Bob Hart: Yakini

Photographs by David Caird

Hardie Grant Books $29.95

Review: Gilbert Wong

Yakini the baby gorilla was born by caesarean section at the Royal Women's Hospital in Melbourne last November. When delivered Yakini weighed 2.6kg and spent some time in a neonate's crib, but was immediately a media hit.

It's easy to see why. Caird's clever photographs remind us how close the link is between humans and the great apes.

We are such close cousins that Yakini is as endearing as any cute baby, triggering deeply embedded instincts. The reason the photographs affect us is not solely because of anthropomorphism, which is an altogether too easy criticism to level at this book.

Yakini's name means "Truth" in Swahili, and he does manage to look both new to this world and infinitely wise, an old face on a newborn's body.

He is a western lowland gorilla, a species we came to know through the book by Dian Fossey Gorillas in the Mist which was later made into a film, and is one of perhaps fewer than 100,000 of his species left.

Of the fabled mountain gorillas Fossey researched, there are fewer than 650 left.

Their habitats in Nigeria, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Congo and the Central African Republic have the misfortune to be in areas of high political instability and Third World agricultural practices.

The warning Yakini's story has at its heart is that unless action is taken soon the only home Yakini and his species will know will be in zoos.

As fine as the best of them are, this would be an ecological tragedy.