{"id":179540,"date":"2025-10-04T23:30:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-04T23:30:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/179540\/"},"modified":"2025-10-04T23:30:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-04T23:30:12","slug":"the-last-testament-of-jane-goodall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/179540\/","title":{"rendered":"the last testament of Jane Goodall"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was preparing to write a profile of Dr Jane Goodall, I never expected it to become a\u00a0tribute. Goodall died at the age of 91 on 1\u00a0October. She was in Los Angeles as part of a\u00a0North American speaking tour; the week before she had been in New York City, a keynote speaker at an event occurring alongside the United Nations General Assembly\u2019s annual session. She maintained a daunting calendar, often travelling some 250 days a year to share her message of environmental conservation and social activism.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When we met in July, I asked what gave her the drive\u00a0and the capacity for such a gruelling schedule. She\u00a0spoke of her deep love of nature and animals, and what she felt was the urgent call to preserve them: \u201cI\u2019m going to fight for that until I take my last breath.\u201d <\/p>\n

She was speaking from the book-lined drawing room of The Birches<\/a>, her childhood home in Bournemouth, a charming red-brick built in 1872 and kept by her sister and niece. \u201cI truly feel I am coming home,\u201d she said of her fondness for the house, which she left in 1953 to attend secretarial college in London. \u201cMy favourite tree, up which I used to spend hours and hours, and read, and do my homework, is still there.\u201d She was happy to be back in the English coastal town \u2013 not that she would let herself be too distracted. \u201cI don\u2019t go into town \u2013 what for? I hate shopping!\u201d she laughed incredulously.<\/p>\n

\"GoodallGoodall at the Bournemouth National Science Society\u2019s museum \u00a9 Robbie Lawrence<\/p>\n

She was wearing her typical uniform \u2013 an olive-coloured safari jacket, her white hair pulled back in a ponytail \u2013 and surrounded by pictures of family. There was also an illustration of David Greybeard, the chimpanzee who would be so pivotal to her research in Gombe, Tanzania. We were speaking about the 65th anniversary of her arrival in Gombe and the pioneering research programme that has since become vital in the\u00a0field of ethology. Her work in illuminating the use of\u00a0tools by chimpanzees in the \u201960s was considered so groundbreaking that, as her friend and fellow field researcher Dr Anthony Collins put it, \u201cshe abolished the barrier between man and animal\u201d. A centre being built in Africa, bearing her name and intended to carry on her legacy, is set to open next year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel I get help from somewhere, whatever that great spiritual power is,\u201d she said of her mission. And she wasn\u2019t scared of the future. \u201cWhen you die, it is either the end of everything \u2013 you are gone, snuffed out, finished, or there is something. I happen to believe there is something \u2013 so I can\u2019t think of a more exciting adventure than finding out what the something is.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Over the decades, Goodall became a global icon: a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, United Nations Messenger of\u00a0Peace, a bestselling author many times over and the subject of numerous documentaries (a new BBC series is\u00a0said to be in the works for 2026). Her podcast series, The Jane Goodall Hopecast<\/a>, which ran for 34 episodes, included guests ranging from Margaret Atwood to US senator Cory Booker. Yet she was always very clear that fame was a means to an end.<\/p>\n

\"GoodallGoodall in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania, as seen here in the 1965 US TV documentary Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees \u00a9 1965 CBS Photo Archive <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not that icon out there,\u201d she said in July, in her diffident, soft-spoken manner. \u201cBut I realised it can help the mission \u2013 the mission to make the world a better place.\u201d There were, she added, \u201ctwo Janes. This one who is talking to you now, just me, sitting here rather weary\u2026 And then there\u2019s the other Jane, known by everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Born Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall in 1934, she was a carefree child. She had pet tortoises, clambered up trees \u2013 \u201cBeech\u201d and \u201cNooky\u201d \u2013 and was mad about dogs. At 12, she founded her own junior naturalists\u2019 organisation, the Alligator Club, and as a teenager was raising money to care for animals. It was her neighbours\u2019 pet dog that taught her, against the prevailing scientific logic, the lessons she would later apply to chimpanzees. \u201cI was told by learned professors, \u2018You can\u2019t talk about them having personality, mind, emotion, because those things are unique to humans.\u2019 Well, that dog had taught me that that was rubbish. You can\u2019t share your life with any animal and not know that we are not the only sentient beings.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"TheThe late conservationist Jane Goodall \u00a9 Robbie Lawrence<\/p>\n

She was fascinated with Hugh Lofting\u2019s Dr Dolittle, Kipling\u2019s The Jungle Book and Edgar Rice Burroughs\u2019 serial starring Tarzan of the Apes \u2013 fantastical tales of jungle living, side by side with wild animals (copies of these were still in the Bournemouth house). Around the age of eight, the young Jane let it be known to her family she planned to go to the forests of Africa; an offer from a former classmate to stay on a family farm outside Nairobi allowed her, at 23, to realise her childhood dream.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Three years later she would arrive in Gombe and her life would change again. She met Louis Leakey, the brilliant paleoanthropologist, in Nairobi and was hired to study the wild chimpanzees. \u201cThe first day after we\u2019d put up our tents,\u201d she said, \u201cI had time by myself to climb up a slope opposite to the camp and sit there. I saw a baboon troop and a monkey, and it was like, \u2018This is it.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"GoodallGoodall observing a field of baboons, 1974 \u00a9 Fotos International\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Within four months, in November 1960, after many solitary hours spent watching from afar, she was permitted by one chimpanzee, David Greybeard \u2013 so named for his streak of white facial hair \u2013 to get close enough to observe him stripping leaves from a twig, then inserting it into a termite mound and twisting it around before pulling it out and eating the insects that had latched onto it. It was a discovery of great significance. Leakey famously cabled back to Gombe: \u201cNow we must redefine \u2018tool\u2019, redefine \u2018man\u2019, or accept chimpanzees as humans.\u201d Goodall would go on to observe chimpanzees eating meat and engaging in acts of violence towards each other, all radical discoveries that would reshape human understanding of animal behaviour.<\/p>\n

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The span of her life and work will be presented in Dr Jane\u2019s Dream: The Goodall Centre of Hope<\/a>, a cultural and educational centre located in Arusha, a popular safari staging ground at the crossroads of Mt Kilimanjaro and the Serengeti National Park. After years of planning, the centre \u2013 whose design involved African artisans and former Walt Disney Imagineers \u2013 is now complete. There will be exhibits dedicated to Goodall\u2019s early days in Gombe \u2013 including \u201ca replica of the ex-army tent that mum and I shared\u201d \u2013 alongside others focusing on chimp behaviour and animal intelligence. The space interweaves personal history with her wider manifesto: Dr Jane\u2019s Dream aims to be more than a museum or archive, instead positioning itself as a hub for future generations to continue Goodall\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

\"GoodallGoodall with a chimpanzee in the Gombe National Park in Tanzania, 1972 \u00a9 Bettmann Archive<\/p>\n

\u201cThe centre is truly about education and hope,\u201d says Saifuddin Khanbhai, a philanthropist and jewellery entrepreneur who donated the site on which it is being built. Khanbhai founded the Arusha Cultural Heritage Centre, located on five acres, in 1994 to promote African culture and its preservation. Dr Jane\u2019s Dream will sit alongside several buildings and workshops already on the\u00a0grounds. \u201cI think it is our duty to promote her legacy,\u201d\u00a0says Khanbhai. \u201cWe need her message, her work to be encompassed in a place.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recent political developments have only added a sense of urgency to the work of the non-profit organisations that must now operate without Goodall as their global figurehead. JGI \u2013 the Jane Goodall Institute<\/a>, founded in 1977 \u2013 operates 26 chapters globally. In February, as part of the Trump administration\u2019s wider move to reduce USAID\u2019s footprint globally, JGI Tanzania received an official termination letter from the US government. It rescinded a five-year award totalling $29.5mn in grant money. For Alice Macharia, JGI\u2019s director of Africa programmes, the loss of funding \u201chas led to a significant reduction in the scale of implementation of our integrated community-led conservation and development efforts\u201d (among them TACARE, which seeks to help residents of the local villages that dot the shoreline of Lake Tanganyika).<\/p>\n

\"GoodallGoodall at the Bournemouth Natural Science Society\u2019s museum \u00a9 Robbie Lawrence<\/p>\n

Goodall was clear-eyed about the coming dangers. \u201cI\u00a0see nature being destroyed all around the world,\u201d she said. \u201cI have three grandchildren [Goodall married twice,\u00a0and had one son], and what we are doing is stealing\u00a0our children\u2019s future… We still haven\u2019t learned to\u00a0treat animals with respect.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Recommended<\/p>\n

\"Samburu<\/a><\/p>\n

Yet she remained undaunted. \u201cI guess I\u2019m obstinate,\u201d she said. \u201cIn these times today, with what\u2019s going on in the world, we must not give up, and instead fight harder for truth and justice. If you lose hope, then we are doomed.\u201d Her message for those who would listen was clear: \u201cYou must not give up. You must do your bit.\u201d<\/p>\n

All we can do now is take heed. Goodall has done as\u00a0much as she can. \u201cDoes it sound weird if I say to you\u00a0I\u00a0think I was put on this planet with a mission?\u201d she\u00a0asked, her eyes twinkling. Her message of hope stayed\u00a0bright until the end.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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