by John Fowler
Where do I even begin?
The story is such a long and convoluted one. My longest statement becomes my old standard—“Dian was kind of difficult to work with.”
I soon learned that women in particular identified with Dian, full of praise for what they saw as groundbreaking—not only in terms of the fieldwork, but in challenging the sexism of the scientific establishment. Recalling the arc of Carolyn’s experience, I thought how Dian would have treated these starry-eyed fans. No one lasted, or remained in Dian’s favor long—least of all, these kindred spirits. Such notions were only fantasy; there certainly wasn’t room for two Dians on the mountain.
Dian never reached me again, but a letter from Sandy Harcourt did manage to find me. I was surprised, and in fact quite honored, to read his offer for me to return to Rwanda for a two-year stint, this time with expenses covered and even a paycheck, of all things. In the letter, he explained that the student doing the gorilla census work wasn’t faring too well, and they wanted me to replace her. It was with a little shame that I wrote back to him declining this offer. It all just seemed too soon, and I was quite enjoying my new zoo career, among the many coworkers who had become my like-minded friends. Rosalind Aveling wrote me too, in a kind and flattering effort to recruit and lure me back to the Virungas to work with Conrad on the gorilla census. With her letter also came bitter news as she wrote:
Bonne Année died of double pneumonia at the end of a long rainy season. The group had been ranging very high and far, and we think she just got exhausted trying to keep up, and succumbed to the pneumonia while weak.
Here, I had to pause and take a deep breath before continuing. Life as an independent member had been too much for our little one at such a young age within this group of older members. My hopes of returning to the Virungas one day had been most inspired by seeing my little one as a grown-up gorilla, perhaps with a baby of her own. Alas, she had to grow up too fast under the circumstances, and that had taken her life. I take solace knowing she had died a wild gorilla, free in her homeland, in a group of her own who cherished her.
Houghton Mifflin published Gorillas in the Mist in 1983. It was with some pride I found my name in the index, and flipped to the pages on which Dian recalled our horrific attempt at releasing Bonne Année into Group 5. But that’s the extent of it, all the credit for caring for our little orphaned gorilla she gave to her dog Cindy. My cohorts—Peter, Stuart, Carolyn—are absent, as if they never existed. But Peter’s photos appeared, the ones Dian had to have, and Peter was given full credit.
Otherwise gone was everyone who spurned her, and that list was a long one. I tried to read the book from page one, but soon realized the story was sanitized to the point of sterility. The writer bore little resemblance to the woman I knew. Nearly all those who bolstered Dian’s efforts were missing from the pages. With little intrigue, Dian attempted to divert the reader with meandering stories of the gorillas. In print, as in life, she was withdrawn from people, hiding among gorillas in a fantasy world of her own design.
I could see why she insisted we write as complete a narrative as we could in our gorilla notes, as these are what she drew from to create her embellished interpretations, such as the following:
After her mother’s emigration from Group 4 Augustus seldom hand-clapped; however, she resumed the activity when Titus started chin-slapping. Together the two sounded like a mini-minstrel band. On sunny, relaxing days, their claps and slaps could prompt playful spinning pirouettes from Simba, Cleo, and little Kweli. After several months of closely scrutinizing Titus’s attention-getting feat, Kweli began chin-slapping whenever he was without play partners.
What I was reading, in essence, was that gorillas make music, have little bands, and dance parties to celebrate good weather and times of peace. This passage, like so many, gives good insight into Dian’s anthropomorphic mind, and flights of fancy.
The battle over camp continued for Dian among African wildlife leaders and the world of primatology. Although news from there, and my knowledge of goings-on back at Karisoke, diminished and faded, mention in the book only bolstered my being typecast as “the gorilla guy” among peers, but in the zoo, I immersed myself in a broad world of myriad species. I had neither transitioned into primatologist, anthropologist, nor behaviorist, but remained a student of zoology. With so much attention on the charismatic mountain gorillas by competent -ologists, there was little need, or room, for me.
Dian Fossey was found murdered at Karisoke Research Center on December 27, 1985. Wayne McGuire, the only student in camp, and Kanyaragana stumbled upon her lifeless body, hacked to death, her face disfigured by the gash of a panga blade. She had found her way back to her mountain home, but this brutal flourish served as a punctuation mark of hate and rage at the end of the famous primatologist’s tumultuous life.
By this time I hadn’t seen Dian in over five years. My fellow zookeepers knew her from the National Geographic articles showing her as an intrepid scientist nestled among a peaceful family of mountain gorillas against the lush green backdrop of equatorial Africa, and wanted to know my reaction to her shocking death. They seemed a little stunned when I simply replied, “I’m not surprised.”
Terry Maple had since returned to Atlanta, and had taken the helm for Zoo Atlanta’s new direction as a respectable modern zoo. Two months after Dian’s death, he invited me to accompany a television film crew to Rwanda to produce a documentary on East Africa, culminating in a story about the famous gorilla researcher Dian Fossey. My role, he said, was to help serve as a tour leader and Swahili interpreter, but after learning that I worked with Dian Fossey, the crew turned their cameras on me.
In the course of interviews with the film’s director/producer, Bert Rudman, I mentioned briefly that Dian believed in sumu or local “black magic.” Bert fixated on this to sensationalize his story, urging me to speculate on the relationship of black magic to Dian’s death. But I remained unwilling to conjure up some fictionalized account of Dian’s life and death in this manner. More and more, I found myself avoiding Bert’s persistent questioning on the topic.
During a break in filming at Rwanda’s plains park, I spoke with the wife of a Belgian park ranger at the Hotel Akagera bar. She told me something I hadn’t yet heard, that the real reason Dian was killed was because of her knowledge of the poacher trade.
“Everyone in the park system here knows this!” she proclaimed, in her Belgian-French accent.
She then continued on with her story that Dian had openly boasted of having enough information to link high-profile figures, like Rwanda’s President Habyarimana, to poaching and international trade in wildlife, including endangered mountain gorillas. Apparently she had been threatening to bring everyone down in a spectacular exposé. This plausible conjecture, at the time, was obscured by an official accusation against Dian’s longtime tracker Rwelekana, and Wayne McGuire—convenient patsies at the scene. Rwelekana died in prison, leaving none more haunted by Dian Fossey than Wayne McGuire.
When we reached the base of the trail up to Karisoke, I was thrilled to see familiar gorilla trackers for the Mountain Gorilla Project. The tourist program had taken hold, and it was obvious from the sturdier mud huts with fresh thatching, and the better clothing worn by the locals, that it had positively affected the local economy.
I was ashamed as Bert, arriving unannounced with the TV crew, got pushy with the park authorities about letting them film.
“John, can’t you do something?” Bert asked me.
But I remembered being on the receiving end of pushy interlopers wanting special access to gorillas. When I politely asked one of the original tourist gorilla trackers, Zumalinda, about getting back up to Karisoke, his answer was enough for me and the film crew.
“If you try, you may become a suspect in Dian’s murder,” Zumalinda politely warned me. Karisoke was still a crime scene.
After Dian’s death, her Digit Fund survived through changing leaderships, eventually changing its name to
the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International. So many still love her name, especially the women who see themselves as “kindred spirits” as Carolyn once had. In 2007 they celebrated Karisoke’s fortieth year, and I was invited by the fund’s director, Clare Richardson, to accompany a tour of their patrons. The trip included a special visit to the former site of Karisoke Research Center and a hike to see gorillas.
Standing once again among the towering Virunga Volcanoes, I was dazzled by the scope and scale of Rwanda’s gorilla tourism. Daily throngs were organized into small groups to visit the gentle giants. Signs read: “Welcome Dear Tourist” and “Given Peace, Gorillas Bring Currency.” Gorillas are featured everywhere on billboards, signs, and logos throughout the country. They are a true symbol of pride for the small nation.
Today’s organized tourism of gorillas, and the resultant boost to the economy of the region, and all of Rwanda, grew out of the Mountain Gorilla Project. The little seed planted by Amy Vedder and Bill Weber, with Jean-Pierre von der Beck, Sandy Harcourt, and nurtured and cultivated further by Rosalind and Conrad Aveling, and those that followed. That seed had taken root and held fast among the rich volcanic soil to become a model for neighboring countries. The program has grown and flourished into a tree of life—establishing the mountain gorillas’ value as an economic resource, more valuable alive than dead. Protection of this precious resource has led to a growth of the Virunga mountain gorillas’ vulnerable population. It’s no small irony that most people still associate today’s gorilla ecotourism with Fossey, who, of course, always fought against tourism, although she had started as one herself.
From below, on this rare clear day, I see all the towering volcanoes around me, and I well know each by name: Muhavura, Sabinio, Gahinga, Mikeno, Visoke, Karisimbi . . . My eyes stop at the low-slung curve of the saddle region, and Karisoke, where I lived such a formative year, so privileged to live among the rumbling elephants and the snorting buffaloes and the barking bushbucks and the whistling duikers and the screeching hyraxes. And privileged to have known Bonne Année, and to have cared for her, among those imperiled great apes, the mountain gorillas, a purer version of ourselves.
What was it like? I am asked. What was Dian like? The answer is a long one. Karisoke was the answer to my dreams of life and work in Africa. It was also a brutal dose of disenchantment amid the harsh reality of that deceptively beautiful place—its frigid rains and bone-chilling mist, its rugged tangled terrain, with gorillas on the brink of extinction and its impossible headmistress at the center of it all. My responses have always been short, vague, and inexplicit because the answer is a long one and counter to expectations. And so I tell my story.
EPILOGUE
THE RUINS
It is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
The herbal smell of undergrowth, wet from recent rains, triggers memories with every step. The mountain’s morning air is cool, as always. Deep hoofprints still puncture the black volcanic mud, as they have done for eons in these scattered clearings, evidence of where the forest buffaloes foraged the night before.
I have returned for the first time in twenty-six years, on the trail I knew, now overgrown. I linger behind the others, stalling, searching my memory bank and looking for visible landmarks. My cabin is gone, but at the site of its faded outline by the familiar flowing streambed I am overwhelmed by a rush of memories so jumbled and bittersweet, they choke me. A powerful gravity brings me to my knees on the grass where my doorway used to be. I am thankful that the others follow some newer pathway, their voices fading somewhere ahead where the forest gives way to open meadow. I gather my emotions. A weathered sign above the sun-bleached skull of a buffalo reads, “Dian Fossey’s Original Cabin.” It had been my cabin.
All the cabins are gone, even Dian’s large one at the far end of camp, and the paths between them in our little village, once so well worn and defined by our boots and the hooves of buffaloes. Karisoke has been reclaimed by the forest from which it had emerged decades ago, and I see it as Dian must have seen it upon arrival. A brutal civil war that swept the country has erased all but the gorilla graveyard. There among the markers for Dian’s beloved apes, is her own stone tomb.
Today is the fortieth anniversary of Dian Fossey’s founding of Karisoke Research Center. The program has grown to a scale and scope none of us could have foreseen, relocated to a town below. So many Africans now are a part of this; Rwanda’s own now carry the torch. I am stunned to see Baraqueza, now fifty-six years old, still a gorilla tracker, and a former anti-poacher patrolman, Sekalyongo, now a tracker, too, at sixty-four! We greet each other heartily. They are true survivors. Both have lived through Rwanda’s horrific genocide, remaining hale and fit enough to hike these mountains daily, even in the harshest weather. We chatter away in Swahili, rusty from the passing years, pausing to recall words and the names of others now dead. Of the dozens in the throng, the three of us are the only ones present who knew Dian Fossey. Our history bonds us, and separates us from the others.
The congregation gathers around her gravesite—a massive slab of stones and concrete, as if a fortress against desecration. I cringe at the thought of this becoming a Fossey worship scene with maudlin displays and tears from those who never knew this troubled woman. Mercifully it doesn’t. Baraqueza and Sekalyongo stoically place flowers on the cold stony slab. None in the throng cries, and I wonder what they think and know, murmured into ears via second hand, second generation, faded and filtered over time, becoming lore, distilling into legend. The research center’s new director, Katie Fawcett, remains professional, somber but steadfast, emotionally sound in stark contrast to her long-gone predecessor, Karisoke’s troubled founding mother.
Dian’s grave is surrounded by the wooden placards marking the burial grounds of her research gorillas: Uncle Bert, Flossie, Puck, Digit . . . Fittingly, Dian lays among them now. I recognize so many of the names, and am saddened by the monikers of those I knew. Marchessa’s name brings back vivid memories of taking her body into Ruhengeri for necropsy and returning her here for burial. One marker is missing, the one I had made . . . not that of a gorilla, but of Dian’s beloved monkey, Kima. I deliberate with Baraqueza and Sekalyongo about its location. We three agree on a spot where the monkey’s remains lie hidden and I am again thrust back in time to her ill-fated return to camp. I also don’t see a marker for Bonne Année, our little orphan, with whom I’d spent so many days. I realize I don’t know the story of our little orphan’s remains, only of her passing. Perhaps she was left on the slopes where she died. For me, Mount Visoke serves well as her shrine.
On Dian’s tomb there is that strange word again, “Nyiramachabelli,” which she cultivated for herself, with its ch and ll spellings not characteristic of Kinyarwanda words. She didn’t need a label to become a legend. Fittingly, the plaque says, NO ONE LOVED GORILLAS MORE. She is given great honor in return for bringing the plight of an endangered species to so many, to have sparked global interest with those pictures of her among gentle mountain gorillas, and her stories of them. While Dian ended her close personal relationships spectacularly and abysmally, the admirers she couldn’t spurn remained undaunted. To not know her is to love her.
Dian inspired the world, but despite the dire situation of the Virunga’s last gorillas, she couldn’t work collaboratively and cooperatively. Any disagreement set her off, triggering her contempt and withdrawal. Her isolation was self-inflicted. But since her death, people have rallied and the mountain gorilla did not die with her, although her resistance did. Her wall crumbled and fell, like the cabins of her long-gone camp. Karisoke, and its mission, has grown and flourished, like the remaining gorillas of these mountains—not because Dian made the world love her, but because she made them love gorillas more.
Off the mountain and down below, I am dazzled by t
he new Karisoke, now part of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International. Relocated to the town I knew as Ruhengeri, which changed its name to Musanze after the genocide. The mission has broadened too, by adding education and community development to the original goals of research and conservation. It is even a major employer for the town. Katie Fawcett was lighthearted on this occasion, even joyful. After the merriment of uplifting speeches, acrobatics, and dance performances, one of her senior Rwandan staffers dutifully advised his team not to overindulge, reminding them that they must be back at work the very next day.
“Oh, tomorrow’s tomorrow,” Katie interjected with a wave of her hand, and the festivities continued. Moved by the real joy expressed on the faces of so many now employed by the new Karisoke to serve a burgeoning population of mountain gorillas and a new generation of Rwandans, I joined Baraqueza and Sekalyongo in the dancing.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Virunga Volcanoes on approach, immersed in clouds. Mounts Gahinga, Sabinio and Muhavura lie on the Rwanda-Uganda border.
In the chilly morning sunlight, mists of the cloud forest drift through branches of Hagenia abyssinica, a dominant tree species of the Virungas.
Dian Fossey with Bonne Année. The only picture I dared take of Dian in the moment, but I think she was actually posing and wanted me to take more of her that day.
Our orphaned gorilla, Bonne Année, rests affectionately atop Dian Fossey’s beloved dog Cindy. Both were confiscated from poachers, although under quite different circumstances.
Me, Bonne Année, Carolyn Phillips, and Peter Veit, sitting on the bank of Karisoke’s Camp Creek, after a day of gorillas.
In search of Nunkie. Hiking across the boggy meadow from Rwanda into Zaire, just near the forest edge up ahead. Mount Mikeno looms in the background beyond, with clouds forming at its crown as the sun warms its dark stone monolith.