Jane Goodall: sixty years in the forest, waiting for chimpanzees to trust her
At twenty-six she walked into Gombe with a notebook and binoculars. Her method was patience itself — and the chimpanzees' trust rewrote the definition of being human. Sixty years later, an old friend still recognized her.
In 1960 a twenty-six-year-old Englishwoman named Jane Goodall walked into the forest at Gombe, in Tanzania, with a notebook and a pair of binoculars.
She had no university degree; she would earn one later. She had no research funding. She had a dream she had been carrying since childhood: to go to Africa and live among animals. The accepted method in her field at the time was to put chimpanzees in cages and observe them. She refused. She would sit in the forest and wait.
Waiting was her entire method. For the first months the chimpanzees vanished the moment they saw her; the closest she ever got was five hundred meters. She did not chase them. She did not climb after them. She set no traps. Every morning she climbed the same hill and watched through the binoculars, day after day. The local people told her to give up: the chimpanzees will never pay you any attention. "They don't know me," she said. "I have to let them get to know me first."
Four months in, it happened. An adult male she privately called David Greybeard did not run. He sat nearby and foraged, and then he did the thing that astonished the world: he took a banana from her hand.
Some time after that, through the leaves, she saw David push a stem of grass into a termite mound and draw it out with termites clinging to it, and lick them off. He was making a tool. He was using a tool. Until then, the definition of a human being had been the tool-making animal; the line between us and them was drawn exactly there. She sent the observation to her mentor at once. His telegram came back with one line: ha, now we must redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human.
She used the most patient method there is and made the cleverest discovery of the century: no traps, no cages — she made herself a quiet stone in the forest and let trust grow on its own.
She kept that research going for sixty years. Generations of Gombe chimpanzees were born, and she wrote their lives into book after book. She found that they feel joy and grief, that they embrace and kiss and hold hands, that they mourn their dead. She also found violence among them, and she did not gloss over it; she recorded what she saw. "The longer I observe them," she said, "the more I feel that the boundary between us and nature is much thinner than we imagine."
When she grew too old to climb in the forest, she flew around the world instead, more than three hundred days a year on the road, arguing for conservation. Roots & Shoots, the environmental education program she started, went into schools in dozens of countries and got children to begin with the small things around them. People asked what she was after. "Only if we understand, will we care," she said. "Only if we care, will we help. Only if we help, shall all be saved."
In her nineties she was still giving interviews by video, speaking slowly, her eyes clear. Someone asked what she was proudest of in her life. It was not the discoveries that rewrote the textbooks. It was a memory. Years later she went back to Gombe and sat on the same hill, and a chimpanzee came out from behind a tree and sat down beside her. The two old friends sat there quietly for a while.
"He knew me," she said. "In that moment I knew that all those silent mornings sixty years ago had been worth it."
In the end
Loving another species takes a rare quality: the patience not to demand anything back. Jane Goodall spent sixty years telling us that trust cannot be captured, only waited for — and that the trust which finally arrives can change how human beings understand themselves.