Me, Jane

DALE MORRIS meets his all-time hero Dame Jane Goodall, renowned primatologist, anthropologist, author and UN Ambassador for Peace, but better known as the champion of chimps

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“I had an absolutely wonderful life when it was just me and the chimps,” Dame Jane Goodall tells me, while reminiscing on her decades of research into the social and family interaction of chimpanzees, in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania.

Jane has travelled to South Africa from England, where her base is a family cottage, to give a nationwide series of special lectures on how to positively change the world for the betterment of humanity and wildlife.

After her talk in George on the Garden Route, we’re chatting over a cup of tea in the nearby Le Jardin Country Guest House where she’s staying. Despite her global fame as a world authority on chimpanzees, she’s humble and soft-spoken.

“I grew up on Tarzan novels, you see. I fell in love with the idea of a life in the wilds of Africa, but sadly Tarzan married the wrong Jane, and so I had to do it all by myself.”

Do it all herself, indeed.

Way back in the late 1950s, young Jane Goodall became the first person infiltrate a group of wild chimpanzees, and went on to dedicate more than 50 years of her life to studying their behaviour.

In 1957, after saving money by waitressing, Jane travelled by boat from England to Cape Town and then travelled on to Kenya, where she met paleoanthropologist and archaeologist Dr Louis Leakey.

“He was unearthing fossils of our late hominid ancestors from the Olduvai Gorge,” she says. “And although his discoveries were defining our knowledge of human evolution, he wasn’t able to ascertain the behaviour of these creatures simply from their bones.”