Dresden Zoo Honors President Obama
In a less than brilliant PR move, the Dresden Zoo in Germany, recently named it's newborn mandrill monkey after President Barack Obama. Almost immediately, the director of the Initiative for Black Germans complained, “It’s a catastrophe. Black people continue to be confronted by associations with the animal kingdom and primitivity.”
Manuela Collmar, a zookeeper at the zoo’s Afrika Haus responded, “This year they all begin with ‘O,’ and one of the employees chose ‘Obama’ – it was meant to be positive and an honor in light of his visit to Dresden in June,” She also added, “neither she nor her colleagues were aware of the history of using monkeys to caricature and ethnically stereotype black people”.
The Zoo promptly changed the monkeys name to Okeke, which means 'he who was born on market day’, or one, for short…
Source - ANORAK
1 comments
The Germans have never been known to be good with the race issue. What's next, a weasel named Weisenthal?
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