If you’re not worried by the war, you’re not paying attention. No, not the war in the Middle East. The war in Africa. The Red Cross says there are more than 50 active conflicts in Africa right now. But the only one that interests our media is a civil war in Uganda between two troops of chimpanzees.
For over 30 years, primatologists have studied the world’s largest known group of wild chimps, the Ngogo group, in the rainforest of the Kibali National Park in northwestern Uganda. By 2015, there were nearly 200 Ngogos, living in what the primatologists described as harmonious “clusters.” One day, however, fellow primate Aaron Sandel of the University of Texas at Austin witnessed the larger Central cluster attacking the smaller Western cluster. The next few years saw an increase in what NPR’s Nathan Rott called “polarization.”
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“Then the killing started,” Rott wrote, in that dramatic way that suggests NPR people secretly like it. The Western cluster was smaller, but it had its back to the mahogany tree. First to go was a Central adolescent named Earl. Between 2018 and 2025, the Westerners had launched 24 separate attacks, killing at least six more mature males and 17 infants in the Central group. The conflict is still ongoing.
In their early April report in Science magazine, Aaron Sandel and his colleagues describe a “transition from cohesion to polarization in 2015 and the emergence of two distinct groups by 2018.” Were the chimps radicalized by the rise of alpha silverback Donald Trump, Russiagate, and the 2018 midterm elections? Other factors in the breakdown sound strangely familiar. While Americans clustered into red and blue camps by “geographical sorting,” the Ngogo chimps slid toward schism through “years of increasing avoidance,” until by 2017 they were living in “largely distinct territories.”
The old “party networks” still survived when it came to hunting and fighting outsiders, but a “clique,” composed “exclusively of Western males,” arose within the Central camp in 2014. This clique, the future Western leadership, appeared only months before the “Republican wave” of the 2014 midterm elections carried the Tea Party into the House. Shortly afterward, a respiratory virus of unknown origin killed the senior “nodal” figures who had sustained cross-group communication.
The epidemic was a tipping point. The “male grooming networks” that once held the Ngogo cluster together now split into rival subclusters. Their isolation made the young males involuntarily celibate, “incels” among Homo sapiens, and more aggressive. As “network polarization” increased and college-educated white women said dating conservative men gave them the ick, Western and Central chimps stopped mating.
The Ngogo researchers call the subsequent violence “civil war.” If that is what it is, it’s highly unusual. Genetic studies suggest that the Ngogo chimps last divided some 500 years ago. The only known prior case is the “Gombe Chimpanzee War” of 1974-78 in Tanzania, described by Jane Goodall. This involved the killing of all the males in the smaller cluster, possibly with the mercenary assistance of a passing leopard, and then the surrender of the winning cluster to a larger group of males that moved in to exploit the situation, like the Turkish army in Syria.
Goodall had convinced herself that the chimps were “nicer” than people. For years, she suffered nightmares about the chimps’ cannibalism, infanticide, mutilation, and blood-drinking. If Goodall’s war reporting were a movie, it would be called Guerrillas in the Mist. She wasn’t sure why the Gombe apes chimped out. The Ngogo observers think that resource scarcity played a part. Although Ngogo chimps had a low population density, erratic fruit production may have caused “heightened feeding competition.” Spikes in commodity prices preceded popular uprisings such as the Arab Spring of 2011 and the election of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Chimp (R-Bananas).
IRAN AND THE MODERN WAY OF WAR
Most of our behavior is, as Jonathan Leaf argues in The Primate Myth, closer to that of herd-forming language animals such as dolphins. Though our collective warfare resembles that of apes, primatologists convinced themselves that “entrenched ethnic or ideological divisions” are the preconditions for collective violence in humans. “Lions don’t have religion and political parties or ideologies. Neither do wolves or ants for that matter,” Michael Wilson of the University of Minnesota told NPR, with the wisdom of tenure. The experts also felt the traditional term, a “troop” of apes, wasn’t nice, so they called it a “cluster.” As in “cluster bomb.”
The Ngogo war detonates these liberal projections. It leads Sandel’s troop to argue that “ethnic, religious, or political divisions” are rationalizations of deeper biological patterns. Group identities can split and go ape without the “cultural markers often thought necessary for human warfare.” Unless, that is, the apes were learning from us while we were learning from them. In both Gombe and Ngogo, the chimps were doing fine until the humans turned up. And who better to teach the culture war than a cluster of university professors?
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.
