Many people, myself included, were elated to learn that Walking With the Great Apes would be republished, as the book is an in-depth account of three highly significant contributions to primatology, as well as an account of the three women who made these contributions—Jane Goodall with chimpanzees, Dian Fossey with gorillas, and Biruté Galdikas with orangutans. No other book presents these studies together as comprehensively or as well.
Their stories are no less interesting than that of Sy Montgomery herself, as she, too, is a courageous and fascinating woman. At the time she decided to write this book, her career had just begun. After this book was published to critical acclaim, she went on to become a famous nature writer with many award-winning books to her credit, some for adults, others for children. But when she made her plans to write Walking With the Great Apes, she was a freelance writer and reporter, and as such had no more money than do others in those professions. Yet she was determined to persevere. So she saved every penny—for more than a year her diet was little more than rice and water, and not very much rice. Finally, with a very minor advance from a publisher—about what an ordinary celebrity would spend for a designer dress or an evening’s entertainment—she had accumulated enough to buy an airline ticket. She planned her trip carefully and thoroughly in advance, arranging to visit and interview some of the researchers—the three primatologists and others involved with primate studies—via contacts in the United States and also by mail, since at that time telephones were unreliable or nonexistent in the remote areas of Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Indonesia—the countries she would have to visit. At last her arrangements seemed solid, and a schedule of travel was thoroughly planned. Her plane was to leave in the morning. That evening, she made a phone call just to reconfirm her arrangements and learned to her horror that, without her knowledge, one of the most important appointments had been canceled.
What was she supposed to do? Her plane ticket was nonrefundable, nor could she change it, nor could she rearrange her other appointments by mail in less than two or three months. It was then or never. She had to leave, so she went.
In Nairobi, Sy had booked a small room in the least-expensive accommodations she could find—a place with the menacing name of Terminal Hotel, deep within the low-rent section of the city replete with drunks and robbers. Alone in her room on that first night, she was so frightened that she trembled. Her plans had fallen to pieces. She faced the very real possibility that she wouldn’t be able to get the material she needed to write this wonderful book of hers, now in its eighteenth year of publication. She knew no one in Nairobi or, for that matter, in all of Africa, and she couldn’t phone home for advice or help. In those days the phone call would have cost upward of $40 per minute, and with only enough money for one frugal meal a day, she couldn’t afford it.
Nevertheless, determined to try her best, she set out alone for Rwanda to visit the camp of the late Dian Fossey, with no idea of what she would find when she got there. She hitchhiked part of the way, walked part of the way, and traveled on matatu buses—the rickety little vehicles that provide transportation to much of rural Africa. Most of these vehicles are designed to carry six to ten people, but inevitably contain twenty to twenty-five people, often with livestock, and are so uncomfortable and scary that Sy learned to sleep at will, a skill she acquired from the other passengers who slept to escape the ordeal. Most people were very kind to her—friendly, polite, and helpful, as would be the way of rural Africans with a lonely stranger—but when she reached the base of the Virunga volcanoes, the guard assigned to accompany her up the mountain threatened to kill her if she didn’t give him her money. She told him, truthfully, that she had no money, but she did have a very valuable bill in her possession which he could have. He took it. It was an out-of-date British pound note, and it was worthless, but after all, as she said later, “So was he.”
Her marvelous book mentions none of these difficulties. She doesn’t dwell on the dangers of travel, of the terrible fever she got in Dar es Salaam, of the leaches she found in her bra in the jungles of Indonesia, of the horrible fevers that she and the photographer, Dianne Taylor-Snow, both caught in Indonesia where they suffered together in an airless, filthy flop-house, agreeing that if one of them found that the other had died, she would inform the other’s husband. She doesn’t mention that she reached the research station deep in the jungle where the rescheduled visit was to take place, at the appointed time, only to find that the person she was to interview wasn’t there and wasn’t expected back until after Sy with her nonrefundable, nonchangeable air ticket would have to return to the United States. Again, no one had told her.
At the time, the American and British expatriates in Africa were a fairly rum crew, or many were—arrogant and thoughtless, disdainful of others but full of themselves beyond all reason, and thus in complete contrast to most of the African people themselves. Whether or not this mindset had permeated the remote jungle research stations is hard to say. But Sy has great charm and a gift for friendship—her social skills are rivaled by none, as is her perseverance. Somehow, this very young woman managed to interview all the people whose information she needed, to conduct all the many observations she had planned, and to befriend Goodall and Galdikas as well as the researchers in the late Dian Fossey’s camp, so that when she boarded the plane for home, she had everything necessary to write a book—this book—which is unlike any other, but is exactly what Sy had wanted it to be. In short, the book is a multifaceted triumph.
It has often been said that one should never annoy the person who has the ink, as Biruté Galdikas was to learn from having angered one of her biographers. But Sy didn’t use her ink to describe her difficulties because these didn’t interest her, and this says more about her journalistic skills and moral compass than any of the difficulties say about their possible perpetrators. She used the ink to honor the researchers and the animals, and to describe a field method that was very suitable for women—a method quite different from those of the prevailing, largely masculine, scientific community. Male researchers have certainly covered a lot of ground in the fields of zoology and animal behavior, but too often from a decidedly masculine point of view. At one time, for instance, it was assumed that a group of female animals (lions, for instance) was the harem of the male in their midst, yet this is seldom the case. The group is usually a cohesive unit of mothers, sisters, daughters, and aunts, along with their small children. If the species is territorial, these females are the owners. The adult male so prominent among them is there only temporarily and at their pleasure. Yet this arrangement seemed so foreign to our patriarchal culture that years passed before the implications of a nonhuman male surrounded by females came to be fully understood.
Then, too, male scientists had set the tone of the manner in which they interfaced with their subject animals, and were generally known for the emotional distance they made sure to maintain. The absence of personal involvement was assumed to indicate good science, so that many researchers, in presenting their material, went to ridiculous extremes to depersonalize their subjects, and would refer to an animal as “it” rather than “he” or “she.” To acknowledge that an animal had gender would be sentimental, it seemed. I can think of no male scientist working in the field who has made a lifelong commitment to any individual wild animal.
Fossey, Goodall, and Galdikas were exactly the opposite. Their methods of study were much more like those approved for anthropologists than like those approved for wildlife biologists: an anthropologist who thought it best to call the village headman “it” would be laughed out of existence. Normally, anthropologists form deep relationships with the villagers who are kind enough to help them with their studies—not a few anthropologists have married into such groups of people—showing a kind of commitment that the anthropology community applauds. Because women are less likely than men to see barriers between themselves and animals, and are more likely to form permanent commitments, women are more perceptive about their subjects, and learn from them more easily. Louis Leakey realized this, and rather than encouraging male researchers to conduct the important great-ape studies that he envisioned, he chose Fossey, Goodall, and Galdikas. Thus Sy was the perfect person to describe them, as no one knows animals, or understands them, or respects them, or seeks out their individuality, better than she. The primary object of her work was to present the relationships between the women and their subject animals, and to tell the stories of the animals as well as those of their human observers. One of the most moving stories in the book is that of the relationship between Fossey and Digit, a wild gorilla. Both were murdered, first Digit by poachers, later Fossey by an unknown assailant. Their graves are in the Karisoke research station, side by side. How many male researchers are buried beside an animal? And how much greater insight into one’s subject species is attained through mutual connection than if no connection exists? These three female primatologists formed lifelong relationships with their groups of study animals, cared deeply about them, and for the most part didn’t pretend, in order to avert disapproval from the more restrictive scientists, that they were impartial. Today, these three women are lauded as pioneers and their studies have worldwide importance. In the accepted manner of anthropologists rather than in the more traditional manner of many field biologists, they conducted their studies by means of their deep, personal knowledge of individual animals, and this became the focus of Sy’s book.
And as it happens, material for this book was gathered by methods that now seem familiar. You go to your study area, search for your subjects, try to reassure them by your demeanor that you mean them no harm, and then learn from them. You are there because you care about them and what they are doing. That’s what Sy did. She approached her famous female subjects fully as empathetically as they approached theirs. Fossey was no longer living when Sy began her work, but Goodall and Galdikas, also primates, were not unlike their own subject animals in that they probably had little knowledge of the woman who was trying to understand them and less knowledge of what would result from her work. It is not the task of scientists doing fieldwork to make life easy for a biographer or reporter, and I am sure that Galdikas and Goodall assumed that Sy would do whatever she needed to do pretty much on her own, but Sy was no more deterred by this than any good primatologist would be if a great ape gave a threat-grin or threw something at her. To understand the subject, no matter what it does, is the primatologist’s task. It is also the reporter’s task, and Sy was more than equal to it. The result is a hugely empathetic book that honors the researchers and their study animals alike, a book so beautiful that it lives in the minds of all who read it.
ELIZABETH MARSHALL THOMAS