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Jane Goodall
By Anne Keehn
At the age of one, Jane Goodall befriended an earthworm, and tried to take it to bed. It was only when her mother told her that worms needed dirt to live that she let it go. At the age of four, she hid in her family’s chicken coop for hours just to watch a hen lay its eggs.
In the childhood years following her parents’ divorce, Goodall found inspiration and solace in the mythical stories of Tarzan and Dr. Doolittle. She wanted to live amongst animals in the wild, like Tarzan; she wanted to communicate with them, like Dr. Doolittle. To emulate storybook characters was a fanciful—though heartfelt—dream.
By the time she was a teenager, Goodall had decided that Africa was the one place where that dream could come true. The animals themselves were enough to spark the imagination. “All those elephants and giraffes and lions. There was nowhere else in the world like it,” she says.
Unable to afford a college education, Goodall attended secretary school, and spent a few prudent years working behind a desk. But when a childhood friend invited her to Kenya to visit her parents’ farm, Jane instantly quit her secretary job, found work as a waitress, and saved up just enough money for the trip. It was 1957, and Jane was 23 years old when she boarded a boat to Africa.
In Kenya, Goodall met prominent archeologist Dr. Louis Leakey, who was to become her mentor. Like a Dickensian benefactor, the well-connected, Kenya-born academic flung open doors of opportunity for the penniless young girl from London. For a brief time, Goodall worked as Leakey’s assistant and secretary. She accompanied him and his anthropologist wife, Mary, on a three-month dig in the Serengeti, her first of countless excursions into the wild.
In 1960, Leakey asked Goodall to study chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in Tanzania, then known as Tanganyika. Brimming with enthusiasm but inexperienced (she did not yet have a university degree), Goodall, in Leakey’s estimation, was nonetheless the perfect candidate, a free thinker unencumbered by the narrow teachings of academia.
The British imperial government, which controlled Tanganyika at the time, expressed trepidation at the notion of a young woman venturing into the African bush alone. “So my mother, who supported my every childhood dream, came with me,” Goodall recalls. “We lived out of one used tent; we had two tin cups. I had never really done anything like it before. But it felt so much like being home.”
Goodall’s methodology was unorthodox from the get-go. Instead of keeping an emotional distance from her subjects, as was the scientific doctrine of the time, she named each chimpanzee she studied. She gave them beautiful, evocative names like David Greybeard and Goliath. “I suppose if I’d have gone to school I would have been corrupted,” she says. “But it never occurred to me not to give the animals names. Why wouldn’t I? It was as natural as naming your child or your pet.”
In 1964, nudged along by Dr. Leakey, Goodall returned to the U.K. to become a Ph.D. candidate at Cambridge University. She remains one of the select few to attend the prestigious school’s postdoctorate program without an undergraduate degree.
Over the years, Goodall’s compassionate observations of chimpanzees yielded groundbreaking discoveries: chimps use tools, have social and familial bonds, and engage in warfare. Like humans, they have a propensity for love and a capacity for violence.
In the ‘80s, when she awakened to the rapid degeneration of chimpanzee habitats in Africa, Goodall’s work evolved into a life of social activism. She now travels over 300 days a year to campaign for environmentalism, conflict resolution, poverty eradication, and human rights. All these causes are entwined, she maintains, just as the fate of humans is entwined with the fate of animals.
“Chimps are such great ambassadors from the animal kingdom,” she says. “They make us understand that we are part of the animals, not separate from them.”
In 1977, Goodall established the Jane Goodall Institute, the world’s most prominent protector of chimpanzee habitats. She won the Gandhi/King Award for Nonviolence in 2001, and was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace the following year. She became a Dame of the British Empire in 2004, and in 2006 received the French Legion of Honor. Though she eschews the eminence that has come with her honors, she recognizes that her prestige affords her the ability to garner more funding and government support. Of all her accomplishments, G oodall says she is most proud of her Roots & Shoots program. Established through the Institute, it’s a grass-roots education and activism program with branches in 96 countries. Through the program, schoolchildren are encouraged to identify social and ecological needs in their communities, and act on them. “If young people don’t think they can make a difference, what’s the point?” she says. “Roots & Shoots, more than anything, is about how every single person can effect change.”
At 72, Dr. Jane Goodall has maintained the wide-eyed amazement at the world that sparked her curiosity as a child. There is no note of cynicism or world-weariness in her voice. Her expression in photographs is open and receptive. In her ever-smiling, everexpectant face, the world is reflected back as something beautiful and good.