Ndakasi, Congo’s beloved mountain gorilla, dies at 14
Ndakasi, a mountain gorilla in Congo who found global fame and admiration after she photobombed a park ranger’s selfie in 2019, has died at the age of 14.
The Virunga National Park said in a statement Tuesday that Ndakasi died on Sept. 26 after battling a prolonged illness and “took her final breath in the loving arms of her caretaker and lifelong friend, Andre Bauma.” The statement is accompanied by a photo of Bauma, who befriended the gorilla when she was just 2 months old.
“It is with heartfelt sadness that Virunga announces the death of beloved orphaned mountain gorilla, Ndakasi,” the park tweeted, adding that her condition “rapidly deteriorated.” The park did not specify her illness.
Ndakasi went viral in 2019 after she and another orphaned mountain gorilla, Ndeze, struck a pose just as park ranger Mathieu Shamavu took a selfie. The image features the gorillas playfully peering toward the camera in hilarious fashion as Shamavu takes a serious selfie.
But Ndakasi had already lived an interesting life before the photobomb. Born in 2007 at the park that sits between Uganda and Rwanda, Ndakasi began life at a time when mountain gorillas were critically endangered. There were only 720 mountain gorillas on the planet in 2007, according to the park — the number is now more than 1,000.
Her life started with tragedy. In April 2007, rangers at the Congolese park found a 2-month-old Ndakasi “clinging to the lifeless body of her mother, gunned down by armed militia hours earlier,” park
officials said in a statement. Her mother’s death was part of a series of massacres of gorilla families in the region that led the park to strengthen the protection of its mountain gorillas, they added.
Understanding how dangerous it would be to leave the mountain gorilla by herself, vulnerable to people with guns and human encroachment, rangers brought Ndakasi to the park’s rescue center. It’s there that she met Bauma.
Two years later, the park
developed the Senkwekwe Center, the only facility in the world that looks after orphaned mountain gorillas. It didn’t take long for Ndakasi and Bauma’s bond to grow.
By the time Ndakasi was featured in the 2014 documentary “Virunga,” with Leonardo DiCaprio as an executive producer, Bauma told the BBC he was more than a caretaker and friend. “We shared the same bed, I played with her, I fed her,” he said. “I can say I am her mother.”