Photos courtesy Shirley C . Strum
STRUM ARRIVED in Kenya on September 11 , 1972 , her 25th birthday . Born in Stuttgart , Germany , and raised in San Diego , Strum was a graduate student at UC Berkeley when she first set foot in Kenya ’ s Great Rift Valley . She didn ’ t expect to stay and make a life there ; she didn ’ t think she could live without the ocean . But when she stood atop a rift escarpment and could see for miles across the landscape , she remembers thinking , “ This is almost as good .” Before long , she fell in love with the “ great big skies ” and seeing all the animals there — lions , cheetahs , hyenas , elephants , zebras , giraffes and more , all of them “ free and as big as life ,” she says . “ That had quite an impact , too .”
Still , she didn ’ t anticipate 50 years . She hadn ’ t even intended to focus on baboons , and during her first season in the field , she remembers worrying if she ’ d be able to tell the baboons apart . “ Males and females were very different in size , but otherwise nothing was obvious . They were a puzzle ,” she says .
She came back for another research
season , then another . And over time , as her familiarity with the baboons grew , so did her fascination . Today , the Uaso Ngiro Baboon Project , which Strum has directed since 1976 , ranks as one of the longest-running primate research projects anywhere in the world . She ’ s also come to know and — she admits — sometimes even love seven generations of baboon families .
For almost that entire span of time , Strum has shuttled between Kenya and San Diego , teaching in the Department of Anthropology every spring and living in Africa the rest of the year . She and husband David “ Jonah ” Western , currently the chairman of the African Conservation Centre , raised their children , Guy and Carissa , in both California and Africa .
But in the beginning , Strum says , she was in “ a bit of a bubble .” She didn ’ t interact much with Kenyans — or the baboons , for that matter . The researcher before her had watched the initial study group , “ the Pumphouse Gang ,” from a car . Strum ’ s first innovation was to get out of that vehicle and walk , habituating the baboons to her presence just enough that they would act naturally .
“ It took just a little while to figure out that they weren ’ t like they had been described ,” she says . “ It took longer to figure out what was going on .”
Since male baboons are nearly twice as big as females and look like they ’ re built for aggression , the assumption was they have a male-dominated society ruled by violence . But Strum discovered that ’ s not so .
It ’ s not that baboons are pacifists exactly — they have their scuffles and shows of dominance . They ’ ll hassle each other over different matters . But deadly confrontations with other baboons ? Not really . And the most belligerent don ’ t always win either , not in terms of food resources or their
32 TRITON | FALL 2021