A Message from Jane Goodall
Fifty years ago, in July 1960, I began a study of chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve (now Gombe National Park) in the British protectorate of Tanganyika (now Tanzania). I had not attended college then, and it had been difficult for my mentor, the late Louis Leakey, to find money for me. Eventually, though, he got a six-month grant from Leighton Wilkie, a Des Plaines, Illinois, businessman with an interest in human evolution. The British authorities had refused to let a young girl go into the forest alone—so my mother, Vanne, volunteered to accompany me. Bernard Verdcourt, a botanist from the Coryndon Museum where Leakey was curator, offered to drive us there. After some eight hundred miles, over mostly dirt roads, in his overloaded Land Rover, we arrived in Kigoma, a small town on the eastern shores of Lake Tanganyika.
What an arrival. On the other side of the lake, the people of what was then the Belgian Congo (which subsequently became Zaire and today is the Democratic Republic of the Congo) had risen up against the white settlers. Kigoma was overflowing with refugees, most of them sleeping on mattresses on the floor of a large Belgian warehouse at the port. The first night we three travelers shared one small room in the only hotel, but a Belgian family was desperate, and so we moved out and set up our tents, as directed, in the grounds of the prison. (It was well guarded and would be safe, we were told.) And we helped the citizens of Kigoma to feed the refugees, making hundreds and hundreds of Spam sandwiches.
It was two weeks before we could embark upon the last phase of the journey, for it was feared that the Africans in the Kigoma region might follow the example of the Congolese. But this did not happen, and so, on July 14, Vanne and I set off in the government launch, the Kibisi, on the twelve-mile journey to the Gombe Stream Game Reserve. The tiny aluminum boat that would be our only link with civilization was on board, along with provisions for several weeks, and Dominic Charles, who had been chosen to look after the camp and cook our food. Bernard had returned to Nairobi, convinced (he later confessed) that he would never see us again.
On arrival we were greeted by the two resident game scouts and Iddi Matata, who, we discovered later, was the most infamous witch doctor in the region. Fortunately he decided to extend his protection over the two strange white women. The cumbersome ex-army tent that Vanne and I would share was pitched near a small stream in a little clearing close to the lakeshore. Then, with about an hour of daylight left, I set off to explore the forested slope rising above the camp.
If I close my eyes, I can recall my utter joy as I sat in a clearing looking down at the lake shimmering in the evening sun. A troop of baboons paused to threaten me, barking at the intruder. There was the smell of a recent bush fire and the gentle falling notes of mourning doves. After supper around the campfire, I pulled my camp bed outside and lay looking up at the stars wondering if any of this could really be happening. Had my childhood dream actually come true?
During the months that followed, I sometimes despaired that our money would run out before the chimpanzees lost their fear of the strange white ape who had invaded their forest world—and that would be the end. But Vanne was always pointing out how much I was actually learning—how the chimpanzees made nests each night, traveled in groups of different sizes, ate fruits and leaves and flowers, and so on.
Vanne had to leave after five months—about a week before some twenty young men from Mwamgongo village, located to the north of Gombe, invaded my camp. They wanted to drive me away so that they could move into the reserve to cultivate the fertile valleys, and they were armed with pangas (machetes). Expecting to find me in my tent, they arrived at six o’clock in the morning—but, as always, I was already up the mountain. Thank goodness Vanne was not there, either. They cut down trees all along the stream and then left. I still remember the sick feeling I had when I got back and saw the devastation. Rashidi Kikwale, who had been appointed to accompany me into the field for the first few months, reported the incident to the authorities in town, and they came to fetch me in the Kibisi. I was forced to stay in Kigoma until the ringleaders, identified by Rashidi (who himself came from Mwamgongo), had been arrested and put in jail.
Then I returned to the forest, and soon after I saw David Greybeard, the first chimp to lose his fear of me, using grass stems as tools to fish for termites and even stripping leaves from a twig to make a tool. It was this breakthrough, the startling discovery that we humans were not the only beings to use and make tools, that prompted the National Geographic Society to make the first of many grants, enabling me to continue my research. Meanwhile, Tanganyika, which had been part of German East Africa until Word War II, made a peaceful transition to independence in 1961, under President Julius Nyerere. In 1964 it joined with Zanzibar to form the Republic of Tanzania.
In 1962, the National Geographic Society sent Hugo van Lawick to photograph and film the chimpanzees. This resulted in an article in their magazine and the documentary film Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees, which took the Gombe chimpanzees into the living rooms—and hearts—of people around the world. Two years later, Hugo and I married and our son, Hugo Eric Louis, nicknamed Grub, was born in 1967. By that time I had obtained my Ph.D. degree from the University of Cambridge in England. The Gombe Stream Research Centre was established, affiliated with the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, the University of Cambridge, and Stanford University in the United States, and many students from Europe and America, along with our well-trained Tanzanian field staff, were learning ever more about Gombe’s chimpanzees, baboons, red colobus monkeys, and so on. A major grant for this work was obtained from the William T. Grant Foundation. And the game reserve was gazetted by parliament as Gombe National Park, giving the area greater protection.
In the 1970s, the Ujamaa movement, initiated by the socialist government of Julius Nyerere, forced scattered communities to relocate into villages and practice communal farming. This resulted in rapid deforestation of the hills around Gombe as villagers tried to create new fields for their crops. At the same time, some of the refugees fleeing the ethnic violence that repeatedly broke out in Burundi (the border is not far from the northern park boundary) sought refuge in the hills around Gombe. And then civil war broke out on the other side of the lake in what was then Zaire. In May 1975, four of the students from Gombe were kidnapped by the rebel forces of Laurent Kabila and held for ransom. The money was paid, and they were eventually returned, but the incident led to the temporary closing of the research station to foreigners. All traffic up and down the lake was carefully monitored and a strict curfew enforced.
By this time, Hugo and I had parted ways, and I had married Derek Bryceson, then director of national parks in Tanzania. He made it possible for me to visit Gombe during that time and also helped me maintain the team of Tanzanian field staff, dedicated men who were able to continue regular observations. But because there was no Ph.D. scientist in residence at Gombe, the William T. Grant Foundation withdrew its support. The financial instability that followed prompted Ranieri and Genevieve (Genie) di San Faustino to set up the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) as a vehicle for fund-raising—initially solely to maintain the research at Gombe.
In 1986, during a conference in Chicago, researchers from across Africa presented information about the rapid decline of chimpanzees throughout their range countries due to human population growth, habitat destruction, and hunting. Chimpanzee infants had been captured in large numbers (by killing the mothers) initially for the international wild-animal trade (for medical research and entertainment) and subsequently as part of the burgeoning bushmeat trade—the commercial hunting of wild animals for food. At the conference there was also a session about the treatment of chimpanzees in medical-research laboratories and other captive situations, such as the circus, movies, pets, and so on. How could I continue my idyllic life—collecting data in the forest, writing papers, teaching at Stanford twice a year? I felt compelled to do what I could for the chimpanzees, and so I took to the road to raise awareness around the world about their plight.
Meanwhile, the situation in eastern Zaire remained unstable; refugees were continually arriving, some of them hiding in the hills around Gombe. In the early 1990s, I flew over the area in a small plane and was horrified to see the degradation of the land outside the tiny national park. How could we even try to protect the chimpanzees when people were struggling to survive? And so in 1994, JGI initiated the TACARE program, a community-based conservation program that has improved the lives of the villagers living around Gombe. Today, these villagers have become our partners in conservation. Trees are springing up on the devastated slopes, and through our Roots & Shoots programs in schools, children are learning about the chimpanzees and the need to protect them.
The Gombe Stream Research Centre has gradually grown again and, as you will read in the following pages, exciting new studies are ongoing. I get back there twice a year, though these visits are short. Yet, I can climb up to the peak from where I first observed the chimpanzees at a distance, or sit by the waterfall in Kakombe Valley, and recapture the wonder of the early days, renewing my energy, and absorbing the peace of the forest to sustain me for the tough months on the road. And although, along with Rashidi, Derek, Hugo, and my mother, my old chimpanzee friends have all passed away, their children and grandchildren are now roaming the forests.
One thing is certain: As the years go by, we shall continue to learn new things about these closest relatives of ours. And there will be more people—in Africa and around the world—who will join us in the fight to protect them and their forest homes.
