I DON’T usually use my column for such greetings, but I think today, Thursday April 3, is a special day, particularly for Dame Jane Goodall – happy 80th birthday, Jane! I don’t know when I first met and interviewed Jane, certainly back in the mid-80s I would think, but I do know that I knew immediately that I had the great privilege of dealing with a very special human being. She was soft-spoken and gentle, but extremely animated when talking about her favourite animal, the chimpanzee, of course.
It has always been her favourite animal, ever since as a young child growing up in London with her favourite stuffed toy, a chimp called Jubilee (she still has it). Her interest in nature seems always to have been there and it was to develop into a lifelong passion, and it still is. Just a few weeks ago she was in Cape Town with her stuffed chimp (I don’t know if it was the original Jubilee) talking about, yes, chimps and life.
She eventually became a full time professional primatologist following a jump-start with the legendary Louis Leakey in Kenya, and her project on chimpanzees at Gombe Stream National Park on Lake Tanganyika in western Tanzania became the longest running such study ever (45 years). Today she is not just Dr Goodall, but Dame Jane Goodall, and a UN Messenger for Peace as well. One of those messages in the front of one of her books*, “Only if we understand, can we care. Only if we care, will we help. Only if we help, shall they be saved”, she’s talking about chimpanzees.
Our meetings were just wonderful experiences (for me, anyway). I would have given her the subject of my intended interview, we would talk formally for perhaps ten minutes, then I would switch off the tape recorder and microphone and we would settle back and chat. It was those chats that would usually lead to me switching the microphone back on to record some of my best ever interviews with her.
I remember once in particular. We often discussed the quite amazing fact that we share more than 98.5 percent of our DNA with the chimpanzee (a statistic that some scientists dispute today, but never further than 95 percent) and it was always the similarities that we discussed – our ability to communicate, our social behaviour, our use of tools, our diet and even our often violent nature. One day, however, I asked Jane what were those all-important 1.5 percent of things that made us different? I know it was a very long chat, but I don’t think we came up with any exact answers.
Jane invited me to Gombe, but although my wife and I made it across the Serengeti almost to Lake Victoria once, we didn’t make it to Gombe. Anyway, wonderful memories and I hope you have a great day, Jane, perhaps sharing it with both humans and chimpanzees. Cheers!
* Through a Window, Jane Goodall, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1990.
