and four.
Speaker 3 (46:31):
I want to say yeah, I believe it was from
cardiac arrest, which is apparently a pretty common way for
elderly gorillas to go.
Speaker 1 (46:38):
We did find a funny story about his love life.
Do you think we got time to throw that in?
Speaker 3 (46:41):
Let's toss it in. Okay, Okay, So.
Speaker 1 (46:44):
Max the Gorilla did show up in the news for
at least one non crime related thing, non advertisement related thing.
We found a story about his love life that has
there's some pretty interesting language in here. But Max's partner Lisa,
(47:05):
who who he was protecting.
Speaker 3 (47:07):
He was protecting yeah from from Isaac?
Speaker 1 (47:09):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Max and Lisa were still together. This
was a long running relationship and uh, some journalists believed
that they had perhaps lost the spark because Max stopped
being interested in intimacy with Lisa.
Speaker 3 (47:26):
Yeah. There's an article from Independent Online, Max the Gorilla
Refuses to Mate where they talk about this issue and
how the gorilla scientists there at the Johannesburg Zoo, because
that's a job, even considered dosing old Max, possibly in
a gatorade equivalent to drink with some viagra integrate integate energy.
(47:49):
Let us know, right, listeners, let us know how to pronounce.
But apparently gorillas in general don't really they're not really
that into sex in the first place. So once the
spark is gone, the thrill is gone, my friend, it's
gone for good.
Speaker 1 (48:05):
Yeah. And then Max, as we said, passed away peacefully
in his sleep. That's a happy ending for him and
his widow. Then Lisa continued on for about two years.
She had another partner, a nineteen year old named Macoco,
(48:25):
young Buck young Buck, the Boy Toy, and Lisa passed
away in two thousand and six at the age of
thirty five. She had during a surgery to determine whether
or not she had a cancer's growth. Yeah, but neither
of them died of gunshot wounds.
Speaker 3 (48:45):
That's very true. And to this day, there is a
statue commemorating Max the Gorilla at the Johannesburg Zoo that
you can go visit in his honor.
Speaker 1 (48:55):
And thus concludes our story of Max the Gorilla. We
found so many other amazing things. I had a really
tough time not putting in more stories of animals doing
heroic stuff with humans.
Speaker 3 (49:11):
I know there's a lot there, but you know, we
kind of we took a pretty dark turn in this
one and really needed that context in that background, and
I'm glad we did. It's a little intense, but it
also shows that the nineties totally historical time, my friend, Yeah,
for more reasons than just like trapper keepers and.
Speaker 1 (49:29):
Stuff across the world, guatemal in civil war, for instance.
You know, So we would like to thank you so
much for spending some time with us today. We know
this episode went a little bit long, but we wanted to.
We wanted to explore as much as we could the
story behind the story, which too often gets forgotten or
relegated to a footnote in a history book.
Speaker 3 (49:51):
And we of course would like to hear from you.
Speaker 1 (49:54):
You can find NOL, super producer, Casey and I all
over the internet. We're on instant, We're on Facebook. Check
us out at Ridiculous Historians where you can. You can
find us hanging out in the forums, posing and answering
very strange questions.
Speaker 3 (50:09):
We also might be posing as other users creeping. Oh really,
I have a pseudo account? Yeah, did you start one?
I can tell you the name though, because you'll know
it's me. How's your picture's board coming? Ben? Oh? Yeah,
well I had a vision board. Sorry, excuse me, how's
your vision board coming? Thank you? It's it's a it
(50:32):
just keeps getting bigger. Yeah, you got a lot of vision.
Speaker 1 (50:34):
It's yeah, it's it's an ongoing effort. I think a
Ridiculous Historian.
Speaker 3 (50:39):
Facebook a big part of it. The Facebook group.
Speaker 1 (50:41):
I've got a picture of the Facebook group. I've got
a picture of you and I and a helicopter, which
I think could be really cool at some point.
Speaker 3 (50:50):
So we'd like to hear from you.
Speaker 1 (50:53):
What are some other examples that you remember from your
neck of the Global Woods involving an animal doing something.
Speaker 3 (51:00):
Heroic, possibly in the nineties, Possibly in the nineties, Yes,
bonus points in the nineties, but we will be interested
in any time period, and it may end up on
a future episode because I think we can make a
really fascinating thing.
Speaker 1 (51:15):
It might have to be a list because there are
so many, you know what, I gotta get out of here.
Speaker 3 (51:20):
I've got to trim down my list. I found like thirty.
It's awesome memorial. Dam man. We should probably like go
to the lake or something and get on a boat
and take a helicopter to a boat. Yeah, oh man,
let's take the ridiculous history copter, the ridicula copter. We
have a helipad on the roof here upon city Market
that is a true story, right next to the mini golf.
Speaker 1 (51:39):
Course, next to the mini golf course and the fancy
hot dog stand.
Speaker 3 (51:44):
Yes, so we are going to get out of here.
As always, thank you so much to.
Speaker 1 (51:48):
Our super producer, Casey Pegram, Thank you to Alex Williams
who composed the.
Speaker 3 (51:52):
Track, and huge thanks as always to our top notch grade,
a one of a kind researcher Christopher Hasiotis who hit
us to the harrowing story of Max the Gorilla. See
you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
(52:13):
your favorite shows.
Welcome Ridiculous Historians to this week's classic episode. If you're
hearing this when it publishes, welcome to December seventh, twenty
twenty four, Joined as always with my super producer, mister
Max Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
I'm guessing I am going to be the second most
famous Max on this episode.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
I don't know, man, don't you know what history is? Weird?
Speaker 1 (00:25):
And dare I say ridiculous? It's Ben Bullen here with
Max Williams, our faithful correspondence. Mister Noel Brown is adventuring
and Max, I am so glad that you are here
with us. In this intro to our classic episode, we
were talking about it a little bit off air. This
(00:48):
is the story of another Max.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Yeah, this one's interesting because I've heard this one referenced
a lot, so you know, this is before I worked
on the show. But this is what This is our
cutoff time right for stories. If it's after this, it's
not We can't consider it history right.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
That is a decision I made arbitrarily, and we've just
sort of gone with that for quite some time. It
goes back to the philosophical question of what counts as history.
History is a living thing. It's an ongoing conversation. If
you are a fan of history, then you probably have
(01:30):
dealt with the same dilemma you have wrestled with this
idea what counts as history, what counts as the present?
Why is why is postmodern literature such a magabadger, such
a pickle when it comes to the idea of experience.
We're talking today about a primate named Max, not to
(01:55):
be confused with our super producer, mister Max Williams. We're
talking about a guy who was once upon a time
the most famous crime fighting gorilla in all of South Africa. Now,
our buddy Max here is a Western Lowland gorilla. He
was at the Johannesburg Zoo and in nineteen ninety seven
(02:19):
he was shot and he was wounded, and he became
a symbol for larger tensions and social issues within the
nation of South Africa. And to your point, Max, in
this episode you will hear a pivotal moment for us
on ridiculous history. This is the episode wherein we determined
(02:45):
our cutoff for the past versus the present. Anything that
happened before nineteen ninety seven counts as ridiculous history for us.
Anything after that, well, negotiable.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
Yeah, I know.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
I'm excited for this. Let's get into it.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome to the show,
(03:35):
fellow Ridiculous Historians, friends and neighbors, US residents and citizens
of the world alike. We are going on a journey
today to a different part of the world, and what
better way to get into it than to open with
a question, Noel, have you ever seen a gorilla in
(03:56):
real life?
Speaker 3 (03:57):
Yes? At the Columbia Zoo in Colombia, South Carolina, they
have a gorilla situation. There, a gorilla situation. Have a
gorilla sitch? Yeah, now silverbacks, I believe. Oh and I'm ben. Oh,
of course you are.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
And we have to, of course give a shout out
to our long suffering super producer, Casey Pegram.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
He's still in the wind, but he's here in spirit.
In fact, today we are kind of producerless and peek
behind the curtain. It is Memorial Day and we are
here in the office making this episode just for you,
just for you, specifically you.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Yes, if you're listening, you're thinking we're talking about a
general to you.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
No, we don't do that.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
No, it's specifically you. And what better way to start,
we thought today than to talk a little bit about gorillas.
These are amazing.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
Creatures they are, and they are majestic and also quite powerful.
Oh yeah, a lot of upper body strength. They got
those big old forearms and those tiny little legs. But man,
I would not want to run into one in a
dark alley or you know, accidentally end up flung into
its pen.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
Yeah, they're the largest living primate. Males are about twice
the size of females, so a male gorilla can weigh
up the four hundred pounds.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
And they.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Have opposable thumbs just like us, right, so they can manipulate,
hold and carry things. They're also really really smart and
they are fun. Fact, although they look like they might
be ferocious carnivores, they're not.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
You remember Coco Cocoa, the sign language gorilla, right, heartwarming story.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
There still still a little controversial in the science. But
I don't know, man, that that stuff can break your
heart because it feels like it's having very human, self aware,
sapient interactions.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Well, if you want going to double down on the heartbreak, Ben,
there's actually a picture of Robin Williams kicking it with
Coco and it will jerk some tears right out of
your ey eye holes if you look at that.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
One eye holes. Oh, the Rick and Morty reference that
we're just gonna leave there, what is it?
Speaker 3 (06:07):
Terry flaps? Yeah, texted me. But on the way up
and you were downstairs and you you asked me if
I wanted to touch your terry flaps.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Yes, that is a that is a reference. Don't go
calling hr on us, folks. That is a reference to
Rick and Morty. But but the the statement of eye holes, yeah,
it's it's true. It will hurt your eye holes and
your heartholes to see Robin Williams with that, that lovely gorilla. Now,
Coco has something in common with our with our protagonists,
(06:38):
or a tragic hero of today's story, because Coco is
a type of gorilla called a Western Lowland gorilla. Western
Lowland gorillas are the primary type of gorilla that you
will see in a zoo across the world. There are
some exceptions. There's an Eastern Lowland gorilla that lives at
the Antwerp Zoo, and there are some mountain gorillas that
(07:01):
live in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And I
mean zoo gorillas, not gorillas in the wild. So typically,
if you are imagining a gorilla exhibit you have seen
or a preservation you've seen here in the States, then
it is going to be it's going to be a
home to western lowland gorillas. They're generally lighter colored than
(07:25):
Eastern gorillas, but in terms of behavior, they're still the same.
They're very intelligent, they're tremendously strong, They're calm until they're
not well.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
They're highly territorial. They will protect their turf and their
own if you come up upon them and oppose a threat,
they will go to great length to defend themselves and
their loved ones.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
And occasionally these stories pop up in the news like Harambei,
the gorilla who was tragically put to death.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
A little kid fell in the pen.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
When a kid a human child something sounds so creepy
and David Bowie esque and Labyrinth saying human child.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
Yeah, Well a.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Kid fell in and as a result, Rombey was put
to sleep.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
And today's story centers on a human man, a human man, yes,
who was once a human child, and a gorilla named
Max who lived at the Johannesburg Zoo.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
So, as the story goes, a guy was fleeing the police.
He had robbed some houses. He was on the lamb,
he was on the run, and he vaulted a fence.
I'm trying to picture how this happened, Like, did he
know what he was getting into? Was He's like, that's cool,
I'll figure this out. Anyway, vaulted defence, running from the cops,
(08:49):
ended up inside Max's gorilla pit. Yeah, that he shared
with his life partner, Lisa.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
His mate, his better half. So this guy, this criminal,
Isaac Mofokang, jumps into the zoo as he said, Noel,
and Max, as we had established earlier, being a gorilla,
is thinking, who the heck is this? This is not
a zookeeper. This is not one of the people that
I know. And so he defends his territory. What we
(09:22):
mean by that is he displays signs of intimidation and
he moves toward Isaac Mofo Kang and Mofo Kang. Unfortunately
for Max was.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Armed, Yeah, and he put a few slugs and old
Max didn't he He.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Shot him in the chest, but that was not enough
to stop a four hundred pounds angry gorilla. So Max
bites Isaac, and you know, we try to be a
family show. But bites him in the butt essentially, and
it sounds hilarious now, but that is a grievous wound.
(10:04):
So he has Isaac Muffulken bitten in the buttocks. He's
pinned him against the wall. This man is about to die.
Police intervene and in the process of rescuing Isaac, the
police officers, at least two of them, are also injured.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
By Max, He's not having it well. I mean, you know,
he can't differentiate at this point between friend or foe.
He's already been threatened. And then these other schmo's show
up trying to apprehend the suspects, and to Max, they're
just another part of the problem. They are trespassing on
his land and he's been shot. Well, got shot in
(10:41):
the chest and then in the neck, right right, yeah,
through the neck. But I think the one in the
neck passed right through, I want to say, luckily. And
then the one in the chest was not a mortal wound, thankfully,
And in fact, I think they actually left it in.
They left the bullet in because it would have been
more traumatic for Max if they had had to digger
and do surgery to get it out and they put
(11:01):
them down. Yeah, under anesthetic rather, but we are getting
ahead of ourselves.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
We are getting a little bit ahead of ourselves. There's
just a bit more color we should add to the
story here, because in many other countries and many other
points in time, this may have been a story that
you hear as a three to four minute piece on
your evening news right you turn it, you tune into
(11:29):
channel eleven whatever, and people are saying, strange story from
a local Columbia zoo or something. However, this was Johannesburg,
South Africa in the late nineties. People were tremendously concerned
about crime in the city and so Max became famous
(11:50):
for this.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
Yeah, something of a symbol you know, of I don't know,
maybe rule of laws not the right term, but just
the idea of pushing back against criminals that were just
everywhere the wave of crime. This is awful, and you know,
we're gonna get a little more into this, but we
also haven't really talked about the fact that this is
the nineties and our show's called ridiculous history and the
(12:11):
notion of the nineties. It seems a little off even
for us. We were like, is this really historical, but
man was at a different time. It was a very
different time.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
And the way that we decided to approach this was
to look at what we would call a cutoff date, right, like,
at what point does something become history even though we're
creating it every single second of our lives. I think
we can all agree that right now two thousand and eight.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
Would still be a little too recent. I think so.
But nineteen ninety and not to mention the history surrounding
this time in Johannesburg and South African general, we forget
I certainly forgot that apartheid, this this institutionalized racist government
that own owned South Africa for decades, had only just
(13:05):
ended and there was severe fallout. You know, they had
democracy for the first time after the end of apartheid.
This again institutionalized segregation of the majority black population of
the country and by the minority white government of the country.
(13:25):
We can get in a little bit more specifics about
that in a minute, but that's the that's the atmosphere here. Yeah,
and the crime, you know, the non political violence is
there's no rule of law. It's like a free for
all in the street. It absolutely as a total powder
k and this idea of Max, I think it could
be argued was sort of a beacon of hope that
(13:47):
was very quickly latched onto by the community. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
One thing that may be useful by way of comparison
for American listeners is to think of McGruff the crime dog.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Do you remember McGruff? Noll I do, But he was
a cartoon and he was pretty inspiring. Just as a cartoon,
This was a real life gorilla that had weathered this
chaotic environment.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
And the reason the reason I bring up the McGruff
comparison is because Max becomes this very useful symbol for
the police, as we said, and he has merchandise that
comes out. We've got stuffed Max dolls.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
Well, and McGruff would take a bite out of crime.
Max took a bite out of the butt of crime.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Yes, and Max was also as you had said, Max
was real. This was a real incident. But he didn't
just get stuffed animals made in his likeness. He became
a celebrity. And I don't know if you had ever
heard this word, but this was my first time reading
the word spokes beast.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
Was he a pan sexual, non threatening spokes thing? Remember
that from mister show pit pat. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
spokes beast. He was the spokes beast for Labombo Bananas
and he actually got paid with a year's supply of
free bananas. They literally made it rain bananas on Max Catching.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
A computer company hired him to pose in ads for
its new software.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
Yeah. I wonder what the software was called. I couldn't.
I couldn't find any specifics about that, but it was, Yeah,
you have a gorilla kind of chilling your software for you.
That's that's interesting. He must have really been beloved. There
was There was a drink, an energy drink, which I
love the name of. It's just called Energade or Innergade.
I was wondering, is it interrogate or energy as well.
(15:39):
It's sort of like a Gatorade equivalent. I guess they
they signed up Max after they learned that that was
Max's favorite drink for taking antibiotics at the zoo. The
zoo keepers would slip his meds into a nice refreshing
bottle of energade.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
And so he thought he was having a juice party,
which you know that I can easily see that happen
because if Innergate or Energade is anything like Gatorade or
power Aid. Then it's probably very sugary.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
Right.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
So a bank and a construction company also sponsored Max,
meaning that they contributed money to the zoo for his upkeep,
medical bills, feeding.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
Et cetera. Yeah, like upgrading his pen, things like that,
the infrastructure. Because again, he was like a local He
wasn't a national treasure, you know, a local hero. We
got to tell the newspaper story. This is great. Yeah,
the Saturday Star paid twenty two hundred bucks for a
photo or I guess for a photo shoot where Max
was browsing the paper and they got the photos.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
After they got the photos, because Max clearly is a
professional at this point, after they got the photos, he
went ahead and ate every.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
Page of the paper. He was a fan. He was
a fan. He was trying to take it all in
through osmosis.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
It's similar to what more Sendak called the highest praise
he had ever received, the children's.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
Author of Where the Wild Things Are. Uh.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
He said he received a note from a fan who
did they enjoyed his book, reading it, and they also
wanted to eat it.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
My girlfriend asked me the strangest question the other day.
She said, have you ever eaten paper to keep someone
from getting it, like like a note. And at first
I was like, what do you talk? What do you mean?
And she you know, I mean like, if you have
a teacher caught you passing a note in class, rather
than having her confiscate it and see what horrid things
you were writing, I'll just eat it. Yeah, I'm like,
(17:37):
it's that as.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Baller, that sounds like something people should not admit to doing.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
Well, I'm sorry for throwing her under the bus, but
you guys don't know. Oh did she did she admit it?
She admitted it. Yeah. I mean it's resourceful. I think
so too. But what was she possibly writing that would
have been like worth consuming right there in front of
the teacher?
Speaker 1 (17:56):
Overthrow the teacher. The revolution is now.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
I think so.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
Speaking of which, Yes, speaking of which, we could go
on a list some of Max's sponsorships, but it's more important,
we feel, to explore why this occurred. Once this came so,
we mentioned, we mentioned apartheid, we mentioned the distinction between
(18:21):
political and non political crime, and unfortunately we could do
an entirely different show on the systemic causes of apartheid,
the process of combating it, and the ramifications of apartheid
that remain in Johannesburg in the modern day. But we
(18:43):
feel the cultural ecology from which Max's celebrity arises is
as important as the details of that moment in the zoo.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
Oh for sure, dare we say much more important. But
Max being like like a batman esque figure like and
Johannesburg and South Africa being the Gotham city, everyone needs
a hero they can look to, they can believe it,
they can believe in And as silly as that sounds,
and you know, we're editorializing a little bit here, but
I can't help but think that's what caused this gorilla
(19:17):
to reach such heights of celebrity. You know, just a
bit of background, because I did not know quite how
far back this stretched. Apartheid became law in South Africa
in nineteen fifty. Things like marriages between white people and
black people were forbidden, any kind of sexual relations. The
(19:41):
idea was to separate not only black people from white people,
but black people from each other and like sectionalize them
into different They called them, you know, tribal factions or whatever,
and it kept them from organizing and kept them from
fighting back and having political power. Right, they had to
(20:01):
carry papers. It was like Nazi Germany. And this again,
this did not really fully come to an end, at
least on the books until nineteen ninety three. Right.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Yeah, this process of setting aside territory and for black
inhabitants of South Africa at the time was the things
they were making were known as Bantustans and ten of
them were established in South Africa to concentrate members of
certain ethnic groups, making those groups, in the opinion of
(20:35):
the ruling party, ethically homogeneous and making them nation states.
But it also it also, as you said, had the
clear effect of removing or stymying the ability of people
to band together in a larger force to combat apartheid.
Apartheid was based on the principle known as boss cop.
(21:00):
Now neither Noel nor I speak this language, but boss
cop with two a's two s is was this. It's
this concept that translates from Afrikaans to something like boss ship,
like being the boss or domination. It's it's essentially it's
white supremacy. And the idea of the National Party at
(21:25):
this time was very much solidly based in the old
concepts of colonialism. The idea that there is some sort
of a stab, there's some sort of inborn superiority, depending
on how one defines a race or whatever. And we
(21:47):
must also point out that these kinds of concepts, this
white supremacy stuff is not is not a just a
general all white people are better, because there are also
levels in their white supremacist ideas that certain white people are,
you know, somehow better than other.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
White people, et cetera. And these concepts go back to
the very founding of South Africa as an independent nation.
In nineteen thirteen, this thing called the Land Act was
passed that began this segregation of Black Africans and the
minority whites and also deprived Black Africans of the ability
(22:29):
to work as sharecroppers and they were you know, denied
a means of an income essentially.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
Yeah, absolutely, And this again, this applied not just to
people that the governing forces characterized as black. It applied
to people that they characterized as non white in any ways.
So this also included what would be described as South
Asians or people they would have called Indians at the time.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
And it would split up families because a mother, for example,
could be considered black or Bantu. And then a child
or a spouse could be classified differently, and it would
literally break up these families.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Yeah, yeah, that's spot on. Through the dual use of
bureaucracy and brutality, they attempted to and in some spheres,
succeeded in taking this insane notion and enforcing it or
bringing it to a horrific reality on innocent people. These
(23:36):
are not you know, it's not like a weird punishment
they made up for soldiers. These are civilians, these are children. Yeah,
and we see already an unsustainable situation. Things like what
we see historically. What we find is that in cases
of discrimination, which always always exists, cases where this sort
(24:01):
of execrable suppression and oppression of people occurs, there is
almost always going to be a backlash.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
Yeah, instant opposition in the form of the African National
Congress as early as the nineteen thirteen Land Act, that
controversial law that was passed. And this is the party
that would be like if we're talking rebels versus you know,
the Empire, these are the rebels right in star Wars
(24:34):
parlace here. And it wasn't until the late forties that
the idea of apartheid actually began. The African or National
Party actually won an election using this. This the first
time you started seeing this word apartheid, which means separateness.
There's a fantastic rundown of all of this in the
(24:54):
timeline of Apartheid on history dot Com that I recommend
checking out. For sure. It gives you a pretty deep
dive into some of this. And we're not going to
go into the minutia of all of it, because it's
a whole, like you said, been a whole story unto itself.
But from the very start you have this opposition and
a culture of violence, a culture of war essentially.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Yeah, So the precedents for these racist beliefs existed for
a long long time. They were codified in the late forties.
But the history of the African National Congress, as you said,
doesn't start just there in the forties.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
The origins go back.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
You'll hear people report that the African National Congress really
starts or it's the first inklings of this begin when
a fellow named Pixley Saka Seme says in nineteen eleven,
forget all the past differences among Africans and unite in
one national organization. It's also really important to say this
(25:58):
that during the time of colonialism, many of the borders
that were established in the modern states now were created
to purposefully divide existing communities. So now it doesn't matter
if for time immemorial you and you and the rest
of your community have lived in this one area. Right
(26:23):
once the national lines are drawn by these European powers,
all of a sudden, you are different states.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
Almost like a more extreme version of something like gerrymandering,
where you're sort of rigging the game against people to
ensure that they have no voice politically.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Right from the perspective of the pro apartheid National Party,
the activities of the National Congress are terrorism essentially, that's
what they're That's what they are are perceiving it as.
(27:01):
That's what they're portraying it as in the international media.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
But you gotta fight fire with fire, Ben, I mean,
these is essentially a fascist regime, you know, that is
trying to utterly crush any kind of resistance with violence,
and the only way to fight back against that is
with more violence, And unfortunately a lot of the time,
I mean, that's the thing. The history of this country
(27:25):
is so rooted in conflict, just constant conflict from the
beginning until apartheid came to an end in the early nineties. Well,
the conflict's change, perhaps, that's what I'm saying, Even the
notion of it coming to an end in them establishing
real democracy. That does not happen overnight, especially when you've
(27:46):
just had constant struggle for decades and decades, it becomes ingrained.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
You know, in nineteen sixty seventy black demonstrators are killed
in Sharpville and the African National Congress is officially banned,
just just like ten years after the government comes to power,
they classify everybody by race. Oh, they also banned the
Communist Party as well in nineteen fifty. Let me go
(28:13):
back for a second. In nineteen fifty, Nelson Mandela is
responding to the banning of the Communist Party, these racial
classifications and such by launching a campaign of civil disobedience.
But when the ANC is officially banned in nineteen sixty
one year later, Nelson Mandela in nineteen sixty one heads
(28:36):
the African National Congress's new military wing, which launches sabotage campaigns,
and these become you know, these become on the ground operations,
so no more civil disobedience. These are acts to meant
to purposely in some way cripple the function of the government.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
Absolutely, I mean they are in open rebellion. And Nelson Mandela.
After many of the leaders of the movement were jailed
or executed, Mandela was in prison, as you know, for
quite a long time, from nineteen sixty three until believe
just nineteen ninety and they kind of bounced him all
(29:18):
over town, didn't they been. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
He was originally jailed in Marshall Square Prison in Johannesburg.
He along with his co defendants, admitted that they had
committed acts of sabotage, but denied that they were waging
guerrilla war against the governments. Of course, there's sentence to
(29:40):
life in prison, although the prosecutor demanded the death sentence.
Mandela is eventually transferred to Robin Island.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
Where he is.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Forced to live for the next eighteen years. And at
this point he's thinking, you know, I may be in
jail for the rest of my natural life. He gets
transferred to a couple of different prisons. There is also
a free Mandela protest taking place at that time. The
politics don't stop because he is imprisoned, and he in
(30:13):
many ways becomes a symbol for the fight against apartheid.
He gets transferred to a prison in Cape Town called
Pollsmoor Prison and the conditions they are a little better
than they are at Robin Island. But then he gets
transferred to Victor Verster Prison near a place called part
and he eventually, going back to what you said, he
(30:37):
eventually in nineteen ninety is freed.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
He is freed and hem in league with the current
President FW de Clerk, who was the head of the
government at the time. They work together to repeal many
of these apartheid laws that have been on the books
for so long and establish a new constitution which gave
(31:02):
African black citizens the right to vote democratically and other
racial groups that were also discriminated against as you mentioned
non whites, and all of this went into play in
nineteen ninety four, they started free elections and essentially laid
(31:23):
the groundwork for having a free and democratic society.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Right the ANC campaign to ninety four, their slogan is
a better life for all and there's a focus on development.
This is around the time that the world, much of
which was already against the pre existing system of apartheid.
This is when the world also starts to actively support
(31:50):
Nelson Mandela and the A and C through the soft
diplomacy of international accolades and awards, most particularly the Nobel Prize.
Speaker 3 (31:58):
Yeah, he shared that with the clerk.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
And the campaign was meant to not just break the system,
but to build a better one. They had and continue
to pursue as we're going to find noble goals. One
such would be the idea of building a million houses
in five years, free education, access to water and electricity
(32:25):
because many people went without it.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
And this constitution was insanely forward thinking, had so many
protections built into the language, protections that we don't have
on the books that we fight for daily in this country.
Protection for gays and lesbians, leading to the being called
the Rainbow Nation. Rainbow Nation exactly. Not only that, some
(32:50):
of those very progressive ideas of how to establish good
housing for the poor, the idea of basic human rights,
to education, to healthcare, workers' rights, access to information again, women,
gays and lesbians, children, environmental protections. And then there's this
(33:14):
thing that I thought was so cool. It's called the
principle of the ratchet. And this was language built into
this constitution that said, essentially even if the government can't,
with the resources currently available, give all of these things
like schools, housing, clean water to every community all at once,
it has to convince the courts that they are working
(33:36):
towards it in a fundamentally real way.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
Which is fantastic because it's a baked in accountability right.
And while we are rightly praising the anc for doing
a thing that many people around the world once thought
was impossible, we do also have to acknowledge that the
way they got there did involve what you know, did
(34:03):
involve more than non violence and more than sabotage of
industrial stuff like in There's an article in The New
York Times from nineteen ninety seven that examines how senior
officials of the African National Congress later after taking powers,
said that they had, if not actively participating in some
(34:31):
of the guerrilla violence that Mandela had been accused of
and his co defendants, they could have at the very
least done something to stop it. They were tacitly aiding
people who were perpetrating these events. Again not all on
not all on just you know, soldiers of the pro
apartheid side, but again men, women and children.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
The line becomes so blurred because so many of these
groups are little independent offshoots, independent rebel grips, militias that
are armed, because apparently in nineteen ninety four you could
buy an AK forty seven on the black market for
what would equate to about fifteen dollars American. There's this
incredibly moving and disturbing article in The New Republic from
(35:16):
nineteen ninety four called South Africa's Violent Road to Real
Democracy and it mentions some of these statistics about the
AK forty seven and how supposedly at the time you
could order a hit for that same amount fifty rand.
And this article centers, at least in the early part
of it, around this hospital called Bara gowan Off Hospital
(35:37):
shortened to the Barra, which is in the Soweto township
of Johannesburg, and it just shows a lot of the
comings and goings and interviews a lot of the doctors,
and it just you know, you're seeing stabbing victims coming through,
people with these very telltale wounds from a particular weapon
(35:57):
called a panga, which is like a machete that the
members of the Zulu faction would carry, and it just
the sense of desperation that comes across in this article,
like they refer to the Doctor's Trauma ward as the
pit and it just I can't imagine the chaos. And
(36:18):
it does a really good job of kind of differentiating
between the political violence that had a death toll of
more than fifteen thousand over a span of four years,
but the majority of the violence that outshine even that
insane number was just criminal violence.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
Right, yeah, And I'm glad you're bringing this up, although
it is a disturbing thing. In two thousand and seven,
the South African government contacted the Center for the Study
of Violence and Reconciliation to figure out why this crime
occurs or what the tone of it is, the systemic causes,
and one of the things they found was that the
(36:59):
courts were inefficient and that violence had become normalized.
Speaker 3 (37:06):
So this was expected.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
And this is also tying in, of course, the vulnerability
of young people, high levels of inequality. From these various factors,
we see hard numbers arise. I think in the same
article you mentioned sites, at least in that time, South
Africa's murder rate was ten times that of the United States,
(37:30):
which you know has a national image of a country
with a cartoonish murder rate.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
Here at the US. Yeah, and of course you know
with this chaos, the African National Congress was constantly at
war with the police and their goal, according to this
article and everything else we've seen, was to make these
various areas, these townships ungovernable is the word they use here.
And so you're dealing with this just decades long struggle
(37:59):
that never quite comes to an end even after apartheid ends.
You can't just turn that off with the passage of
the law.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Right, it's very difficult to address all of the contributing factors,
the old enmities, because we can't forget that many of
the pro apartheid individuals that were active in the government
were also tremendously financially influential, right or socially influential.
Speaker 3 (38:30):
So some of those means.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Of not to sound like a banned Communist Party member,
but many of those means of production were still owned
by the forces of apartheid or portype.
Speaker 3 (38:44):
People allow money to be made with constant conflicts, right,
and this.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
We know that this sounds like disturbing stuff. But while
we're painting this picture, we don't want to gloss over
the fact that South Africa as a nation has made
tremendous progress, but that progress still continues today. South Africa
as recently as twenty fifteen have been characterized by British
(39:15):
papers like The Guardian as a country at war. There
were the murder rates sword to nearly forty nine people
a day in South Africa overall, and of course that's
not going to be evenly distributed. A lot of that
happens in the urban centers. But despite all of that,
(39:38):
this progress continues the legacy of the African National Congress continues.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
It's interesting, though, because Johannesburg is subject to something that
we are seeing quite a lot of here in Atlanta,
which is rabid gentrification. A lot of these formerly uninhabitable
or very very highly dangerous places, burnt out buildings, abandoned locations,
have now been cleared out of squatters, you know, very
(40:08):
low income homeless people that are living there illegally. They
have all been cleared out to make way for developers.
There is an area, as an article on CNN called
Johannesburg's crime hotspot transformed to hipster hangout that's very familiar
to where we're sitting right here, in a place called
Pont City Market in Atlanta on a street called Ponce
(40:29):
de lay On that used to be very dangerous and
a lot of crime, and now it's kind of a
lot of that's been swept away and replaced by bougie
hipster malls, and that same thing is happening in Johannesburg.
Speaker 1 (40:44):
Activists are referring to this as spatial apartheid and calling
for occupations of Cape Town. There's there's another article from
the Guardian, whom I found had a lot of great
reporting on this by Alice mc cool that examines how
these housing activists are taking over a nurses home, a
(41:06):
hospital and attempting to gain national and international recognition of
the housing problem, both in terms of affordability, in terms
of gentrification, and in terms of historical land theft, which
is you know what happened?
Speaker 3 (41:23):
Well, of course I saw a thing in this article
from CNN about how these developers are now looking at
Johannesburg as a super hotspot for buying up real estate.
One developer in particular, who is doing a project called
Arts on Main in a precinct called the Mobonang which
means place of Light, talks about these stats. He says
(41:47):
it's paid off financially, but it will pay off more
in the medium to long term. And this is a
developer by the name of Jonathan Leebman who is kind
of making this his a big project of his. Apparently,
apartments now can get one between the range of two
hundred and eighty thousand RAN or about twenty eight thousand
dollars American to three million RAN, which is about three
(42:08):
hundred thousand and Libman says that these prices in Johannesburg
are skyrocketing so he can buy up buildings. He said
he used to be'd pay one hundred euros a square
meter for a building, and now because of the efforts
of guys like him, the prices are going through the roof.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
And in twenty eleven the government tried to combat this
by ruling that local councils local governments essentially are required
to house anyone evicted to make room for a private
or public development. But the problem is, according to activists,
that the authorities who are charged with this responsibility only
(42:45):
provide overcrowded blocks where families are still forcibly split up,
or squalid slums essentially, and even those only meet a
fraction of the demand.
Speaker 3 (42:57):
So we can.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
See with this, with the ecology the environment in which
these events occur, we can see how injustice becomes a
daily part of almost every human being's life, right at
least for that time. And so of course there is
something tremendously powerful and cathartic about seeing justice done. Both
(43:24):
for oddly enough the speculation, but both the pro apartheid
racist forces, the authoritarians or the empire from your earlier comparison,
and the rebel forces or the people fighting for equality
both saw something in Max the gorilla because they saw
rule of law.
Speaker 3 (43:43):
Right.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
If you're pro police, you're seeing like, oh, look, rule
of law. The authorities won. If you're anti police, you're saying, oh, look,
finally someone who can do the job. And because of this,
for a time, Max becomes this universally lauded figure. And
(44:07):
Isaac the unfortunate, Isaac Mofolkung who goes to jail he has.
Speaker 3 (44:13):
Captured a forty year sentence, got a forty year sentence.
A judge referred to him as an unguided missile, a
loose cannon, a time bomb, because he had had just
a rap sheet, a very thick one, let's say that.
Speaker 1 (44:27):
Yeah, And he eventually passed away in a psychiatric hospital.
But you and I were talking off air about this nool.
There were some suspicious circumstances to his death.
Speaker 3 (44:38):
Yeah, Supposedly his sister got a call I believe it
was his sister from somebody from the facility saying that
he had passed away after vomiting and collapsing. But then
when they got to the hospital, the story changed to
this idea that he had stolen a fistful of another
patient's medication. When they come around with those trays, I
(44:59):
guess with the pills and the cups and gobble them down,
attempting suicide and succeeding. But the circumstances are a little murky,
and it's this The whole story is a little strange.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
Yeah, And you have to put yourself in the family's position.
How else can you react but with suspicion when someone
tells you one story about your loved one's death and
then they tell you a completely different story.
Speaker 3 (45:25):
So there remains.
Speaker 1 (45:28):
From that family's perspective and unsolved mystery regarding the shooter.
Speaker 3 (45:33):
Of Max the gorilla.
Speaker 1 (45:34):
Regarding Isaac, we should also say Max's story doesn't end
when he gets those endorsements. We have more news about
Max the Gorilla Well.
Speaker 3 (45:47):
He was voted Newsmaker of the Year for South Africa
for nineteen ninety seven the Johannesburg Press Club. He was
twenty six years old at the time. We should mention
name this national gorilla hero. It's new Maker of nineteen
ninety seven, and they presented him a giant trophy a
meter high made of cake and fruit that he devoured
(46:08):
on camera like promptly right, super good photo op.
Speaker 1 (46:11):
Max went on to live at the Johannesburg Zoo as
a symbol of justice, a symbol that something could be
right in the world until the age of thirty four,
which was pretty good for a gorilla. Not ben where
he passed away in his sleep in two thousand and four.
Speaker 3 (46:31):
I want to say yeah, I believe it was from
cardiac arrest, which is apparently a pretty common way for
elderly gorillas to go.
Speaker 1 (46:38):
We did find a funny story about his love life.
Do you think we got time to throw that in?
Speaker 3 (46:41):
Let's toss it in. Okay, Okay, So.
Speaker 1 (46:44):
Max the Gorilla did show up in the news for
at least one non crime related thing, non advertisement related thing.
We found a story about his love life that has
there's some pretty interesting language in here. But Max's partner Lisa,
(47:05):
who who he was protecting.
Speaker 3 (47:07):
He was protecting yeah from from Isaac?
Speaker 1 (47:09):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Max and Lisa were still together. This
was a long running relationship and uh, some journalists believed
that they had perhaps lost the spark because Max stopped
being interested in intimacy with Lisa.
Speaker 3 (47:26):
Yeah. There's an article from Independent Online, Max the Gorilla
Refuses to Mate where they talk about this issue and
how the gorilla scientists there at the Johannesburg Zoo, because
that's a job, even considered dosing old Max, possibly in
a gatorade equivalent to drink with some viagra integrate integate energy.
(47:49):
Let us know, right, listeners, let us know how to pronounce.
But apparently gorillas in general don't really they're not really
that into sex in the first place. So once the
spark is gone, the thrill is gone, my friend, it's
gone for good.
Speaker 1 (48:05):
Yeah. And then Max, as we said, passed away peacefully
in his sleep. That's a happy ending for him and
his widow. Then Lisa continued on for about two years.
She had another partner, a nineteen year old named Macoco,
(48:25):
young Buck young Buck, the Boy Toy, and Lisa passed
away in two thousand and six at the age of
thirty five. She had during a surgery to determine whether
or not she had a cancer's growth. Yeah, but neither
of them died of gunshot wounds.
Speaker 3 (48:45):
That's very true. And to this day, there is a
statue commemorating Max the Gorilla at the Johannesburg Zoo that
you can go visit in his honor.
Speaker 1 (48:55):
And thus concludes our story of Max the Gorilla. We
found so many other amazing things. I had a really
tough time not putting in more stories of animals doing
heroic stuff with humans.
Speaker 3 (49:11):
I know there's a lot there, but you know, we
kind of we took a pretty dark turn in this
one and really needed that context in that background, and
I'm glad we did. It's a little intense, but it
also shows that the nineties totally historical time, my friend, Yeah,
for more reasons than just like trapper keepers and.
Speaker 1 (49:29):
Stuff across the world, guatemal in civil war, for instance.
You know, So we would like to thank you so
much for spending some time with us today. We know
this episode went a little bit long, but we wanted to.
We wanted to explore as much as we could the
story behind the story, which too often gets forgotten or
relegated to a footnote in a history book.
Speaker 3 (49:51):
And we of course would like to hear from you.
Speaker 1 (49:54):
You can find NOL, super producer, Casey and I all
over the internet. We're on instant, We're on Facebook. Check
us out at Ridiculous Historians where you can. You can
find us hanging out in the forums, posing and answering
very strange questions.
Speaker 3 (50:09):
We also might be posing as other users creeping. Oh really,
I have a pseudo account? Yeah, did you start one?
I can tell you the name though, because you'll know
it's me. How's your picture's board coming? Ben? Oh? Yeah,
well I had a vision board. Sorry, excuse me, how's
your vision board coming? Thank you? It's it's a it
(50:32):
just keeps getting bigger. Yeah, you got a lot of vision.
Speaker 1 (50:34):
It's yeah, it's it's an ongoing effort. I think a
Ridiculous Historian.
Speaker 3 (50:39):
Facebook a big part of it. The Facebook group.
Speaker 1 (50:41):
I've got a picture of the Facebook group. I've got
a picture of you and I and a helicopter, which
I think could be really cool at some point.
Speaker 3 (50:50):
So we'd like to hear from you.
Speaker 1 (50:53):
What are some other examples that you remember from your
neck of the Global Woods involving an animal doing something.
Speaker 3 (51:00):
Heroic, possibly in the nineties, Possibly in the nineties, Yes,
bonus points in the nineties, but we will be interested
in any time period, and it may end up on
a future episode because I think we can make a
really fascinating thing.
Speaker 1 (51:15):
It might have to be a list because there are
so many, you know what, I gotta get out of here.
Speaker 3 (51:20):
I've got to trim down my list. I found like thirty.
It's awesome memorial. Dam man. We should probably like go
to the lake or something and get on a boat
and take a helicopter to a boat. Yeah, oh man,
let's take the ridiculous history copter, the ridicula copter. We
have a helipad on the roof here upon city Market
that is a true story, right next to the mini golf.
Speaker 1 (51:39):
Course, next to the mini golf course and the fancy
hot dog stand.
Speaker 3 (51:44):
Yes, so we are going to get out of here.
As always, thank you so much to.
Speaker 1 (51:48):
Our super producer, Casey Pegram, Thank you to Alex Williams
who composed the.
Speaker 3 (51:52):
Track, and huge thanks as always to our top notch grade,
a one of a kind researcher Christopher Hasiotis who hit
us to the harrowing story of Max the Gorilla. See
you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
(52:13):
your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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