![]() On social media, "Harambe" (which is a Swahili word that roughly translates to cooperation) became an exhortation, an annotation and an ironic hashtag. From there, the messages spread to Twitter, were fruitful and multiplied. In July, The Post traced some of the earliest cheeky tributes to Black Instagram, with its overly sincere memorials to the gorilla. ![]() He is the relatively new phenomenon of online mourning and celebrity death. He is how we value cute animal lives more than human lives - "particularly black human lives," Burgess said. He is how we value human life versus the rest of the natural world. "Memes have key signifiers, or hooks, that get repeated," Jean Burgess, an expert in digital culture and memes at the Queensland University of Technology, in Brisbane, Australia, told The Washington Post on Monday.įor a single word, Harambe has a lot of hooks: He is the noble caged animal. Harambe now belonged to all of us, but he belonged to the Internet's dank corners and edgy teens most of all.Īs an Internet meme, Harambe's second coming is mostly jokey tributes. Months after the gorilla was killed, he was resurrected by the Internet, as The Washington Post previously reported. Primatologist Jane Goodall called it a "devastating loss to the zoo, and to the gorillas."īut the great ape's tale did not end with the usual news-outrage cycle. The western lowland gorilla, Harambe, died. Fearing for the child's life, a zoo employee shot the ape. The gorilla dragged the 3-year-old boy through the exhibit by his ankles. You probably know how the rest of the story goes: The boy survived the tumble only to be snatched by a 17-year-old male gorilla. At the very end of May, a young boy climbed the fence that surrounds the Cincinnati Zoo's gorilla enclosure.
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