FILM Summary

Rubondo: One Man’s African Ark

“When I heard about the plan to put chimpanzees on Rubondo,” Jane Goodall recalled, shaking her head, “I was shocked…they were just dumped there.”

“Shocked” was Goodall being polite when she spoke with our team about the 1960s era Rubondo re-wilding plan. Looking back from 2026 it’s hard to believe it was allowed to happen, or is it? Primatologists, zoologists, pretty much anyone in a related scientific community were horrified. But the man who helped create the safari industry in Africa, saw an opportunity and took it. And while Rubondo could never be considered a success…it wasn’t the abject failure many expected.

The story starts with an internationally famous zoologist/TV star hiding a secret Nazi past, talking the new leader of Tanganika into turning a massive island over to him for his absurd ‘Operation Chimpanzee.’ His untested, unscientific idea was to re-wild ill-tempered chimpanzees from zoos and circuses across Europe to a massive island in Africa, thereby both saving them from being sold to labs, and kicking off his dream of creating a new Great Ape Serengeti safari park. Destruction, death, wife-swapping, misery, bankruptcy ensues. But the chimpanzees make it and are now the only growing colony of chimpanzees living in the wild.

Underlying themes include: Human development vs. making room for wild animals; East Africa’s over-dependence on safari tourism; “hard re-wilding” as a solution to habitat loss; very problematic people can do good things.

Quick backstory…

Almost 60 years ago, a 60,000 acre island in Lake Victoria was cleared of inhabitants by the newly independent Tanzanian government and turned into an re-wilded ‘African Ark’ of sorts. The man behind it, a German Zoologist/filmmaker/TV star/author/former Nazi Bernhard Grzimek—a famous multi-hyphenate who created the Serengeti National Park and made it into the world’s most renown safari park in the late 1950s. But he was disappointed with the results of his famous park, particularly with the fact that the government wouldn’t let him evict the people in it. So in the 1960s when Grzimek got the chance to try it again on a massive island, he knew exactly what he wanted to do differently. His radical re-wilding ideas were all there in his bestselling book, “No Place for Wild Animals.”

A handful of animals who Grzimek considered endangered species (elephants, giraffe and rhino from across the continent) were the first to be ferried over to this newly formed game preserve. Then Grzimek, aka Rubondo’s Noah, set about planning his biggest challenge: re-habituating 17 chimpanzees from zoos and circuses in Europe. Crating them and shipping them across oceans, overland and then on ferry to the island. The chosen immigrant chimps were all miserable in their current conditions, had mostly not met one another, and had never been to the island. On top of that, there was no pre-arrival habitat analysis done by Grzimek or his team to find out if they would even be able to survive on the island. In Dr. Grzimek’s words, he was: “setting them free on Rubondo.”

The stated intention was for this massive forested island park to be a new model of a hybrid zoo/game preserve—a Great Ape Serengeti National Park. But it hasn’t gone exactly according to plan.

Three generations later, the chimpanzees on Rubondo Island National Park have miraculously created the most successful wild chimpanzee colony in Africa by one very important metric…They are the only expanding population of wild chimpanzees in Africa. But otherwise this island experiment is one of Grzimek’s biggest missteps. It has never lived up to what was promised, and is certainly not uttered in the same breath as Serengeti, ever.

That said, it has this unusual, growing population of as many as 80-100 chimps living in one large troop who have developed their own distinct culture over the decades. So for the chimpanzee population, it may not be the failure it was long thought to be. The other animals unfortunately fared less well. The rhinos were all poached within five years of their arrival. The elephants and giraffe are troublingly inbred, and likely need an injection of genetic diversity asap, but that’s a touchy subject, and may not work.

Who is the man behind it, this former Nazi/Zoologist?

Grzimek always acknowledged being in the German army during the war. But his story was that he only joined the party when he needed to, and played a minor role. Which turned out to be false. Biographer Claudia Sewig discovered that he signed up for the Nazi Party well before the war, in 1936, and was an officer in charge of unknown Nazi agricultural efforts. He was also close with Hitler’s inner circle, including Leni Riefenstahl. Widely rumored to be a lover of his, she used his pet wolf named Genghis for her deeply problematic film, Tiefland. That film also featured Roma concentration camp inmates as extras.

Much of his life reads like a series of unlikely adventures, but none more than his escape from Berlin at the end of the war. With the Russians advancing on the capital, Grzimek opted to desert rather than be sent to the front, and is spirited away by his pregnant mistress out of besieged Berlin, stuffed into a giant chest. His daring paramour, a former secretary turned actress, drove him through checkpoints off to the Western Front, where he surrendered to the US Military and ended up being offered the role as Frankfurt Chief of Police. Her turns that role down but talks the occupying US forces into naming him the director of the bombed out Frankfurt Zoo.

Investigations in the late 1940s zeroed in on his hazy claims about his low level work in the army during the war. He repeatedly denied membership in the NSDAP, but in November 1947 the US Army decided that wasn’t true and removed him from the Frankfurt Zoo, fined him, and sent him off for denazification. A year later he was “exonerated” and reinstated as head of the zoo. After that, questions about his honesty and character would occasionally resurface, for example when his adopted black son threatened to release damaging family secrets to the press, or when, in the late 1970s, he divorced his estranged wife and married his favorite son’s widow.

If it’s the fastest growing troop of wild chimpanzees in Africa, so why was it a mistake?

The new generations of chimpanzees born on the island are reluctantly being habituated to humans, they seem fearful and suspicious. Possibly even dangerously so. Meaning no one knows exactly how many of them there are, or has had a chance to closely observe and document their recently observed behaviors. And with the chimpanzee population largely avoiding contact with humans, the island is far from an ideal tourism experience.

Who cares if tourism isn’t thriving?‍ ‍

That's a concern because tourism is what brings in much of the money that supports the park and keeps it (and its animals) protected. The island currently hosts around 1000 visitors a year. The small safari camps on the island have lost money since opening, because tourists who travel from far away to the island want to see the chimpanzees - but more often than not, they aren’t able to. And that doesn’t sit well with most people have having spent thousands of dollars to get there and days of trekking into the vast inhospitable forest.

Why should anyone be interested in this island and the ongoing, mostly successful yet highly controversial rewilding experiment?

This Tanzanian National Park—the country’s least visited—operates at a significant loss, leaving Rubondo’s fate and the fate of this growing troop of wild chimpanzees who were forcibly moved there and have made it their home over the past half century, uncertain. But the fate of 100 chimpanzees isn’t the whole picture, the island and the experiment are the first of its kind at this scale. So a better understanding of how these animals managed to survive and thrive in a completely unfamiliar place with no help from humans is worthy of further study. And even more importantly than the fascinating tale of the chimpanzees who made this their home, the island national park plays a central role in the ecosystem of Lake Victoria. The protected waters around it are the vital hatcheries for the fish (mostly Nile Perch) that feed the over 8 million people who live around Lake Victoria South (LVS) basin area.