After a long battle with cancer, Stella Brewer Marsden, the indomitable English lady who founded and ran the Chimp Re-hab Centre at the River Gambia National Park in CRR, died last Thursday.

Stella and her father Eddie Brewer, then chief of Wildlife of The Gambia, founded the first-ever chimpanzee rehabilitation programme in1969, as a solution for a group of chimps confiscated from hunters and traders by the Gambian wildlife authorities.

Funding for Stella’s project was always difficult and she initially used proceed from the sales of The Forest Dwellers, a book written by herself, and from sales of a one-hour documentary film of the project made by Hugo van Lawick. However, these sources dried up many years ago.

In 2000 the project was registered as a UK charity (No.1081151) under the name of the Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Trust.

Since 1981, the project has operated a special adoption scheme as a means of generating funds for the project that has been the main source of funding over the years. Some of its sponsors have continued funding for more than 20 years and have followed their chimp through adolescence into adulthood and finally into parenthood, and, in one case, even into grandparenthood!!

Newsletters, sent to sponsors twice annually, were written by Stella Marsden herself from the unique and privileged position of having shared almost an entire lifetime of adventure with these chimps as they rediscovered and now colonize their wild environment.

The newsletters are a serialised description of an extraordinary community, covering its daily tasks, its eccentricities, its celebration of births and the grief and trauma of its occasional deaths. The newsletters are also a means whereby the chimps, simply by being their fascinating selves, raise their own funds without that fund-raising jeopardising their freedom or the way they live.

Managing the project and protecting the chimps is an ongoing task, one to which there is no foreseeable end, for the Centre will need to protect the chimps for as long as humans continue to pose a threat to them. This costs money, which the project has to constantly generate.

African carers

The project has African career, two of whom, Bruno and Rene pictured above, have each served over 30 years. Edrissa, also a poet and story-teller, has served for at least 10 years.

Since 1969, they have been working to give orphaned chimpanzees the opportunity to grow up free and independent in their natural environment, rather than leaving them to their all too frequent fates as sad captives in a human world, or worse, as substitute humans in a laboratory.

It is now the longest running chimpanzee rehabilitation project in Africa, which protects and monitors a total population of 76 chimpanzees occupying three islands in the River Gambia National Park. Many of these chimps were born on the islands, the sons and daughters of the distressed orphans nurtured back to health and rehabilitated there over 20 years ago.

Three infants born recently are third generation - grandchildren. The fact that these chimpanzees are able to competently bear and mother their own offspring means the Chimp Re-hab Centre has succeeded in saving not just the individuals brought there but the many generations that will follow. The Chimp Re-hab Centre is now a Gambian national treasure admired and appreciated by both the government and people of The Gambia - it also earns income from tourists and other visitors.

Stella leaves behind her husband David Marsden, two sons, and her sister Heather.