‘She nuzzled me like a chimpanzee’: The Jane Goodall I knew

Richard Godwin remembers a formidable scientist whose bond with primates led to her charismatic connections with people – and a daily Scotch for the voice

When you tell people you’re a journalist, they often ask who the best person you’ve ever interviewed is – and until I met the ethologist Dame Jane Goodall last year, I didn’t know how to answer that. There are people who are skyscrapingly famous or impressively eminent – but the encounter feels routine, prosaic. Then there are the times you extract amazing revelations from people no one’s ever heard of.

Goodall, who died aged 91 in California while on a speaking tour this week, was different. She has been commemorated in magazines, documentaries, a forthcoming biopic, scientific papers, Lego sets, as Barbie dolls and garlanded with honours. She is both a genuine scientific pioneer (in 1960, she became the first person to document chimpanzees making and using tools in the wild, for example), but unlike most scientists, has lived an improbable, glamorous, adventurous, rich, full, unrepeatable life.

I didn’t know if I would get close to any of this when I met her. You can forgive a 90-year-old for wanting to be anywhere other than a London photo studio, submitting to questions she’d already answered hundreds of times. In fact, within a minute, she was gently nuzzling me, to show how we would greet one another if we were chimpanzees: “I’m the female, you’re the big male and I’m a little bit nervous of you. So, I come up with a submissive akh akh akh! …And you’re completely quiet but you gently pat my head. That reassures me.”

We then talked for You magazine about language, religion, science, her wartime childhood, her racing driver father who ran away, her training as a secretary and then, being dispatched by the anthropologist Louis Leakey to Gombe Park, Tanzania, to just, like, find some chimpanzees and watch them for a bit. This took months, and she contracted malaria “30 to 40 times”.

She told me unprintable things about what she actually saw the chimpanzees get up to (“Of course, that made him laugh and laugh!”) and spoke movingly about her husband, Hugo van Lawick, who came to photograph her for National Geographic. We moved on to love and war and how chimpanzees mourn one another and how she liked to drink Scotch every day as it was good for the voice.

‘She spent her last decades travelling the world, trying to use her formidable knowledge, talent and charisma to change things for the better. Not by lecturing people and making them feel guilty. But by connecting with them’ (AP)

She described how the chimpanzees had a sacred space, a waterfall, where they would occasionally retreat to perform ritual dances, before sitting and quietly contemplating the water, reaching towards understanding. “What is this stuff that’s always coming and it’s always going but it’s always here? The sun, the stars… what are they? What do they mean? Once we have words, we can turn this feeling into something like an early animistic religion.”

Afterwards, I had the curious feeling that the entire wonderful conversation had taken place by this waterfall. Then it occurred to me that no human has perhaps ever spent as much time closely observing chimpanzees, our closest relatives, as she had. If you can land in the jungle and win the trust of a chimpanzee as a kind of species ambassador, you might just have a singular talent for making connections. It clearly served Goodall well as an environmentalist, as the many testimonies following her death have shown.

Goodall was by no means sentimental. At first, she said she venerated the chimpanzees. Once she had observed the complexities of their bonds, their capacity for empathy, self-sacrifice and even their deep depressions, she thought they were like unfallen humans: purer and nobler than us. Then she witnessed the group split and wage years of civil war: rape, murder, torture, often of former kin, and what chilled her was not the apes’ savagery, but the fact that the roots of human evil really do reach that deep into our evolutionary bedrock.

Goodall was often dismissed by the scientific community for doing everything wrong (though she did later gain a PhD in ethology). And yet most of the discoveries she made required imaginative, empathetic leaps as opposed to purely scientific ones – and I can’t help thinking these are precisely the sort of leaps required if we are to begin to repair some of the terrible damage we have done to the other forms of life with which we share the planet.

The destruction of the chimps’ habitats was clearly a deep pain. And yet she was hopeful and practical, like the best of her generation. She spent her last decades travelling the world, trying to use her formidable knowledge, talent and charisma to change things for the better. Not by lecturing people and making them feel guilty. But by connecting with them.

I asked what she believed happened after death. She wasn’t convinced it would be the end. “Living and dying – it’s a cycle and we’re in the cycle,” she said. “Maybe we have to go through different phases to get to whatever the end is. I don’t know. But that’s going to be the next great adventure, finding out!”