Ndakasi and the Orphans of Virunga: Mountain Gorillas

A silverback mountain gorilla can weigh close to twice what a grown man weighs, and he builds every kilogram of it on leaves, stems and bark. He does not need to kill anything to become the most physically dominant primate in the forest. That is not gentleness. It is a different definition of power – one that requires nothing to die for it to exist.

Now picture that power meaning nothing to a bullet. Picture it shot dead anyway, not for meat, not for a trophy, but because it happened to be standing in the way of a charcoal trade moving through a park it had lived in for longer than the park had a name.

That is the tension inside the Plant-Based Power Gorilla hoodie. It is not baring its teeth. It is not a threat display. It is a statement of fact rendered as art – an animal that grew that much muscle, that much mass, that much quiet authority, without ever needing to take a life to do it.

And here is the part that isn’t a metaphor at all. Real gorillas lived through exactly the threat this design refuses to depict. One of them had a name, and the world watched her grow up.

The Massacre Was Real

In 2007, seven mountain gorillas were shot dead in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo – first two females, then three females and a silverback, in two separate incidents. Roughly seven hundred mountain gorillas existed on the entire planet at the time. Those seven killings erased close to one percent of the species in a matter of months.

They weren’t poached for meat or antlers or hide. The killings were tied to the illegal charcoal trade choking the park and to the broader pressure bearing down on the land itself. A gorilla, in that equation, was simply in the way.

Two Hundred Rangers

Virunga is Africa’s oldest national park. It is also one of the most dangerous places on earth to do conservation work.

More than two hundred rangers have been killed protecting it.

That number sits behind every gorilla that survives there. Every patrol, every anti-poaching sweep, every orphan carried out of the bush alive is a number someone paid for with a life that didn’t come back.

The Only Nursery of Its Kind

When rangers find an orphaned mountain gorilla, there is exactly one place in the world built to take her: the Senkwekwe Center, inside Virunga itself.

Ndakasi arrived there as a two-month-old, found clinging to the body of her mother, who had just been shot. A ranger named Andre Bauma found her in the rain and carried her out. He kept her alive that first night using his own body heat, because there was nothing else to use.

She grew up at Senkwekwe under the rangers’ care. In 2019, she and a fellow orphan named Ndeze stood upright behind ranger Mathieu Shamavu and photobombed his selfie. The picture went everywhere – two young gorillas grinning, in a sense, into a phone camera, in the one sanctuary on earth built specifically for gorillas who had lost everything.

Ndakasi

She died on 26 September 2021, after a long illness.

She died in the arms of Andre Bauma.

The same man who had carried her out of the rain fourteen years before was the last thing she felt.

The Numbers Keep Climbing

The 2007 massacre forced Virunga into major security and institutional reform – the kind of change that usually only comes after something is nearly lost for good.

Mountain gorilla numbers have since climbed past one thousand. They are the only great ape on the planet whose population is currently increasing.

Thunderclap Ink didn’t do any of that. Rangers did, and an orphan who lived long enough to be photographed twice – once by accident, once on purpose, by everyone who has read her story since.

The strength in that design isn’t the gorilla’s alone. It’s what happens when an animal that refuses to disappear meets a ranger who refuses to let it.

Source: Virunga National Park. We are not affiliated with them – we simply report what they did.