Ludmilla, known as Milla, was discovered as a tiny baby chained to the body of her dead mother at a meat market in Cameroon, Africa in the early 1970s. Milla was purchased and raised as a human child by a British couple who lived in Kenya. When the couple left Kenya, they gave Milla, who was then a toddler, to someone in Tanzania, where she became a barroom attraction at a local hotel. For years, she had the run of the hotel until she got older and bit someone, at which point she was confined to a cage, as so many chimpanzees all around Africa increasingly are. In 1990, Jane Goodall found Milla and wanted to provide her with a better life in the company of other chimpanzees. By this time, Milla was addicted to cigarettes and beer. Because she had never really known life other than with humans, there seemed to be no way successfully to introduce her to wild chimpanzees. So Goodall decided to fly Milla to a chimpanzee sanctuary in Zambia known as the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage.

Most of the chimpanzees brought to Chimfunshi are infants, orphaned as a result of the bushmeat trade and the illegal smuggling of chimpanzees for pets and entertainment. Milla was nearly twenty years old and had been removed from the only life she had ever known, so her transition proved difficult, perhaps because in addition to her age she was one of the smartest and most demanding chimpanzees the orphanage had ever encountered.