by Tim Cahill
AWF joined with a consortium of the Rwandan Office of Tourism and National Parks, the Fauna Preservation Society, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Peoples Trust for Endangered Species to sponsor the Mountain Gorilla Project. There were several successful fund drives. Dian felt that the Project, and specifically AWF, was taking money that should have gone into her work, that "Digit's blood money" was being used for an ineffective and potentially dangerous program.
Especially galling to Dian was the Mountain Gorilla Project's policy of developing tourism. The idea that tourists could be brought into the park to view habituated groups of gorillas seemed hazardous to her. Reproductive cycles could be disrupted by the stress such visits would
cause. Diseases could be passed to the gorillas. The whole concept was emotionally unacceptable: gorillas should be granted their privacy, she told a friend. They should be left alone. Their world should be pristine, not soiled with clicking cameras, with loud and curious louts, with people who had no knowledge or respect for these animals she loved. In an article published in the April 1981 National Geographic she listed the "tourist presence" among the factors that would lead to the demise of the mountain gorilla.
Mountain gorilla conservation is a multifaceted problem. Poachers have killed gorillas for their skulls and hands, but this has always been rare. Perhaps more threatening to the population as a whole is the potential trade in baby mountain gorillas for private collections and zoos. The gorillas you see in zoos are lowland gorillas. A recent survey out of Gabon suggests there are as many as thirty thousand surviving lowland gorillas. A bridge group, the eastern lowland gorilla resembles the mountain gorilla but is actually a separate race. The mountain gorilla—with only a few hundred individuals surviving—would be a prize animal for any zoo in the world. Some zoos—a very few—are unscrupulous.
To obtain a baby mountain gorilla, poachers would have to kill the silverback and the mother. In November 1982, this is precisely what happened. A wave of poaching struck the Virungas. In widely separate incidents, ten gorillas were killed. No hands or heads were taken. Officials at AWF feared that a contract had been put out for a baby gorilla. Suspicion centered on private collectors from the Mideast. Shortly thereafter, it was discovered that a European zoo had purchased a baby mountain gorilla. (In fact, the animal turned out to be an eastern lowland gorilla.)
The zoo denied any complicity in the otherwise inexplicable wave of poaching. The gorilla hadn't come from Rwanda or Zaire, the zoo pointed out, but from a neighbor-
ing country. It seems that a kindly traveling missionary had found an orphaned baby gorilla. Well, of course the missionary had his good work to do and couldn't spend his life caring for a gorilla, but he did want it to have a good home. This religious individual had simply given the gorilla to the zoo, a gift that would benefit everyone. And since the animal was given as a gift, there was no paper trail to follow and no way to check the story out.
Many people involved in gorilla conservation found the tale of the kindly missionary tough to swallow.
The most dangerous poaching activity in the Virungas, however, involves the trapping of duiker, a small antelope about the size and color of an Irish setter. Wire snares are positioned along game trails, and gorillas often blunder into the antelope traps, catching a hand or foot in the wire. They are generally able to extricate themselves, but the wounds fester in the dampness of the jungle, they become infected, gangrene sets in, animals die. Some lose limbs. Ndume, my favorite silverback—the gorilla with a Gore-Tex fetish— lost a hand in a duiker trap.
Over the years, Dian and her trackers removed literally thousands of wire snares from the park and specifically from the area around Karisoke. In 1980, park guards, working under Mountain Gorilla Project coordinator Jean Pierre van der Becke, were working to remove snares from the more remote areas of the park.
Poaching is a well-publicized and emotional issue, but the clearest danger to the mountain gorilla is the destruction of its habitat. In 1979, a Mountain Gorilla Project worker named Bill Weber took a survey of the people living on farms below the park. The majority seemed to see Volcano Park as a white man's playground. They thought the land should be turned over to more farms.
To understand Rwandans' hunger for land it is necessary to know a bit about the history of the country. The aborigi-
nal people were the Twa, a pygmy people who lived as hunters and gatherers in the great expanse of forest that Rwanda once was. Then came the Tutsi, a race of giants, the tallest people on the face of the earth, who cleared some land for grazing purposes. Finally, the Hutu came out of the north. An agricultural people, the Hutu set about feverishly clearing the land.
Today, the Hutu farming ethic informs the fabric of Rwandan society. When I flew into Rwanda, my seatmate seemed staggered at the contrast between the jungle of Zaire and the bare, rolling hills of Rwanda. "These people hate trees," he said. More to the point, these people need to eat. Rwanda is the poorest sub-Sahara country in Africa. About the size of Delaware, Rwanda has a population of 4.7 million people; 95 percent of those people are subsistence farmers who eke out a living on farms that average a mere two acres apiece.
Worse, the population is growing at a rate that exceeds 4 percent a year, which puts another 23,000 families on the land each year. And there is no more land. None. The tiny farms are simply subdivided. Famine is a very real possibility.
No wonder Rwandans look to the park's forty square miles for desperately needed farmland: the volcanic soil is some of the richest land in all Rwanda. It is there, people feel, for the purpose of putting food into the mouths of children. And there is precedent for turning the land over to farming.
In 1968, 40 percent of the park was cleared, and pyre-thrum, a natural insecticide, was planted. It would be a cash crop that would provide jobs and bring money into the country. In that year, there were an estimated 480 mountain gorillas in the park. Now there are about 260. The destruction of 40 percent of the gorillas' habitat was followed by the loss of almost 50 percent of the population.
It is a commonplace observation that the quickest way to destroy an animal is to destroy its habitat. The Rwandan government, for its part, had a clear duty: its people must not be allowed to starve. One proposal under consideration
in the capital city of Kigali involved turning over a major section of the park to cattle ranching.
The Mountain Gorilla Project tourist program was a strategy for saving the gorillas' habitat. Tourists would bring money into Rwanda, they would provide jobs for local people, they would spend for ancillary services, for hotels and food and transportation. A healthy tourism industry would help feed Rwanda, and a healthy tourism industry required a healthy population of gorillas secure in their traditional habitat.
During my visit to the park in 1981, Dian's highly trained trackers were still patroling the area around Karisoke. Jean Pierre van der Becke, of the MGP, was leading antipoaching patrols into the remote areas of the park. Mark Condiotti, an American working for MGP, was habituating two new groups for the purpose of tourism. The program was two years old. The park had always operated at a loss—salaries for guards and administrators and the cost of maintaining facilities were a drain on the already strained economy— but fees paid by tourists had increased by two and a half times in the two years MGP had been operating. In 1981 the park managed to pay for itself for the first time in its history.
In only two years, some real progress had been made. Aside from the tourism program and the antipoaching patrols, the MGP was working with the people who lived on the farms—called shambas —that roll, bare and treeless, to the very borders of the park. An estimated 780 people occupy each square mile in the land below the park. Conrad and Rosalind Aveling, working for the MGP, were charged with convincing these people that the fertile land above them was best left uncleared, uncultivated, unspoiled.
One evening, about twilight, the Avelings went down to the first village below the park to get their tiny picku
p truck. It was time to take the traveling MGP show a few miles down the muddy, rock-strewn joke of a road to a
village called Karindagi. There were perhaps fifteen huts in the village—one- or two-room affairs with dirt floors—and Conrad parked just outside town in a large, fallow potato field. He set up a loudspeaker on the top of the truck, dropped a cassette into the tape machine, and cranked the sound up, loud. It was a song with a disco beat about "Rasputin, rasputeen, lover of the Russian queen," who, the singers declared earnestly, was "Russia's greatest sex machine." To the west—by way of a light show—a florid equatorial sunset backlit the line of volcanoes above.
People gathered around the truck. There were more of them than could possibly have lived in those few poor huts. Farmers seemed to rise up out of the ground itself. By the time it was dark, there were hundreds of people surrounding the truck. Some were dancing to the song about Russia's greatest sex machine, others were watching Rosalind work the clever panels on the pickup, which folded out to form a large movie screen. When Conrad snapped on the projector, the people of Karindagi sat rapt before a film about gorillas.
There was much laughter, as there is anywhere in the world when gorilla films are shown. I suppose it has something to do with the obvious intelligence in the animals' eyes, the human quality of the facial expressions. There is a shock of recognition. The people of Karindagi, who do not go into the park, who do not have televisions and never see specials about mountain gorillas, who do not subscribe to National Geographic, were beginning to learn what Dian Fossey had taught many in the outside world: the gorillas who ranged above, who could be heard roaring at the edges of the park, were not savage beasts after all. The animals in the film were gentle with humans, inquisitive, trusting. It seemed a revelation to the people of Karindagi.
Afterward, Conrad showed some slides intended to demonstrate that clearing any more of the slopes above would destroy the watershed and that the rivers would die in the dry season, just as the rivers below the pyrethrum project had. There was a discussion of the economic benefits of a tourism program.
On the way back to the park, I told Conrad that the
program had certainly worked as entertainment. The question was: did the message sink in? Conrad thought it was too early to tell.
Back in the States, Dian was working on her book Gorillas in the Mist and—in letters and conversations—railing against "comic book conservationists," and "the hordes that have climbed onto the 'Save the gorilla bandwagon.' " She had grave doubts about the MGP tourist program and how it would affect the gorillas' health, but an incident with a pair of MGP workers probably closed off any avenue of compromise.
I don't know the gist of that conversation. I suspect it was a discussion that turned into an argument, and that spur of the moment anger triggered the final fatal comment. Perhaps the MGP workers were talking about the education program, suggesting that farmers who saw an economic advantage in a healthy gorilla population would not tolerate poachers. It wasn't like the old days anymore. You couldn't keep the people below ignorant of the forest, fearful of the conservationists. It couldn't be done single-handedly, not anymore. Some benefits had to accrue to the native people, and the fight couldn't be personalized, so that it seemed as if there was only one person in the world who cared for the gorillas. Perhaps voices were raised at this point. And then the MGP workers said something that others had suggested, but never to Dian Fossey: they said it was possible that some of the gorillas had been killed for no other reason than revenge. They had died not in spite of her work, but because of it.
Ann Pierce, who became friendly with Dian toward the last, asked me if I had any idea how badly that comment had hurt Dian. "All those years up there," Ann said, "can you imagine, can you even begin to imagine, how badly Dian was hurt."
I said I thought I could. In 1981 I had seen something in Dian's cabin at Karisoke that gave me an idea of her pain.
Nick and I had been given to understand that Dian would not be back, and her cabin was opened to us. The house may have been cozy with a fire blazing away, but on this gray
afternoon it seemed cold and barren. Outside, a steady chilling rain fell, and I could hear it on the roof. Papering one wall was a series of black-and-white pictures, full-face shots of gorillas. In the constant damp of Karisoke, the photos had begun to curl at the edges.
Did Dian Fossey need photos to keep the animals straight? Gorillas are eminently recognizable when you've lived with them for a while, and Dian certainly did not need to memorize photos. I knew that scientists usually sketch nose prints as an identifying technique. The positioning of the nostrils, the horizontal ridges above, are all distinctive. Maybe these photos were for the purpose of redrawing nose prints taken in field notes. Or for students who might study with Dian.
Nick and I stood side by side, looking at the photos. What was their purpose?
I thought of Rosalind Aveling, her refusal to hold the baby gorilla, and wondered if she wanted to avoid the kind of intense relationship with individual animals that typified Dian's best work. It is very difficult to do field work with primates of any kind and not be drawn, emotionally, into that world. There was, I imagined, a danger beyond science in loving not wisely but too well.
The photos on the wall were head shots, nothing artsy, just gorillas in different moods, but mostly smiling. I thought of actors and their eight-by-ten glossies. Strange, though. We had been in Rwanda more than a month, Nick and I, we had met most of the habituated groups and a good number of wild groups. We knew the local actors, and these were strangers.
I looked over at Nick. He turned away, but not before I saw a sad, stricken expression on his face. A prickling sensation ran up my back and along the tops of my arms. "Sweet Jesus," I said, "these are the dead ones."
M 985 was a banner year for the Mountain Gorilla Pro-^B ject. Tourist fees, paid to the park, had become the
I third largest source of revenue for the nation. The tour-
I ists spent even more money on transportation, hotels, ™ food, and local services.
Dian's suspicion that tourist visits might upset the gorillas' reproductive cycles did not prove out. Kelly Stewart and Sandy Harcourt could show that there was no difference in fertility between the research groups and the tourist groups. Perhaps this is because tourism is strictly controlled. There is no touching allowed, and tourists are kept a respectful distance from the animals. Mark Condiotti was actually able to habituate two groups to accept humans, but only from a distance. Additionally, tourists are limited to six individuals, and visits may last no more than an hour and a half once a day.
Both the tourist groups and the research groups were found to be more stable than the wild groups. The animals in the tourist groups were as healthy as those in the research groups, and both were healthier than the animals in wild groups.
There had been no gorillas killed since 1983, probably because the groups most accessible to poachers, those closest to the edge of the park, have been turned over to tourism and are closely monitored; because the trackers take time to destroy traps even with tourists in tow; because the MGP and Karisoke both ran continuing antipoaching patrols.
The combined thrust of tourist dollars and the MGP education program had changed some minds. Bill Weber found that almost all the people living under the park wanted it turned over to farms in 1979. Six years later, another Weber poll showed a majority of farmers in favor of the park.
The government abandoned its plan for cattle ranching in the Virungas, and, in a stunning reversal of policy, actually put forty-five acres back into the park. The Kato Forest,
a partially cleared stand of bamboo, was reclaimed. Group thirteen, a tourist-habituated group, ranged close to those acres, but it often passed over into Zaire. The proximity of good feed, it was thought, might keep them in Rwanda. That has been the case, and recently one of group thirteen's females gave birth in the Kato Forest.
Conrad and Rosalind Aveling were at work in Z
aire, setting up that country's version of the MGP.
Russ Mittermeier, director of the World Wildlife Fund's Primate Program, calls the MGP u one of the most successful, if not the most successful, conservation program on the continent." It is, in fact, a model project, and its three-pronged approach—controlled tourism to provide revenue, education, and antipoaching work—is being copied by the WWF in their efforts to save the golden lion tamarin and the muriqui in South America. "Of all the endangered primates," Mittermeier said, "and I'm talking about the ones who are down to a few hundred individuals, the outlook for the mountain gorilla looks best. The Mountain Gorilla Project is a proven program that works."
And while the MGP prospered, funding was becoming a problem for Dian. She felt that many people were giving money to the African Wildlife Foundation (which had emerged as the principal MGP funding organization) in the mistaken belief that it was going to her. She felt AWF was siphoning off "Digit's blood money." An organization that had funded much of the research work at Karisoke pulled out.
Back at Karisoke in December 1984 for one of her visits, Dian wrote, "My lifework is now being deprived of funding it badly needs. Then, one evening, earlier this year, while I was sitting on the living room floor with my African tracker and patrol workers counting the traps and snares they had brought to camp that day, I realized fully that this was what active conservation was all about and if others want to emulate our efforts, lots of luck to them, the gorillas will ultimately profit by it. In the meantime, the African staff and myself wake up each morning with our integrity intact knowing that our day will be fully utilized for the