Pursuing Giraffe: A 1950s Adventure

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

To get married or go to Africa to study giraffe? The author was a
trained zoologist in her early 20s when she sailed for a ranch in South
Africa where she walked smack into the realities of apartheid in the
1950s and the consternation caused by a white woman who drove and worked
alone. She found the ranch manager, Mr. Matthew, kind and helpful in her
pioneering research but was shocked by his attitude toward black
Africans. She argued politely; he explained his position as if to a
child. They remained lifelong friends.

In her rackety car, Anne Innis Dagg drove out daily to watch giraffe as
they ate, lay down, and walked about while she documented, measured,
photographed, and eventually filmed. The careful account of her work is
an informative view of a field scientist’s task, judiciously
interlarded with her attachment to favourite giraffe, stabs at
friendship with the Africans, and coping with snakes.

She later sailed to Dar es Salaam, took a government job to raise
money, was disappointed in her hunt for giraffe in East Africa, and
returned to the ranch by way of Zanzibar, Mt. Kilimanjaro, the Great
Zimbabwe National Monument, and Victoria Falls. Everywhere she went, she
made friends and capably rebuffed sexual advances. Her chilling account
of climbing Kilimanjaro, with four porters and a guide who spoke no
English, is perhaps the highlight of the book; her excitement at
completing a climb that many others had failed is exhilarating.

The narrative is dense, embracing her studies, her personal adventures,
her dismay over prejudice, and brief forays into the past and future
history of areas in which she travelled. What emerges is the tale of a
scientist in a strange land at a distant time, and a puzzled look at
intolerance including her own. Her youthful astonishment is sometimes
funny, sometimes poignant. Mr. Matthew once told her he could never be
friends with an African. Twenty years later, she was married when a
Canadian science dean told her he would never give tenure to a married
woman.