Jane Goodall returns to Gombe

JANE Goodall returns to the place where her chimpanzee research began - and finds a world much changed.

TWAM 21 March 2015

JANE Goodall was already on a London dock in March 1957 when she realised that her passport was missing.

In just a few hours she was due to depart on her first trip to Africa. A school friend had moved to a farm outside Nairobi and, knowing Goodall’s childhood dream was to live among the African wildlife, invited her to stay with the family for a while. Goodall, then 22, had saved for two years to pay for her passage to Kenya. Now all this was for naught, it seemed.

It’s hard not to wonder how subsequent events in her life – rather consequential as they have turned out to be to conservation, to ­science, to our sense of ourselves as a species – might have unfolded differently had someone not found her passport, along with an itinerary from Cook’s, the travel agency, folded inside, and delivered it to the Cook’s office. An agency employee, documents in hand, found her on the dock. “Incredible,” Goodall says. “Amazing.”

Within two months of her arrival in Kenya, Goodall met the paleontologist Louis Leakey and he offered her a job at the natural history museum where he was curator. He spent much of the next three years testing her capacity for repetitive work, in particular during a summer expedition of several weeks to Olduvai Gorge, where Leakey’s wife, Mary, also a paleontologist, would later find the hominid fossils that proved the African origins of Homo sapiens. Goodall’s job was to rise at dawn and spend hours on her hands and knees, clearing away dirt and rock with a pick.

Louis Leakey believed in a hypothesis first put forth by Charles Darwin – that humans and chimpanzees share an evolutionary ancestor. Close study of chimpanzees in the wild, he thought, might tell us something about that common progenitor. He was, in other words, looking for someone to live among Africa’s wild animals. One night at ­Olduvai, he told Goodall that he knew just the place where she could do it: Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve, in what is now Tanzania.

In July 1960, Goodall boarded a boat and after a few hours motoring over the warm waters of Lake Tanganyika, she stepped onto the pebbly beach at Gombe. Last summer, 54 years later, Goodall was standing on the same beach. The vast lake was still warm, the beach beneath her sandals still pebbly. But nearly everything else in sight was different. A ranger station and a small lodge stood nearby. Just out of sight were more cinder-block buildings that housed staff, researchers and their labs. Jutting into the lake was now a dock, where a boat was pulling up with a load of day-trippers from Kigoma, a small city to the south. All of this bustle was, of course, a result of the work ­Goodall began that day in 1960, which continues as one of the longest and most rigorously conducted inquiries into animal behaviour.

For a good while in the beginning, Goodall had little human company. Today, as a globe-trotting conservationist, she can neither avoid nor refuse human contact. She can find relief from the crush of humanity only in hotel suites, in Bournemouth, her childhood hometown on England’s south coast, and here, on a remote shore of Lake Tanganyika.

An old friend and colleague of hers told me that Goodall, who turns 81 next month, regards Gombe as her “church” and her “refuge”. On this trip, though, a sense of sanctuary seemed out of reach. This morning we planned to take a walk in the woods and look for some chimps. But the trailhead of the path she wanted to take was blocked by a phalanx of tourists and ­Goodall knew they would detain her if she tried to go that way. Anthony Collins, a Scot who directs baboon research at Gombe and sometimes oversees its additional mission as an ecotourist destination, stood with us. He asked Goodall, “Where do you want to go?”

“Away from all these people,” she said. Just then Goodall saw Daniela de Donno Mannini, head of the Italy branch of the Jane Goodall Institute, the conservation nongovernmental organisation she founded in the 1970s. De Donno Mannini was in the area to visit an orphanage in Kigoma. She noticed Goodall at the same moment and came over, all smiles and hugs, a couple of her associates in tow. After a few minutes, the Italians went off with their park guide and the other tourists, heading into the forest to find chimpanzees. Within 60 seconds, someone else appeared seeking an audience with Goodall. Another boatload of visitors was arriving at the dock. Before they could approach, she headed into the woods.

Gombe’s terrain is extremely rugged. The park cannot be reached by road, and its borders are a long walk from any village. These features make the preserve an Eden for chimpanzees, while mostly keeping people at bay. But ­Goodall had chosen – for my sake, perhaps – an easy path. We climbed a short way to a natural terrace in the hillside, where forest was overtaking a dilapidated cabin. This was Lawick Lodge, the one-room home she shared in the mid-1960s with Hugo van Lawick, the Dutch photographer dispatched by National Geographic to Gombe once Goodall’s astonishing findings were coming to light. I asked if she could still see, in her mind’s eye, the chimps with whom she once shared the forest. “Yes,” she said with some ­sadness. “Mostly David Greybeard.” This was the first chimp to accept Goodall; as alpha male, his acceptance led others to follow suit.

We didn’t encounter any chimps on our walk. Researchers and field staff who follow the animals daily could have directed us to them, as they do tourists. But, Goodall said, “I just don’t enjoy seeing the chimps when there’s loads of people around.” She didn’t see a single one ­during her four days at Gombe.

A little more than three months after arriving at Gombe the first time, Goodall was walking along a ridge when she came within sight of a termite mound. From 100m away, it took her a moment to realise that the black shape in front of it was a chimpanzee. She dropped to the ground, crawled to within 50m and watched the animal climb on top of the mound with a piece of grass. It sat there for the next several minutes, doing something with its hands, but Goodall couldn’t tell what. When it climbed down, the chimp she would name David ­Greybeard strolled to within 10m of Goodall before noticing her and stopping short. She noted an expression she could call only “shock” on his face. Then he turned and fled.

Two days later, Goodall returned to the same spot and saw David Greybeard again, this time with another chimp. Now she could see what David Greybeard was doing. Her finding, published in Nature in 1964, that chimpanzees use tools – extracting termites from their mound with leaves of grass – drastically altered humanity’s understanding of itself; man was no longer the natural world’s only user of tools. More ­discoveries would follow. Chimpanzees hunt and eat meat. They lead complex social lives, suggesting an emotional capacity previously ascribed only to humans.

Today the social lives of animals from whales to ants have been abundantly catalogued using Goodall’s methodology, which has helped to set the basic ground rules for contemporary field biology. Goodall herself became the first exemplar – before Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking – of the pop-culture scientist-communicator. And after two and a half decades of living out her childhood dream, Goodall made an abrupt career shift, from scientist to conservationist. In 1986, she attended a conference of primatologists in Chicago and noticed a common theme running through the papers being presented. “Every single place where people were working, forests were disappearing,” she told me. “It was an absolute shock.”

Then in the early 1990s, Goodall flew in a small plane directly over Gombe. It offered a new perspective on her tiny sliver of virgin forest, which was now surrounded on three sides by 52 rapidly expanding villages full of desperately poor people. Gombe’s chimps needed to cross into suitable habitat outside the park to connect with other chimpanzee populations and maintain genetic diversity, but there would be no such habitat if poverty continued to force a growing human population to chop down trees. The flight convinced her that the chimps’ lot could not improve until that of the people living near them did. She now spends about 300 days a year on the road advocating for forest conservation and sustainable development.

It’s not always clear which is her priority today: chimps or humans. Though she sees the work on behalf of each as mutually reinforcing, on balance the results seem to favour people. Community leaders, elected officials and ­citizens in several of the surrounding villages told me that work done by the Jane Goodall Institute in the area has probably raised incomes locally and provided health care and education. Whether chimps will also benefit is unknown.

Craig Packer, a professor at the University of Minnesota who studies wildlife conservation processes and did research at Gombe in the ’70s, has some doubts that conservation efforts will help the Gombe chimpanzees much. “I’ve seen a lot of development and aid projects in Tanzania, and they’re awfully difficult to implement,” he says. “Planting a few trees around Gombe is nice. It’s better than not planting a few trees around Gombe. But if you’re thinking of the future of chimpanzees, you’ve got to realise it’s one of dozens of places. It’s a footnote.”

Goodall’s institute is trying to preserve habitat in places around Gombe so that chimpanzees can perhaps counter the steep population decline they have suffered in recent decades. But the work is going to be forbiddingly expensive, and it requires the participation of numerous stakeholders. Success seems a way off yet.

One day I travelled with Goodall from Bujumbura, Burundi’s capital, to Gombe. For her, the day included some early morning emailing, meetings with local officials and the ambassadors of France and the US, and a ­four-hour drive in an un-air-conditioned LandCruiser with stops along the way to visit local chapters of Roots & Shoots, her institute’s international youth program. As we drove out of the city, the crowded shacks gave way to cassava fields. It was hot, and we’d just had lunch; I expected Goodall to take a nap. Instead, she began jotting down ideas for how to cheaply procure a vehicle for Burundi’s Roots & Shoots.

By the time we reached the border with ­Tanzania, darkness had fallen. The border guard wanted to match faces to passport photos; shining the light of his mobile phone onto Goodall’s face, he remarked, “You look tired.”

“You’d be tired, too,” she responded cheerily. “I’ve given lots of speeches today, to ministers and ambassadors.” Asked if she wanted to sit down while the official finished his paperwork, she replied: “No, I don’t want to sit down! I’ve been sitting – I want to dance around the room!” And she proceeded to shuffle across the bare cement floor, hands in pockets. Half an hour later we were speeding across the waves under an enormous orange moon rising over the mountains.

Goodall had been working for 13 hours – a long day, but it produced news of one notable success. On her previous visit to Burundi, in 2013, she’d discussed with the French ambassador, Gerrit van Rossum, the situation with Burundi’s Vyanda Park: refugees from the country’s civil war were returning home and building houses in the park and along its edge. She told van Rossum she didn’t think the government had the resources to enforce the park’s legal ­protection. Today, at one meeting, van Rossum told Goodall that after that visit, he persuaded France’s government to come up with the cash to hire park rangers. They would also finance outreach, hoping to persuade residents that conserving the forest would promote tourism.

“Can you imagine what it’s like for me to hear, ‘Because of your last visit, we’re doing this work’?” Goodall said. “You never know who it’s going to be, or what they’re going to do. But as long as I do it, it keeps happening. So you can see why I can’t very well stop.”