Dian Fossey

Dian Fossey (January 16, 1932 – December 26, 1985) was an American ethologist interested in gorillas. She completed an extended study of several gorilla groups, observing them daily for years in the mountain forests of Rwanda.

Initially encouraged to work there by famous paleontologist Louis Leakey, her work is somewhat similar to Jane Goodall's work with chimpanzees.

Early years

Dian Fossey was born in Fairfax, California, but grew up in San Francisco, where she attended Lowell High School. She earned her bachelor's degree in occupational therapy from San Jose State College (now San José State University) in 1954. She moved to Louisville, Kentucky to work at a hospital, and at the invitation of a boyfriend, she began thinking about visiting Africa in 1957.

Career

By 1963, she had secured financing for her trip. While in Africa, she met Dr. Leakey, from whom she managed to get a job researching gorillas. She displayed a proficiency for gaining the animals' trust and named several of those she worked with, including her close "friend", Digit. In 1967, she founded the Karisoke Research Center, a remote rainforest camp nestled in the Virunga Mountains, in Ruhengeri province, Rwanda. When her photograph, taken by Bob Campbell, appeared on the cover of National Geographic magazine in January 1970, Fossey became an international celebrity bringing massive publicity to her cause of saving the mountain gorilla from extinction. She attended the University of Cambridge, where she received a Ph.D. in zoology in 1974.

Dian Fossey strongly supported "active conservation" i.e. antipoaching patrols and preservation of natural habitat as opposed to "theoretical conservation" which includes the promotion of tourism. She was also strongly opposed to zoos as the capture of indidviual animals all too often involves the killing of its family members. Many animals don't survive the transport, and the breeding rate and survival rate in zoos can be lower than in the wild. She also viewed the holding of animals in "prison" for the entertainment of people as unethical. Fossey, Dian : Gorillas in the Mist. 1983

Dian Fossey is responsible for the revision of a european community project that converted parkland into pyrethum farms. Thanks to Dian Fossey's efforts the park boundary was lowered from the 3000 meters line to the 2500 meters line^*.

Tragedy

Fossey was found brutally murdered in the bedroom of her cabin on December 26, 1985. Her skull had been split by a native panga, a tool widely used by poachers, which she had confiscated years earlier and hung as a decoration on the wall of her living room adjacent to her bedroom. Fossey was found dead beside her bed and 2 metres away from the hole in the cabin that was cut on the day of her murder. Mowat, Farley: The Story of Dian Fossey and the Mountain Gorillas of Africa. Warner Books, 1987 Despite the violent nature of the wound, there was relatively little blood in her bedroom, leading some to believe that she was killed before the wound was inflicted.

Farley Mowat's biography of Fossey Woman in the Mists claims that it is very unlikely that she was killed by poachers. Mowat posits that she was killed by those who viewed her as an impediment to the touristic and financial exploitation of the gorillas. According to the book, which includes many of Fossey's own private letters, poachers would have been more likely to kill her in the forest, with little risk to themselves.

On the night of Fossey's murder, a metal sheathing from her bedroom was removed at the only place of the bedroom where it wouldn't have been obstructed by her furniture, which supports the case that the murder was committed by someone who was familiar with the cabin and her day-to-day activities. The sheathing of her cabin, which was normally securely locked at night, might also have been removed after the murder to make it appear as if the killing was the work of poachers. According to Mowat it is unlikely that a stranger could have entered her cabin by cutting a hole, then going to her living-room to get the panga while Dian could have had all the time to escape. The cabin was in great disarray with broken glass on the floor, tables and other furniture turned around. Fossey was found dead with her gun beside her however the ammunition was of the wrong caliber and didn't fit the weapon. All of Fossey's valuables in the cabin, thousands of dollars in cash and travelers' checks and photo equipment remained untouched - valuables a poor poacher would most likely have taken.

After Fossey's death, her entire staff, including Rwelekana, a tracker she had fired months before, were arrested. All but Rwelekana, who was later found dead in prison, supposedly having hanged himself, were released. Mowat believes that Fossey was killed by an African she had admitted inside her cabin but who was working for the very people who wanted her removed so the the gorillas could be exploited as a tourist attraction.

Many of the organizations which opposed Fossey, including ORTPN (the Rwandan tourism office) and other wildlife organizations, used and continue to use her name for their own financial gain up to this day. Weeks before her death, ORTPN refused to renew her visa. However Fossey managed to obtain a special two-year visa through Augustin Nduwayezu a benevolent Secretary-General in charge of immigration ^*. Mowat believes that the extension of her visa amounted to a de facto death warrant.

Dian Fossey was potrayed by her detractors as eccentric and obsessed, and all kinds of stories were circulated about her. According to her letters, ORTPN, the World Wildlife Fund, African Wildlife Foundation, FPS, the Mountain Gorilla Project and some of her former students tried to wrest control of the Karisoke research centre from her for the purpose of tourism, by portraying her as unstable. In her last two years Fossey claims not to have lost any gorillas to poachers; however the Mountain Gorilla Project, which was supposed to patrol the Sabinyo area, tried to cover up gorilla deaths caused by poaching and diseases transmitted through tourists. Nevertheless these organisations received most of the public donations. The public often believed their money would go to Fossey who was struggling to finance her antipoaching patrols while organisations collecting in her name put it into costly tourism projects and as she put it "to pay the airfare of so called conservationists who will never go on antipoaching patrols in their life".

Months before her death, Fossey signed a high-paying contract with Warner Bros for a movie which was to be based on her book, Gorillas in the Mist. The prospect that her work would be funded far into the future may have contributed to her demise.

Fossey's will stated that all her money (including proceeds from the movie) should go to the Digit Fund to finance antipoaching patrols. However her mother, Kitty Price, challenged the will and won.

The director of ORTPN, Habirameye, who refused to renew Fossey's last visa request, insisted at the filming of Gorillas in the Mist that there should be as little about the death scene as possible.

Dian Fossey is interred at a site in Rwanda that she herself had constructed for her dead gorilla friends.

Legacy

After her death, Fossey's Digit Fund in the USA was renamed the "Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International". The Digit Fund in the UK which Fossey lost to the Fauna Protection League (FPS) was also renamed after her as "The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund UK" (DFGF-UK). However she never received any funds collected in her name by the FPS and although some conservationists associated with the FPS wanted her to be removed from Rwanda FPS and the DFGF-UK continue to use her name up to this day for their financial purposes including promotion of tourism which Dian opposed and the financing of local bureaucrats.

One of Dian Fossey's friends Dr. Shirley McGreal continues to work for the protection of primates through the work of her International Primate Protection Leage (IPPL) one of the few wildlife organisations that according to Fossey effectively promote "active conservation."

For a year after Fossey's death, until the conviction of one of her students for her murder, poachers dared not enter the forest for fear of being captured and interrogated for her murder. Many believe that the student convicted of murdering Dian was just a scapegoat and that the evidence against him was contrived. Immediately after the conviction, in late 1986, poaching began to rise again. Elephants and leopards are now completely extinct in the Virungas.

After Fossey's death until the 1994 Rwanda genocide, Karisoke was directed by former students who had opposed her.. During the genocide the camp was completely looted and destroyed. Today only remnants of her cabin that was converted into a museum for tourists at the time remain. During the civil war the Virunga parks were filled with refugees and illegal logging destroyed vast areas.

Books and movies

Her book Gorillas in the Mist is both a description of her scientific research and an insightful memoir of how Dian Fossey came to study gorillas in Africa. Portions of her life story were later adapted as a film The Story of Dian Fossey starring Sigourney Weaver as Fossey. The written work covers her scientific career in much greater detail, and omits material on her personal life, including her affair with photographer Bob Campbell (which formed a major subplot of the movie, in which Campbell was played by Bryan Brown). The movie also portrayed Fossey as a woman completely obsessed by "her" gorillas, who would stop at nothing to protect them. It includes a fictitious scene in which she orchestrated the mock hanging of a poacher and another where she burned poachers' huts. The movie invented characters including the animal trader "Van Vecten" and changed the names of Fossey's students. Mowat's Woman in the Mists was the first booklength biography of Dian Fossey, and it serves as a useful counterweight to the dramatizations of the movie and the focus on gorillas in her own work.

A new book published in 2005 by National Geographic in the United States and Palazzo Editions in the United Kingdom as No One Loved Gorillas More, written by Camilla de la Bedoyere, features for the first time Fossey's story told through the letters she wrote to her family and friends. The book is published to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of her death, and includes many previously unpublished Bob Campbell photographs.

More recently, the Kentucky Opera Visions Program, in Louisville, has written an opera about Dian Fossey. The opera, entitled Nyiramachabelli, premiered on May 23, 2006.

A book called the Dark Romance of Dian Fossey was published in 1989 and compares the story of Dian Fossey with versions as seen by others. However much of the book is uncited and it repeats the salacious and racist stories created by her detractors. For instance, the book claims that Fossey became a racist because she was gang-raped by black soldiers, an event that Fossey and her friends repeatedly and vehemently denied.

In 2006, Gorilla Dreams: The Legacy of Dian Fossey was published. ^*. Written by investigative journalist, Georgianne Nienaber

At the beginning of Gorilla Dreams, Fossey attends her own funeral and watches her murdered gorillas interacting with the graveside bystanders. She establishes a new relationship with the slain gorilla Digit, who acts as her guide after death as she carefully reviews her life, its challenges, successes, hardships, and the ultimate closure of her murder. Although Fossey’s death is officially unsolved, recently released documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, as well as testimony from the International War Crimes Tribunal proceedings, offer new suspects, motives, and opportunities. Every fact about Fossey’s life is meticulously annotated. However, the setting of her conversations with the murdered gorillas is obviously fictional, yet steeped in African tradition.

Citation

“When you realize the value of all life, you dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future.” The last words printed carefully in Dian' s journal on the final page.

"No, I won't let them turn this mountain into a goddamn zoo". Dian Fossey in the movie "Gorillas in the Mist". In the year 1990 more than 10.000 tourists visited the Virungas whilst the Gorilla population is ca. 350.

Bibliography

Fossey, Dian: Gorillas in the Mist. Houghton and Mifflin Company, 1983

Notes

External links

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