Going
Back to Gombe
By Jeremy O’Kasick |
The ferryboat looked like something out of The African Queen. It was 1972, and two graduate students, Stewart Halperin and Richard Wrangham, stood upon the shores of the second-deepest lake in the world, Lake Tanganyika, waiting to board the rickety vessel that would take them to Gombe Stream National Park.
The students intended to study chimpanzees under the guidance of the legendary primatologist, Jane Goodall. Over the next two years, Wrangham and Halperin became friends and colleagues as they lived among Gombe's steep hills and dense rainforests and immersed themselves in the park's chimp communities. Gombe Stream would change the course of their lives.
Different paths out of the forest
"He had more energy and discipline than anyone at Gombe," Halperin recalls of Wrangham. "He woke when the chimps rose from their nests and he would stay with them for 8-10 hours a day, almost every day."
Wrangham's dogged dedication in attempting to understand absolutely everything about chimpanzees is legendary. While at Gombe, Wrangham tried to convince Goodall to allow him to live and even eat like chimp. ("You'll at least wear a loin cloth!" Goodall reportedly told him when he suggested that he do so naked.) While the experiment turned out to be more of a challenge than he anticipated, Wrangham says he did gain a deeper appreciation for our closest relatives. He will also never forget his last supper at Gombe.
"Jane made me dinner by putting live termites in a jam-jar, covering it with paper that had holes, and giving me a grass stem so that I could fish for termites like chimpanzees," Wrangham recalls. "I did! I think she might have done so, too."
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Born in Britain, Wrangham first traveled to Gombe while pursuing his PhD in animal behavior at Cambridge University. Today, as a professor of anthropology at Harvard University, he is at the forefront of his field, having produced a number of seminal studies about chimpanzees and published a wide array of books about primates, evolutionary biology, and conservation. |
His latest work, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, proposes a radical new theory on human evolution and has been named one of the best books of 2009 by the Economist and the New York Times.
When not teaching at Harvard, Wrangham heads to Uganda where he continues his primate research and directs the Kibale Chimpanzee Project.
Behind the lens, in front of the monkey
For Halperin, Gombe became something more than the scientific research of primates. Having first spent a short time studying gorillas with Dian Fossey in Rwanda, Halperin became enchanted by the mystery and the aura of the forest and its landscapes.
"It always comes back to me as an idyllic setting where we bathed in the streams of Lake Tanganyika and lived on little slabs up in the mountains," he says.
Halperin noted that the research institute attracted many luminaries of photography, such as famed British filmmaker, Alan Root, and the Dutch wildlife photographer, Hugo van Lawick, who had been Jane Goodall's husband. He says he often found himself behind the lens of a camera while observing chimps.
"Time changes when you go to Gombe," says Halperin. "It pushes you into a new time and space and you have to learn how to be a good observer. It also taught me how to observe light and movement and to use the lens."
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Halperin went on to travel the world and to study photography under the famous Austrian photographer, Ernst Haas. Today Halperin’s collection includes some 120,000 color transparencies of fine art photographic prints and an expanding digital library, which ranges from stunning landscapes in New Zealand to dreamy abstracts in Italy, from wildlife in Key West to dramatic cultural displays in Brazil. For all his world travels, however, Halperin says his journey truly began with the chimps in Gombe. |
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Going back
Last year, the two friends considered what they might do for the 50th anniversary of Jane Goodall's first chimpanzee study in western Tanzania. It soon became clear to them both: they needed to go back to Gombe.
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In September of 2010, the duo will lead a return voyage to Tanzania to celebrate Goodall’s 50-year legacy as an iconic pioneer of conservation and research. Thomson Safaris has partnered with the Jane Goodall Institute to offer the historic 15-day trip with Halperin and Wrangham at the helm, guiding an exclusive group of travelers in habitats that range from the forests of Gombe to the plains of the Serengeti, from the grassy highlands of Ngorongoro to the sandy shores of Zanzibar.
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Travelers will learn from their leaders' fields of expertise, taking informal lessons in photography and engaging in discussions about evolutionary biology and animal behavior. Furthermore, significant trip proceeds will help support the outstanding conservation work of the Jane Goodall Institute.
Wrangham says he has many fond memories and he eagerly awaits the reunion and anniversary trip in September, noting that since their days at Gombe, Halperin has "always been the life and soul of the party, making people smile."
"It was mind-boggling and mystical and magical," recalls Halperin. "And the best part is now we get to go back and share those places and have new experiences."
"Going into the forest and viewing chimps is still a thrill for me," says Wrangham. "You never know when they will surprise you with a new kind of behavior, a new insight about what they understand about the world, or an unexpected emotion about another chimpanzee. They have such powerful feelings, all the way from sympathy and caring to disdain and cruelty. But they are never boring."
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