Dian Fossey
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Dian Fossey (January 16, 1932 – December 27, 1985) was an American Zoologist who completed an extended study of several gorilla groups. She observed 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.
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.
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. [1]
Dian also viewed the holding of animals in "prison" (zoos) for the entertainment of people as unethical.[1]
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.
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[edit] 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.[2] 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.[2]
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.[2] 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 organisations received most of the public donations[citation needed]. 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".
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.[2] 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.
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.[2]
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.
[edit] 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 which renamed itself "The Gorilla Organisation" in 2006 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.[2]
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 League (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.[2] 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.
[edit] 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 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.
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 of Bob Campbell's previously unpublished 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, [2] written by an investigative journalist, Georgianne Nienaber.
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.
[edit] 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. In 2005 eight gorillas died of measles which were transmitted by tourists.
"And of course, nobody thinks about the goose that laid the golden egg" [2]
[edit] Bibliography
- Fossey, Dian: Gorillas in the Mist. Houghton and Mifflin Company, 1983
[edit] Notes
[edit] External links
- Murder in the Mist solved?
- Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International
- http://ippl.org
- The Legacy of Dian Fossey
- Dian Fossey Murder Files
Categories: Articles with unsourced statements since February 2007 | All articles with unsourced statements | Primatologists | Ethologists | Anthropologists | Alumni of Darwin College, Cambridge | San José State University alumni | People from Louisville, Kentucky | People from San Francisco | Women biologists | American scientists | Murdered scientists | 1932 births | 1985 deaths
