Pursuing Giraffe: A 1950s Adventure (Life Writing)

A captivating memoir from one of the first zoologists to study wild animals in Africa.

In the 1950s, Anne Innis Dagg was a young zoologist with a lifelong love of giraffes and a dream to study them in Africa. Based on her extensive journals and letters home, Pursuing Giraffe vividly chronicles Dagg’s realization of that dream and the year she spent studying and documenting giraffe behaviour. Her memoir captures her youthful enthusiasm for her journeys―from Zanzibar to Victoria Falls to Mount Kilimanjaro―as well as her naiveté about the complex social and political issues in Africa.

Once in the field, Dagg recorded the complexities of giraffe social relationships but also learned about human relationships in the context of apartheid in South Africa and colonialism in Tanganyika (Tanzania) and Kenya. Hospitality and friendship were readily extended to her as a white woman, but she was shocked by the racism of the colonial whites in Africa.

Reflecting the twenty-three-year-old author’s response to an “exotic” world far removed from her home in Toronto, Pursuing Giraffe is a fascinating account that has much to say about the status of women in the mid-twentieth century, and the book’s foreword by South African novelist Mark Behr (author of The Smell of Apples and Embrace) provides further context for and insights into Dagg’s narrative.

Anne Innis Dagg graduated with a biology degree from the University of Toronto and earned her PhD in animal behaviour from the University of Waterloo―before many women made careers in science. She has published numerous books and articles on animal behaviour and on feminist issues, including The Feminine Gaze: A Canadian Compendium of Non-Fiction Women Authors and Their Books, 1836-1945 (WLU Press, 2001).