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