Harambe

On May 28, 2016, a three-year-old boy climbed under a 3-foot fence, crawled through 4 feet of bushes, and fell 15 feet into the Gorilla World enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo5. Harambe, a 440-pound silverback, approached the child in the moat. Over the next 10 minutes, bystander footage showed Harambe dragging the boy through shallow water, at times propping him up and at other times pulling him down2. Onlookers' screaming made the gorilla increasingly agitated1.

Witness Kimberley Ann Perkins O'Connor told CNN that Harambe initially seemed to be helping the child, but the crowd's noise pushed his behavior toward rough handling1. Zoo director Thane Maynard described the situation as dangerous, saying the child's head was "banging on concrete" and that a tranquilizer dart could take five to ten minutes to work, during which Harambe might have become even more aggressive13. Zoo officials shot Harambe with a single rifle round. The boy was treated at Cincinnati Children's Hospital for non-life-threatening injuries5.

A bystander uploaded footage to YouTube, where it pulled in over 12.6 million views within 48 hours4. By May 29, a post about the incident hit the front page of Reddit's r/news with more than 7,100 upvotes and 6,200 comments4. That same day, a Change.org petition titled "Justice for Harambe" appeared, collecting over 338,000 signatures in two days2. The hashtags #JusticeForHarambe and #RIPHarambe spread rapidly across Twitter and Facebook14.

Harambe generated extensive media coverage throughout 2016. The Associated Press, CNN, BBC, NBC News, TIME, and The Daily Dot all published pieces on the meme and the incident behind it71142136. The Atlantic analyzed Harambe as "the perfect meme," arguing that the meaninglessness of the original event made it ideal for viral spread because no narrative could contain it11.

The Cincinnati Zoo publicly begged people to stop with the memes. Director Maynard told the AP: "We are not amused by the memes, petitions and signs about Harambe. Our zoo family is still healing, and the constant mention of Harambe makes moving forward more difficult for us"15. That plea, predictably, only fed the fire. The zoo temporarily deleted its Twitter account due to the nonstop Harambe mentions9.

The UMass Amherst email controversy placed Harambe at the center of campus free speech debates in September 2016. The FIRE organization used the incident to argue that UMass's harassment policy was broad enough to ban gorilla jokes and needed revision23. Vice confirmed through the university's press office that no formal ban existed24.

Immediately after the shooting, zookeepers extracted and preserved Harambe's sperm in a "frozen zoo" for future conservation efforts. "There's a future," the zoo's director declared. "It's not the end of his gene pool"10.

By June 2016 primatologist Jane Goodall had emailed Cincinnati Zoo director Thane Maynard with her own read of the incident, writing that "it looked as though the gorilla was putting an arm round the child, like the female who rescued and returned the child from the Chicago exhibit"33. The letter, leaked and screencapped across Twitter, fueled the camp that argued Harambe should never have been shot.

The meme then split into branches that ran in parallel through the summer. "Bush did Harambe," a riff on the "Bush did 9/11" format, picked up after July 2016 photos resurfaced of George W. Bush meeting Harambe's mother during a 1996 visit to the Cincinnati Zoo34. "Out of respect for Harambe" became its own template, with users mock-announcing they were canceling random behaviors as tribute, the joke leaning on the gap between the gravity of the framing and the triviality of the activity. By August, "Harambe was an inside job" photoshops layered on conspiracy-theory styling, sometimes paired with halo and sainthood iconography that pulled Harambe into the absurdist deity register Weird Twitter had been cultivating35.

After the November 2016 US election, a widely shared claim that Harambe pulled 11,000 to 15,000 write-in votes for president spread across social media. Snopes, PolitiFact, and CNN all debunked the figure, pointing out that 34 states require write-in candidates to pre-register and that aggregated national write-in totals aren't even published in most jurisdictions36. The real number is unknown, but Harambe did get at least a few real votes: Axios Charlotte documented 44 write-ins for him on Mecklenburg County ballots alone37.

By mid-2017 a "timeline split" theory crystallized on Reddit and Twitter, with users half-jokingly arguing that Harambe's death marked the moment the universe forked into the darker of two possible paths. The bit turned into one of the more durable post-irony frameworks for processing later bad news, and Harambe outlasted almost every other 2016 entry by treating him as load-bearing cosmology rather than a punchline.

Harambe was born at the Gladys Porter Zoo in Brownsville, Texas on May 27, 1999. His name came from local counselor Dan Van Coppenolle, who won a naming contest inspired by Rita Marley's 1988 song "Harambe (Working Together for Freedom)." The word "harambee" is Swahili for communal labor5. Tragedy marked his early life: when he was two, his mother, brother, and half-sister died of chlorine gas poisoning after chlorine tablets were placed too close to a space heater in their enclosure5. He was transferred to the Cincinnati Zoo in September 2014 to learn adult gorilla behavior and join a new social group5.

The shooting triggered a fierce public debate that crossed professional lines. Primatologist Jane Goodall said video footage suggested Harambe might have been trying to protect the boy, but she concluded the zoo had no choice. "It was awful for the child, the parents, Harambe, the zoo, the keepers and the public," she wrote5. Zookeeper Jack Hanna told ABC's Good Morning America there was "no doubt" the child would not have survived without the shooting13. Zoo director Maynard called critics "Monday morning quarterbacks" and stated: "We'd make the same decision today"2.

In June 2016, the meme took an ugly turn when an Australian Facebook page called AFL Memes posted images comparing Harambe to Adam Goodes, a retired Indigenous Australian football player who had been called an "ape" by a spectator in 20133. BuzzFeed misidentified the wrong AFL Memes page as the source, prompting the falsely accused page to threaten legal action for defamation4. The actual page responsible issued a public apology and removed the images. The incident was covered by dozens of Australian news outlets4.

The "Dicks Out for Harambe" era pushed the meme into territory no brand could follow. The Guardian identified a key reason the meme outlived others: its dark subject matter kept corporate accounts at a distance, which meant Harambe never went through the "co-opted by marketing" death cycle that kills most viral trends12. The lone exception was Sonic the Hedgehog's official Twitter, which had already become a meme account by that point12. New York Magazine's Brian Feldman reached the same conclusion, likening Harambe's immunity to corporate co-option to the 9/11 truther meme12.

In September 2016, residential advisors at UMass Amherst sent students an email warning that Harambe references on whiteboards were "micro-aggressions" and a "direct attack" on the campus's African American community, because UMass had a residential community called "Harambe" (from the Swahili word)16. The RAs also warned that "Dicks Out for Harambe" could be reported as a Title IX violation23. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression pushed back, calling the email a free speech issue and arguing that UMass's harassment policy was broad enough to potentially ban gorilla jokes23. UMass spokesperson Daniel J. Fitzgibbons later clarified to Vice that the university had "not taken any steps to ban jokes or references about Harambe" and that the email reflected two students' initiative, not official policy24.

The September 2016 "Harambe McHarambeface" story was a masterclass in hoax construction. Multiple outlets including the Daily Mail and Metro reported that a baby gorilla at China's Jinhua Zoo had been named via public vote, combining references to Harambe and the Boaty McBoatface craze18. The BBC investigated and found the entire story was fabricated: the "Boston Leader" website that broke the story had been registered just days earlier, contained almost no real content, and the Jinhua Zoo didn't appear to have any gorillas22. Former zoo staff contacted by the BBC had never heard of gorillas at the facility22.

By November 2016, the meme collided with the presidential election. Claims spread that Harambe received 15,000 write-in votes for president. The Daily Snark ran the number as fact20. Snopes debunked it, pointing out that 32 states require write-in candidates to file official paperwork before votes are counted separately, and eight states prohibit write-ins entirely19. USA Today reached the same conclusion: the specific vote totals were baseless, since a deceased gorilla could not have filed the required paperwork21.

The Atlantic published one of the sharpest analyses of why Harambe worked as a meme, calling it "the message that became a medium," capable of carrying any signal without becoming identified with any one of them. The piece framed Harambe as a "meme in the original sense intended by Richard Dawkins: a cultural signifier that spreads simply because it is good at spreading"11. Professor Jeremy Wallach of Bowling Green State University described Harambe as "polysemic," a cultural sign with many different interpretations depending on who was using it7.