The whole Sunday Times story:
Me Tarzana, queen of the jungle
A Bradford woman has revealed her past as a child raised by monkeys in Colombia
Richard Brooks, Arts Editor Published: 21 October 2012
Marina Chapman, now living in Yorkshire, spent five years with capuchin monkeys as a child
MARINA CHAPMAN today gingerly climbs trees that once she could have scaled in seconds as the adopted daughter of a family of monkeys in the South American jungle.
The amazing story of a Bradford housewife that has more to do with Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan than David Hockney’s home city in West Yorkshire is to be told for the first time in a book and television documentary.
For five years as a young girl she lived with a colony of capuchin monkeys in the jungles of Colombia and learnt to catch birds and rabbits with her bare hands.
She was eventually found by hunters but that did not save her. They sold her to a brothel — in exchange for a parrot.
It was only when she came to Britain and married John Chapman, a former church organist, that she felt safe. She did not tell her husband about her background until after their wedding.
Now she and her family have decided to tell her story to help highlight the horrors of human trafficking in Latin America.
Chapman believes she was born in about 1950. When she was about five she was kidnapped, presumably for ransom, but was then abandoned in the jungle.
“It’s assumed that the kidnap went wrong,” said Vanessa James, one of Chapman’s two daughters, who is helping her mother with her book, The Girl with No Name, which has already been sold in seven countries and is being published by Mainstream in Britain next April.
“All she can remember is being chloroformed with a hand over her mouth. And all she can recall of her life before that is having a black doll as a toddler,” said James.
What is known — Chapman has been questioned by Andrew Lownie, her agent, and by the publisher — is that she lived for about five years with capuchin monkeys.
Experts on feral children say that monkeys are known to accept young humans into their fold. For example, John Ssebunya, a four-year-old Ugandan boy, was left in the jungle for more than a year and lived with vervet monkeys. Now aged 27, he adapted well to life with humans after his rescue.
Chapman lived on the sort of food the monkeys ate and broadly copied their lifestyle. “She obviously learnt to fend for herself and only once got very ill when she ate some poisonous berries,” said James, who is a film and TV composer.
After about five years she was found by the hunters who took her to the city of Cucuta in northeast Colombia and sold her to a brothel.
Often beaten — sometimes so badly that she lost consciousness — she was groomed for prostitution but escaped before having to sleep with a client. She then spent years on the streets, sometimes being arrested and put in a cell.
In her mid-teens she was taken in by a Colombian family as a maid. It was there that she suggested the name of Marina Luz for herself. She lived with one family, but worked mainly for the next-door neighbours, who were in the textile trade.
When, during her mid-twenties, the neighbours went to stay in Bradford for six months on business they took her along. It was there that she met John Chapman, a 29-year-old bacteriologist, at a church meeting. He then spoke no Spanish and she virtually no English. While the Colombian family were concerned about leaving her behind, she wanted to stay, and a few months later married John Chapman in 1977.
What is also extraordinary is that she raised her own children in part as if they were monkeys. “When we wanted food, we’d have to make noises for it,” said James. “All my schoolfriends loved Mum as she was so unusual. She was childlike, too, in many ways.”
When her daughters were younger, she would bring creepy-crawlies and furry mammals into the house. But nobody outside her close family knew her remarkable background.
“I got bedtime stories about the jungle, as did my sister,” said James. “We didn’t think it odd — it was just Mum telling her life. So in a way it was nothing special having a mother like that.”
Interestingly Chapman never cries. “I guess it’s an emotional effect of her earlier life,” said James.
Over the years, her English has improved, though she speaks stiltedly and with an accent. She trained as a cook, for some time working at the National Media Museum in Bradford, before switching careers to help young troubled children.
Five years ago Chapman returned with James to Colombia to see if she might be able to trace her natural parents, whose home village, she thought, was not far from Cucuta.
Appeals were made in newspapers and on television, a method not unusual in Colombia where child abduction and trafficking remain common.
“One woman came forward, but Mum could not bring herself to meet her,” said James. “What was extraordinary is that her first names were Marina Luz. Maybe she was a sister? What we don’t know is if she said that was her name because that’s my mother’s, or if my mother had subconsciously named herself that as it was one she recalled from before being kidnapped.”
While in Colombia Chapman also got in touch with some of the members of the family who had unofficially adopted her. However, she was stopped by the military from going into the jungle area where she thought she originally lived.
A television documentary about her childhood is now being planned by Blink Films, whose executive producer is Dan Chambers, a former programme head of Channel 5.
