“I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up;
instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla… You make compromises in life; not every kid
can grow up to become president or a baseball star or a mountain gorilla. So I made plans to join the baboon troop.”
And with that introduction setting the pace, you get your
welcome into the life of Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford University professor who,
true to his word, went off to become a baboon.
Fascinated by the science of how group living effects our health,
Sapolsky traveled to Kenya and set up shop among a troop of baboons, who he
studied in depth, getting to know them as individuals and immersing himself in
their comings and goings. He shares his
experiences in A Primate’s Memoir: A
Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons.
By the time that Sapolsky got his start in Kenya, Jane
Goodall and Dian Fossey and Birute Galdikas had already been in the field for
years with their different great ape species, and we as humans were already
coming to terms – willingly or otherwise – with just how close we are
behaviorally to our closest relatives.
The baboon troop shadowed by Sapolsky – cheekily named after Old
Testament patriarchs – is full of societal drama, with constant upheavals and
plotting and back-stabbing and then surprising moments of altruism. It’s easier to think of the author as an
anthropologist or a visiting diplomat than it is a biologist. His research animals come across more as
people than impersonal study subjects, which makes the writing that much more
humorous and poignant – and that much more painful when something goes wrong.
Sapolsky doesn’t limit his musings to the lives of
baboons. He recounts all sorts of
experiences he’s had as an eye witness to a changing East Africa, from a failed
coup in Kenya to the struggle to unseat Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. He fills his stories with a colorful cast of
characters, from a Leonardo-like genius of a camp assistant who dazzles him
with his brilliant camp innovations to a surly hyena biologist who warms up
with the chance to share his favorite animals to Maasai warriors, struggling to
figure out where they fit in a changing world.
For an American or European, writing about your experiences in Africa
can always be a little tricky – you are, of course, writing from a position of privilege
and there is always a risk that some patriarchal colonialism will seep into
your story. Sapolsky does a better job
than most – his narrative introduces us to a host of Kenyan characters from
different cultures who he writes of as individuals with unique lives and
stories and personalities, not as some monolithic “African” culture as many
writers in his shoes do.
Science, even when written for a popular audience, can be a
difficult pill for some readers to swallow.
Fortunately, Robert Sapolsky does a pretty good job of dousing that pill
with chocolate. He is genuinely one of
the funniest nonfiction writers I’ve ever read.
His description of his horrified discovery that elephants have breasts –
human-like breasts, not udders like cows – had me in stitches; he is convinced that he’s gone so bush-crazed
that he’s actually hallucinating boobs on elephants. You’ll be having so much fun that you’ll be
oblivious to how much – biology, neuroscience, anthropology, history – that you
are soaking up with it.
Sapolsky’s entire book is infused with how much he cares –
about the science, about the friends that he made studying in Africa, and above
all, about the baboons he studied. It’s
almost impossible for the reader not to be infected with that same level of
caring – I first read this book twenty years ago, and there are still passages
in it which make me tear up when I read them. By the end of the book, I’m willing to bet
that you’ll care to.
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