The goodness of Jane Goodall

Until a few months ago, I would not have imagined that I would ever breathe the same air as Jane Goodall. After queuing up for over three hours and shuffling through restless sweaty crowds, I see her at the Mumbai LitLive Festival hosted at NCPA, Mumbai—right there, in front of me, shuffling nimble-footed, a shimmering light of a person; I am afraid to blink, lest she disappear. She walks onto the stage with her mascot—a soft toy chimp who has been with her on all her tours. This is what she calls her Hope tour, travelling across the world beginning from Mumbai, talking about her life, her journey, and through these stories, imagining the possibilities of an ecologically responsible world. Amidst her listeners are parents, children, aspiring scientists and researchers, readers and writers, and I, who grew up reading about Goodall and her chimpanzees in our school textbooks. 

As a witness to a world where climate change was slowly turning into reality and capitalism threatened agrarian societies, Goodall pursued a very intriguing question in her primate research—how was it that apes were very much like humans? This, as opposed to the prevalent theories in her discipline that assumed that these two species evolved in opposite directions. Her question provided a simple twist to the human-centric narratives of our world—where we either strive to prove the superiority of human beings over animals or try to valorise animals from the high ground of humanity. 

Goodall presents us with a very interesting question—if apes are in fact as angry, as violent, as caring, as loving, and as communicative as human beings, then why not see us in them and why not see them in us? Untouched by academic methodologies, there is a certain lived wisdom of knowing from the field that Jane has been encouraged to inculcate by her mentor and collaborator, Dr Louis Leakey, throughout her research at Gombe National Park in Kenya.  A certain heart, a certain feeling, is what she calls for all scientists to have when studying the world. Amidst several anecdotes of her time with her chimp and human friends in the forests of Gombe, Jane also recollects the challenges she faced and the support she had from her mother, who was the first person to believe in her journey, assuring her at every step and even accompanying her to the forest. Her mother would say to her, ‘Jane, with your binoculars you are learning far more than you realise about the chimpanzees’. 

Jane's sole focus was on gaining the trust of the chimpanzees, and for that, she observed, she needed time. 

This relational commitment of Jane to her community was unique in that it was not knowledge of others she was after. It was trust that she valued. She fondly recalls David Greybeard, the chimpanzee who showed her that they could use tools as imaginatively as humans. David, she says, was the first chimpanzee who shed his fear of Jane, for which she is forever grateful. Painting each of her chimp friends as having vivid personalities and being expressive in non-verbal communication, ‘kissing, embracing, holding hands, patting one another in reassurance, shaking of fists in anger, does that not remind you of certain humans we may know?’, Jane makes the entire auditorium laugh with amusement. Most significantly, she recollects how she faced fervent objections from the scientist community when, enrolled in her PhD for a formal degree, she refused to tag her chimpanzee friends with code numbers and instead insisted on giving them distinct names. 

Goodall’s comparative study, in which she had always wanted to prove that it was apes that were very much like humans and not humans who ‘evolved’ from apes, is a simple and powerful way to dismantle the overbearing discussions in humanities and social sciences that are based on the idea that humans and nature are separate from each other—a premise most probably constructed for the purposes of the commerce and capitalism of thought. After all, trust the clever human who only has to profit from knowledge enterprises that love to keep certain things unknown and then fund massive projects in order to ‘know’ these things? Nature often becomes the object of such enterprises. However, have we ever stopped and wondered how easily we reach out to the flower in the garden as compared to meeting another person in the eye? What is it that makes the former act feel different from another?

In Goodall, I felt as if I saw nature. In her simple attempts at understanding the questions from the audience, in trying to adjust her mic on the podium, and in trying to keep herself warm in her blue shawl, I saw a person who had transcended convenient social categories and chosen to just respond to the world with all her possibilities. In Goodall, I saw the glow of one who has learnt well how to wait, how to be patient and present, and how to observe so gently and quietly that one can see the arrival of understanding just like the break of dawn. 

That is the goodness of Jane Goodall.