Gorrillas in the Mist10:02 Apr 15 2007
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In 1966, Fossey secured financing for a trip to Africa. There she met Dr. Louis Leakey, from whom she managed to get a job researching gorillas. Along with Jane Goodall and Biruté Galdikas, Fossey was known as one of "Leakey's Angels". 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.
Also she wanted everyone to know that gorrila's are all not bad as movies and books make them seem. Photographs showing the gorilla "Peanuts" touching Dian's hand depicted the first recorded peaceful contact between a human being and a wild gorilla. Dian's extraordinary rapport with animals and her background as an occupational therapist brushed away the hollywood "King Kong" myth of an aggressive, savage beast. She received a Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Cambridge in 1974.
Dian Fossey strongly supported "active conservation," i.e., anti-poaching 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 individual 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 is often lower than in the wild.
For example, in 1978, Fossey attempted to prevent the export of two gorillas, Coco and Pucker, from Rwanda to the Cologne zoo. She learned that, during their capture, 20 adult gorillas were killed.
Dian also viewed the holding of animals in "prison" (zoos) for the entertainment of people as unethical.
Dian Fossey is responsible for the revision of a European community project that converted parkland into pyrethrum farms. Thanks to Dian Fossey's efforts, the park boundary was lowered from the 3000 meters line to the 2500 meters line.
Fossey's book Gorillas in the Mist was praised by Nikolaas Tinbergen who was a Dutch ethologist and ornithologist who won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Her book remains the best selling book about gorillas of all time.
Death
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 meters away from the hole in the cabin that was cut on the day of her murder. 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 whose Canadian edition is called Virunga 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, but 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 man she had admitted inside her cabin but who was working for the very people who wanted her removed so the gorillas could be exploited as a tourist attraction.
According to Linda Melvern (in her book "Conspiracy to Murder", 2004), Protais Zigiranyirazo, Rwanda's ex-president's brother-in-law, could also have been "implicated in the murder of Dian Fossey in 1985."
Quoting Nick Gordon, author of a book about Fossey's death, "another reason why she might have been killed is that she knew too much about the illegal trafficking by Rwanda's ruling clique." Protais Zigiranyirazo who was the prefect of the Ruhengeri province where Karisoke's located also had strong financial interests in gorilla tourism.
Dian Fossey was portrayed 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 organizations 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 organizations 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".
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 and pressure on Fossey was mounting. 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.
Months before her death, Fossey signed a one million dollar 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.
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.
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 remain of her cabin that was converted into a museum for tourists at the time. During the civil war the Virunga parks were filled with refugees and illegal logging destroyed vast areas.
Her book Gorillas in the Mist is 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 Gorillas in the Mist: 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 Virunga whose British edition is called "Woman in the Mist" 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.
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. None of the money made by the big grossing movie was donated to the Digit Fund.
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