Driven by a love of primates and the possible threat of dementia, 68-year-old Dr Donna Swift is racing time—and terrain—to see every primate species on Earth before her memory fades or her body gives out. In doing so, she’s raising awareness of the threats to our nearest relatives.
To visit wild bonobos in the lowland rainforests of the Democratic Republic of Congo requires a special sort of traveller; one who is hardy, fit and fearless, and not against navigating swampy jungle paths and murky waterways guided by a local person armed with a machete and a headlamp to light the way.
The traveller must be determined and patient, content to wear the same clothes for a week or so, miss a meal here and there, and able to take warnings about “significant security concerns, including civil unrest, armed conflict in specific regions, high threats of terrorism and high rates of violent crime and kidnapping, which prompt government advisories against all non-essential travel” in their stride.
They should also look good in a hat because when they reach the bonobos, high up in the trees in their remote habitat, the great apes are unlikely to recognise them as close kin – humans and bonobos share about 98.7% of their DNA, making them, along with chimpanzees, our closest living relatives – and greet them with reverence. Instead, the apes are more likely to urinate or defecate on the heads of their visitors.
Dr Donna Swift, a 68-year-old Canadian-born Nelson resident and social anthropologist who has had both knees replaced, is this traveller. Swift has made it her mission to see in their native habitats every primate species – 533 of them, estimates the International Union for the Conservation of Nature & Species Survival Commission.
Since setting out in 2022, Swift has travelled to 12 countries in Africa as well as India, Myanmar, Thailand and Sri Lanka. Some of the species she’s seen in the wild include (rare) western hoolock gibbons, (rare) Gee’s golden langur, stump-tailed macaque, pig-tailed macaque, capped langur, black and white colobus, Zanzibar red colobus, and golden, vervet and blue monkeys. There are also the great apes: chimpanzees, mountain gorillas, western lowland gorillas and bonobos.
Swift has been fascinated by primates since she was a high school student on a trip to the Toronto Zoo, about 125km away from her home in Ontario’s Peterborough. “I can remember seeing a gorilla mother who had recently given birth,” she says. “The zookeepers took the young gorilla from its mother because it was in need of extra care, and the mother sat there crying. It was so human. I was so moved by this behaviour.”
She intended to study primatology but dyslexia meant she had trouble using equipment, such as microscopes, necessary for the biology component of her course. She switched to cultural anthropology and found her way to New Zealand to do her PhD in social anthropology. Here, she became interested in what causes young women to become violent, developing theories and contributing to policy and community-directed activities for prevention.
The two-year Girls’ Project, in the Tasman Police District of the upper South Island, was one of those. It led to awards, including the Sonja Davies Peace Award in 2014, and the chance to work with institutions and organisations around the world. Swift says there are similarities between her work on human interpersonal violence and watching primates.
“Much of watching primates is about how they engage and relate to each other. Yes, there is violence and hostility in the primate world, but there is also a lot of caring and kindness, just like human primates,” she says. “In terms of my research into female violence, competition for power, popularity and resources and how these combine sit behind human behaviour. When these are under threat, we become our worst.
“It’s somewhat similar in the primate world, but bonobo offer a different slant as they are matriarch-led. The dynamics of their relationships tend to be more peaceful. Further understanding [of this] is needed and maybe there will be something that human primates can learn from this.”
Race against time?
While Swift’s later-in-life undertaking is fuelled by a lifelong love of primates, there is another motivation. She knows if she doesn’t do it now, she could find herself unfit for any kind of adventure travel. It’s not just the physical limitations that come with older age – dementia and Alzheimer’s disease is seeded throughout her family tree.
“I asked a psychologist, ‘should I get tested?’ and he said, ‘What would you do if you found out?’ I said I’d draw up a bucket list and he replied, ‘Why don’t you just go and do it anyway?’
“Also, I don’t have any family. Everybody was talking about their family and their grandchildren and their cousins and all of that. I thought, ‘I need to find some family,’ so I went back to my interest in primates and decided, ‘Well, let’s just have an extended family’ and set out to see how many I could find. I have a love of primates. I love their humanness. I think primates make better humans sometimes.
“Being a quieter person, I have always been a watcher so spending time observing primates comes easily to me. I have lots of patience and don’t get easily bored, and I get fascinated watching the tiniest details, like how the gorilla’s hands move when stripping bark, or how does a chimp youth hold onto its mother’s back when she is running?”
Her research background meant when she turned up to Matt Roberts at Nelson’s Orbit World Travel, Swift already had a detailed idea of where she wanted to go, what she wanted to see and how she might get there.
“You have a few people who want to go to Antarctica or climbing in Nepal or do a safari, but I’ve never had anyone like Donna who’s doing something driven by passion that is so in-depth,” says Roberts. “She likes to go off the beaten track and combine different trips, so it’s not just one and done. The research she does beforehand is amazing. She’s discovered things I didn’t know, so it’s helping me, too.”
What have I got to lose?
Swift says others might describe her as determined or disciplined, and she has a lot of faith in herself.
“I guess through life, I’ve had a lot of challenges and I just say to myself, ‘Okay, Donna, you can do this.’ I have a constant conversation going on with myself and I ask myself, ‘what have I got to lose?’ That’s always been my motto in life and if a door opens or a challenge presents, then I take it. So I’ve been mountain-biking in the jungle in Sri Lanka, with monitor lizards and goats running across the trails and coconuts falling from the trees.
“I got to Jane Goodall’s research centre, at Gombe National Park on Lake Tanganyika, Tanzania, and went swimming in the lake because I was hot. I realised afterwards there were highly venomous cobras endemic to the lake, crocodiles and hippopotamuses in there, but I was hot and needed a swim.”
Meeting Goodall was a thrill while a picture of the celebrated Gorillas in the Mist movie, from the book by primatologist and conservationist Dian Fossey, takes pride of place in her living room. Swift is often able to find guides or local experts linked into conservation projects or research. It means she can get to remote locations that might otherwise be out of bounds, and in exchange for their knowledge, Swift shares her own work and news of what’s happening in other countries.
“As well, I try to give financial support to them personally and their causes at a local level. Afterwards I try to bring awareness to the work they do thus generating interest and hopefully further funding.”
She adds that not having any family means there is no one to dissuade her from pursuing her goal. Does Roberts ever try?
Swift jokes she doesn’t tell him about her adventures until she returns and then launches into a story about what is supposed to be the safer way to visit bonobos. It involves crossing the Congo River from Brazzaville, in the Republic of Congo, to Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The plan was to drive through Kinshasa to the Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary and return in a day, but a guide’s late arrival, a delayed river crossing, gridlock and a dispute between drivers meant Swift found herself having to spend a night in Kinshasa, where tourist kidnappings for ransom demands are rife. Staying in a hotel close to the river border, there were no locks on either door to her room so Swift wedged chairs against them and spent an uneasy night sleeping fitfully before returning to the relative safety of Brazzaville.
Roberts acknowledges Swift is a far cry from clients who fly to Europe and then call him up asking that he locate and return an electric toothbrush left on the plane. “And it’s not like she walks out of an airport and that’s it. I get daily reports from around the world of what’s going on, so can be in touch if I need to and change plans if necessary.” He’s become more accustomed to leaving messages for Swift and having to wait a few days before she responds because she is travelling in areas where there is no phone or internet connection.
Travel ready
A keen walker who aims for 12km a week, Swift is also vegetarian and extremely careful about drinking water while away. Hydration and water purification tablets as well as an ultraviolet light for purifying water are staples in her lightly packed bags.
“You’ve just got to roll with things, make the best out of situations and get your priorities right. I mean, you have to leave your curling iron at home. Forget the make-up. Sometimes I’m wearing the same clothes for a week straight,” she says. “I don’t travel to eat and if I have to miss a meal here or there, it’s not a big deal. I take a jar of peanut butter with me and I’ve survived on that for a bit. I’m there to see the animals, see the country and take pictures.”
Swift’s travel has extended into photography, and she plans a book featuring her pictures as well as travel tips.
“One of the things I hear from so many people when I come back is, ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that. I wouldn’t know how to start to plan it. I’d be scared.’ But, you never know what’s around the corner and at my age right now, I’m losing a lot of friends and acquaintances to cancer and other diseases or they lose their mobility and, for me, well, Alzheimer’s has always been on the horizon, so why not get these things done while I can?”
Swift also holds presentations to various groups and sees them as a way to raise awareness of the threats facing our primate kin. Loss of habitat is the biggest threat – many primates will become extinct without conservation measures. But along with deforestation, there’s the exploitation of resources, corruption, overkill of wildlife, pollution of waterways and military strife.
She says photos of primates, particularly of the great apes, show up human characteristics as well as interaction between young and old. “My audiences always comment, ‘they’re so human’. That’s when I explain about the amount of DNA we share and the other similar physiology and behaviours.”
Raising awareness
Unsurprisingly, Swift’s view of humanity is changing and she readily admits she might prefer the company of primates in the quiet and stillness of a jungle to humans. It’s here, while watching gibbons swinging in the tree canopy or mountain gorillas foraging through roots and stems, that she gets a sense of peace and appreciation for a much simpler existence.
It means she returns to New Zealand or Canada with a heightened awareness of privileges that are so often taken for granted, such as clean water, food choices and access to medical care or government financial support.
“Sometimes I wonder if human primates are evolving in the best direction,” she says. “I’d been to The Gambia in West Africa in 1986 and loved wandering along the extensive white sand beaches of the Atlantic coast. This year in Gabon, which shares the same coastline only further south, I was stunned by the pollution I encountered.
“In remote areas the magnificent wild forest elephants would wander down to the shore, but sadly they trod over metres – metres! – of plastic bottles and bags, old fishing lines and broken Styrofoam containers that were being washed up along the beach. Beautiful white sand dotted with garbage. Gabon is a developing nation with a very small population. This rubbish was not local; the ocean currents were carrying it in from other countries.”
Right now, Swift and Roberts are planning her next trip. After all, there’s a giant gap on her travel map where South America sits and she’s yet to see New World monkeys.*
*Primates are split into old world monkeys in Africa and Asia and new world monkeys in south and central America.