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Journalism of Courage
Ethologist and conservationist Jane Goodall remains an inspiration for millions of children. (Facebook/Dr. Jane Goodall) Jane Goodall, arguably the most recognisable primatologist in the world, passed away at the age of 91. She died peacefully in her sleep in Los Angeles, where she had been on tour.
Beginning in 1960 with her now legendary study of wild chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania, she reshaped our understanding of animal behaviour, pioneered community-based conservation and founded Roots & Shoots, a youth programme that remains active in more than 70 countries.
Goodall inspired millions, particularly young readers, to imagine lives in deeper relationship with the natural world. As she told Time magazine in 2018: “When I was a little girl, I used to dream as a man, because I wanted to do things that women didn’t do back then such as traveling to Africa, living with wild animals and writing books.”
The following childhood books helped propel her towards the forests of Gombe and towards history:
John Dolittle loves animals so much that his house is soon full of them. (Source: amazon.in)
Lofting’s eccentric doctor, who discovers he can converse with animals, gave the young Goodall her first glimpse of a world in which humans and animals might meet as equals. The whimsy of the story belied a serious idea that would underpin her later research: empathy as a scientific tool.
Orphaned as a babe in the African jungle, tiny John Clayton, the only child of Lord and Lady Greystoke, is rescued by a tribe of great apes.
Goodall admitted she was “jealous of Tarzan’s Jane”, wishing she could be the one in the jungle instead. Burroughs’s pulp creation may now read as a colonial fantasy, but for Goodall it offered an intoxicating promise: that a human life could be lived among animals, not apart from them.
The Jungle Book follows Mowgli’s journey through the Indian jungle.
In Kipling’s Mowgli stories, the human child raised by wolves blurred the lines between species, a theme that would echo throughout Goodall’s career. What began as bedtime reading became, in effect, an early field guide to imagining kinship across the animal world.
