My name is George the Mandrill and I belong to the family of Old World monkeys
to be found in southern Cameroon, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and the Republic of the Congo.
I spent the greater part of my life in the Berlin Zoo where East-German foot-soldiers and housewives
would make hateful comments because of my colourful backside
which is indeed purple and even blueish and pink at times.

I remember David Bowie came to have a look at me in the Berlin Zoo in the 1970’s
and we understood each other perfectly.
We both looked like rock stars although each of us in our own way
David Bowie was never moved like me into a separate species called Mandrillus.
Charles Darwin wrote that no other member of the whole class of mammals
is coloured in such an extraordinary way as the adult male mandrill.

My name is George and you can call me George the Mandrill,
my nose is blue blue electric blue and my ass is purple rain’t that a bitch,
I am the heaviest living monkey though not me personally,
we are the mandrills, we are hunted down for bushmeat,
we are on the brink of a total mandrill eclipse yet not me,
I walk the earth alone,
with grey hair and a blue-greyish nose and a grey ass on which I sit when I am tired,
which is often, and on which I sit when I am out of breath, like now.