Jane Goodall’s legacy of courage and hope

By now, you don’t need reminding who Jane Goodall was and will forever remain. By now, the past months’ global outpouring of grief over the death of a messiah for nature has played itself out on your screen or newspaper many times a day. Jane. Jane. Jane.

Maybe you’re stirred by a planet in distress. Maybe you’re not. But suppose you are, then you probably recall not only where you were when you found out that Our Burning Planet’s Hero of the Year had left us. You probably recall precisely how you felt when you heard or read the news. Invincible, forever-there Jane — gone, gone, gone, when we least needed her to leave.

Primatologist Jane Goodall, who died on 1 October at age 91 while on tour in the US, bridged the chasm between humanity and the rest of the natural world by documenting tool use in chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. She held up the mirror, showing Homo sapiens that we were less unique than we had thought.

Of course, the Canadian author Malcolm Gladwell argues that high-achieving “outliers” are as much a product of their innate and honed abilities as they are the result of their birthplace, support network and capacity to speak to the questions of their time. That’s a kind way of saying most Janes — and there are many unsung ones — don’t stand a chance of being the kind of Jane whose loss the world has so deeply felt.

Story gold

Goodall was a product of her time. The glaring contrast of a young, blonde English rose braving wildest Africa, as it was romanticised then, would almost inevitably grip the Empire’s imagination — not forgetting this Jane was also the darling of 1960s National Geographic’s publicity vehicle. Jane, as we say in journalism, was story gold.

Thanks to her fieldwork in Gombe, she was allowed to study for a PhD at Cambridge without obtaining groundwork degrees like other Janes who had presumably done some fieldwork, too.

But maybe that’s where her luck ended. That is because one might imagine an entirely different version of Jane — one fading away into relative obscurity as a scientific footnote after she made her extraordinary observations on primate intelligence.

Despite having all the fortune in the world, such as the backing of the Kenyan palaeoanthropologist Louis Leakey, such a Jane could have refused to leave the peace of the forest and the chimpanzees she loved so profoundly.

Given the unfolding chaos elsewhere, that would have been an intellectually bipedal thing to do. She’d earned the right, after all.

In interviews, Goodall revealed she was depressed by ecological collapse and sometimes didn’t feel like getting out of bed. And perhaps it is precisely this that set this Jane’s life apart.

The Jane Goodall mourned by the world today refused to stay in bed.

Day after day, for six-and-a-half decades, the primate scientist swung her feet out of bed, pulled her hair back into the time-saving ponytail that never changed and devoted her exceptional smarts and fortitude to the planet that sustains us.

By the time the UN Messenger of Peace closed her eyes for the final time, she’d also written more than 27 books for adults and children, established an eponymous institute and the Roots & Shoots youth programme — projects recognised for their global impact.

Maverick defiance

As gentle as she seemed, her legacy was one of maverick defiance: she persisted in primatology when there were almost no other women in the field. She bit her opposable thumb at scientific rules by naming her subjects — and seeing us in them.

“When, in the early 1960s, I brazenly used such words as ‘childhood’, ‘adolescence’, ‘motivation’, ‘excitement’ and ‘mood’, I was much criticised. Even worse was my crime of suggesting that chimpanzees had ‘personalities’. I was ascribing human characteristics to non-human animals and was thus guilty of that worst of ethological sins — anthropomorphism,” she noted in her essay for The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity.

“Certainly, anthropomorphism can be misleading, but it so happens that chimpanzees, our closest living relatives in the animal kingdom, do show many human characteristics.”

Perhaps the only missing link in the biography of this peerless icon is why Goodall had to leave us in the very year that Donald Trump returned to the White House to morph the world’s largest democracy into a brazenly ecocidal authoritarian regime.

Why, why, why?

Jane Goodall left us in 2025 because her work on Earth was done. She lived to show the “intelligent” ape what to do in times like these. For it is only by refusing to give up on the frail but resilient blue dot that we, Jane’s students, can do justice to what she sacrificed.

It is the only way we can look in the mirror she held up for us and consider ourselves fully human. DM

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This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.