Day after day she went out into the bush and climbed into the steep valley forests of the Tanzanian interior. Setting out at first light, sloshing through streams and clambering the treacherous slopes in heavy rain, Jane Goodall’s mission was to get as close to the chimpanzees as possible and study them in the wild.
For the first few months she had little success. She could hear the chimps calling noisily to each other in the trees and stuffing themselves with figs but she couldn’t get close to them. They took one look at “this weird white ape” and fled, as she wrote in her autobiography.
But she persisted, wearing the same dull-coloured clothes every day and trying not to get too close too quickly, and eventually the chimps grew used to her.
One day – five months into her research – instead of running away, two large chimps she named David Greybeard and Goliath, peacefully went on grooming themselves in the sun.
A few months later, one of the chimpanzees took a nut from her open palm.
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And then she watched, spellbound, as David Greybeard stripped a twig of leaves and scooped it into a termite mound to pull up insects for him to munch on. It was the first clue that chimps made and used tools the way that man did.
“Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as human,” her mentor, the paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, wrote in response to her discoveries.
Her extended study and resulting book, “In the Shadow of Man”, was “a piece of research that changes man’s view of himself”, said David Hamburg of Stanford University School of Medicine, adding that Goodall’s “work with chimpanzees represents one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements”.
A toy chimpanzee called Jubilee
The rugged forests of Tanzania were an unusual place for a young single girl from the British seaside town of Bournemouth to be spending her time in the 1960s.
But then Goodall, born in London in 1934, had been passionate about animals since childhood.
At the age of 4, she locked herself in the henhouse for five hours to observe the laying of an egg while her anguished parents searched for her high and low and her mother rang the police.
Her most beloved childhood possession was a toy chimpanzee called Jubilee and she had dreamed of living in the African bush among wild animals since she was 8 or 9 years old.
After leaving school at 18 and juggling jobs as a secretary and waitress, she saved up enough money to visit a school friend at her family farm in Kenya in 1957.
During her African trip, she was advised to look up Leakey, curator of what was then the National Museum of Natural History in Nairobi.
Taken by her passion for animals, Leakey hired her as his assistant secretary on the spot.
But he was also looking for someone with “an open mind” and “monumental patience” to make a study of chimps in the wild in the hope that this might lead to new insights about the behaviour of early man.
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Leakey wanted someone whose mind was not “cluttered up by the reductionist thinking of the animal behaviourists of the time” and he felt that someone like Goodall would be more open to recording what was directly in front of her, rather than trying to prove or disprove some hypothesis.
Impressed by Goodall’s observational skills and tenacity, he asked her to take on the chimpanzee project in Tanzania, while choosing Dian Fossey to study gorillas in Rwanda and Birutė Galdikas to study orangutans in Borneo. The three became known as the trimates or “Leakey’s angels”.
So in 1960, Goodall and her mother Vanne set up camp at the Gombe Stream National Park, on the shores of Lake Tangayanika, where she quickly established a routine.
Setting out at dawn to a spot where she could observe the chimps, she would spend all day watching them through binoculars, jotting down observations and recording everything she saw.
Goodall viewed the chimps as sentient beings and gave them names – Mr McGregor, Flo (who was given her own obituary in The Times) and her daughter Fifi, and her beloved David Greybeard – an approach that earned her accusations of “the worst kind of anthropomorphism”.
Indeed scientists – usually men – often tried to discredit her work as “that of a young, untrained girl” because at the time she had no scientific qualifications (she later went on to earn a PhD in ethology from Cambridge), claiming that the blonde, slim, athletic Goodall only won grants “because of her legs”.
But Goodall was never bothered by male criticism – or accusations of “being difficult” – and felt that if her legs earned her publicity for the chimps, then so much the better.
“It actually doesn’t take much to be considered a difficult woman. That’s why there are so many of us,” she once said.
But in 1962 she was nonetheless perturbed to hear that National Geographic, which was then financing the study of the chimps, was sending a photographer, Hugo van Lawick, to document her work with them.
She often spoke of the delight that she felt at being alone in the forest and loathed the idea of someone imposing on her solitude.
But van Lawick had a quiet voice, they both loved being out in nature and the work they were doing, and they just “got on very well”, she said. He proposed to her by telegram as soon as he’d left Gombe.
Meanwhile, the emboldened chimpanzees drew closer and closer to her camp. At first they came for the bananas, and then they began to invade the camp in large numbers – stealing anything they could chew on – and enabling her to observe them in close proximity.
Goodall often said that her observations of chimps such as Flo – who were so playful and protective of their children – helped her to be a better mother.
But in 1962 she witnessed the “dark side to their nature” – that they could be brutal and vicious – with the chimps displaying aggressive competition that escalated into cannibalism and genocide.
Her son Grub, born of her marriage to van Lawick, had to play in a large wire cage as the chimps were known to eat other primates.
And as the camp at Gombe flourished, and welcomed students from around the world, there were other challenging times.
In 1974 she divorced van Lawick, who was spending increasing amounts of time making documentaries in the Serengeti, but they remained good friends. In 1975 she married Derek Bryceson, an MP and then director of Tanzania’s national parks. (Bryceson died of cancer just five years later in 1980).
And in 1975, three of her student helpers were kidnapped by a rebel group led by Laurent Kabila from what was then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, and held hostage for weeks until a ransom was paid – an episode she described as “the worst time” of her life.
From scientist to activist
But the real turning point came in October 1986 when she attended a conference in Chicago held by leading chimpanzee researchers and discovered for the first time the extent of rampant deforestation and the threats to the chimps’ habitats.
She learned about the trade in chimpanzee meat – escalated by the sharp increase in commercial logging and bushmeat hunters riding in on the logging trucks – and that chimps were being used for medical research.
“I went as a scientist, I left as an activist,” she said.
From then on, she traveled widely to lobby governments, visit schools and give speeches – barely spending three weeks in the same place – in a bid to raise awareness about the chimps’ plight.
In 1977 she founded the Jane Goodall Institute, a global community organisation that works to protect chimpanzees and their habitats, and in 1991 she set up the “Roots and Shoots” programme, which inspires young people around the world to be conservation leaders.
“The greatest danger to our future is apathy,” she told TIME magazine in 2002. “We can do something to preserve our planet.”
In 2017 she gave an online Masterclass in Conservation, which she opened in fluent Chimpanzee, calling and whooping what she translated as, “This is me, Jane.”
Indeed, Goodall saw her conservation work as “very much a paying back” for all the time she had spent in the forest.
“How many people are lucky enough to live their dream for so long? To be in paradise,” she said.
Goodall is survived by her son Grub, three grandchildren and her sister.