Tributes to Monkey Helpline founder Steve Smit are still landing days after the KwaZulu-Natal conservationist, known across South Africa as the Monkey Man, died on Wednesday, 12 August 2026, aged 70.
Smit founded Monkey Helpline in 1995 with his partner, Carol Booth, and the pair spent the next three decades pulling injured vervet monkeys off roads, out of roofs and away from snares.
Booth paid tribute to him in an emotional interview published on Friday, 14 August 2026, as reported by IOL.
What Monkey Helpline founder Steve Smit built
Over more than three decades, Monkey Helpline answered more than 18 000 rescue call-outs and helped facilitate more than 6 000 releases of vervet monkeys back into the wild.
Those are the numbers sitting behind the nickname.
The work was rarely glamorous. Monkey Helpline took the calls nobody else wanted, dealing with the injured, the orphaned and the ones people simply wanted gone, and Smit’s stubbornness about turning up for them is how the Monkey Man name stuck.
If you live anywhere along the KwaZulu-Natal coast, you know vervets. They raid kitchens, tightrope across power lines and get blamed for everything. As housing developments pushed further into their habitat, the clashes multiplied, and Smit’s phone was often the last stop for a monkey on the wrong end of one.
Carol Booth on losing her other half
He was 70 when he died, after a long illness. The pair had been partners in both senses, at home and in the field, for the whole life of the organisation, which is what makes Booth’s tribute so difficult to read.
Booth, who co-founded the organisation with Smit and worked alongside him for 30 years, described him as her other half.
She did not dress up what his death has done to her, and the line Booth used to sum it up needs no unpacking at all:
“I’m not whole now.”
Public tributes have not been limited to those who knew Smit personally.
Filmmaker Beth Neale is among those who have remembered him since his death, and conservation groups around the country have posted their own messages, a reaction that has kept his name trending days after he died.
Where Steve Smit’s Monkey Helpline goes next
The pressure that made his phone ring has not eased. Development keeps pushing into vervet territory along the KwaZulu-Natal coast, and the call-outs that come with that pressure do not stop because a founder has died.
Monkey Helpline has not said publicly how it will operate without him, and no memorial details had been announced by Sunday, 16 August 2026.
What Smit leaves behind is measurable, though: thousands of vervets that got a second run at the trees because someone picked up the phone.
