I am grateful to those people who lived and worked at Gombe during the late 1960s and contributed to this book with interviews and commentary, particularly Jane Goodall, Geza Teleki, Carole Gale, Nicolas Pickford, Timothy Clutton-Brock, Patrick McGinnis, and Timothy Ransom. Tim Ransom’s interviews have been supplemented with reference to material from his book Beach Troop of the Gombe (1981), while Tim Clutton-Brock’s contribution was clarified by reference to his 1974 Nature article, “Primate Social Organisation and Ecology,” and his 1975 piece in Folia Primatologica, “Feeding Behaviour of Red Colobus and Black and White Colobus in East Africa.” A few others who arrived not very long after Ruth’s death and spent significant time there—including David Bygott, Richard Wrangham, and Anne Pusey—also contributed with interviews, information, and opinions, and I thank them for their generous help. Anne Pusey is currently the J.B. Duke Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University and director of the Jane Goodall Research Center at Duke, which today holds the archives of long-term data from Gombe. These include records and observations originally written by Ruth, Geza, and Carole in 1968 and 1969. Geza and I spent three days at Duke, and Anne generously spoke with us about the Gombe record-keeping methods and enabled us to dip as deeply as we wished into the archives and review relevant records.
To supplement the many dozens of hours of interviews conducted specifically for this book, I have relied upon journals, letters, informal written recollections, and official documents and records. Additional materials include five large files of written recollections, correspondence, and photographs provided by Geza, personal journals and letters from Carole, and an extraordinary personal correspondence lent me by Jane Goodall. The Goodall letters were, in fact, gathered, edited, and published on their own during the ten years that I did the research for her biography, Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Men (2006). And since The Ghosts of Gombe is, in some ways, an expansion of that earlier work, albeit with a very different style and orientation, I should mention that a significant amount of the background information for this book comes from the biography and, in turn, from the gracious contributions made by dozens of people named in the acknowledgments there. I am grateful once more to those many dozens.
I have stayed at Gombe twice, and thus my knowledge of the place is somewhat anchored in direct experience, although inevitably that of a social and cultural outsider. But I have also, in this book, tried to expand my vision of Gombe by suggesting some of its cultural and historical context beyond and before the Euro-American one. Mrisho Mpambije Kagoha, a Lake Tanganyika fisherman who once fished off the shores of Gombe, and who met Jane when she first arrived in 1960, gave me his impressions of that interesting encounter during an interview conducted in the mid-1990s, with the translations between Swahili and English provided by David Anthony Collins. Tony Collins, as I’ve long known him, came from England, soon after Ruth died, as a graduate student researcher who intended to study the baboons at Gombe. He stayed and remains there today as an important member of the continuing community and also as director of Gombe’s ongoing baboon research. Tony is himself an astute cultural historian for that part of the world and has kindly served as my informant—aided significantly in that role by Shadrack Mkolle Kamenya (director of chimpanzee research and conservation with the Jane Goodall Institute, Tanzania), who grew up in a village at the edge of Lake Tanganyika. Other important Tanzanian-born informants long associated with Gombe and contacted through Tony Collins include Jumanne Kikwale, Hamisi Matama, and Eslom Mpongo. Smita Dharsi, yet another local informant, was a few months old when, in 1960, she met Jane in Kigoma, which, as the town nearest to the Gombe research station, was and still is its main source of food and supplies. The name Dharsi should be familiar to readers of this book; Smita’s father, mother, and grandfather, who were close friends of Jane’s during the 1960s, ran a general store and petrol station in town that served the Gombe research community in both practical and personal ways.
Further information arrived through contacts I made during 2013 and 2014 as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. My Radcliffe researchers Matthew Wozny and Deborah Onuoha helped expand my knowledge of East African cultures and beliefs, while Harvard undergraduate Kennedy Mmasi, a Tanzanian by birth, added his own distinctive recollections and perspectives. In addition, I am indebted particularly to the following three written sources: Kefa M. Otiso’s Culture and Customs of Tanzania (2013); Gary Van Wyk’s Shangaa: Art of Tanzania (2013); and Michele Wagner’s “‘Nature in the Mind’ in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Buha, Western Tanzania,” which is a chapter in Custodians of the Land, edited by Maddox, Giblin, and Kimambo (1996).
In 2015, I was given an opportunity to consider the psychological dimensions of this story while a visiting scholar at the Erikson Institute for Research and Education, part of a large and advanced psychiatric treatment center in western Massachusetts called the Austen Riggs Center. There, I was settled into an office on the periphery of an excellent library and surrounded by professionals who have dedicated themselves to psychotherapy in an institutional setting. My time as an Erikson Scholar enabled me to examine this story as both a tale of someone who died and a tale of those who survived—how they were affected emotionally and sometimes damaged by that experience. I must thank John Muller and Virginia Demos, who served as teachers and mentors while I was at Austen Riggs; I also want to express my gratitude for additional support from Jane Tillman and Lee Watroba.
Finally, I must thank three special people who served as friends, advisors, and skilled readers of the manuscript during its several stages of revision: Heather McGiffin, Wyn Kelley, and Daniel C. Dennett.
Sober nonfiction frequently presents a single perspective, the author’s, on some purportedly truthful account. I have worked to transcend that kind of sobriety in large part by recognizing openly that the past can never be perfectly captured and by presenting multiple and sometimes conflicting perspectives. I express the perspectives often, though not always, of those individuals who consented to interviews, and I try to identify them sometimes directly (“in her opinion,” “it seemed to him”) and sometimes through a close paraphrase that echoes the individual’s speaking style. In instances where I represent someone’s actual thoughts by placing the words in italics, I am quoting directly from something described as a thought in an interview or from something written privately (as in a journal). When I refer to language written publicly (as in letters or published material), I place it in quote marks. I also use quote marks to identify conversations that were written down or remembered as direct dialogue while recognizing, of course, that people commonly maintain inexact recollections of conversations that took place in the distant past. I have in one instance changed a name out of respect for someone’s privacy; but probably my closest approach to fiction occurs in the brief portrait of Alphonse the fisherman, which has been developed from photographs, background research, and other people’s recollections of the man. In spite of such creative liberties taken, the story told here is true—or as true as I can make it in shape and fact.