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Transcript:
Last week, English primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall died peacefully in her sleep at the age of 91, and so while sad, this news offers me a unique opportunity: to make a second video in a month where I get to talk about Bigfoot.
Okay, it’s not the most important aspect of Goodall’s legacy but it obviously is one close to my heart: several times over the years, Goodall went on the record to say that while she didn’t outright believe Bigfoot existed, she couldn’t necessarily discount it. For instance, it most recently came up in an interview with GQ in 2021, when she said, “I was in Ecuador. We’d flown for two solid hours over unbroken forest in a small plane and we visited four tiny little communities. 30 to 50 people, no roads, and they communicate with each other by means of like in the old days—it was the town crier, but these are hunters actually, and they carry the news from one village to another and letters and things like that. So I had an interpreter and I said to him, “When you next meet one of these hunters, could you ask if they’ve ever seen a monkey without a tail?” Three of the hunters came back and said, “Oh yes. We’ve seen monkeys without tails. They walk upright and they’re about six foot tall.””
“Now this was an interpreter from the village. He knew nothing about Bigfoot, nothing at all. Every single country has its version. Yeti, Yowie in Australia, Wild Man in China. So I don’t know if it’s perhaps a myth that stems from maybe the last of the Neanderthals. But then is the last of the Neanderthals still living in these remote forests? I don’t know. But I’m not going to say it doesn’t exist and I’m not going to say people who believe in it are stupid.”
Okay, so a few things that raised some flags for me. For a start, you’re saying that someone in a remote Ecuadorian village knew English well enough to serve as a translator. How do we know he’s never heard about Bigfoot?
But even if he hadn’t, yeah, many different cultures around the world have this idea of a “wild man” or human-like creature lurking in the wilderness. That doesn’t mean it’s real. Anthropologists NOT named Jane Goodall have spent decades studying comparative mythology: why do different cultures independently develop the same types of fairytales with similar story structures? Why do they independently name their gods similar things and give them similar powers? Why do they come up with similar ideas for how the world was created? These studies are really interesting because they point to something that might be inherently human, something shared across cultures and time. Personally, I think that’s more interesting than “maybe there really is a big ape thing that defies all biological realities?” But that’s just me.
Oh, and before I get off the topic, here’s one more possible explanation: maybe that translator was fucking with her. A six-foot tall tailless monkey? Yeah, lady, they’re all over the place. One of them is my Uncle Carl.
All that said, even though I was initially disappointed when Goodall first gave her opinion on Bigfeet, these days I’m a little more sympathetic. It seems like she just had this naive, childlike hope that there’s something weird and interesting out there, and also it feels to me that maybe she was protective of “first world” colonists mocking indigenous cultures.
Which brings me to something that, unlike her Bigfoot interest, hasn’t been featured in the many news stories about Goodall’s life and work: how colonialism played a crucial role in it. I’ve been thinking of it recently thanks to Michelle A. Rodrigues, a primatologist and biological anthropologist who was inspired to go into that work in part because of Goodall. Years ago, she happened to watch the 2017 documentary Jane, and was struck by the narrative presented, of one lone white English scientist who braved the jungles of dark Africa to singlehandedly make landmark discoveries and conserve the threatened environment.
In an essay, Rodrigues presents what is left unsaid: first, the way colonialism is inextricably tangled in Goodall’s success. Her upbringing was middle class, but she was related to nobility who connected her to the Queen and allowed her access to Louis Leakey, the famed paleoanthropologist who sent her to British-occupied Tanganikya. Leakey himself was in British-occupied Kenya because of his Church of England missionary family colonizing “British East Africa.”
Goodall and her work were first famously photographed for National Geographic by Baron Hugo Van Lawick, a member of the Dutch nobility who grew up in the “Dutch East Indies,” now known as Indonesia. She later married him, making her a Baroness.
Rodrigues doesn’t mention this, but Goodall’s second husband was Derek Bryceson, the only white British member of the Tanzanian parliament and the director of their National Parks system at the time they met.
None of this diminishes Goodall’s incredible legacy, just like my own comparatively tiny accomplishments aren’t diminished by acknowledging that I have benefitted wildly from white supremacy and a comfortable middle class upbringing. But as Rodrigues points out, ignoring the colonial elephant in the room leads directly to these accounts ignoring the important work done by the people around Goodall: the Tanzanian scientists working in the background, and the locals who worked just as hard alongside Goodall to protect their fragile ecosystem. They were there, and are still there, and I can’t name a single one of them.
And the thing is, I think Goodall would have loved for the press to focus more on those people. In recent years she became more and more outspoken about how she was able to accomplish so much thanks in large part to being a beautiful white woman, a double-edged sword that led her male peers to dismiss and harass her but the press to celebrate her. She even started to comment upon colonialism itself, in the way that more powerful countries profited off of the destruction and subjugation of Africa, its people, its flora and fauna. Unfortunately, a lot of that ended up in her 2013 book Seeds of Hope, a mess of plagiarized garbage that had to be delayed in order to remove stolen passages from Wikipedia, the Choice Organic Teas website, and an astrology site. Yikes.
But in the book that was eventually published, but few probably read for good reasons, she acknowledges both the importance of indigenous knowledge and how colonialism exploited and destroyed the global south. I don’t think she would have objected to a documentary that, as Rodrigues puts it, tells the “stories-behind-the-stories.” After all, one of the great things Goodall did was to establish the Jane Goodall Institute, which sponsors a lot of conservation projects around the world but is particularly focused on community activism, sponsoring and educating young people in Tanzania, in Uganda, in Ecuador and Malaysia and Papua New Guinea to empower them “to take action to make the world a better place for animals, people, and the environment.”
Why wouldn’t she want the world to know the names of the people she inspired to carry on her life’s mission? Of course she would. She literally died while on a lecture tour, during which she delivered her last words, which were a call for hope and for her legacy to continue on after her.
So while it’s sad that Jane Goodall has died, it’s worth remembering that despite the narrative in National Geographic and various documentaries, she was more than “just” her landmark research. She dedicated the latter part of her life to using her fame to spread hope and actually plant the seeds for new generations of environmental stewards, and hopefully one day we will know their names, too.
