Lyall Watson (12 April 1939 – 25 June 2008) was a South African botanist, zoologist, biologist, anthropologist, ethologist, and author of many books, among the most popular of which is the best seller Supernature. Lyall Watson tried to make sense of natural and supernatural phenomena in biological terms. He is credited with coining the "hundredth monkey" effect in his 1979 book, Lifetide; later, in The Whole Earth Review, he conceded this was "a metaphor of my own making". Born in Johannesburg in South Africa, full name Malcolm Lyall-Watson, he had an early fascination for nature in the surrounding bush and learned much from a Zulu minder, who taught him bushcraft and native African animism from an early age. Watson attended boarding school at Rondebosch Boys' High School in Cape Town from the age of ten, completing his studies in 1955. He enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand at the age of 16 where, by the time he was 20, he had earned degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand and from the University of Natal (now the University of KwaZulu-Natal). At the University of the Witwatersrand he had studied under Raymond Dart, leading on to postgraduate anthropological studies in Germany and the Netherlands. He completed a doctorate in ethology at the University of London, under Desmond Morris. He also worked at the BBC writing and producing nature documentaries, and for many years he spent seasons as an expedition leader and resident biologist on board the MS Lindblad Explorer, leading to the publication of a textbook for the general reader on Whales of the World in 1981. He was involved in setting up the Indian Ocean Whale Sanctuary, and in 1977 was appointed as the Seychelles Commissioner for Whales. Watson wrote twenty-four books in all, during a writing career which spanned four decades.
Life
Childhood (1939–55) Born on 12 April 1939, in Johannesburg, South Africa, Watson, born Malcolm Lyall-Watson, was the eldest of three brothers. His father, Doug Lyall-Watson, was an architect who served abroad during World War II with the British Royal Air Force (RAF). Douglas Lyall-Watson was of Scottish ancestry, although five generations removed from his Scottish roots. Watson's mother Mary was of Dutch South African heritage, descended from Simon van der Stel, the first Dutch governor of the Cape. Watson spent his memorable childhood on his maternal grandparents' ranch in a corner of the Transvaal that borders Mozambique and Swaziland, where his mother Mary helped to run the large farm for her aging parents. His grandmother Ouma, Afrikaans for "old ma", English name Grace, was interviewed by the authorities once for defacing postage stamps; she was accustomed to drawing devil's horns on the portrait of the statesman who instigated apartheid, before posting her letters. Watson was often placed in the care of an elderly Zulu, the son of a tribal chief, who taught the inquisitive boy bush craft, gave him the nickname Mbuzi, meaning "The Goat" because of his delight in sampling and exploring everything, and impressed him with the animistic ideas of African tribal culture. When his father returned from the war, Watson was already attending a local school at a neighbouring farm. His father's subsequent, itinerant lifestyle as an architect, and his mother's profession as a radiologist, kept Watson on his grandparents' farm until the age of ten, when he was sent to a boarding school in Cape Town. It was during summer breaks from Rondebosch Boys' High School, spending a month unsupervised with a dozen other boys from his local district on a beach in Plettenberg Bay, in the southeast corner of the Western Cape, that Watson developed his thirst to explore, and learned the independence of thought that stayed with him all his life. Already, at the age of nine, on his grandparents' farm, his grandmother had taken him to the chief of a local tribal community who had been a life-long friend of hers, to be initiated into adulthood with all the other boys of the village. By the time he went to boarding school, he was fluent in Afrikaans, English and Zulu.
Higher education (1955–60) At Rondebosch Boys' High School Watson's academic progress caused him to jump over a year and consequently he finished his studies a year early, at the age of fifteen. His father allowed him to travel before starting at university, and the fifteen-year-old indulged a growing passion for elephants by visiting the only two areas in the southern Cape still to have them. At the age of sixteen he began his studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, one of four English language universities in South Africa at the time. He initially intended to study medicine, and one of his tutors was Raymond Dart, who taught anatomy at the university but had worked extensively gathering fragments of fossil hominids, being the first to describe the genus Australopithecus. Watson volunteered to help sort a large collection of donated fossils for Dart, and the two struck up a friendship that would last until Dart's death in 1988. Watson came to realize that his interests lay in zoology and anthropology rather than in medicine, and he completed his BSc degree at the University of the Witwatersrand having taken courses in a wide range of subjects including botany, zoology, geology, geography and even psychology. He gained his BSc(Hons) in the Department of Zoology at the University of Natal, now the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in 1959, awarded in 1960.
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