Jane Goodall, page 49
Independence had come to Kenya Colony on December 11, 1963, a moment marked in Nairobi by a parade some quarter of a million people long and broad, hours of splendid tribal dancing, a dramatic lowering of one flag and raising of another, a proud assembly of paternal dignitaries, and so on. Kenya then entered transitional status, a twelve-month gestation period before it would emerge a year later as the Republic of Kenya, led by President Jomo Kenyatta. Malcolm MacDonald had been selected as the white-haired, pale-faced midwife to assist in that gestation and birth. Elected a member of Parliament at the age of twenty-seven, appointed a cabinet minister by the age of thirty-three, he had been sent by Winston Churchill to serve as high commissioner to Canada in 1941, a prelude to two and a half decades in high-level colonial diplomacy and administration. And now, as Kenya proceeded from independence to full statehood, MacDonald had been brought in as, in the words of one historian, an essential figure of “outstanding political deftness.”
He greeted Jane and Hugo upon their arrival at State House, ordering coffee and biscuits and peevishly accepting tea and no biscuits. The guests were shown to their “sumptuous suite,” as Jane put it, and had dinner that evening with Mrs. MacDonald and her daughter, since “H.E. was tied up with Prime Ministers.”
The following evening was taken up by a twenty-guest dinner to honor a retiring air force commodore. Jane wore a new black dress and let her hair fall loose around her shoulders, making, she thought, a strong impression. She sat to the left of the governor-general, with the commodore’s wife on her other side, and the three of them “talked chimp nearly all through dinner—the wife joining in & being nice & interested.” After dinner the women removed themselves for a civilized coffee and liqueur before the fire while the men followed MacDonald out to the garden, where, Kenya-style, they all stood in a row and urinated.
It was raining hard in Nairobi, and the rains extended south into Tanganyika and all the way to Gombe. The countryside was wet, rivers were flooded, and after Jane and Hugo had driven three quarters of the way to Kigoma, they were forced to turn back. They put the car, their supplies, and themselves onto a train and finally arrived at camp on April 14. They were soon joined by Jane’s newly hired secretary, Edna Koning, who had boarded the last passenger train liable to operate for some time, given that the tracks near Kigoma were covered by 20 inches of still-rising water.
The tiny object of all that rushed and rained-on effort, Flo’s baby (christened Flint), was, Jane wrote to Melvin Payne at the Geographic, “simply the most adorable little object you ever saw.” Jane, of course, had been “heartbroken” that she had not been there to witness the birth or the baby’s first days, but Kris reported that she had not missed much. For the first five weeks Flint hardly moved at all, remaining a small blob of squinting face and tiny hands that grasped Flo tightly. Then, according to Kris (as Jane relayed to Payne), two days before she and Hugo arrived, the infant began looking around “with intelligent focused eyes” and also began moving his arms. So, Jane concluded, “I think we were lucky and timed our arrival fairly well. He should take his first crawl in a couple of weeks!”
Jane was intending, she reassured Payne, “to start work on another arti cle in the not too distant future.” In the meantime, though, aside from the new baby, there were several other urgent matters, including the training of the new secretary. Edna Koning was the person who had sent Jane an impassioned message from Lima after the appearance of her chimpanzee article in National Geographic. It was an interesting letter, at once emotional and reasonable, but Jane may have been more intrigued by the almost perfect typing—and now the young woman was settling into camp as a secretary. In Nairobi, Hugo and Jane had acquired a “super tiney weeny tape recorder” and “the only typewriter like ours in Nairobi,” and Edna’s primary task would be to reduce Jane’s labor by transforming tape-recorded day notes into a typewritten evening journal. She would also handle the professional correspondence, starting with thirty letters to publishers hoping for a book about Gombe and the chimps.
Jane’s habit had been to spend many lamplit hours each evening transcribing the day’s scribbled notes into the more permanent record of a field journal, and it was a great relief to have Edna take over that chore. But far more pressing than the transcription problem was the provisioning one.
The old Banana Club method of feeding the chimps—scattering basket-fuls of fruit across the ground in a fairly haphazard fashion—had reached its logical conclusion the previous year. In order to reduce the squabbling and hoarding among chimps as well as their regular conflicts with baboons, Jane and Hugo planned to refine their control over the dispersal of bananas. In February, while Hugo was still in Nairobi, he had designed and ordered for £150 ten steel banana boxes that could be opened remotely with wires and levers—but when he and Jane showed up at Gombe in April, the steel banana boxes were not there. At the same time, Kris said that more chimps had been wandering into camp and had been boldly sauntering into the tent to find whatever was attractive inside, such as clothing and bedding. Kris had stuffed everything he could inside boxes. But then Goliath initiated a new fashion of chewing on canvas, and within a short while several of the chimps were gathering together in canvas-chewing groups, gnawing away at the tent, camp chairs, and camp bed. From canvas they graduated to wood, and by the time Jane and Hugo arrived that April, the apes had finished off a chair leg and the back of a cupboard. Far more disturbing, they had also started raiding the fishermen’s temporary huts on the beach and pulling out some of their clothing, creating the immediate possibility of a serious incident.
Clearly, Jane and Hugo realized, they had to locate the banana dispersions farther away from the beach and the fishermen’s huts, and they soon found an excellent site about a half-mile up from their old lakeshore camp, on a slight ridge. It was, she wrote home, the “most delightful shady place, palm trees overhead, and a lovely open space opposite where, we thought, when the long grass was trampled or cut down, Hugo would be able to film the chimps admirably.”
Using sheets of corrugated iron, Hassan built a chimp-proof banana store and a shaded sleeping hut big enough for a couple of African assistants. Once that construction was done but before they moved their tent and supplies up there, Jane and Hugo thought to show the new Ridge Camp to the chimps. “So we filled the store with bananas,” she wrote home, “and I came here at crack of dawn ready to seduce early chimps which might pass with delicious bananas. No chimps passed.” Hugo, still down at the old Lake Camp, contacted Jane by walkie-talkie around nine o’clock that morning and said that several of the apes were down there. He wondered whether to try tempting them onto the trail and up to the new place. She said he should. “So he picked up an empty box—one they sometimes have bananas in, walked past them—they ignored him—and then held the box up and sort of waved it at David. Good old David, immediately hoodwinked, gave screams of delight and anticipation.” Jane was soon hearing Hugo’s frantic and breathless voice on the walkie-talkie: “They’re coming!” She quickly began flinging bananas “all over the place as the excited screams and calls approached—and they came—a long string of black creatures all rushing after a panting and disheveled Hugo who was still brandishing the empty box. With yells of pleasure they fell on the new banana supply.”
Now that the apes had been introduced, it was time to ready the site for human habitation, first by leveling a meadow of tall grass. A small army of fishermen, hired and organized by Hassan, showed up with pangas and sticks and proceeded to cut, beat, and trample down the grass. They were soon joined by Jane and Hugo, who, having decided that trampling was best, held hands and danced in a trampling waltz. The next day they leveled a square of earth and erected their tent, soon piling all their equipment inside. They draped polythene over their books in bookshelves and locked up almost everything else in wooden boxes and crates. They also started folding up their beds and locking away their bedclothes every morning. (“I dread the day,” Jane wrote home, “when they suddenly realize that the clothes we are actually wearing are as good to chew as the ones they steal from broken into boxes and stores!!”)
Meanwhile, the rain continued to fall, at one point coming down that spring “as I never imagined it could rain.” Lazy little Kakombe stream was “transformed into a raging hurtling river, with enormous boulders being dashed along,” and Kigoma was cut off from the outside world, which meant that the town shops soon ran out of several essentials.
Along with the mail and equipment from the National Geographic, a new tent intended for Edna’s use was stuck in the floods somewhere between Kigoma and Nairobi. Without her new tent, Edna had to use the old one, still down at the Lake Camp. Kris had returned to England and his job at Kew Gardens by then, so Hugo and Jane could luxuriate by themselves in their tent at the new Ridge Camp. Naturally, they loved their “new little home” in all its romantic seclusion and blissful privacy. “It is really most super—we have our cosy supper and coffee round the fire—did I tell you we have bought a really elegant coffee percolator—one of those glass ones that push the coffee up and then let it down again? It is really most handy for out here because all you have to do is light a small flame, and remember to time it. And it makes good coffee. Then we come back to our cosy tent here.”
By the end of May, though, the rains had let up and the first mail train had been able to plow through the water into Kigoma. Edna’s tent finally arrived and was quickly erected up at the Ridge Camp. The new arrangement was, Jane wrote home on June 1, “rather sad—better really, from work points of view, but not so nice and cosy for us in the evenings when we had our own special little tent.” Still, it was “the most heavenly tent imaginable.” Poles in the middle and at the sides elevated the canvas roof high enough for a person to stand upright everywhere inside. Yellow mosquito-net windows on all sides provided “such a nice warm light all the time” and kept things breezy and cool during the day, and the rear of the tent opened into a smaller extra room with its own mosquito-net windows. The extra room was supposedly a washroom, but it was big enough to hold a trunk, a wooden stand, and a bed, and so it became Edna’s bedroom, while the main room served as a daytime storage area for books and papers, plant specimens, and extra clothes and a general workspace.
The Lake Camp, with its rather tattered, A-shaped canvas structure down near the beach, remained for some time the location of the clinic and dispensary. At the end of a hard day, Jane and Hugo would settle down before the fire at the old camp, tomato juice in hand, “only to be brought off our feet by a string of patients.” And every third night, approximately, an “extra large mob” (as Jane phrased it in her June 1 letter home) would appear, all of them “madly inventing ailments” while eagerly begging Edna to play her guitar. The two main instigators of this group were also guitarists, and after Edna had played a few songs, she would hand the instrument over to them. Then, “surrounded by an admiring circle,” they would play their favorite African songs until supper was announced, whereupon Dominic “shoos them all away.” But, Jane thought, “how they love it.” And as a result of Edna’s guitar and their hosting of the guitar nights, Jane and Hugo were frequently given hens’ eggs as gifts.
Not enough eggs, though, since old, bald-headed Mr. McGregor had developed “an absolute passion for eggs. If we even half open a container with eggs in it, when he is anywhere around, he simply rushes up, taking the shortest possible route even when this is straight through the tent and over someone’s legs, scattering wadges and cardboard in his wake, and grabs the eggs.” McGregor first revealed this strong passion when they were sleeping down at the old camp and one morning handed a couple of eggs to Dominic to boil for breakfast. The chimp happened to be “miles away calmly eating a pile of bananas,” but he “suddenly leapt to his feet, rushed, upright, to Dominic (who he is normally scared of) and snatched away the eggs—albeit with rather a trembling hand at his own audacity!”
So McGregor was the big bad egg thief; but there was also Pooch (who “will dare much for an egg”) and Fifi (“manages to get one very frequently”) and little Gilka, who liked to steal them as well, although since her mouth was too small to contain an entire orb, she would crack them, watch the contents pour out, and chew over the wet shells before spitting them out.
The birth of the Ridge Camp marked the beginning of a new system for banana provisioning (with a few eggs occasionally tossed in). Since the steel banana boxes Hugo had ordered in Nairobi had not yet shown up, he and Jane began experimenting with various alternative ways to distribute bananas, hoping, as ever, to reduce the jostling chaos.
First they tried hiding the fruit in trees and various containers—but most were soon found by a small band of determined specialists. Moreover, the chimps were still getting into everything else, and now that they were encouraged to come in and actually hunt for bananas, they were becoming even more intrusive and destructive. A chimp named Marina had gotten into the habit of pushing Jane aside whenever she opened the banana storage box, in order to dive in headfirst. Marina also ate Jane’s moccasins and Hugo’s gym shoes, and even tried Edna’s wooden-soled leather sandals. Then Peter Pan (soon known as Pepe) smashed open two big coffee thermoses as well as a large flashlight, just to see, it seemed, whether there were any bananas inside.
When, by late June or early July, Hugo’s steel banana boxes still had not arrived, Hassan began constructing a few concrete boxes with steel lids, which he planted in the ground at the new camp. Positioned so that the lids would drop open, the boxes were baited with bananas and the lids drawn shut by wires tightened remotely with levers. The remote levers were pinned into position, so that by pulling the pins, anyone could slacken the wires, allowing the lids to drop open and expose the bananas. The new de vices may have seemed a little Rube Goldbergish, but theoretically, at least, they enabled a person to release a controlled amount of fruit from a comfortable distance. Jane announced hopefully to Melvin Payne in a July 9 letter that as a result of the new system “already the situation is vastly improved, and we are able to cope relatively easily with the largest of groups.”
It was clear that the Ridge Camp and provisioning area were satisfying to the chimps. They seemed more relaxed away from the beach and farther into the forest, and Jane was soon watching several new individuals appear. The chimps were “more at home” there, she reported to Payne, and thus she was seeing more play among the mature individuals. In fact, so many new behaviors were cropping up that it was hard to keep track of them all. By July 9, Jane and Hugo had already twice watched the chimpanzees closely as they reacted to snakes. They were now observing the chimpanzees drumming: percussively punching and kicking the thin, high roots of a particular species of tree. They had seen Flo display just the way the males did: charging, dragging vegetation, slapping the earth or a tree. And they were discovering new chimp foods, including weaver ants, caterpillars, and a swarming kind of termite. The weaver ants were being consumed in “large quantities,” and Jane and Hugo soon discovered that they “have a most exotic flavour, and we are planning ways of marketing them as tropical delicacies!!” When the termites swarmed, the chimps would stand in the treetops and try to snatch them out of the air with one or both hands. “The chimps look rather strange when they feed in this way—rather as though they are signalling!”
But certainly the most important focus of attention that year was little Flint, who offered Jane and Hugo an unprecedented opportunity to record the development of an infant chimpanzee in the wild. By early July, Flint had, as Jane wrote home, “lots of teeth, upper and lower—about 6 in each jaw” and was taking “his first tottering steps—so far, not more than two before collapsing. However, he progresses, because, at first, he cried as soon as he collapsed so that Flo gathered him to her breast immediately. Now he keeps quiet, gets up, and tries again.”
Flo was occasionally carrying Flint around on her back, while Flint was increasingly interacting with other members of his family, especially sister Fifi. “Fifi now takes him more and more often, and is allowed to keep him for longer and longer periods. As she sometimes runs off with him and carries him up tall trees, with poor Flo puffing in pursuit, we can’t help feeling that this might be one of the reasons for the suspected high rate of infant mortality!”
Flo and her offspring had been important before, as members of the study community, but now they seemed central. The family also appeared to be one member larger than Jane had previously believed. As she expressed her thinking to Payne, “We have also come to the conclusion that one of the adolescent males, some two or three years older than Figan, is also a son of Flo.” Obviously, it was not possible to be certain, but Jane and Hugo had seen enough evidence to justify renaming the chimpanzee Faben, so that he fit in alliteratively with the rest of Flo’s family.
One important point is that Faben is the only adolescent male, with the exception of Figan, who is allowed to touch, and even play, with Flint. He is continually moving about with Flo, plays frequently with both Fifi and Figan and, believe it or not, with old Flo! The other day he was tickling her in the ribs until the old girl shrieked with laughter! And only yesterday we saw a never to be forgotten sight: Flo, Faben, Figan and Fifi (not to mention dear old Flint clinging on for dear life under his Ma) all chased each other round and round and round a palm tree, grabbing at each others ankles as they went. We all agree that we have never seen anything funnier.
Soon Flint could, as Jane wrote home, “walk about 4 steps without falling over.” Then, as she noted in a subsequent letter, “Flint can now walk! Tottering to be sure, but at least 6 steps, or bounds rather, before total collapse. He has found that the faster he leaps the more likely he is to reach his objective without losing his balance.”
