By Professor Girma Berhanu

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Editorial Foreword

On Dehumanisation, Imagery, and the Long Shadow of Scientific Racism

The Editors  •  Ethiopian Tribune  •  April 2026

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There are moments when an act of casual cruelty illuminates, with terrible clarity, the architecture of a deeper malice. When the sitting president of the United States shares an image depicting a Black former president and his wife as primates, the instinct of many is to reach for the vocabulary of aberration: reckless, impulsive, beyond the pale. The Ethiopian Tribune does not share that comfort. What such an act reveals is not an anomaly but a continuity the latest expression of a visual and rhetorical tradition whose roots run through the slave ships, the colonial exhibitions, and the pseudoscientific lecture halls of the 19th century.

It is in that spirit that we publish this essay by Professor Girma Berhanu, a scholar whose career has been devoted to the intersection of education, identity, and political violence. Writing from Sweden, where a social services department recently deployed imagery of apes in hijabs as a pedagogical tool for marginalised youth, Professor Berhanu asks the question that polite discourse prefers to skirt: not merely that such representations are offensive, but why the ape, and why it retains its power to wound across centuries and continents.

The answer, as Professor Berhanu traces with care and rigour, lies in the particular violence done to Darwin’s theory of evolution by those who required a scientific patina for their politics of hierarchy. Evolution taught that humans and apes share common ancestry; Social Darwinism translated that into a ladder, with some peoples assigned rungs closer to the animal kingdom than others. The insult, in this reading, is not merely abusive, it is a claim about ontological status, about who belongs fully within the category of the human.

For readers of this publication, the stakes are not abstract. Ethiopia and the broader Horn of Africa have endured their own encounters with the racialising gaze of empire, their own experience of being rendered primitive and pre-modern in the visual and textual archives of colonialism. The dehumanising logic that Professor Berhanu analyses is the same logic that framed African sovereignty as inconceivable and African suffering as natural. To understand it is to understand something essential about how power legitimises itself.

Professor Berhanu closes with a challenge that is also an obligation: legal remedy is insufficient. What is required is a transformed pedagogy, one that equips young people, and particularly those most targeted by such imagery, to read the visual world critically. The Ethiopian Tribune endorses that challenge unreservedly. Journalism, at its most purposeful, is itself a form of that literacy: naming the structure behind the slur, refusing to let cruelty pass as comedy.

“The insult carries no scientific weight. Its power lies elsewhere: in centuries of conditioning, in the grammar of empire, in the persistent human will to construct a hierarchy of the human.”

— The Editors, Ethiopian Tribune • April 2026

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Synopsis

Pictures, Pejorative Discourse, and the “Ape” Insult

Girma Berhanu  •  9 April 2026

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This essay examines the historical and cultural origins of the “ape” insult as applied to racialised groups, tracing a line from the misappropriation of Darwinian evolutionary theory through 19th-century scientific racism to the visual propaganda of the present day. The author’s inquiry is prompted by three concurrent incidents: a social media post by the US president deploying primate imagery against a Black former head of state and his wife; a legal complaint in Sweden over educational material depicting marginalised youth as apes; and the persistent reality of monkey chants directed at Black footballers in European stadiums.

Berhanu situates these incidents within a broader argument about visual culture and power. Drawing on bell hooks, Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works, and Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, he argues that the biological falsity of the insult is precisely the point: its force derives not from science but from centuries of cultural conditioning that deliberately confused the shared common ancestry of humans and apes with a racial hierarchy in which some peoples were placed “closer to the animal.”

The essay addresses the Swedish school curriculum’s emphasis on visual literacy, argues that images are neither neutral nor trivial particularly when directed at already marginalised communities and calls for an educational and institutional response that goes beyond legal prohibition. Berhanu’s conclusion is that dismantling the cultural infrastructure of dehumanising representation requires historical awareness, critical visual literacy, and a deepened public commitment to human dignity.

Approx. 1,050 words  •  Academic essay / Op-ed  •  Author: Prof. Girma Berhanu, University of Gothenburg  •  Cleared for publication

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Essay

Pictures, Pejorative Discourse, and the “Ape” Insult

Girma Berhanu  •  9 April 2026

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A few weeks ago, two boys who are enthusiastic about football asked me a difficult question: why are Black footballers insulted in stadiums with monkey chants, images of apes, or even by fans throwing bananas? Why apes of all animals? At the time, I struggled to respond. I tried to explain, in my own way, the role of history, human hierarchies, the theory of evolution, and scientific racism. Yet I felt inarticulate, as if I had not fully captured the depth and cruelty of the issue.

Since then, I have reflected more deeply. One recent incident involved a social media post by the president of the United States, who shared an image depicting a former president and his wife as apes or monkeys. After pressure from members of his own party, the post was deleted. But what was the intended message? That they look like apes, think like apes, or are somehow less evolved?

Public reaction followed a familiar pattern: initial shock, followed by quick dismissal. Many people brushed it aside as a childish or impulsive act, ignoring the deeper structural, institutional, and historical precedents behind such imagery. Yet we know that presidential communication is rarely accidental; it is often carefully crafted within inner political circles.

Around the same time, I revisited How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley, which examines how authoritarian politics divide societies into “us” and “them.” While I cannot explore his full argument here, his framework helps us understand how dehumanising language and imagery function politically.

A third incident occurred closer to home, Sweden. The newspaper Göteborgs-Posten reported that Lars Arrhenius was pursuing a legal case concerning educational material used by a social services department in north-east Gothenburg. The material, titled Angry Apes, was intended as a pedagogical tool for young people facing social challenges. It included images such as an ape wearing a hijab and other apes in a sweater labelled “Orten” (the neighbourhood).

The material was widely criticised and later withdrawn. A complainant argued that it “clearly contains racist and discriminatory images” and risks creating an exclusionary environment for children and youth. It is difficult to understand how associating already marginalised young people with apes could be considered educational. My purpose here is not to enter the legal debate, but to examine the cultural message embedded in such representations. Where does this deeply pejorative association between certain groups and apes originate?

We live in a visual culture. Images shape how we perceive the world, others, and ourselves. Yet many people lack the tools to critically interpret visual representations. As bell hooks observed, it is troubling that mass media increasingly uses powerful imagery for specific effects, whilst simultaneously encouraging us to believe that these images are insignificant.

Even the Swedish curriculum (Lgr 2011) emphasises that images play a crucial role in how people think, learn, and understand the world. Visual literacy is essential for democratic participation. Whilst powerful images can serve as effective pedagogical tools, degrading representations — particularly those targeting marginalised groups such as ethnic minorities, women, disabled individuals, and LGBTQ+ communities — can reinforce harmful stereotypes and produce lasting damage.

To understand the enduring power of the “ape” insult, we must turn to history. Many of us learned about racism and colonialism in school, often alongside the ideas of Charles Darwin. Although Darwin’s work in On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man revolutionised biology, his ideas were widely misunderstood and misused.

Evolution does not claim that humans descended from modern apes. Rather, it posits that humans and apes share a common ancestor. However, this nuance was lost in public discourse. The simplified claim that “humans came from apes” made it easier to weaponise the comparison. Calling someone an “ape” came to imply that they are primitive, less intelligent, or less civilised.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, these distortions merged with scientific racism and Social Darwinism. Thinkers misused evolutionary ideas to construct racial hierarchies, falsely claiming that some groups were “closer to apes” than others. As The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould demonstrates, such pseudoscientific claims were used to justify colonialism, slavery, segregation, and the dehumanisation of non-European peoples.

This history helps explain why the “ape” insult persists today. Biologically, humans are primates; the insult has no scientific basis. Its power lies instead in centuries of cultural conditioning, visual propaganda, and racial hierarchy. The question, then, is not only why the insult exists, but how we confront it. How can we protect new generations — especially Black, Indigenous, and other racialised communities — from such deeply dehumanising representations? What role should schools play? What responsibilities do media and political institutions carry?

Legal measures alone are not enough. What is required is a broader transformative agenda: one that promotes historical awareness, critical visual literacy, and a deeper understanding of human dignity. Only then can we begin to dismantle the cultural foundations that allow such insults to persist.

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Girma Berhanu is Professor of Special Education at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.