KINSHASA, April 12 (AGCNewsNet) – In a powerful blend of art and activism, cardboard puppet animals paraded through Kinshasa’s Botanical Garden this week as part of The Herds, a theatrical performance aimed at drawing global attention to climate change and environmental degradation.

Monkeys, leopards, giraffes, and a towering gorilla—each sculpted from cardboard and guided by black-clad puppeteers—moved from a solemn crawl to a full sprint, symbolizing an urgent escape from environmental collapse. Their imagined journey: a migration from the heart of the Congo Basin to the Arctic Circle.

The performance, conceived by the same creative team behind 2021’s The Walk—which featured a 12-foot puppet refugee girl named Little Amal—uses storytelling to make visible the invisible effects of the climate crisis. In Congo, those effects were painfully evident just meters from the performance, as parts of the garden remained flooded from devastating rains earlier in the week that submerged half of Kinshasa and claimed dozens of lives.

“This isn’t just theatre,” said Tshoper Kabambi, a Congolese filmmaker and local producer for The Herds. “It’s a message. Our rainforest is one of the lungs of the planet, and yet people ignore what’s happening here—deforestation, flooding, destruction.”

The Congo Basin, the second-largest rainforest in the world after the Amazon, plays a critical role in stabilizing global climate. Yet its plight receives far less international attention.

Artistic director Amir Nizar Zuabi, who also helped lead The Walk, emphasized that The Herds will travel through 20 cities en route to the Arctic, carrying Congo’s story into the global conversation. “What happens in Congo must be seen in Norway, in Europe, in the U.S. It’s all connected,” he said.

Local artists were key to the Kinshasa performance, as their counterparts will be in other cities along the route. As The Herds heads north, it carries with it not just paper and cardboard, but the weight of a world in environmental distress—and the hope that art can still move hearts.

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