Dilwyn Jenkins was a champion of Peru’s indigenous peoples, and particularly of the Ashaninka tribe of the western Amazon, whom he worked to support for nearly 40 years. Indeed, it is partly thanks to Dilwyn’s efforts that the traditional lifestyle of the Ashaninka has survived, despite successive threats from loggers, drug traffickers and an occupation by the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerilla group.
Dilwyn, who has died unexpectedly at the age of 57, began his long association with Peru as a teenager, when, on leaving Haberdashers’ Aske’s Hatcham school, south-east London, he taught himself Spanish and worked as a milkman to fund a solo trip to the country. Later, as a student of anthropology at Cambridge University (1976-1979) and inspired by the tribal peoples he had met in the Amazon, he and fellow student Pete Wade (now professor of anthropology at Manchester University) won a BBC/Royal Geographic Society award to make a documentary. The film that they and three fellow students made, observing the Ashaninka way of life and warning of the threats that contact with outsiders brought, was screened in 1978 as part of the World About Us series, with the student film-makers participating in a panel discussion on their experiences hosted by David Attenborough. It was the first time that the Ashaninka community had been filmed.
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