by Jane Goodall
It was at about this time that Goblin began, quite systematically, to terrorize Jomeo. Even though it was already clear that Jomeo was highly submissive to the younger male, Goblin lost no opportunity to charge and attack him—during reunions or other periods of social excitement. Indeed, Goblin persecuted him so fiercely that for a while Jomeo, unless he was with one of the other senior males, would leave the group he was with whenever he heard Goblin's distinctive pant-hoots nearby. And then, having reduced the Gombe heavyweight to a state of abject inferiority, Goblin began overtures of friendship. Suddenly he was grooming him more than he groomed any other male, sharing food with him, reassuring him in time of stress. The two became frequent travelling and feeding companions. In other words, they became friends—and Goblin, for the first time since turning on Figan five years earlier, had an ally. Not a very strong one, perhaps, but at least when he was with Jomeo, Goblin had a chance to relax and enjoy male companionship.
About a year after Figan's death the other males finally seemed to give up. Worn down by Goblin's repeated challenges, they let him have his way. And so, at seventeen years of age, Goblin became the undisputed alpha, able to control almost any social situation. Although he continued to display often, his performances were less violent and led less frequently to attack. At long last, things became more peaceful for the other members of his community.
Looking back over this fascinating story it is clear that, whether genetic or acquired, Goblin, like Mike, Goliath, and Figan before him, showed, in super-abundance, courage and persistence—the will to get to the top and to stay there despite setbacks. Can we point to any aspects of Melissa's early care that might have contributed to the development of these characteristics? She was an attentive and supportive mother, yet in no way over-indulgent. When Goblin got into difficulties during his early attempts to walk and climb, his mother usually left him to get himself out of trouble, even when he whimpered—unless he was really stuck in which case she quickly retrieved him. She was not restrictive but not overly permissive either. She was not a punitive mother, and was not always able to command instant obedience—Goblin learned early on that, if he went on trying, he could sometimes get his own way. Yet he was not spoilt—when it came to things that really mattered to her, such as weaning, Melissa imposed her will on her son. All in all she was, quite clearly, a good mother with respect to her child-raising techniques. And, to the extent that Goblin's behaviour was inherited, since she contributed fifty per cent of his genes, she was undoubtedly a good mother in this respect as well.
14. JOMEO
JOMEO'S PERSONALITY was utterly different from that of Goblin. Where Goblin was fanatical in his determination to rise to a high social position and stay there, Jomeo, from adolescence onward, was almost entirely lacking in social ambition. He was the heaviest male we have known at Gombe, tipping the scale at just over one hundred and ten pounds, and he was a terrible enemy to individuals of neighbouring communities. Yet he did his best to avoid conflicts with the males of his own social group. A conundrum, was Jomeo, with a unique personality and a unique life history.
We know nothing of his childhood, for he was already a young adolescent when first I met him, in the early sixties. I seldom saw him in his family setting since his mother, Vodka, was shy and, together with her two younger offspring, Sherry and little Quantro, she spent most of her time in the southern part of the community range. Jomeo, however, became a regular camp visitor. In most respects he was a perfectly normal adolescent, but he did have one idiosyncrasy. When he came to camp with one or more of the big males Jomeo, like any other youngster, was seldom able to get a share of bananas. And so, like the other adolescent males, he quite often arrived by himself—which meant that we could hand him his very own bananas. This was when the odd behaviour showed itself—the moment he set eyes on the fruits he began to scream. Not just a few small screams of irrepressible excitement—which would have been quite understandable—but loudly, and for a couple of minutes at a time. Naturally, any chimps who happened to be nearby rushed to camp to see what was going on—and helped themselves to Jomeo's bananas. For at least six months he behaved in this peculiar fashion. And then, quite suddenly, the screaming stopped.
When he was about nine years old, Jomeo began his attempts to intimidate community females with the bristling, swaggering displays that are the hallmark of adolescence in the male chimpanzee. Initially, these performances were vigorous, impressive and audacious. Once he even dared to compete with Passion for a pile of bananas. As this most high-ranking and aggressive female began, with absolute confidence, to gather up the fruits, Jomeo stood upright and, with every hair on end, so that he looked twice his already large size, he swaggered in front of her, arms waving, with tight-lipped and furious mien. Passion, probably startled by his temerity (for to her he was still a child) gave back as good as she got and, as he displayed away, seemingly defeated, she began to gather up the scattered bananas. But Jomeo had merely gone to better equip himself for battle. Seizing a large dead branch that was lying nearby he charged back and began to swagger even more impressively, brandishing his weapon. And Passion, while she hung on to the bananas she had already picked up, did not dispute Jomeo's right to the rest.
It seemed then that Jomeo was firmly established on the ladder that would lead, ultimately, to a high position in the dominance hierarchy. But then something happened. One day in 1966, just a few months after his successful confrontation with Passion, Jomeo limped into camp covered with deep wounds. The worst was a great gash across the sole of his right foot which took weeks to heal and which left the toes permanently curled under. We shall never know who or what attacked Jomeo, but whatever it was that happened, it seemed to affect his whole subsequent career. His blustering displays towards the community females, even the lower-ranking ones, abruptly ended. A year later I observed an incident that typified Jomeo's position in his society. It began when Passion's infant Pom moved too close to Jomeo during feeding. When he hit out at her, warning her to keep her distance, she did not move but, looking towards her mother, then back at the big male, gave a small but defiant-sounding bark. Instantly Passion charged towards Jomeo—and this time, in marked contrast to his performance the year before, he fled before her and, screaming in fright, took refuge up a palm tree. When she began to climb after him, Jomeo, screaming even louder, leapt to another tree, tumbled to the ground, and raced, helter-skelter, away.
By that time, Jomeo had become the heaviest male at Gombe, and his chicken-hearted behaviour made him the laughing stock of his human observers. Even when he was fifteen years old and weighed nearly one hundred pounds, Passion could sometimes put him to screaming flight. And so it might have gone on, perhaps for the remainder of his life, had it not been for his brother, Sherry. The two of them had begun to spend more and more time together after the disappearance of their mother in 1967. Whether she had died, or perhaps decided to remain in some peripheral haunt, we do not know: she and her infant daughter simply stopped appearing in camp and were never seen again. But Sherry and Jomeo became all but inseparable, and in many ways the elder brother acted in loco parentis. When Sherry, during his early attempts to intimidate the females, was threatened—and like all young adolescent males he often was—then Jomeo ran to his defence just as Vodka would have done had she been there. As time went on and Sherry tackled higher- and higher-ranking females, so Jomeo's help was needed more and more often. And on those occasions when he did fight, Jomeo was a chimpanzee to be reckoned with. What matter if his technique was not always the best—he was still at least twenty pounds heavier than the largest of Sherry's female adversaries, and he inflicted hurt no matter where he hit or kicked. When he bodily lifted his victim in the air, then slammed her down, as he so often did, the punishment was horrible to watch. And so, at last, the females began to respect and even fear Jomeo and the days of Passion's supremacy over the huge male were gone for ever.
The frequency with which a male displays is, of c
ourse, an important factor in determining his position in the male hierarchy. Jomeo's frequency had dropped to almost nil after the horrible injury to his foot six years earlier. But now, because of his new self-confidence, he began to display much more often. Poor Jomeo—I sometimes wonder whether those early performances of his, intended to strike fear into the hearts of the beholders, were as amusing to the chimpanzee spectators as they were to us humans! He had so much to learn when it came to technique. Once, for example, he tried to enhance a fast downhill charge by rolling a huge rock. But instead of bounding noisily down the slope, adding a whole new dimension to Jomeo's performance, it remained firmly embedded in the hard ground. Any other male would have charged on regardless. Not Jomeo. He came to a complete halt, turned around, and heaved and pushed on the offending rock. Eventually he pried it from its resting place—but to no avail. It was much too big, and after rolling lazily for a couple of feet it came to a halt. Jomeo, the effect of his display now completely ruined, ran on, in a half-hearted way, without it.
Another time as he charged towards a group of females and youngsters, he tripped over a tree root and fell, sprawling in the undergrowth. The females, instead of screaming and fleeing in the way that must be so immensely satisfying to a young male, had quietly climbed nearby trees and, by the time he had picked himself up, were watching him from safety.
Funniest of all (from our point of view) was "the case of the recalcitrant sapling." It was a small tree, with a nice leafy top that would have looked good if flailed and brandished by a charging male. But when Jomeo seized hold of it as he ran past, he failed either to snap it off or to uproot it. And so, as with the boulder, he interrupted his performance to struggle with it. After about thirty seconds he finally managed to uproot the little tree. By then it was quite clear (to me) that it was far too large to make an effective prop. But Jomeo, having won his battle with it, was obviously determined to use it anyway. He charged on, dragging it tenaciously behind him. At least, that is what he tried to do. But it had so many side branches that one or other repeatedly became entangled in other vegetation: three times, before he finally abandoned his display, Jomeo was forced to move backwards, hauling at the sapling with both hands.
Gradually though, with the passing of the months, Jomeo's displays improved and he developed an impressive and powerful technique that was all his own.
It was the same when it came to hunting: at first Jomeo, though dead keen usually bungled the job. There was the time, for instance, when he tried to catch an adult blue monkey. The chase was fast and furious and the monkey, in desperation, took a flying leap to a neighbouring tree. Jomeo, close on its heels, likewise launched himself into space. But he never made it. "Halfway across he simply ran out of jump," David Bygott (who observed the incident) told me afterwards. Poor Jomeo: he crashed to the ground some thirty feet below, and for a chimp as heavy as Jomeo, that is some fall. He stayed quite still for a few moments, undoubtedly dazed and probably hurting. Then he stood up, gazed after his rapidly vanishing midday meal, and plodded off to eat figs.
When hunting, the Gombe chimpanzees mostly capture infant and juvenile prey, and typically they make heavy weather when it comes to killing an adult monkey. Thus when Jomeo captured a full-grown colobus male it was not surprising that it took him quite some while of hard and strenuous biting, flailing and hitting before his victim lay, limp and dead, across a branch. Then, before Jomeo could enjoy even a single mouthful of his hard-won prize, the other senior males converged on him and snatched it away. It was Richard Wrangham who watched that drama, and I remember him telling me the rest of the story afterwards:
"He sat and watched for a bit as the others divided up his prey. They were all excited and screaming and he was very quiet. He didn't join the females and youngsters to beg for a share. He just went and licked a few leaves below, where blood had splattered down. And then he wandered away. I almost felt like crying."
As time went on there were other reports of Jomeo losing his prey to higher-ranking males—once even to Gigi—and we all began to feel sorry for him. But we noticed too that he very often disappeared during or after a hunt. And we began to wonder whether, perhaps, he sometimes managed to catch a small monkey during the confusion and sneak away with it before any of the others noticed. One day, after catching an infant which was then taken from him by Figan, Jomeo disappeared as usual. And then, about two hours later, he was found, sitting by himself, with a hugely distended stomach, and clutching the remains of a bushbuck fawn. Clearly it wasn't always necessary to feel sorry for Jomeo!
But all the time, despite his new accomplishments—his unchallenged authority over the females, his improved display techniques, and his increasing skill in hunting—Jomeo continued to be plagued by countless small indignities. All of which, of course, increasingly endeared him to us. There was, for instance, the day that I watched him as, slowly and with an air of intense concentration, he inched his way up a tall tree. All morning it had rained and the trunk, gleaming like polished ebony, was very, very slippery. At last the lowest branch, some twenty-five feet above the ground, was within the climber's reach—but even as he made a grab for it he began to slip. Faster and faster he plummeted earthwards, clutching the treacherous trunk tightly but in vain. There was a thud as the Gombe heavyweight reached the ground. For a few moments he sat perfectly still, staring at the trunk before him. Then, after gazing up into the branches above, he slowly rose to his feet and, with great determination, began the difficult ascent a second time. No fairground enthusiast ever struggled up a greased pole with more persistence—and this time he made it. For the next hour he feasted on tender green leaves and by the time he was ready to descend, the trunk had dried out in the afternoon sun and he reached the forest floor with dignity.
Then there was the colobus monkey incident. The adult male colobus are extremely brave in defence of their females and young. Even when chimpanzees are hunting in groups these colobus males will charge and mob them fearlessly and usually succeed in driving them away. Perhaps this is because, although the colobus are smaller, they have long sharp canines and they almost always try to bite the hunter's genitals. Thus it is not unusual to see two or more chimpanzees leaping away through the branches with loud screams, hotly pursued by a couple of infuriated colobus monkeys. But what happened to Jomeo one day was utterly unusual. He was sitting, peacefully feeding on fruit and minding his own business when a large male colobus assailed him—out of the blue as it were. Launching himself from a branch above, the monkey landed almost on top of Jomeo and hit at his head, uttering the curious high-pitched threatening call of his kind. Jomeo, surprised out of his wits, gave a single startled yell and fled!
"And who but Jomeo," laughed Richard one evening, "would be put to flight by the sight of three baby porcupines rustling noisily and busily through the dry grass!"
Even an event that was essentially tragic ended by making Jomeo more of a comic figure than ever. Somehow he hurt his left eye. For more than two weeks the lid remained tightly closed, quantities of fluid dripped out, and it was obviously very painful. We gave him antibiotics in bananas and eventually the wound healed, but it left him not only with impaired vision, but also with an eye half-white from scar tissue. He should have looked sinister—indeed, sometimes he did, especially when he peered out from thick foliage in the dim light of the forest. More often though it gave him a somehow rakish appearance. Poor Jomeo—not only the character but even the appearance of a clown.
Despite the fact that he eventually established his dominance over the adult females, Jomeo almost never showed any interest in bettering his position vis a vis the other males. He did have one long standing rivalry with Satan, who was about the same age as himself. We saw the first signs of this in 1971 when they were late adolescents and sometimes swaggered at each other with bristling hair when competing for food or during the excitement of a reunion. At that time it seemed that their social rankings were about equal, and these confrontations u
sually ended with the two rivals, grinning hugely, embracing one another. After a couple of years, though, Satan, after winning a few fights, asserted his dominance over the bigger male—unless Sherry was there to back his brother, in which case Satan, confronted by the fraternal team, would give way.
When Sherry began to challenge the lower-ranked of the senior males his displays were tempestuous, daring and imaginative. He would emerge suddenly and unexpectedly out of the bushes hurling huge rocks and flailing branches and fronds with such fiery zeal that the senior males would often get out of the way—thus boosting his ego so that he challenged his elders more and more often. Whenever his impetuosity got him into trouble, Jomeo—if he was there, and he almost always was—would charge over and display impressively in support of his younger brother. It seemed that Sherry was all set to rise to a high social position and there were many who predicted that, before too long, he would topple Figan—the reigning alpha at that time.
But then came a decisive defeat. Satan, exasperated by a long series of the younger male's disruptive displays, finally turned on him and attacked him fiercely, inflicting numerous wounds. Jomeo, as usual, rushed to Sherry's assistance and, although he did not actually attack Satan, displayed so violently around the conflict that Satan turned from his victim in order to chase the elder brother away. This almost certainly saved Sherry from even worse injuries.
That was a historic fight, for it brought to an end Sherry's bid for high social rank. After that, although he did sometimes fight the senior males, it was usually in the context of meat eating or sex—when, in other words, there was some immediate, material reward. But for the remaining few years of his life he never again strove for a high position for its own sake. Thus Sherry reacted to adversity rather as had brother Jomeo to that unseen attack ten years before. How different, these two brothers, from those males whose heroic struggles took them to the top and kept them there at whatever cost to themselves: Mike, Figan and Goblin.
