Animal Annie

From GNM no. 1 (English edition), 2013. This article was published in the print magazine and is reproduced here in its original form. Facts and figures were correct at the time of writing.

She has caught white rhinos, been imprisoned by Idi Amin’s henchmen and starved in Sudan’s jungle. Just turned 60 recently, she regrets nothing: her experiences have made her stronger and the person she is today. Meet Ann Olivecrona who has been working with wild animals all her life.

By Helena Bäckhed Photo Maria Macri

Mama Chimp, Animal Annie and Swedish Annie. These are some of the nicknames she answers to. She has never been like others – and never wanted to be like them either. There are few people who have lived such an eventful life as Ann Olivecrona.

The first time I hear her talk, I notice that she has a deep voice and that she speaks with some kind of Stockholm accent. Or perhaps it is standard Swedish? She is one of the last participants on a summer radio program. It is noticeable at the start of her programme that she has focused on anthropoid apes for the past few years.

“It’s not so strange that chimpanzees have different personalities and skills as they are so like us. They continue to surprise us and can come up with the most hilarious things. Ally, a very intelligent female, is a fully-fledged electrician. She can short-circuit the complicated, electric fence around the reserve. Then she climbs out, but just to show us that she can. She walks in nicely again too.”

My curiosity grows. When she talks about how she sees the world, I can feel how the questions start to bubble up within me.

It takes a month before I get to meet her. It is the day before the Gothenburg Book Fair starts. Ann is waiting for me in the foyer of the Gothia Towers hotel. I am struck by how tall she is when she gets up. Her grey hair is pulled back in a hair band – just as it is in the pictures I have seen of her.

There are a lot of people and noise in the book fair restaurant, but we finally find a calmer corner. After listening to her on the radio and reading her latest book about her life among the wild animals of Africa, I feel as if I know her. But I soon find out that this is not the case.

She talks willingly about her passions: about the importance of biodiversity, the dangers of cutting down the rainforest, wolf hunting and monkey meat in restaurants. She has fewer words to say when it comes to her private life. But we cannot get away from her surname. If it is Olivecrona, then certain questions are unavoidable.

She understood early on that her grandfather, Herbert, was not like other people’s. He was a world-leading surgeon who operated on Stalin and King Faysal of Saudi Arabia. The young photographer (now a very famous one), Lennart Nilsson, was present to photograph the surgery.

Her relationship to her surname has not always been easy: partly due to the demands and expectations of outsiders and partly due to the demands of Grandfather Herbert, who carried her to the baptism font. He wanted her to become a doctor.

“I was his first grandchild and he fully prepared for me to follow in his footsteps.”

But Ann never wanted to become a doctor or lead an average life in Sweden. She knew what she wanted to do when she was five years old – to work with animals. She has not changed her commitment since then and has never regretted her choice. Her stubbornness has helped her many times.

“I have been true to my calling all my life, but it has been tough at times. When I grew up in the 1960s and 70s, you were supposed to fit a pattern. There were male and female professions and no one thought it was strange. If you wanted to do something outside of the box, then people thought you were weird.”

Her father, Gustaf Olivecrona, was also famous and he was on TV a lot. Together with Lars Orup and Åke Ortmark, he was one of the three Os: the people who introduced tough journalism to Sweden. According to many people, they helped overturn the Social Democratic government in 1976 when they asked Olof Palme on live TV how much a litre of milk cost. He could not answer the question and, as there were only two channels back then, this had a lot of impact. But to Ann, dad was just dad – no more and no less.

“The day after a political debate during elections, my teachers thought I should explain what they had talked about the evening before just because my father was on TV. But I never watched current news programmes if I could help it.”

It might have been easier if she had grown up in Stockholm, where it is easier to disappear in the crowd. She lived in Ljusdal and also had a different surname to that of her mother and stepfather.

“People always had expectations of me that other kids didn’t have to endure. It was extremely irritating. There were many times I wanted to be called Johansson instead in order not to suffer through all those questions.”

As always, her days are hectic when she visits Sweden. And, as always, she wants to visit family and friends. This time her schedule is crammed more than usual. Her autobiography has just been released. It is called Mitt i Afrika – en kvinnas kamp för de vilda djuren (In the middle of Africa – a woman’s fight for wild animals).

We sit down with a cup of coffee, something that she enjoys in the country of her birth. Back home in Kenya, she usually drinks tea. I ask her if it was hard to go against her grandfather’s wishes when she decided to study zoology.

“It wasn’t really a choice. There was no other alternative as far as I was concerned. I’ve never doubted what I was going to do – not even for a second.”

Her motivation and steadfast determination finally softened up Grandfather Herbert, even if it took a few years during which time he refused to talk to his first-born grandchild.

You can ask yourself how a Swedish five-year-old decided she wanted to work with wild animals in Africa. She has thought about it a lot and come to the conclusion that it is thanks to Cyrus Granér, who wrote the children’s book Burre Busse’s Adventure in Africa (first published in 1916).

“It was the first time I discovered that such exciting animals existed. I still have the book on my bookshelf.”

She has spent the past fifteen years saving chimpanzee babies who have been badly treated due to the illegal deforestation of the rainforest. You can see sparks of anger in Ann’s deep grey eyes when she talks about bush meat – i.e. the trade of meat from wild animals – which is forbidden but very profitable. As is the case all too often, money is the cause.

She shakes her head when she talks about the many rumours of meat from wild animals in Brussels, the base of European senior politicians. “Traditionally, monkey meat was only eaten by certain tribes of pygmies, but nowadays it is fashionable. Unfortunately. The meat is very expensive. The same people who eat Russian caviar are those who can afford it. So, Brussels is probably a good place to start investigating whether my information is true or not.”

Cutting down the rainforest gives poachers access to the deepest part of the rainforest – parts that, previously, were protected. The roads built by the construction companies are not really meant for inhabitants and those who want to capture the shy and valuable animals who live there use the roads to gain access.

One way of getting at the chimpanzees is to set the undergrowth on fire so that the animals flee up into the trees, where they can easily be shot down. When the mothers die, the youngsters fall down too as they cling onto the females. They go down into the burning grass and many get large wounds on their backs. The baby chimps are captured alive and sold to the highest bidders around the world. They do not have enough meat on them, but are prized as pets. She makes gestures with her entire body when we start talking about the traumatized and wounded apes.

“They are terribly mistreated and abused. Their so-called owners make them suffer in different ways: they burn them with cigarettes, break their fingers and cut off their teeth with bolt cutters. It’s incredibly tragic and only one chimp out of four survives captivity,” she tells me.

“Chimpanzees are our nearest relatives and have exactly the same needs as we human beings have. Abusing chimp babies is the same thing as mistreating a little child. In all ways,” she says and adjusts her headband.

There are a large number of photos in her book that show apes following and climbing over Ann. The really small ones need as much contact as possible and she carries them in a baby sling.

“A lot of them are completely apathetic so that, first, we have to give them back the will to live. We can’t feed them if they don’t want to eat. They need love and closeness to start off with so I become a surrogate mother.”

Many small chimp babies have had Ann as their second mother. She has built many cots – with lids – so that they do not get out and tear apart everything in the room. Something that can happen quickly because they are so full of curiosity.

“The really young babies can’t sleep by themselves, so they lie next to me in bed and cling onto my T-shirt with their tiny hands all night long. You have to lie still if you want to get some sleep.”

According to Ann, animals are very often better creatures than we humans. They are more honest, warn others when they get angry and so on. She enjoys the wordless, direct communication she has with animals. She cites Gandhi to emphasize her point of view about how everything hangs together, ‘You can judge the greatness of a nation by the way they treat their animals.’

“There’s a lot of truth in that. If you treat animals badly, then there’s a greater risk that you’ll treat people badly too.”

She has worked with other animals apart from apes over the years. Borås Zoo was her way into the life she chose so early on. She got a summer job there when she was thirteen.

“It was everything I dreamt of, even though I broke my arm just before I started and the work was really hard. It was wonderful!”

The summer job led to a job in Longleat, England – the world’s first safari park. She met the Chipperfields, a circus family, there for the first time. Later on, she would work closely with the son, Richard, in Africa. She did not know this, however, when she took a year off when she was 16. The job in England was also tough and she worked from morning until the sun went down.

“I learnt how to shoot clay pigeons, handle a whip and drive a car. I did everything the grown men did.”

It took a few years before Ann actually made it to the continent she had been dreaming about since she was a child. Money for her trip came from an unexpected source. When it was time for her last year project at high school, she wrote about baboons. During her summer job at Longleat, she discovered that they felt worse the smaller the space they had to live in. The same thing applied if they got too little food. She drew parallels to humans and her teacher thought her work was exciting. Without telling her, the teacher sent in her essay to Unga Forskare (Young Researchers). That winter an envelope arrived with 10,000 Swedish kronor (just over 1,000 Euro).

“That was a lot of money in those days. It was easy to choose. Finally, I was going to Africa!”

We are interrupted suddenly by some ape-like sounds. It is the journalist Petter Karlsson, who has helped Ann write her autobiography, who comes and greets her in a very special way. They know each other well after all the time they have spent together in Africa. They check the times for the evening press event at the book fair and the schedule for the next few days. As soon as Petter leaves, the phone rings.

“I have to take this as we’re waiting for some important answers,” she says apologetically.

At the moment, she is working with the African Apes Foundation. There are so many orphaned chimpanzee babies that a new nature reserve has to be created. Regulations and politics are time-consuming.

Ann is used to dealing with bureaucracy as well as with the military. She has been courageous since she was a child. When she was two years old, she went into a cattle field to stroke what she thought was a cow. She toddled up to an animal that turned out to be a grumpy bull that was not at all interested in a little child. It got her on its horns and threw her. But she was not afraid. Her mother hurried to the field and saw, much to her distress, how her daughter went calmly back to the bull and stroked it again. It was probably more shocked by the little girl than she was by it. The bull stood still and let her stroke it as much as she wanted.

“I’ve never been afraid of animals. People are far more unpredictable and difficult to read. Animals always show their feelings and are far more straightforward.”

Ann Olivecrona is not afraid of anything: not scared of talking in front of others, like so many are. She is not even afraid of death. The only thing that makes her feel uncomfortable are mirror sunglasses as Idi Amin’s special forces used to wear.

She arrived in Idi Amin’s Uganda in 1973. It was ranked as one of the most dangerous countries in the world after Amin came to power in 1971. At first, the people believed in the new leader, but he soon became an impulsive and power-hungry despot. She often saw bodies floating in the river and, even more often, the crocodiles got there first. The only sign of the executions were the military caps floating in the water. That – and the fact that the crocodiles were probably the best-fed animals in the Nile. It was in this chaos that she was to work as a trapper for her English friend, Richard Chipperfield.

Ann witnessed much death and atrocity in her time in Uganda. Some things left a deeper scar than others.

“I saw a lot of people shot, but it’s quite another thing to see a man beaten to death by a group of special soldiers – and not be able to do anything about it. Yes, it was really horrible. You can’t do anything to stop a group of men armed with machine guns. If it had been Sweden, then I wouldn’t have hesitated a second if I’d seen a gang beating someone lying on the ground. Never!”

The situation in Uganda became more and more intolerable and, in 1974, it was far from a safe place for Ann and her colleagues (if it ever had been). They quickly left Uganda and decided to set up a trapping camp in Sudan instead. The government there gave them a licence to capture some white rhinos. They got a map, which turned out to be from 1945, so it was not very accurate. The idiom ‘to fall off the map’ was very apt.

After four days filled with hardship, they finally arrived at the right place. In Uganda, they had been mainly self-sufficient, but it was different here. Before leaving, they ordered food deliveries and everything was paid for. Nothing they paid for reached their camp way up in the wilds of north Sudan. And they did not have the petrol to leave. They did what they could and tried to catch their own food, but it was impossible without a gun. They soon started to starve.

Thirteen weeks later, Richard Chipperfield arrived at the camp of those stranded in the jungle. Instead of the usual happy reunion, he was greeted by living skeletons. Ann weighed 34 kilos and was not far from death.

“I had a terrible stomach ache at first, and then I just became apathetic. But somewhere inside me was the stubbornness that helped me believe that help would come tomorrow.”

And when the food came, there was no immediate relief either. It took a long time for her stomach to get used to food again.

“It hurt just as much to start eating again as it did to stop. Each bite was a struggle. But the body is an incredible thing and after three weeks, I was back to my old self. And no – I would never dream of going on a diet. If you’ve gone through real starvation, then such thoughts never cross your mind.”

This tumultuous experience did have a good side: the white rhinos and their babies captured in Sudan by Ann and her colleagues are the only ones left in the world today. It is estimated that there are seven rhinos left.

We meet up again three weeks later. Ann comes running into the foyer of The Skansen Aquarium ten minutes late. She does not waste a minute when she finds herself in Sweden.

Ann moves among the lemurs, pygmy marmosets and golden lion tamarins as if she were in her own backyard. And this is pretty near the truth. When she is in Sweden, she often stays at Jonas Wahlström’s flat, which is just above where the lemurs live. She jokingly calls it ‘the Baboon Hilton’. It is a perfect place to stay for a woman who is often called Mama Chimp and Animal Annie. She is used to the noise of the apes back home in Kenya. The joy of the apes has no bounds. They literally throw themselves on Ann and the grapes she has with her.

She returns to the subject of people’s ecological madness. “Everything is connected. Without the forests, there is no oxygen, and without oxygen, we can’t breathe. If we don’t save the forests, then there is no point in saving ourselves. It is by taking care of animals and nature that we can save ourselves in the long term.”

“We can’t consume everything around us and believe that we will survive. People’s greed is so twisted. We forget that we can’t eat money. You can’t eat it and you can’t breathe it!” she says decisively and nods her head so hard that her ponytail swishes.

She points out that all forests are of equal importance, but that the rainforests, which have the richest diversity of animal life, are particularly vulnerable.

All the talk about carbon dioxide emissions annoys her. “All that rubbish about paying compensation when we fly or drive! The real people to blame are those who buy furniture or boat fittings made out of tropical hardwood; those who use the trees that produce the oxygen. And living in those trees, there are animals that are as important as we humans.”

The Western world is a major villain in this drama. Most of the forestry companies that cut down the tropical hardwood trees are European. There is a lot of cheating, but the bottom line is pretty simple: all the hardwood that is supposed to come from Thailand cannot originate from there.

“We try to kick people in the butt to wake them up. Hello! Stop thinking that it’s all so far away and doesn’t affect me. Every consumer has to take responsibility and stop thinking along those lines.”

Ann is fed up with short-term investments. She has seen the results. She is tired of the fact that people only see a few of the links in the chain. For example, oil palms have replaced rainforests, and now we have discovered that they are neither environmentally friendly nor healthy.

“From next year, all products within the European Union have to carry a declaration if they contain palm oil. And a lot of products do contain this: everything from beauty products and shampoo to food and snacks. I think a lot of people are going to get a shock,” she says and sighs deeply.

The phone rings again – this time with a different ring signal. It turns out that she has no fewer than three phones. There is a lot going on with the foundation.

There were several reasons for setting up the African Apes Foundation. One reason was that they wanted to be able to have the support of a foundation when they apply for financing. Because it costs a lot of money to save apes. A lot of money. They also wanted to have a stronger voice as an organization when it comes to fighting against the illegal trade of bush meat and the destruction of the rainforests.

“We educate all our visitors – the local inhabitants as well as tourists – about the great apes. School classes get reduced price tickets and we give each student his or her first experience of sustainable development and wildlife in their own community. This is where we have to start – and we have to do it now.”

She may be talkative when it comes to animal rights, but she is reserved when it comes to her famous friends. The first time she met a big star was when she sang on the radio as a three-year-old. That time the star was Danny Kaye. Other stars she has met when working on films as an animal handler are Charlton Heston, Maud Adams and Meryl Streep.

It is no big deal for Ann to chat with Robert Redford or the Swedish Crown Princess Victoria. One of her closest friends is former Abba singer, Anni-Frid ‘Frida’ Lyngstad, now Princess Reuss, Countess of Plauen. As long as people are good-hearted, it does not matter who they are or where they come from. “I don’t think superstars are exciting just because they are famous. I like genuine people and some of my friends just happen to be well known. It’s as simple as that.”

People often ask her why she saves apes when there are so many people who are starving. It is simple: everything has its own value – no matter whether it is a pangolin in the innermost savannah in Africa, a Swedish wolf or a person, famous or not. Everything has its place in the world. What Ann does question is the special status of humans in the ecosystem. This is something she never tires of talking about.

“Why save people if we won’t save nature? Apes are endangered and people aren’t. Besides, there are loads of organizations that help people. Without nature, we can’t live. Everything is interconnected.”

Our conversation is coming to an end and I wonder if her choices in life have meant that she has missed out on anything. She understands what I am getting at: a life without husband or children. She sighs patiently. It is not the first time she has been asked this question – one which a man in her position would not get as often as she does.

“I just haven’t met the man I can share this kind of life with. Yet. When I was young, marriage meant taking care of the family and the kids – not travelling around Africa and saving wild animals. But I have no regrets. I think I would have died a bit every day if I hadn’t followed my heart.”

She has her family in Sweden, masses of friends in Africa and acquaintances around the world that are always showing up to visit her. Ann Olivecrona will continue to fight for the rights of animals and nature. And she will always be a surrogate mother to the apes that need her.

“I’m not alone, but if we don’t do something, then who will? I don’t want to belong to a generation who died without doing something. Without even trying. We can still make the world a better place.”