The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
The holiday that changed me ‘I’d never dreamt of studying chimps’
For primatologist Jane Goodall, a trip to Kenya in her twenties was the catalyst for a lifelong calling
Ican never forget the first trip I made to Africa. I’d dreamt of living with wild animals and writing books about them since I was 10. But I grew up in the war, and we couldn’t afford holidays. When I left school, there wasn’t enough money for university, so I took a boring old secretarial course and got a job in London.
Then, in 1956, a letter arrived from a school friend, Clo, whose parents had moved to Kenya, inviting me to stay, and I thought: “This is my opportunity!” So I went back home to Bournemouth and worked as a waitress in a hotel. After five months, I had enough money for a ticket aboard a ship named the Kenya Castle. I travelled alone – it was so exciting: my first major trip abroad.
I disembarked at Mombasa and took the train to Nairobi. It was so different in those days: the animals were everywhere, not confined to national parks. There were no paved roads, and driving to the farm in the White Highlands on the first night, we saw an aardvark – I had no idea how rare it was to see one – and a beautiful giraffe, with long eyelashes, looking down its nose. The next morning Clo rushed into my room, saying, “Come quickly, there’s a leopard outside”, and I knew I’d arrived. This was the Africa I’d dreamt of.
I had a wonderful time. But I’d been told to “never overstay your welcome”, so after a couple of months, I moved into a hostel and got a secretarial job in Nairobi. Then someone said, “You should meet Louis Leakey”, a famous paleoanthropologist and archaeologist. So I called him – I was terrified, Louis could be very gruff on the phone – and made an appointment to see him at what was then the Coryndon Museum (now the National Museum). How amazing that his secretary had just quit! He asked me so many questions about Africa, and I suppose he was impressed – he offered me the job.
I did him a lot of good. Leakey would receive lots of academic papers and scribble “Rot! Rubbish! Tosh!” on them, in red, then ask me to get the author on the phone. I’d pretend the person wasn’t available until he’d calmed down. By now I was living in a museum flat and had two monkeys, two mongooses, two dogs and a Siamese cat. I’d also rescued a bush baby from a market, and called him Levi. He lived in a gourd above Leakey’s desk during the day. When visitors came, Levi would survey them sleepily, then take a flying leap onto their head. I think Leakey judged the person by their response to the assault. Meeting Leakey changed my life. He asked me to go on a four-month dig at Olduvai Gorge in what was then Tanganyika, with his wife Mary, a researcher named Gillian, some helpers and two Dalmatians (they would give warning if a lion crept up behind you while you were digging). Olduvai made the biggest impression. Gillian and I shared a tent, and at night you could hear lions roaring and hyenas howling. We had one cup of water a day for washing, but discovered that – just as birds have dust baths – dust keeps your hair clean.
After a hard day’s work in the hot sun, looking for fossils, Gillian and I were allowed up onto the plains. There were so many animals! One day we were walking with the dogs, Toots and Bottom Biter, when they saw a tiny mouse, and chased it into the bushes. I looked round and saw a young male lion watching us – and the dogs – from under a bush. We put the dogs on makeshift leads and walked onwards, with this very curious lion following us for 10 minutes or so. Gillian was scared but – more afraid of Mary Leakey, who adored Toots, than of the lion – I was really excited.
That evening, around the campfire at Gombe Stream, Louis decided I was the person he had been seeking and asked me to study chimpanzees. So long as I was out in the wild, I was happy to study any animal – but I never dreamt of studying chimps. They were so exotic, no one had ever studied them in the wild.
Leakey believed that six million years ago we had a common ancestor, which explained the human-like behaviour of chimps – an idea ridiculed at the time, but accepted now.
First, though, Leakey had to raise the funds and get permission for this crazy project. I had saved all my money and invited Mum to Kenya for a holiday before we both returned to England. I had been in Africa for a year, and would return to take up research in Gombe in 1960. That chimpanzees became my life’s work was entirely due to this holiday, and to Louis Leakey.
by Jane Goodall is published by Penguin at £16.99 ( jane goodall.org.uk; rootsnshoots.org.uk)