Naming a baby monkey Obama not the smartest PR move
One of the advantages, or disadvantages, of becoming famous famous is that everyone what wants to start naming things after you. From airports, to roadways, to children and even zoo animals. However in some cases as the zoo in Dresden, Germany, found out there are some animals that shouldn’t be named after famous people – especially if that person is President Obama.
While I am sure its intentions were good the idea of naming a baby Mandrill monkey after the freshly inaugurated President of the United States it turned out that naming the monkey Obama set off a bit of a firestorm among German blacks.
“It’s a catastrophe,” director of the Initiative for Black Germans (ISD) Tahir Della said. “Black people continue to be confronted by associations with the animal kingdom and primitivity.”
The baby mandrill, which belongs to a species closely related to the baboon, was born on March 23, Manuela Collmar, zookeeper at the zoo’s “Afrika Haus,” said. Each year the zoo names all newborn animals beginning with the same letter.
“This year they all begin with ‘O,’ and one of the zookeepers chose ‘Obama’ – it was meant to be positive and an honour in light of his visit to Dresden in June,” Collmar said, adding that neither she nor her colleagues were aware of the history of using monkeys to caricature and ethnically stereotype black people.
Source: The Local :: Zoo forced to rename primate called ‘Obama’
Following up on the public pressure to change the name the zoo finally relented and its cute baby Mandrill monkey is now known as Okeke – which apparently means ‘he who was born on a marked day’.
