— 9 —

Sorceress: The Madness of Dian Fossey

The headline read: DIAN FOSSEY ASKED FOR IT.

Shortly after Fossey’s murder in 1985, the Philadelphia Daily News ran this banner over an opinion piece by wildlife researcher Nina Stoyan. “Dian Fossey was murdered by an unknown assailant,” she wrote, “but her story survives as a dramatic example of means which did not justify the end.”

“Obsessed conservationists” who put animals’ needs before humans’, Stoyan wrote, alienate local people from their conservation projects and do more harm than good. Dian Fossey, she concluded, “certainly asked for it, because she alienated, insulted and injured the very object lesson to all she needed. . . . Not surprisingly, arrogance will get conservationists nowhere.”

Like a Greek chorus, many in the wildlife conservation community echoed the opinion. “She got what she wanted,” Kelly Stewart, a former student of Dian’s, told a reporter. “She viewed herself as this warrior fighting an enemy that was out to get her. . . . It was a perfect ending. It was exactly how she would have ended the script.”

“It was only a matter of time,” said Diana McMeekin of the African Wildlife Foundation. “Dian’s usefulness to the gorillas stopped at least five years before her death. The woman lost it very severely. She couldn’t get away with that kind of behavior. And she didn’t.”

“She got killed,” said former student Bill Weber, “because she was behaving like Dian Fossey.”

Dian called her strategy “active conservation”: it included funding her own “army” of antipoaching scouts, torturing poachers, burning their possessions, and kidnapping their children. At first when she corraled illegally grazing cattle and destroyed poachers’ snares, she could argue that she was only enforcing her host country’s laws. But as poachers’ spears and snares claimed animals she knew by name, her war grew private and personal, fired by fury and a terrorist’s zeal. She was no longer simply thwarting the poachers; she was punishing them.

When Dian wrote to her friend Richard Wrangham in November 1976, her anger had congealed into hate. In the letter she described an “ordinary day” at Karisoke: at eleven A.M. five park guards brought her a Batwa poacher who specialized in killing gorillas and elephants. “We stripped him and spread eagled him outside my cabin and lashed the holy blue sweat out of him with nettle stalks and leaves, concentrating on the places where it might hurt a mite. Wow, I never knew such little fellows had such big things. . . . I then went through the ordinary ‘sumu,’ black magic routine of Mace, ether, needles and masks, ended with sleeping pills. . . . That is called ‘conservation’—not talk.”

Students’ and colleagues’ tales of her cruelty gather momentum with each telling, like ghost stories that grow more gruesome with each campfire: mock hangings, poachers injected with gorilla dung, Halloween-masked raids. One student says Dian administered mind-altering drugs to a poacher. When the man recovered, she allegedly said to him: “I have taken away your mind. Next time I won’t give it back.”

Not even Jane Goodall, who considered Dian a dear friend, could publicly defend such tactics. The best she could offer was an attempt at excusing them. Jane did not attend the memorial fundraiser at National Geographic after Dian’s death, but she did send a taped message: “It’s probably true that Dian chose wrongly when she decided to take the law into her own hands, to try to fight the poachers by herself. And yet she felt this way was the only way to try to put right the terrible wrongs that she saw being done. But who are we to blame her? I don’t know how I would react if there were poachers threatening the chimps at Gombe.”

“I warned her,” Jane later told a reporter. “Everybody who was fond of her did. But she didn’t want to listen to things like that. She was a law unto herself.”

Dian’s death, as many see it, was the sum of a neat equation. By imposing her own laws on a sovereign nation, by making enemies of local people instead of friends, by caring more about gorillas than people, Dian was just as responsible for her death as the person who wielded the panga that split her skull.

But Biruté Galdikas, as an anthropologist, offers a different explanation: “Dian was very, very African. That’s the only reason she survived as a lone, white woman on the mountain for nineteen years. She was doing what an African would have done in the same situation.

“What killed Dian,” says Biruté, “was Africa.“

One day, only two years into her study, Dian’s staff reported hearing the wailing of a cow in pain. Dian went to investigate and found an adult bull buffalo wedged in the forked trunk of a Hagenia tree. But poachers had heard the sound first. While the animal was still living, they had hacked off its hind legs for meat. They left it there, bellowing in agony, trying to stand on the stumps, drenched in blood and dung. When it saw her approaching, it snorted in defiance.

Dian, weeping, shot the bull in the head. She wept at the animal’s pain. She wept at the Africans’ cruelty in leaving it in this condition. She wept at the animal’s courage in the face of its agony. But an African, unless his tribal heritage had been modified by Western education, would have laughed.

Here is an African joke: an epidemic swept through a village, and everyone who could move left. Two old, dying men, weak with disease, were left behind with the bodies of the dead, which attracted scavengers and predators. One day a leopard came. It walked up to one of the dying men, easy prey. The man’s companion was too weak to chase the leopard away, but he did cry out, trying to deflect the attack.

The punchline of this joke is the victim’s retort to his friend’s effort to help. His dying words were “So what?”

The Ju/Wa San, or Bushmen, of Namibia told this story to John Marshall—and it is true, they say—amid peals of laughter. Few Westerners would find this story funny. Yet many Africans think the futility of the man’s effort to save a doomed companion is the height of hilarity.

A Belgian who had worked in Rwanda for twenty-five years once told me, “The Africans, they are very nice, they are very smart, but you must remember: we are not the same as them. They are not like you and me.”

Once this man visited the area reputed to be the source of the Nile and found people there diving into a deep pool. One diver never came up; only bubbles rose where he had dived. After five minutes, the Belgian was alarmed and insisted on informing the authorities. He drove to the police station, but no one wanted to investigate. The police told him there was a whirlpool at the bottom of the spring, and that this was the tenth report of a person drowning there that day—and these were only the reported deaths. The Belgian asked if he should go back to retrieve the dead man’s clothes, to return them to his relatives. The police asked, “How long ago did you leave?” And he replied, “Fifteen minutes ago.” “Well,” the police said, “you’re about ten minutes too late.” Nobody even looked for the missing diver—not even his companions, who minutes before had been diving there beside him.

From the struggles of a wounded animal trying to free itself from a snare, to the tragedy of a drowned diver, the African response is almost universally the same. Life is cruel, pain is rampant. “So what?”

“Our ideas about altruism are pretty far from these people’s ideas,” said Robinson McIlvaine, a former director of the African Wildlife Foundation, who lived in Africa for fifteen years. “It’s a cruel life in the bush. They’re used to the fact that everything can disappear in a storm or a coup, that famine can destroy everything. Life is cheap. So you grab what you can.”

He recalls a conversation he once had with the president of Guinea (who, says McIlvaine, “had some admirable qualities even though he was a dictator”). McIlvaine was discussing his ideas for helping polio victims and supplying medicines to the elderly. The president was incredulous. He replied to the American, “We can’t devote any of our scant resources to take care of the old and handicapped.”

“You put that into the light of [Americans] redoing buses so wheelchairs can board,” says McIlvaine, “and you see it’s a different world in Africa.”

It is a world where one in ten babies dies before its first birthday and is likely to be buried in an unmarked grave, without ceremony. Among the Akamba people of Kenya, a newborn is considered not human but an object belonging to the spirits until it has survived for four days.

In Africa small children are made to guard cattle against lions, and the safety of the cattle—a form of currency among tribes like Rwanda’s Tutsi and Kenya’s Masai—is given greater emphasis than the safety of the children in the village’s communal prayers. It is a world where teenagers are often subjected to days of brutal torture in initiation ceremonies. Among the Nandi of Kenya, if a girl cries or screams when her clitoris is ripped out during her initiation ceremony, her relatives may kill her for her cowardice. Merciless tribal wars erupt with the regularity and virulence of recurrent malaria, and each member of the tribe is taught from childhood to face pain and death with neither fear nor pity.

And Africa is a world of personal vengeance. Rosamond Carr, Dian’s American friend in Gisenyi, tells how, less than a year before Dian’s death, an African friend named Valentine—a driver for the American ambassador—exposed another driver for selling American embassy gasoline on the black market. When the man was fired, he yelled at Valentine, “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you for this!”

A few weeks later Valentine was riding his motorcycle on a Sunday morning when the man, driving a minibus, chased Valentine and struck him down at high speed. Valentine lay crumpled on the road; the man backed the van up and ran him over, crushing him to death.

Tried and convicted in a Kigali courtroom, the man was out of prison in eighteen months. But few Africans expect courtrooms to mete out justice, and according to the religious beliefs of most Africans, God does not punish in the afterlife. Justice can be a very personal affair.

Ian Redmond remembers a conversation he had with one of the Africans who worked at Karisoke: “He said to me that he didn’t understand how Wazungu [whites] sorted out their differences with people. He said, ‘If you get angry with someone, you can hit them, and if you really get angry with them, you can kill them. What about all the in-between? We can poison someone for a week; we can make them ill for a month; we can make them die a slowly lingering death. And there are all these different things we can do to someone with witchcraft. But the Europeans have only a simpleminded approach: hit someone or kill someone. There is no middle ground.’ ”

Dian was typically, even exaggeratedly Western in her attitude toward children and animals. She adored kids; she treated poachers’ children, and even their dogs, with great tenderness. In a land where animals are valued only for food or skins, she sided with the gorillas and duiker and buffalo. But in her “active conservation,” she adopted the tactics and philosophy of an African.

After she shot the mutilated buffalo, Dian wrote a friend that the experience had “done something to me that I didn’t think possible. Now I am finding myself out to avenge the cruelty of the Tutsi,” she wrote. Before that she would only try to scatter them, shooting above, below, or near the herds. Now she was crippling the cattle, pumping bullets into their hind legs.

“Obviously this makes me no better than the Tutsi who hacked off the hind legs of the buffalo,” Dian realized. But her tactics, at least initially, worked—the cattle disappeared from the area.

Dian proved capable of matching African standards of vengeance. Her use of stinging nettles as implements of torture—a concept that particularly horrifies Westerners—was borrowed directly from African tradition. The Nandi use nettles to whip the breasts and genitals of female initiates the night before their circumcision. When Dian arrived in Rwanda, whipping prisoners with nettles was legally sanctioned as punishment throughout the country.

But she did not stop at inflicting physical punishment. As her fury smoldered, Dian incarnated a new persona: the avenging sorceress.

She painted hexes, cast spells, pronounced curses. She spent hundreds of dollars on realistic masks and carefully rehearsed her “raids” on Rosamond Carr’s African staff before springing upon the poachers: “I am the Goddess of the Mountain,” she would hiss in KiSwahili, “and I will avenge you for killing my children.” It was a vow she later swore on the soul of Digit.

Faking the supernatural is an old colonial trick; to convince Africans of their mythical powers, early explorers would do everything from discharging firearms to pulling out their false teeth. But Dian’s ventures into witchcraft were more than a trick; they became a sacred rite. She took to performing a private ritual, burning small amounts of money, the way Africans often burn meat to appease the spirits of their living dead.

Several times Dian was the target of spells and hexes. After she discovered that her hair was being systematically collected for such spells, she was frightened enough to assiduously clean her hairbrush daily, a habit she kept up even when in the United States. There is evidence that she knew, as Africans know, that witchcraft works. She had seen at least one man in her camp die as a result of witchcraft. Her friend Rosamond Carr sometimes employed a Congolese-born Hutu tribesman to stop hailstorms, using an animal horn and a spoon.

Westerners scoff at witchcraft, but in Africa it is considered a force as powerful and immediate as wind and rain, as real as the scars of tribal markings. Within the past fifteen years the Kenyan government has hired rainmakers to end drought; after a flood Tanzanian officials have jailed rainmakers. Rwandan hospitals frequently refer patients to local witch doctors. But as magic can bring rain and health, it can also bring death. Geza Teleki, while working to set up a wildlife reserve in Sierra Leone, was sentenced to death by a witch doctor who pointed the left foreleg bone of an aardvark at him. “This meant I was to die within twenty-four hours,” Geza said. “It was the moral equivalent of murder. As far as they were concerned, I was a dead man.”

That Geza failed to die was considered a sort of miracle; it was concluded that he must therefore be not man but spirit, wielding an even more powerful witchcraft himself. “Anything that happened was always believed the result of witchcraft,” he said. Geza carefully guarded this image. When he received the news that his father had died, “one of my main concerns was to show no sign of being troubled, because they would have said immediately that this had been arranged by the local witch doctors.”

Ian Redmond says Dian’s war against poachers was, like witchcraft, largely psychological. She would spit on them, rub gorilla dung on their bodies, hurl threats and insults with the force of a club. But Ian, who worked with Dian for more than two years, says he never saw her strike anyone, though she never stopped the Rwandan park guards from doing so.

Likewise, during the more than four hundred days that Bill Weber and Amy Vedder worked at Karisoke, they never saw any poacher physically abused. Kelly Stewart relates that Dian forced barbiturates down the throats of poachers and injected them with gorilla dung, but they are events she admits she did not witness. She was told about them by Dian.

Dian often wrote letters to colleagues describing her methods of punishing poachers and spoke about them to friends over the phone. Former Leakey Foundation president Ned Munger says Dian told him that she woke in the night to boil water to pour on a poacher’s binding ropes to tighten the knots; she described to him an interrogation in which she lent a knife to her men to hasten a confession.

But Dian also describes in her book scenes that eyewitnesses say were overdramatized. Her own affidavit counters her book’s account of her “capture” in Zaire. In her diary excerpts, published in Farley Mowat’s Woman in the Mists, former staff members find discrepancies—in names, dates, reported conversations—compared to their own field diaries. It is possible that many of the unwitnessed atrocities Dian described herself perpetrating never really happened. Diana McMeekin, of the African Wildlife Foundation, concedes that “there is an element of exaggeration in the stories about Dian. But the stories were exaggerations on the theme of truth.”

The stories, well known in the villages below Karisoke, are almost universally believed—as Dian doubtless willed it. Giving voice and print to cruelties she never inflicted may well have been her attempt to give her hate a reality that she could not act out. There is no doubt that she wanted to: she wrote to her Louisville “family,” the Schwartzels, about the Twa poacher whose T-shirt was splattered with Digit’s blood: “I wanted so badly to torture him to death,” she wrote.

Like the death curses uttered by witch doctors, like the punishments inflicted on effigies by practitioners of voodoo, Dian’s voicing and printing of her wishes fed her hate with power. That the stories, true or not, were imbued with belief made them as potently fearful as pointing the left foreleg bone of an aardvark.

Whether Dian merely allowed or directed Rwandan park guards to punish poachers in traditionally African ways, or whether she herself regularly added knife and noose and narcotics to the torture—still the question remains, as demanding as a fist pounding a table: what right had this American woman to frighten and torture Africans who had, legally or illegally, lived on this land for hundreds of thousands of years? What did she think she was doing?

“She was applying African justice to the situation,” answers Leonard J. Grant of the National Geographic Society.

Rwandan officials did not object particularly to Dian’s treatment of poachers. A former director of parks, Dismas Nsabimana, enthusiastically applauded her setting fire to the matting inside a poacher’s hut. He said she should have burned down the entire village. At a meeting with two of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana’s top staffers, the Rwandans agreed with Dian that Digit’s killers, once found, should be put to death—though they argued that hanging would be more appropriate than shooting. What angered some authorities, according to surviving records of Dian’s correspondence with them, were the occasions when she deflected money from their pockets—by driving away tourists, for example—or portrayed them in articles and films as incompetent in protecting the gorillas.

But Western reaction to Dian’s tactics came swift as a gag reflex. Most of her students recoiled from the force of her rage. One threw her pistol into the forest. Most refused to carry guns. Many left within days of their arrival.

Many of them were Peace Corps volunteers, college students whose older siblings had marched in civil rights protests. They had come to Africa with Western, liberal ideals of equality, human dignity, and the power of logical reasoning and good will. One Peace Corps volunteer showed up with a marvelous plan: he would teach the poachers, who had lived for centuries by stealth and spear, to raise rabbits instead.

Dian, who was politically conservative, sneered at the “Peach Core types” and their “rose-colored glasses” view of the world. The match was wrong from the start. They were about people and peace. Dian was about animals and war.

Conservation fund-raising leaflets often liken conservation battles to war. But it has long been politely agreed that this is really only a war of words, fought with paperwork and policies and public relations. The “artillery” is launched by diplomatic pouch from one suit-and-tie capital to another: money and plans for development and education are the weapons these diplomats wield. The enemy is a faceless attitude or principle or a practice taking place far away; the “victims” are concepts—species, not individuals. Many in Nairobi and Washington privately admit they thought Dian was insane.

Dian’s was a real war, hand-to-hand combat, with blood and bullets, hate and hostages. Poachers bearing spears and arrows were leaping over her tent pegs; they were killing gorillas she knew by name; they set fire to the wall of her kitchen, left hexes along her paths, speared one of her students, poisoned her parrots, kidnapped her dog. One visitor was nearly crushed to death by a poacher’s log-drop trap, and Dian herself fell into a pit trap. She did not have time to craft “resource management plans” or wait patiently for diplomatic pressure to bring new laws to pass. Only 480 mountain gorillas were alive in the park when Dian arrived in Rwanda, and by 1985, according to her count, only two hundred and sixty were left. Dian had come to know eighty-eight of them personally and by name. Six had died at the hands of poachers, two had been captured for the Cologne Zoo. “It takes one bullet, one trap, one poacher to kill a duiker, a buffalo, a gorilla, an elephant,” Dian wrote to Ian in 1983. Only well-equipped patrols, she wrote, could preserve the animals remaining in the park.

Her initial opposition to gorilla tourism—which she later reversed—was dismissed by other conservationists as shortsighted. Interestingly, this is a criticism often leveled at Africans. The Ugandan philosopher and scholar John S. Mbiti carried out a study of East African languages; none of the languages he studied contained words or expressions to convey a future more than a few months away. The African concept of time, Mbiti explains, actually proceeds backward from the present—sasa in KiSwahili—to the past, or zamani, the time of the ancestors, to which the dead return. In a land with no winter, there has never been much need to plan far ahead for a future that, unlike the present or past, was never experienced. “You do not plan in Africa,” said Geza Teleki. “You react.”

The Mountain Gorilla Project began largely as a reaction. In 1978, only months after the murder of Digit, Amy Vedder and Bill Weber learned that Rwanda planned to take over 5,000 hectares of the Parc des Volcans for cattle ranching. Forty percent of the original park had already been taken in 1969 for a European-backed scheme for farming pyrethrum, the daisylike flower that yields a natural insecticide. This new plan, Bill and Amy knew, was as immediate a threat to the gorillas as poachers’ spears: it would effectively eliminate most of the park’s bamboo zone and split the gorilla habitat into three small islands.

“The situation was too urgent for us to go back and write up our dissertations,” said Amy. They had to come up with a lucrative alternative to the cattle-grazing scheme, one that would show the worth of saving the gorillas in dollars and cents: gorilla tourism.

“We had considerable reservations about tourists,” said Bill, “but a thousand head of cattle in the park was much worse. The Mountain Gorilla Project’s first priority was antipoaching, but along with the stick we needed the carrot. This was a compromise with the devil, we knew. We were faced with overwhelming decimation of the forest. If tourism was to come, it had to be done right.”

After eighteen months of research, backed by the Fauna and Flora Preservation Society and the African Wildlife Foundation, Bill and Amy, with J. P. von der Becke, set up the Mountain Gorilla Project in September 1979. It was a three-pronged approach: beefed-up antipoaching patrols, gorilla tourism, and education.

At first Rwandan park officials pressured Bill to take more than a dozen tourists at a time to visit the two gorilla groups that were habituated to observers. Only after an unwieldy tourist group of sixteen provoked a silverback attack—resulting in two deep puncture wounds millimeters from Bill’s spinal cord—did park officials agree to limit the tourists to six per group.

The tourism program is carefully controlled. Only a one-hour visit with each gorilla group is allowed each day. Before the tourists undertake the climb to see the apes, they are given a short course in gorilla etiquette: always defer to the animals. Stay quiet and low. Do not touch the gorillas. If an infant gorilla approaches you, back away.

In 1981 the park paid for itself for the first time in its history. Foreign tourists paid forty-five dollars each for an hour with the gorillas; native Rwandans were charged the equivalent of only a couple of dollars. By 1988, with four gorilla groups habituated to tourists, gorilla tourism had become the highest foreign exchange earner in Rwanda, ahead of coffee, copper, and tea. Funds generated from the tourism project allowed the MGP to double its staff, reclaim sixty-two hectares of cattle pasture for gorilla habitat, and fund wide-ranging antipoaching patrols. In 1984, for the first time in Rwandan history, not a single gorilla died at the hands of poachers, and this record remained intact until 1988, when a subadult in Group 5 died from wounds from a snare.

The educational component of the project generated impressive results as well. Bill’s initial surveys, before the project began, showed that more than half of Rwandans living in rural areas wanted to convert the tiny park to agriculture. Today more than 70 percent wish to preserve the forest. The gorillas’ image now appears on Rwandan postage stamps and money; they have even made it into a popular Rwandan song: “Where can the gorillas go? They are part of our country. They have no other home.”

In Gorillas in the Mist Dian Fossey lauded the idea, in theory, of properly controlled tourism, but called it a low priority—one of the “Z’s of theoretical conservation.” In the book’s epilogue she couldn’t resist a swipe at the Mountain Gorilla Project, writing that “the survival chances of these species are little improved by tourism compared with more expedient actions.” She feared the encroachment of strangers on an area she had come to consider as hers and the gorillas’ alone. She loathed the idea of Rwandan officials making money off the animals she considered sacred. She did not trust the then director of parks, Laurent Habiyaremye, who she believed wanted to take over her research station to house tourists. She told people she would burn her camp to the ground before she would allow it to be overtaken.

Amy recalls Dian’s prediction: “I’m going to die and the gorillas will all die around me. They’ll be gone within ten years.”

And many believed, after Dian’s murder, that this would indeed be the gorillas’ fate. When I first visited the gorillas of Parc National des Volcans in 1986, the year after the death of their avenging sorceress, I expected to catch a last, fleeting glimpse of Dian’s majestic gorillas before they faded into the zamani of the dodo and the passenger pigeon. To my surprise and delight, the gorilla population was instead increasing. “The gorillas aren’t dying,” MGP staffer Mark Condiotti assured me. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

There is an old military adage all generals know well: “Don’t name the chickens.” Just as a farmer can’t consider his chickens pets if he is raising them for meat, a commander cannot become too friendly with individual soldiers, for he may well have to send them to death to win a battle.

The trouble with Dian’s conservation strategy, some say, is that she named the chickens. (Quite literally: she kept chickens as pets and gave them fanciful names like Lucy and Dezi and Madoughadougha.) Diana McMeekin told me, “Dian wanted only her gorillas protected from poachers. We wanted to extend protection to all the gorillas of the Virunga Volcanoes. That’s where we had trouble.”

“Good conservationists can’t afford to be that emotionally involved with the populations they’re trying to save,” says Michael Hutchins, a conservation biologist with the New York Zoological Society. “Individuals can’t mean that much when you have to do large-scale manipulations of populations, as a conservationist sometimes must.” A few years back the zoological society sponsored a study: “Wildlife Conservation and Animal Rights: Are They Compatible?” The answer was no.

With Dian dead and the Mountain Gorilla Project a resounding success, it appeared that the Greek chorus’s verdict had proved to be correct: Dian Fossey, they said, had been wrong.

But this conclusion is too simple, as subsequent events would show.

When I first visited Kigali in 1986, my group rushed immediately to Akagera park to see the animals: topi and kob, gazelles and zebra. On my second visit, I took some time to explore the city. There wasn’t much to see. There were several European-style hotels and handsome Dutch-style homes for Western immigrants. The Hotel Mille Collines, where Dian used to stay when she came to town, was carpeted and mirrored. Women in black high heels clicked down the semi-spiral staircase from the reception area to the tiled terrace and swimming pool. Coffee cost one dollar for a single, tiny tasse—a shockingly high price.

Just off the main streets, chickens and goats crowded the roads, and people in filthy, ill-fitting rags stained with red dirt and sweat lived in rusted, tin-sided shacks, sometimes no more than sheets of discarded metal propped over dirt floors. The tin shacks magnified the sound of coughing, mucous rattling in the throat. Polio victims leaned on old pipes for canes, with legs shriveled to bone, or walked with crude crutches, a limb twisted absurdly like a bent pipe cleaner or missing entirely. By the Episcopalian church’s guest house, where I stayed, an old man without front teeth coughed and rattled and laughed as he tried to sell some flowers he was carrying. A madman walked in a circle in the street; unlike the country folk I met in rural areas, people did not respond to my greetings or smile.

Neither did they benefit from the $300 I paid at the other end of town, far from the slums, for my permit to visit Karisoke. Near the banks and the American Embassy, at the Rwandan office of Parks and Tourism, a fat man wearing a gold ring and a tailored, three-piece suit looked at me with unconcealed distain, took my cash and put it in a drawer—without recording the deposit. He was of the class of African that Kenyans call the WaBenzi—for the Mercedes Benzes the rich bureaucrats drive, bought with tourist dollars like mine. Dian hated people like this. Outside the one-story building, in a glass case just outside the hall hung a photo of Uncle Bert—the cover of Dian’s Gorillas in the Mist—and a poster from movie box offices advertising the movie of the same name.

The movie—the rights to which Dian sold in 1985 for $150,000 (had her mother and stepfather not contested her will, the money would have gone to the Digit Fund)—was a smash success. From the publicity it generated for gorilla tourism, Rwandan parks officials saw new opportunities to make money. They wanted to habituate two more groups of wild gorillas to tourists and to increase the number of tourists allowed to visit each group from six to eight and then ten.

In 1987, the director of Rwanda’s parks proposed to David Watts, then the director of Karisoke, that Dian’s house be turned into a museum. “Thousands of tourists tramping through camp!” Watts wrote in dismay to a World Wildlife Fund colleague. Habiyaremye “hastily modified it to ‘a national monument’—charging tourists for the opportunity to see where The Great Person lived, died, and is buried. From there a short step to turning this place into a deluxe tourist center. Stay at Fossey’s camp, gawk at her grave, go to see ‘her’ gorillas.”

The deluxe tourist complex failed to materialize. But in fact, Dian’s grave is now on the tourist circuit. “Trek the gorillas and hike to Dian Fossey’s grave” trumpets the website for one of the many tour companies offering visitors this option. Visitors don’t number in the thousands, and most are respectful. But even back in 1989, when rumor had it that too many tourists would drive the Mountain Gorilla Project (and its supporting funds) out of Rwanda, one American embassy official commented, “Once the goose has laid the golden egg, it will be impossible to go back to the way it was. Dian,” he told me, “must be turning in her grave.”

Many of Dian’s fears have come true. And her mistrust of Rwandan politicians has proved wiser than she might have even guessed. The “Peach Core” types could never have imagined the horror that came to pass in Rwanda, but that Dian—who understood the cruelty of which people, including Africans, are capable—might have.

The war between the majority Hutu and minority ruling Tutsi began in 1990 and officially ended in 1993. But the 1994 assassination of Rwanda’s president ignited the bloodiest conflict in Africa’s recent history. One million were murdered by extremists, often after torture at the hands of neighbors. More than two million refugees—including many of the perpetrators of the genocide—fled to Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). Despite an enormous international humanitarian effort, thousands died of cholera and dysentery in squalid, overcrowded refugee camps. The rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front then prosecuted two more wars, which did not end until 2003. And today the holocaust continues. As this book goes to press, militias and soldiers from Rwanda and a half-dozen other African nations are rampaging through the Democratic Republic of Congo. The fate of the two hundred mountain gorillas of Virunga National Park is unknown.

As during the Rwandan war, the mountain gorillas are innocent bystanders. Rebel forces use the parks as a base from which to attack. Gorillas are caught in the cross-fire. They are shot and snared. Baby gorillas die as families are shattered before the onslaught of rebels and refugees. Karisoke’s buildings have been repeatedly destroyed, as have park buildings in the DRC. Anti-poaching patrols are abandoned.

In Rwanda, the human population now exceeds its pre-genocide numbers. But the gorilla population remains at risk throughout the region—and not just as collateral casualties. Sometimes the gorillas are specifically targeted. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, ten gorillas of the habituated Rugendo family were murdered, some shot in the back of the head, execution-style, in a seven-month period from July 2007 through February 2008. A senior park official was arrested in the slayings. His presumed motive, at the time of this writing, is almost breathtakingly evil: eliminate the efforts to conserve the world’s last mountain gorillas so the forest could be burned for charcoal.

Dian Fossey was, in an important sense, right all along: the gorillas were then, and are now, under siege. The government officials charged with their protection cannot always be trusted to do so.

Since Dian’s death, the fund that now bears her name—The Digit Fund has been renamed The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International—has taken her legacy in directions she might not have foreseen or chosen. In addition to funding anti-poaching patrols and scientific research, the fund has financed a goat project for Batwa (to reduce forest hunting), launched a clean drinking water initiative for 200,000 people, and built clinics and nursery schools in two countries. Dian had once considered efforts to help local people one of the “theoretical Z’s of conservation.” But the fact remains that none of it could have happened without her. Another fact, too, sadly stands: mountain gorillas are as endangered as they ever were, both as individuals and as a species. Murderers are still at large in their shrinking homeland. And that is something Dian always firmly understood.

Today, gorilla tourism is making a strong comeback in Rwanda. In 2008, mountain gorillas drew some 20,000 visitors from around the world, and with them, money critical to protecting the park that is home to 120 of the last 720 mountain gorillas on Earth. A program to rebuild the tourist infrastructure has garnered the support of a number of fine organizations, including The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, Fauna and Flora International, African Wildlife Foundation, World Wildlife Fund, and Wildlife Conservation Society. Another important supporter is the Business Linkages Challenge Fund, which certainly deserves praise for its efforts. But my heart sank when I read a press release about the project. The last paragraph began, “Mountain gorillas are a unique ecotourism product. . . .” To read those words, Dian, I knew, would be turning in her grave.

Dian’s old tracker, Nemeye, says that her grave has moved one meter to the left since she was buried on New Year’s Eve in 1985. People seldom visit the gorilla graveyard where she is buried. The boot-worn trail from the camp to the study area passes to the left of Dian’s green, corrugated tin cabin, and you can easily miss seeing that the graveyard is there. But when you catch sight of it, it takes your breath away.

The graveyard covers an area half as wide as a tennis court, a breadth of grief unimaginable. From almost every angle it seems to be embraced by the muscular arms of the great Hagenia trees, weeping with ferns and moss and trailing wizardly beards of light green lichen. The grass and herbs are cropped close around the graves; here the blades bear the tooth marks of grazing duikers, where only a hundred yards away the grass swallows your knees.

Dian watched the graves fill. Fifteen carved wooden markers bear the names of the gorillas she loved: Uncle Bert, Kweli, Macho, Digit, Tiger, Lee, Frito, Nunkie. Her own marker, directly in back of Digit’s, Uncle Bert’s, and Macho’s, bears the name she loved, which was never hers: Nyiramachabelli. It is almost a relief to find her buried here, to believe her anguish is finally quelled under the wet, black Rwandan earth. It is like a reunion. And in the jewel-like sunshine, it is so peaceful; it seems that nothing bad could happen here.

A new bronze marker, installed with money raised through an international effort after her death, reads:

DIAN FOSSEY
1932–1985
NO ONE LOVED GORILLAS MORE
REST IN PEACE, DEAR FRIEND
ETERNALLY PROTECTED
IN THIS SACRED GROUND
FOR YOU ARE HOME
WHERE YOU BELONG

Camp researchers still talk about Dian, and even the youngest students, who never met her, swap stories: the torture of poachers, attempted seductions of visiting Western men, the whiskey bottles under her bed. When I returned to the camp in 1989, I asked the students what they thought of the new marker. “It’s in English, for God’s sake,” a fresh-faced young student replied in disgust. “This is a country that speaks Kinyarwanda.”