Pan Africa News, 25(1): 11–12 (2018)

BOOK REVIEW

Following Fifi: My Adventures among Wild Chimpanzees:
Lessons from Our Closest Relatives
By John Crocker
New York: Pegasus Books, 269 pp.
Published in 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-568-5, $27.95 (USA), hardback

Among Chimpanzees: Field Notes from the Race to Save Our
Endangered Relatives
By Nancy J Merrick
Boston: Beacon Press, 254 pp.
Published in 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-8074-0, $18.00 (USA), paperback

William C McGrew
School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK(E-mail: wcm2@st-and.ac.uk)

In the early 1970s, under the leadership of Prof. David
Hamburg, Stanford University had a programme that sent
to Tanzania small batches of undergraduates majoringin human biology. At Gombe they spent months acting
as research assistants in ongoing studies of chimpanzees
and baboons. On the chimpanzee front, most students
focussed on the mother–infant study, collecting detailed
data on the daily lives of female apes with dependent offspring. Two of these students, Nancy Merrick and John
Crocker, went on to become physicians, and now, decades later, each has written a memoir, and Jane Goodall
has supplied a foreword to each book. Their books are
enlightening (for after all, how often do such young persons get such a golden opportunity?), but the results arevery different. (Necessary disclosure: I was at Gombe at
the same period in 1972–73 as these two authors, so myfirst-hand knowledge may be similarly impressionistic totheirs.)
Crocker’s is the more focussed of the two, going into
depth, in a three-part structure. Part One is a detailed
recollection of his experience, from arrival at Gombe onwards, for eight months in the field. It covers the first 104
pages, and Chapter 3 is a graphic account of a typical day
in the life of a student researcher doing focal-subject follows of chimpanzee mothers and offspring. He captures
the nuances of the experience, as well as the data collection. In the process, he formed a close friendship with
one of the Tanzanian field assistants, Hamisi Matama, tothe unusual extent that they later ending up going up Mt.
Kilimanjaro together. Part Two describes how Crocker,
as a family physician in Seattle, makes use of ‘lessons
learned’ about parental nurturing, as acquired from timespent with Fifi, one of Gombe’s most famous and influential individual chimpanzees. He shows how the simple
basics of intimate interaction as practiced by our nearest

living relations can be applied to the day-to-day practiceof family medicine. This is a modest application of suchknowledge, by comparison with more prominent andnewsworthy aspects of modelling the evolutionary origins
of human behaviour, such as aggression, technology, social structure, diet, etc., but insights abound. Part Three ofthe book is Crocker’s return to Tanzania and Gombe, 36
years later, in 2009, accompanied by his eldest son. Theirjourney combines curiosity about what has happened in
the meantime to Gombe and the chimpanzees, introducing
his son to the African bush, but most importantly, reunionwith Hamisi, and introduction to his family, after decades
apart. This is done most movingly and contributes to theoverall feel-good tone of the book.
The book is illustrated with 37 good colour plates
from past and present and has a useful 9-page index.
However, it gives no scientific references, even to Jane
Goodall’s basic work, so that readers who want such background information must look elsewhere (see below).
Merrick’s is a much more wide-ranging effort, although the two authors have much in common. She too
gives a personal, detailed account of her student time atGombe in 1972, taking part in the same study of motherinfant pairs as did Crocker. Her account of her first day
in the field shows her to be an articulate story-teller. This
opportunity for comparison of that research project in action is unusual, for example, in terms of allowing a sort ofinter-observer reliability. She too later takes her family toAfrica, for many of the same reasons, and her response to‘progress’ (that is, the development of tourism) at Gombe
provides a useful and confirmatory judgement. But
Merrick goes on to make several trips and not just to see
chimpanzees; an abortive trip to Karisoke to meet with
Dian Fossey must have been frustrating. Her accounts ofsmuggling a young chimpanzee out of Gombe and of the11Pan Africa News, 25(1): 11–12 (2018)
Gombe kidnapping by rebels from Zaire make compelling
reading.
The book then opens up in a variety of ways thatend of being an overall ‘state of the union’ assessment ofPan troglodytes. Wild chimpanzees, especially those infragmented forest segments, such as at Bulindi, Uganda,
get coverage that otherwise is scarce, by comparison withpopulations in well-known national parks. Refuges forconfiscated or orphanned chimpanzees, both in Africa
and in the West, get coverage, as do zoological gardens,
especially Los Angeles Zoo (although its Mahale exhibit,
which has no connection to the wild chimpanzees of western Tanzania, is not explained). All the major conserva-tion problems facing wild chimpanzees are aired, such as
the bush meat trade, and Merrick provides a useful list of
10 things that an individual person can do to help in ameliorating them.
The book has a useful 10-page index and nine pagesof chapter-by-chapter endnotes, in the form of references.
Disappointingly, it has no photographs, and the single illustration, a map, is problematic, failing to name Burkina
Faso and denying chimpanzees to Niger.
In summary, both books have much to offer as firstperson accounts by committed and insightful observers
taking a long-term view. Anyone wondering what it was
like to be a student in Gombe’s heyday of the 1970s willlearn more here than from any other source.
Received: 13 February 2018
Accepted: 14 March 201812