"Because They Needed Me": Rita Miljo and the Orphaned Baboons of South Africa

by Michael Blumenthal, Rita Miljo

Overview

In 1980, a 50-year old animal-obsessed Lithuanian-born woman, and former member of the Hitler Youth, by the name of Rita Neumann-- later to become Rita Miljo-- spirited a battered young baboon by the name of Bobby from a national park in Angola. Therewith began a thirty-year odyssey that would bring her into conflict not only with many of her neighboring South Africans, who considered baboons to be "vermin," but also with the South African authorities themselves.
Much like the work of Jane Goodall with chimpanzees in Tanzania, Dian Fossey with gorillas in Rwanda, and Biruté Galdikas with the orangutans of Borneo -- but without a background as a scientific researcher -- Rita Miljo began her rehabilitation centre C.A.R.E. to nurse orphaned and injured baboons back to health, at the same time pioneering methods of reintroducing troops of convalesced baboons back into their natural habitat.
In May of 2007, Rita encountered a German-Jewish American poet and novelist, and the New Jersey-born son of Holocaust refugees, Michael Blumenthal, who had come to volunteer at the Foundation, and, with that, a rare and unusual friendship, which led to this unique and remarkable collaboration, was born. Combining thirty years' worth of Rita Miljo's edited journals -- which, for the first and only time in her life, she entrusted to another -- with Michael Blumenthal's own impassioned and insightful portrayal of Rita and her baboons, "Because They Needed Me" is a chronicle of primate conservation and the intrepid and courageous woman who devoted her life to it.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940158474774
Publisher:	Aequitas Books
Publication date:	05/04/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	220
File size:	164 KB

About the Author

Rita Miljo was born Rita Neumann in Klaipeda, Lithuania in 1931, and joined the League of German Girls (the girls' wing of the Hitler Youth) at age 8. Speaking of Nazism later in life, she said that “only today, in hindsight, do I understand the total madness we were subjected to”. After working in a Hamburg zoo as a young woman, she followed her husband, mining engineer Lothar Simon, to South Africa in 1953, where he died, along with her 17-year old daughter, in a tragic 1972 light aircraft crash. After this loss, Rita became a renowned conservationist and animal rights pioneer noted for founding and managing the "Centre for Animal Rehabilitation and Education" (CARE) in South Africa near Phalaborwa. She died on July 27, 2012, at the age of 81, in a fire that swept through her home on the Centre's 50-acre reserve along the banks of the Olifants River. The first baboon she ever rescued in 1980, Bobby, also died in the blaze with her.

Michael Blumenthal, formerly Director of Creative Writing at Harvard, graduated from the Cornell Law School in 1974 and is currently Visiting Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Immigration Clinic at The West Virginia University College of Law. His first collection of short stories, The Greatest Jewish-American Lover in Hungarian History, was published by Etruscan Press in 2014, and Etruscan also published his eighth book of poems, No Hurry: Poems 2000-2012 in 2013. He is the author of the memoir All My Mothers and Fathers (Harper Collins, 2002), and of Dusty Angel (BOA Editions, 1999). His novel Weinstock Among The Dying, won Hadassah Magazine's Harold U. Ribelow Prize for the best work of Jewish fiction, and has been re-issued in paperback by Pleasure Boat Studios, who also published his collection of essays from Central Europe, When History Enters the House, in 1998. In his free time, he reads and thinks about primates of all sorts.