The women who gave her life to save the gorillas
MELISSA HOGENBOOM
It is now 30 years to the day since the mysterious death of Dian Fossey, the primatologist who transformed the way we see gorillas.
Before Fosseys work, gorillas had an appalling reputation as violent brutes that would kill a human on sight. Fossey demolished this myth. Living alongside a group of mountain gorillas in the forests of Rwanda, she showed that these huge apes are actually gentle giants, with individual personalities and rich social lives. In many ways they are like us.
But the mountain gorillas were also in terminal decline, their habitats encroached on by farms and overrun by war and civil unrest. Fossey spent her last years fighting an increasingly savage battle to save them, until she finally lost her life in 1985.
The 1988 film Gorillas in the Mist presented a fictionalised version of Fosseys story. We have attempted to tell it as it really happened by speaking in depth to three of Fosseys colleagues and friends, one of whom, Ian Redmond, provided nearly all the photos featured.
Dian Fossey did not set out to become a primatologist. She simply loved African nature and was inspired to travel there in 1963.
During this trip she met the renowned palaeoanthropologist Louis Leakey. He was focused on studying the fossils of our ancestors, but had realised that to really understand how we evolved, we would also have to learn about our closest relatives: the apes.
Leakey had already helped another female researcher, Jane Goodall, set up long-term studies on chimpanzees. Now he wanted to start something similar for gorillas.
At the time little was known about mountain gorillas, one of two subspecies of the eastern gorilla. In films they were depicted as violent brutes, and tales from hunters suggested that if anyone got too close they would charge to kill.
Three years after their meeting, Leakey hired Fossey to study mountain gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But conflict in the country forced her to leave.
So in September 1967, Fossey set up a small research outpost in neighbouring Rwanda: the Karisoke Research Center. This consisted of a few cabins high in the volcanic Virunga mountains.
The area was and is home to the Virunga group of mountain gorillas. This is one of only two populations in the world, the other one being in Uganda.
There were about 475 individuals in the early 1960s, but their numbers were dwindling due to poaching and habitat loss. In the early 1980s the population dropped to about 254 individuals.
Fossey set out to understand and protect the few remaining mountain gorillas, before they disappeared.
Her early work was painstaking. To get close to the gorillas, she started imitating their behaviour.
As she explained to the BBC in 1984: Im an inhibited persona and I felt that the gorillas were somewhat inhibited as well, so I imitated their natural, normal behaviour like feeding, munching on celery stalks or scratching myself. She would also beat her chest with her fists and copy their belch-like calls.
Fosseys patience and quiet demeanour paid off. She gained the gorillas trust and could observe them undisturbed. She soon started to see which gorillas belonged to which family, and learnt the key role played by the dominant silverback male in each family.
This method of gaining their trust is called habituation. It was Fosseys great gift to the world, says gorilla conservationist Ian Redmond, who worked closely with her for over three years. Eventually it led to human-gorilla friendships.
I mean that seriously, says Redmond. Gorillas are so like us and they can see theyre like us. They are as fascinated by us as we are by them. They actually inspected us physically, pulled our lips down and looked at our teeth. They were very curious about this gorilla-like animal that does such different things [to them].
In 1970, only three years after starting her fieldwork, Fossey appeared on the cover of National Geographic magazine. There she first told the world about the lives of mountain gorillas.
The gorilla is one of the most maligned animals in the world, Fossey wrote. After more than 2,000 hours of direct observation, I can account for less than five minutes of what might be called aggressive behaviour.
The world immediately took notice. Heres this lone woman out in the centre of Africa studying what others would have presumed were fearsome dangerous creatures, says Amy Vedder of Yale School of Forestry Environmental Studies in New Haven, Connecticut, US, who worked with Fossey from early 1978.
For the first time, gorillas were captured on film for people to watch in their own homes. Fossey also named the gorillas she studied and shared their characteristics, just as Jane Goodall had done with chimpanzees. That was greatly inspiring. It created a global level of interest and concern about gorillas, says Vedder.
Living in a remote area with few other people around suited Fossey well. But that was not true of everyone who worked there. At night the forest creaked and groaned, and could seem like a terrifying place, Redmond says.
Fossey provided little companionship or comfort. She was not an easy person to live and work with, and often preferred to be alone. She could be extremely charming and charismatic one minute, and hostile the next. Days went by where she barely communicated with anyone except for sending around hand-written notes.
Her friend and fellow primatologist Kelly Stewart spent many years working with Fossey, initially as her student.
She was a hard person to be friends with, Stewart says. She demanded complete loyalty, but you never knew whether she was going to love or hate you that day. She could be very charming, a lot of fun, and very supportive. And then she could turn on you.
By the time Stewart arrived in 1973, Fossey was not spending much time with the gorillas. She was suffering from emphysema, which made her very short of breath. Despite this, she still had full control of the research camp, Stewart recalls.
Fossey also spent ever more time dealing with poachers and farmers, whose cattle encroached on the gorillas habitat. Shortly after Stewart arrived, Fossey shot several of the cattle dead.
When I first got there she was mercurial but was already angry, Stewart says. She was in warrior mode and fighting mode. Her love for gorillas and her hatred of poachers really coloured her behaviour, and some people think it eventually got in the way of rational management of the research centre. BBC
