Working with wild animals and living with African tribesmen may sound like something out of a Rudyard Kipling novel. For Wichita State geology instructor Toni Jackman, that was all once a part of her daily life while researching in east Africa.

Jackman, a Wichita native, graduated from East High School and then continued her education at WSU.  She transferred during her junior year to Stanford University and graduated in 1971 with a double major in human biology and sociology. She went on to pursue a Ph.D. in sociology at Cornell University in New York State.

While pursuing her Ph.D. at Cornell, Jackman met Professor Emeritus Dr. Louis Leaky, who was interested in what Jackman wanted to do and arranged for her to go to Africa.

“I was interested in biological determinants to human behavior,” Jackman said. “So I was looking at various primitive societies and cultures, looking for things that seem to be the same in all these cultures.”

While she was in Africa, Jackman received training from Jane Goodall, the world-renowned primatologist known for her 45-year study of wild chimpanzees and gorillas in Tanzania.

“I started looking at primates, particularly the advanced primates, like chimpanzees and gorillas, looking for similarities in mother-infant, in aggression, in various kinds of activities and thought patterns,” Jackman said. “Because if you saw similarities among all those things, you could pretty much imagine that they were hard-wired into human behavior.”

Jackman studied smaller primates in Kenya and worked there for nearly eight years. Toward the end of that time, she met a man from the Peace Corps in Botswana and travelled with him for a while, and later deciding to study a bushman tribe on her own.

“I found someone who could speak bushman language, and we got some donkeys and we went into the Kalahari [a desert in South Africa],” Jackman said. “He left me there with the idea that he would come back with the donkeys in a month or so.”

She set up her tent and began life with the bushman tribe.  She would gather plants with the women and participate in tribal activities such as making beads, telling stories, singing and dancing.

After about seven years, Jackman returned to Wichita, where she took a job at the then fairly new Sedgwick County Zoo, working in the herpetarium with the amphibians and reptiles. There, she bred some poison arrow frogs and successfully brought them back from the brink of extinction. Later, she became supervisor of the African section, where she trained the elephants and hippos that are still at the zoo today.

Although she was back in Wichita, it was Africa that piqued her interest in geology. After choosing not to complete her Ph.D., she received her master’s degree in geology at WSU. Unfortunately, she got her degree when no one was hiring so she became a diplomat for the United States in Morocco. After the passing of her father, she returned to Wichita to take care of the family ranch and began teaching at WSU in 2003.

Jackman has lived a life filled with sights and adventures that most people only dream about. She encourages others to do the same.

“I encourage everybody to travel as much as possible,” Jackman said. “You never regret the things you do, only the things that you pass up.”