Mwiga Mambo

As a young man, Mwiga was very much inspired by Jane Goodall and her work with chimpanzees in Tanzania. Today, Mwiga is one of Africa’s leading primatology guides. He has twenty years of experience with Nomad, all at Greystoke Mahale, and we are so excited that he is now the manager of the camp, bringing a wealth of experience and knowledge to the role. His family were local royalty: his maternal grandfather was a well-respected Tongwe chief and his grandmother was born in a village not far from where Greystoke now sits. Mwiga was brought up with stories of the chimpanzees, his mother spoke of them often and both his uncle and father worked with the primatologists from Kyoto University. It was his father who introduced Professor John Ichiro Itan to the Mahale population of chimps and his uncle was one of the trackers who helped to habituate the M-Group.

When he was 16, he met Jane Goodall who came to give a talk at his school, and he received a prize from her for his exceptional knowledge of chimpanzees, as well as for a picture he had drawn of one. With such a pedigree, and with his insatiable curiosity, Mwiga was always going to become one of Mahale’s top guides. He started at the bottom though, and joined Roland and Zoe Purcell as a waiter and housekeeper at the early Greystoke, when the camp was still made up of tents on a remote beach. Eventually, he got out into the forest as a tracker where he spent blissful days following one group of chimps after the other, as they traversed the forest, observing unique behaviours and learning the individual characteristics.

Over the last few years Mwiga has been a wonderful ambassador for Nomad, and the chimps of Mahale, travelling to Hong Kong, Singapore and Manila in 2016, and to the USA in 2017 and 2018 where he gave presentations to clients about life in Mahale. He also made a trip to the Virunga National Park in the Congo to meet the gorillas. He still finds that each day with the chimps brings new discoveries and, as he says, he is a full-time student at the best primate university in the world.