In and out of Africa — the giraffe woman holds head high
Giraffes, in their magnificence, look down onto the tops of branches that we, the unen-height-ened, can only look up at the bottoms of. They reach branches we can't even see.
Perspective. Stature. They make a difference. History sees the past from the present down, and can it ever make some people and institutions - who didn't even bother to look up, look forward - look small.
Anne Innis Dagg went to South Africa in 1956 at the age of 23 and had the courage to reach for a branch, if you will, of knowledge that no one else saw or even imagined. The study of giraffes, in the wild. She lived among them.
There were lions there too," Anne says, of being in the bush, but I was more worried about snakes (the deadly black mamba. I had to decide whether to walk hard (to deter the snakes) or softly (so as not to alarm the giraffes)."
Now 89, Anne and her daughter Mary will be in Hamilton on Wed., Sept. 28 to answer questions after the screening of The Woman Who Loves Giraffes."
It's an astonishingly moving, informative, beautifully shot and often sobering documentary (2018) about her work and the attendant gender stupidity, accepted as normal at the time, that threatened to obliterate it. She never got bitten by a deadly snake in Africa. No, for that, she had to come home, to something even more reptilian - old-fashioned boys club sexism, creeping around dangerously in the tall grasses of academia.
As the result of her research Anne became known as the Jane Goodall" of the world's tallest animal. She lived with giraffes in Africa years before Goodall lived with the chimps or Dian Fossey with gorillas. The articles and books that emerged from Anne's copious notes and are called the bible" on giraffes.
I got this small car (a great old Ford UK Prefect) and drove a thousand miles to get there (Fleur de Lys in the area of Kruger National Park)," she says. I had been in love with giraffes since I saw them at a zoo as a girl.
They (South Africans) were all surprised that this young woman' had come alone" into the wilds. But they accepted her warmly.
After she returned to Canada - she was born in Toronto and now lives in Kitchener - Anne started teaching at several universities. She had amazing, priceless footage, film she had taken of giraffes in 1956 - eating, living, mating, fighting. Her driving around in the Ford Prefect. It's all in the documentary.
A PhD, a copiously published author, a brilliant researcher and immensely popular teacher, Anne was rebuffed time and again as she sought tenure. Not having a position, she could not secure funding to advance her giraffe research, to return to Africa.
So flagrant was the sexism in these rejections of tenure that the University of Guelph apologized to her in 2019 and named a scholarship after her.
Too bad it had to take half a century. She was refused tenure there in early 1970s. In between, a radio documentary got made and then the aforementioned movie, prompted party by a great revival of interest in her that erupted in 2010 when Amy Phelps, the giraffe keeper at the San Francisco Zoo, was organizing the inaugural conference of the International Association of Giraffe Care Professionals.
Phelps had grown up memorizing every word of what Anne wrote on giraffes.
I was the little girl that that woman was the hero for," Phelps says in the film. Everyone in the growing field of giraffe studies knew Anne's writing but few knew anything about her or if she were even still alive. Oh, very much so.
In 2010, Phelps tracked Anne down and invited her to the conference, where she was presented with the Pioneer Award - now called the Anne Dagg Pioneer Award - for giraffe research.
The next year, the CBC ran a radio documentary on Anne's experience. After hearing the story, director Alison Reid knew she had to make a film.
It was at the screening of that film at the University of Guelph in 2019, that the university surprised Anne with the apology and the scholarship.
Perspective.
Who knows what Anne would have done with giraffes if she hadn't deferred, for 30 years, her dream to revisit Africa. She thought at the time it would be forever, dispirited as she was by the loss of her long action against the universities before the Ontario Human Rights Commission and the courts.
Dispirited but not for long. Much of her work and writing after the 1970s had to do with galvanizing the struggle for women's rights and equality. She and her writing have been an inspiration to many.
But the work, the truth of her experience, in sum, her life ... has taken a lifetime to be given its due.
The documentary - it is hard to decide whom you are falling more in love with, Anne or the gorgeous giraffes - begins with marvellous footage from the old To Tell the Truth" program.
It was prophetic that all the panellists failed to recognize the real Anne from the impostors. She's being recognized now. Her steps, both hard and soft, have reverberated.
It's an in and out of Africa story but, wonderfully, the out was not forever. Anne went back with Mary, Alison and the film crew in 2016, resulting in some of the movie's most affecting moments.
Anne met descendants of giraffes she knew in the 1950s. Sadly, giraffe numbers are dwindling rapidly. Extinction threatens.
The screening's a fundraiser for The Anne Innis Dagg Foundation, supporting giraffe habitat, and Robert Bateman's nature foundation.
The Woman Who Loves Giraffes," at Playhouse Cinema, 177 Sherman Ave., 7 p.m. Wed., Sept. 28.
Jeff Mahoney is a Hamilton-based reporter and columnist covering culture and lifestyle stories, commentary and humour for The Spectator.jmahoney@thespec.com