Giving her life for African gorillas

Press, 17 December 1988, Page 24

Giving her life for African gorillas

Woman in the Mists. By Farley Mowat. Macdonald, 1987. 370 pp, illustrations, index. $49.75. (Reviewed by Joan Curry) Dian Fossey was the woman who devoted her life to the mountain gorillas of Central Africa and who, in the end, died for them. In her fierce and lonely fight to protect these animals, as a species and as individuals, from exploitation and destruction, Dian Fossey became a legend. In the process she made herself unpopular with various interested parties: those who disagreed with her objectives, those who undervalued her abilities as a naturalist,. those who resented her influence in the realm of conservation, and those who found it profitable to exploit these endangered animals. Twenty years ago Dian Fossey founded a small research centre, which she called Karisoke, in the mountains of Rwanda in Central Africa, so that she could study the mountain gorilla and find ways to protect it from all the forces that appeared to be ranged against it. Almost from the beginning there were conflicts with organisations which provided the funds and wanted some sort of return on their money, or people who wanted to make films of gorillas beating their chests, or the Rwandan tourist and publicity people who wanted the animals to become tourist attractions. Then the various research students that arrived at Karisoke seemed to be more interested in amassing great quantities of facts about gorillas than in preserving the species. She wrote that “... many modern scientists, just like their predecessors, don’t seem to care if the study species perish, just so that they get all the facts they need about them first.” The prickly and passionate Dian Fossey was therefore destined to clash with just about anybody whose views were not in accord with her own. She

distinguished between active and theoretical conservationists. “It takes one bullet, one trap, one poacher to kill a duiker, a buffalo, a gorilla, an elephant. No number of cute cine films are going to stop the slaughter now going on. It takes one small, preferably five small, patrols to cut traps, confiscate weapons, capture poachers, to preserve the animals remaining in the park.” Active conservationists were the kind of people who came to Karisoke prepared to patrol the mountains and cut the traps. Theoretical conservationists were those who operated grand-sounding organisations that spend large sums of money on overheads and the rest on impressive but ill-judged or ineffective projects. Dian Fossey used up a lot of emotional energy on the politics of conservation, partly because she was dependent on funds from international sources and partly because she was instrumental in starting the “Digit Fund,” named after one of her gorilla friends, killed by poachers. But she spent most of her considerable energies in her remorseless battle against the poachers who roamed, and still roam, the mountains of the wildlife park where Karisoke is situated. In spite of laws forbidding the trapping of any animal within the park, poaching is a profitable and vicious business. There are always buyers for gorilla heads (trophies) and hands (dried and used as ashtrays), elephant tusks, buffalo and deer meat, and so on. Overseas zoos are often in the market for captured baby gorillas and don’t know, or don’t care, that the capture of a baby means that a whole group of adults must be killed as they fight desperately to protect their offspring. The animals caught were usually in a terrible condition when handed over to the buyers. One such baby was “near death, anaemic, totally

dehydrated, emaciated ... filled with oozing sores, lice and fleas, with wire scars around its wrists and ... his left foot is only a swollen, gangrenous stump with the wire snare that caught it deeply embedded above where the foot should be.” Dian Fossey was sometimes able to intercept such babies and care for them at Karisoke until they were fit to travel or be returned to a gorilla group. She remained outraged at the trade and fired off a constant stream of letters and articles condemning the ignorance, the apathy, and the greed of those who make the whole business profitable. It is the passion of Dian Fossey that informs this book, written by a man who never met her but who has studied her life with sympathy and admiration, without being blind to her undoubted flaws. She made some friends, although they did not always remain loyal — she was difficult and uncompromising. Had she been more diplomatic, more gracious, more philosophical, more tolerant and so on, she might not have made so many enemies. As it was, she threw herself into the protection of the mountain gorillas, which she grew to know and love as individuals, with all the force of her considerable personality and without counting the cost to herself — financially, physically, socially, or any other way. Isolated as Karisoke is, a steep climb up from a small African town in the middle of the continent, she seemed nevertheless to be always at the centre of storms as she battled on in the cause that was so important to her. Dian Fossey was murdered, in mysterious circumstances, in December, 1985. She was found hacked to death on the floor of her bedroom in her mountain hut at Karisoke and nobody really knows why or by whom. She lies buried next to her friend Digit. Her work goes on.