A few days ago, on October 1st, 2025, Dr. Jane Goodall, world famous primatologist, writer, and conservationist died. She was 91. She pioneered the long-term, in-depth field study of chimpanzees, and inspired a generation of primatologists and conservationists.
Not content with being a world-famous scientist, she also became an advocate for biodiversity, conservation, and that ever so hard to define idea, sustainability — so beloved of the UN, the World Bank, the Davos crowd and “development economists.”
If Jane liked you, things went well. If she did not, things would go badly, no matter how good or professional you were.
Jane ended life as a vegan, no doubt because of her campaign for animal rights and her Joan of Arc like crusade against unjustified medical experimentation on chimpanzees and other mammals.
Jane was a gifted writer and a charismatic speaker. She wrote mountains of words and mountains of words have been and will be written about her, as so much of her life was lived in the eye of the reading and TV watching public. In the 1960s and ’70s she was made a star by her film-making first husband and the National Geographic Society. I grew up watching documentaries about her and as an undergraduate in anthropology, I read her books.
By the time I got to work with her she was world famous. I got to know Jane well because she was my boss for just under two years. Her story is well-known and so I will give you only the bare bones before describing how I perceived her and what she was like to work with and for.
Jane was born into a prosperous and established English family before WWII. She dreamed of far away places and hoped to study primates in Africa (She once told me that she loved the Tarzan tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs and had romantic fantasies about him and his partner and her namesake, Jane). And so after the war she became secretary to the paleontologist and Kenyan Museum Director, Louis. B. Leakey in Nairobi, Kenya.
She ended up in Gombe forest in Tanzania (Tanganyika) on the northeast side of the lake, across from Congo, for Leakey believed that young, patient, single women would make better field workers than men. And, he felt that if they had not yet gone to university they would not be prejudiced by the intellectual fads of the day. Leakey hit gold with Jane.
Jane created a new paradigm in primatology, recognizing the individuality of and the unique almost human like sociability of chimps, their culture, and ability to use tools as well as their aggressive sides. With the publication of her superbly written bestseller In the Shadow of Man in 1971, while becoming a scientific rebel and innovator, she created a new paradigm for primatology, also becoming a conservation star.
The last time that happened was when Charles Darwin became a world-famous public intellectual after he published On the Origins of Species in 1859. Unlike Jane, Darwin “backed into the limelight” whereas Jane basked in it.
Jane inspired a generation of younger primatologists and given her good relations with the Tanzanian government insured that Gombe National Park was open for long term fieldwork by foreigners and a new generation of younger Tanzanian primatologists.
Jane established the American and Tanzanian NGO, The Jane Goodall Institute (JGI), to coordinate and protect this scientific work, which is ongoing. In her senior years Jane did a reasonably good job keeping up with the exploding literature on primatology and the conflicting inferences that we draw from it, in order to make sense of aspects of human behavior that may be prehuman, reflecting in some way the behavioral evolution of our hominid ancestors which was Leakey’s plan from the start.
Stack of Jane Goodall books on a shelf (Geoffrey Clarfield for The American Spectator)
She also created Roots and Shoots; a grass roots conservation club for youth which focuses on doable local projects like cleaning up beaches. It is not glamorous, but it gives people something to do in a world where we have little control over garbage and pollution.
Whenever I visited her at her house in the Indian Ocean in Dar es Salaam I would bring my young son who was a teenager at the time. After tea and cake Jane would say, “OK, let’s go to the beach and collect some garbage,” and off the two of them would go to make a dent in an ocean of pollution. I was touched and delighted.
Unfortunately, my job was difficult and challenging. Coming from a background in field anthropology, rural development and project management, Jane and her Board of Directors hired me to become the Executive Director of the Jane Goodall Institute in Tanzania as the Board had only a hazy idea of what JGI actually did, who did what and how the funds were raised and used. They wanted me to find out and get things organized.
I divided my time between Gombe and the town of Kigoma on Lake Tanganyika with ten days a month back in Dar es Salaam working on Roots and Shoots. I was hired at the same time as a gifted accountant who became my go-to person from the get-go.
Freddy and I were outsiders trying at the same time to bond with, understand, evaluate and to be blunt, audit a staff of more than 60 workers managed by a small cadre of expatriate and Tanzanian project managers who had been organically hired by Jane over time because she got along with them personally.
For me, the job was a discovery process. I got to see Tanzania from the perspective of Lake Tanganyika, got to know the various UN staffers based there who were dealing with the daily arrival of hundreds of Congolese refugees fleeing from the civil war in the DRC. Our Roots and Shoots local branch worked with some of the refugees in the camps on the Tanzanian side. I got to know the staff at JGI, members of other NGOs and, little by little, discovered what JGI employees did and did not do.
My first report shocked my Board of Directors because I explained to them that 95 percent of all funding came from Jane’s lecture series, as she often gave two to three lectures a week flying all over the world wowing and charming her audiences. For example, she would often go on stage and before she said a word would do a perfect imitation of Chimpanzee forest calls. She would then say, “That was from the Chimps as they are unable to communicate with you directly.”
Of course, this brought down the house. She encouraged staff members to do the same. Having a bit of background in undergraduate theatre, when I represented the Institute at a conference in Johannesburg, I did the same. It certainly created interest and excitement among otherwise staid conservationists and biologists.
Despite being a brilliant field worker and natural historian, everything about her and her work was personal. Not surprisingly, as her genius was to look at chimps like people, she even gave them names!
If Jane liked you, things went well. If she did not, things would go badly, no matter how good or professional you were. Jane had her favorites and less so and for the first eight months of my tenure I was her go to for crisis management. But she also knew how to have a good time.
When she visited Kigoma we would often have dinner with senior staff and junior staff would then join us for tea, coffee, beer, and whiskey. Jane could certainly hold her liquor and became playful and talkative, although in most cases she had to be the center of attention throughout the evening.
Occasionally but rarely, I could break this spell, and so one evening I told her I had written a song about her called Forest Full of Chimpanzees. It is a Beach Boy-like celebration of Chimps and Gombe with a stirring chorus that everyone learned to sing quickly. Jane joined in, being a little tipsy, and danced to it while I played guitar and sang this tune. Jane had charm and when she turned it on, she was at her playful and maternal best. Here is the chorus. I have a recording of the song somewhere on a CD.
Chimpanzee, chimpanzee
If you show up often
I will put you in my Phd
Chimpanzee you belong with me
I am rolling and a tumbling in a forest full of Chimpanzees
Her response to my song was a long and funny joke about Jane asking Tarzan to go hunt her some food. When he comes back with some birds and a couple of dead primates Jane cries out, “Oh Tarzan I love you. You brought me my favorite food—Finch and Chimps!”
As I entered the second year of my tenure as Executive Director it was becoming clear that a good administrative framework would have to be established to run the organization more effectively. I had a feeling that despite what the Bible says about The Truth Shall Make You Free, the truth that I was uncovering instead was eventually going to set me free from JGI.
But before I got to begin that challenging job Freddy and I finally began to unravel how the fiscal year often ended with so much unaccountable and missing expenditure. Simply put, JGI was spending money unaccountably and it was hard to track where some of the money was going.
Before dropping that bad bit of news on my Board, Freddy and I came up with an idea for JGI Tanzania that would free it from dependence on the very well-endowed American office in Silver Springs, Maryland. That office received the money from Jane’s lectures and who behaved in a way that because that was the case, they were the donor and we in Tanzania were the “recipient.”
Having coordinated a three-month study abroad in Kenya years earlier for a visiting group of Canadian university students, Freddy and I created a work plan to bring paying, visiting students from the U.S. to Kigoma and Gombe to study conservation biology with lecturers drawn from our staff and other scientific institutes in the country. We estimated we could earn more than $100,000 a year if we engaged two groups of 30 students for two semesters, fall and spring. The living costs in Kigoma were low and we were sure we could get the students to come.
Our own Board thought it was a fine idea, but not surprisingly the “head” office in Silver Springs nixed it, as they did not want us to have our own income stream and act independently. They preferred that they appear as the donor, and we would behave like the “implementing partner.”
As Freddy’s forensic accounting skills and local sleuthing began to point out that the disappearing funds may have had something to do with the local suppliers of goods and services to our projects, we had to decide to alert our Board to this possibility. Things could not go on as they were, as expenditures were hard to track and we had to find the underlying cause of this.
By now the excitement of working with and for Jane was not worth the effort and risk of recommending and implementing a proper forensic audit. Doing so would make me persona non grata with all my staff and certainly stir up hostility against me with the local authorities and the local private sector. I was not up for that fight.
And so, after conferring with my wife I wrote up a confidential report to the Board suggesting a restructuring. I recommended that all positions in the organization be redefined, and everyone (implying me as well) must apply for new defined positions with contract limitations and annual performance reports, against a budget and work plan that is monitored and audited. That is standard operating procedure for any good NGO. Once I presented this plan it did not go well. Jane lost contact with me and my Board would not commit to the way forward. Soon after, I resigned.
Just before I left JGI I got a call from a staffer at the British High Commission, a young woman named Pippa. Ushered into her elegant office at the new EU building in Dar es Salaam in her ever so casual and indirect British way she told me that the British government is looking for a way to raise Jane’s profile. She said they wanted to make her a knight, which is to say a Dame, which is the female honorific in Britain.
My demotic Canadian side missed this subtle cue and so I simply said, “Is there something that you are asking me to do?” “Yes,” she said. “If you, as an outsider to the British system and as her Executive Director, recommend that she become a Dame we can then respond to this outside an objective request. “Oh” I replied. “I will email you something by Monday.”
I have a copy of that email in my files. It begins,“On behalf of the Jane Goodall Institute of Tanzania I would like to recommend our patron, Dr. Jane Goodall for the DBE …” I then spend a page and something explaining why and then surprise, surprise, surprise they made her a Dame.
Once I left Kigoma and returned to Dar es Salaam I began to consult for private companies and ended up at a cocktail party. There I ran into the former head of the Board of Directors of JGI, a wealthy and influential Tanzanian industrialist with an interest in conservation.
Thinking that he may be upset or angry with me that I did not take up the challenge of restructuring JGI, he offered me a drink and with a big smile said, “Thank you so much for resigning. I resigned after you did. It was just too much work to reform that organization and there are other things to do in life. “I was stunned and reassured.
A few short years ago I was in Tanzania on Safari with some friends. They insisted we visit Gombe. We flew by charter plane to Kigoma, took the boat across Lake Tanganyika up to Gombe, visited the chimps in the park and stayed in one of the tented camps outside the park that as Director, I had once tried so hard to prevent being set up.
There were few tourists there at this time of the year. The new Tanzanian Director of JGI showed us around, talked about their work and gave us a personal tour of Jane’s working area. He was quite articulate and hospitable. He asked me if this was my first time to Gombe. I said that I had been there before and was delighted to be here once again. He smiled, shook my hand, and walked us down to our boat.
I will miss Jane. However, I think that as her career moved forward, she had a naïve and misplaced hope that a corrupt United Nations could and should be a partner in her grass roots movement. No doubt her colleagues there may have motivated her to visit North Korea, which I think was a major mistake in judgement and a disservice to her organization.
Then again. No one is perfect and Jane has had a wonderfully positive influence on science and conservation. It is up to the next generation to build on her success. I often remember her on the beach with my son. They always hit it off.
It was personal, you know.
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