Behaviour And Beyond

In 1960, Jane Goodall travelled to Africa with the aim of integrating herself into a community of wild chimps.

- Sarah Begum

Now nearly 60 years on, with Goodall having been put forward for a Nobel Peace Prize, her observations have transformed the way we see our primate cousins.

How did your journey begin?

I was born loving animals. I had a supportive mother – she found books for me to read about animals, thinking that I’d learn to read more quickly. I read Tarzan when I was 10, and that’s when my dream began: to go to Africa, live with wild animals and write books about them. I never thought about being a scientist, because there weren’t women scientists doing those things in those days. It was wartime, we had little money and my father was off fighting, so Africa was a long way away.

I hadn’t been to college – I couldn’t afford it. We had just enough money for a secretarial course, so I got a job in London as a secretary. When I was 23, I was invited to visit a school friend in Kenya, so I gave that job up, moved back home and worked as a waitress in Bournemouth to save money for the sea voyage. It was in Kenya that I met the palaeoanthropologist Dr Louis Leakey. Somebody suggested I see him if I was interested in animals. Guess what? He needed a secretary. So that boring old course led me to a job with him. He was interested in knowing the similarities between early humans and chimps, and he eventually decided that I was the person he’d been looking for, for 10 years, to go to Tanzania to study chimps.

What do you think has been your greatest discovery relating to chimpanzees?