Jane Goodall, primatologist, conservationist and UN Messenger of Peace, made one of the most significant discoveries about chimpanzees — that they could use tools.
Seated by a fire on a cold Nairobi morning, nothing about Dr Jane Goodall tells you she’s hitting 80 or of her fame. Her face is fresh and glowing. Lithe of frame, she could easily pass for decades younger. When I ask the secret of her youthful looks, she says there’s no secret. I guess it all comes down to her decades-long passion — being close to nature with chimps in the forest.
Goodall’s name is synonymous with chimpanzees. When I read my first book on chimps years ago, it was by her, titled In the Shadow of Man. Published in 1971, it’s a classic and she’s authored several more, besides having published scientific papers.
Goodall started her working life as a waitress and secretary because her family didn’t have enough money to send her to college. But she says she had an innate love for animals. When she had saved enough to buy a flight ticket to Nairobi from London, she called Dr Louis Leakey because her friends said, “If you care about animals, then you should meet him.”
Leakey was a globally famous figure for his work with fossil finds and natural history.
“I called his office,” recalls Goodall. “And he answered and asked what I wanted. I said I wanted to meet him. He asked me thousands of questions when we met. Fortunately I could answer most of them because I had read a lot on animals.”
Leakey hired Goodall. That was in 1957, and the beginning of an extraordinary life for her.
It was a visit to Olduvai Gorge that impressed upon Leakey that Goodall was the woman for the job of studying chimpanzees. At that time, none of the famous archaeological finds, like the 3.6- million-year-old Laetoli footprints, had been discovered.
But there was no money for research, and while Leakey went about raising the funds required, Goodall returned to London. While there, she worked at London Zoo and learned what she could about chimpanzees. “At that time, nobody knew anything about chimps, except for captive ones.” That was in 1958.
In July 1960, Goodall was dropped off at Gombe on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Her first sighting of a chimpanzee after weeks of searching was a disappointment. “It ran away,” she remembers. And it happened week after week. “They had never seen a white person,” says Goodall.
Then came the breakthrough. “One chimpanzee lost his fear and he came to the camp and took the bananas lying on the table.”
Goodall continued leaving bananas out for the chimps, and she got to know them individually. This formed the basis of her chimp study.
Today’s researchers would not do that — which even Goodall agrees with — since enticing animals with treats removes them from their natural habitat and natural behaviour, which could compromise the results of the study.
In 1963, Hugo van Lawick, a National Geographic photographer, came to Gombe to film the chimpanzees. “And the world got to know of the chimps,” says Goodall. The two got married (divorced after a decade) and have a son who lives in Dar es Salaam. By virtue of her marriage to Hugo, Goodall became a baroness.
Gradually, the chimpanzees began to trust her, which led her to record previously unknown behaviour such as the chimps using blades of grass to fish out termites from a mound. Until then, no animal in the wild had been recorded using a tool — a skill that was believed to be exclusive to man. It led Leakey to make his famous remark, “We must redefine tools, redefine man or accept chimpanzees as humans.”
“We still don’t know enough about them,” says Goodall. “We still don’t know how many there are, only that they are disappearing very fast as they are hunted for bushmeat; numbers are also falling due to deforestation and the huge illegal trade to China for their zoos.” Chimps have also been used in medical experiments.
Goodall believes there were at least one to two million chimpanzees spread along the equatorial forest belt from West Africa to western Uganda, western Tanzania and Southern Sudan in the 1960s. Today, the estimate is 300,000.
“Unless we can safeguard leafy corridors for them, they have had it,” states Goodall. In small, isolated fragmented forests, it will lead to in-breeding and fighting for territories.
Hope for the future
Today, researchers flock to the Jane Goodall Institute in Virginia, US. Due to her work, there is more space around Gombe National Park for the chimps thanks to a partnership with 52 villages around the park.
Her Roots and Shoots programme is closest to her heart. It targets the youth, whom she believes are the future, and in their hands lies the future of the wild.
The programme GRASP (Great Apes Survival Partnership) is the only species conservation programme with the UN. “We need to protect enough large areas where animals can live unharassed,” says Goodall.
