JANE GOODALL
Focusing on a Genuine Need
…BEING BOUGHT A TOY CHIMP AS A TODDLER. It was made to mark the first chimp born at the London Zoo and was called Jubilee. People said it would give me nightmares, but he became my favourite toy. I took him everywhere. I still have him now, though he’s in his 80s, and rather delicate, so he doesn’t travel.
…MY MOTHER supported my ambition to work with animals. She was the only one who didn’t laugh at my ridiculous dream of going to Africa. She said I’d have to work very hard, take advantage of all opportunities, and never give up. That’s the message I tell young people around the world, particularly in disadvantaged communities. I wish she was alive to know many people have told me that I taught them that because I did it, they could too.
…RUSTY, A BLACK MONGREL, taught me animals have personalities and feelings. I had other pets like guinea pigs and tortoises, and I knew they all had personalities, but Rusty was special. He was highly intelligent, and I thought of him when academics later told me that only humans have personalities, minds and emotions.
…MY FIRST TRIP TO AFRICA IN 1957.
A friend invited me to her family’s farm in Kenya. There were no tourist planes then, so I went by sea. It was the time of the Suez Crisis so the ship went all round the Cape and the first town I set foot in was Cape Town. It was beautiful but had ‘Whites Only’ signs everywhere, which was horrible. On landing at Mombasa, a train took me past herds of wildebeest, which you don’t see now. Then, as a car drove me up towards the farm an aardvark passed ahead of us. There was a giraffe at the side of the road, looking down with those long, curly lashes. The first morning when I woke up, outside my very own window were the fresh paw prints of a leopard. I’d finally arrived in the Africa of my dreams.
…LOUIS LEAKEY GAVE ME MY FIRST WORK IN AFRICA.
There wasn’t enough money for me to attend university, so I went on a secretarial course. A friend said that if I wanted to work with animals in Africa I should contact Leakey, a distinguished palaeontologist. By chance he needed a secretary, and allowed me to accompany him, his wife and one other English girl, Gillian, on his annual fossil hunting trip to the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.
… BEING FOLLOWED BY A LION.
After each day’s work, Gillian and I were allowed to go out on the African plains in the evening. One time we looked round and a young male lion was following us. Scary, but exciting. Gillian said we should head down into the forest, but I said we must stay in the open, because in the thickets he’d know where we were, but we wouldn’t know where he was. The lion eventually gave up, and Leakey told me I’d done the right thing. I think that convinced him to give me the job of studying wild chimpanzees.
…LEAKEY THOUGHT WOMEN MADE THE BEST OBSERVERS. He also wanted a mind uncluttered by reductionist scientific thinking. He felt that learning about our closest relatives would help him better understand the behaviour of the Stone Age humans whose fossils he was digging up. … DAVID GREYBEARD SAVED MY
OBSERVATION PROJECT. We only had six months’ funding to begin with, and when I first arrived at the Gombe Stream Reserve, the chimps ran away. They’d never seen a white ape before. It wasn’t until July 14, 1960, an event now commemorated annually as World Chimpanzee Day, that the chimp I’d named David Greybeard became the first to lose his fear, enabling me to observe him making tools to catch termites. If you saw that today, it wouldn’t be remarkable. We know lots of animals use tools, but then it was thought that only humans did it.
…NAMING CHIMPS was deemed controversial in the scientific community. But I couldn’t have imagined calling a chimp by a number. When the proof came back for my first scientific paper on nature – when I finally got a chance to do a PhD – all my ‘he’s’, ‘she’s’ and ‘who’s’ were crossed out for ‘ it’ and ‘which’. I was furious. I reinstated them all and refused to back down. I won the argument.
… MEETING HUGO VAN LAWICK.
He’d come to film and photograph me on behalf of National Geograph
ic. This took the story of Jane and the chimps into the outside world. We fell in love and married in 1964. We set up the Gombe Stream Research Centre, the first of its type, which is still going strong today and discovering new things about chimps. Sadly, Hugo’s photography took him to the Serengeti while I remained at Gombe, and we drifted apart. We divorced amicably in 1974. …
OUR SON HUGO, AFFECTIONATELY KNOWN AS ‘GRUB’, DIDN’T LIKE CHIMPS. He knew they could eat him. Chimps have been known to take human babies. Today, he finds them more interesting, but he still doesn’t like them.
…‘FEMINISTS’ CRITICISED ME. It annoys me that people despise women if they stop their career to look after children. Chimps teach us that for the first two years of life, it’s really