The last interview of the conservationist ethologist primatologist philanthropist phenomenon called Jane Goodall, before she died at the age of 91 on October 1st 2025, is introduced by a close-up picture of her face, filling an entire page of The Financial Times’ colour supplement. She is looking directly at you, strong, certain, searching, challenging, as if awaiting your response. Opposite, in large black print on an empty white page are her quoted words, “You must not give up. You must do your bit.”
Ten years or so before her death the adopted daughter of Tanzania met a man who was already doing his bit for the country that she held so dear. Saifuddin Khanbai had not even been born when Jane first arrived in 1960 in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park to establish what would become the longest running wild chimpanzee study anywhere.
By the time Saifuddin reached his 10th birthday in the mid-1970s Jane had already spent 15 years, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, watching, following, listening, trying to understand what it means to be a chimpanzee. In that time, the young woman from Bournemouth endured and witnessed unimaginable extremes of both human and chimpanzee behaviour.
Her patient trust-building approach transformed perceptions across the world not only about the intelligence of chimps and how alike they are to humans, not least in the use of tools and eating red meat, but also in the emotions and distinctive characters of individual animals. Then, over a traumatic four-year period, Dr Jane exposed the darker side of chimpanzee behaviour when she tracked and recorded details of males in the larger community in the north attacking a new community of chimpanzees in the south killing males and females alike.
As for human behaviour, the first episode in the 1970s concerned 40 rebels from Zaire who crossed Lake Tanganyika to kidnap four of Dr Jane’s students. Though their release was eventually secured, the incident terrified Jane and her team. As she later put it, ‘After that, Gombe was no longer an oasis of peace in an increasingly turbulent world.’ By the end of that decade peace eluded all of the country as Tanzania fought a war with Uganda, one that would ultimately bring down the Ugandan regime of Idi Amin.
Saifuddin had other things on his mind at the dawn of the 1980s. Having grown up and gone to school in the city of Arusha at the foot of the mighty Mount Meru, he completed his education in England, rejected Medicine as an option, and chose an entrepreneurial path instead, one embedded in the breadth of Tanzanian beauty, from jewellery to crafts, cultures, nature and tribal diversity.
Together with his wife and business partner, Zahra, he built a successful chain of stores before putting heart and soul and money into a philanthropy that would capture, celebrate and champion the art, craftsmanship and complex web of relationships that the people of Arusha and Tanzania have with each other, with tribal identity, with sacred beliefs, the land and wildlife surrounding them.
The Arusha Cultural Centre, opened in 1994, is a vivid statement of Tanzanian and African life. Four circular levels and spiral corridors are packed with the art, sculptures and collective creativity of no fewer than 1,500 artists. For Saifuddin, doing his bit means embracing the 120 tribes of Tanzania, but going further across the Continent of Africa, turning the Centre into an exploration of all of its aspects, good and bad, past and present, war and peace, freedom and oppression, culture and commerce, people and nature.
By the time Saifuddin met the world’s most famous primatologist, he found that her own understanding of people and nature had evolved. In a 1990 flight over Gombe Dr Jane had seen for herself the extent of deforestation. What had been a National Park whose boundaries were difficult to define, surrounded as it was by trees and lush forests, had become a green outpost circled by bare hills. The infertile land could not support the volume of people who now lived there. From the air she saw more clearly than ever before that trying to save the chimpanzees without helping people as well would not succeed.
Jane wasted no time in setting up a community conservation programme to improve villagers’ lives in environmentally sustainable ways. On top of that, she founded Roots & Shoots in 1991, her movement to engage young people in hands-on conservation and humanitarian action. These activities added a whole new dimension to the mechanism for her own philanthropy, the Jane Goodall Institute, established in 1977. It is an organisation that, to this day, declares its mission to be a world where people, animals and the environment thrive together.
And at some point – most likely in the compelling company of the driven woman who, after 2004, had become Dame Jane Goodall – Saifuddin realised that the Cultural Centre of Arusha only told part of the story of Tanzania, of Africa, of what it means to live on any continent and what it means never to lose hope. Who better than this extraordinary lady to complete the story, to illustrate what’s possible when people and nature are in harmony?
That’s why the philanthropy of Saifuddin and Zahra Khanbai, is constructing a new educational centre, what will be known as Dr Jane’s Dream: The Goodall Centre Of Hope. It is no accident that Dr Jane’s Dream, which will tell the story or her life and work and philanthropy, will be situated in Arusha close to the Cultural Centre that Saifuddin and Zahra established. “I think it is our duty to promote her legacy”, Saifuddin told The Financial Times. “We need her message, her work to be encompassed in place.”
Dr Jane’s Dream will be a permanent testament to the never-to-be-forgotten force of nature that arrived from Bournemouth in Tanzania 65 years ago, her message travelling from Arusha around the world for years to come, ’You must not give up. You must do your bit.’