Fossey, Dian (1935–1985)

Dian Fossey was to gorillas what Jane Goodall is to chimpanzees. Her long-term studies of Mountain Gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) in the Virunga Volcanoes of Rwanda, in central Africa, laid the basis for understanding the behavior and social life of gorillas in general, and all subsequent fieldworkers on gorillas have built upon her work.

Like Jane Goodall, Fossey was a protégée of Louis Leakey, the renowned paleoanthropologist. On the grounds that the study of our closest living relatives, the great apes, would teach us a good deal about our own past, Leakey encouraged a number of enthusiastic individuals, almost all of them female, to study these species in the wild. Fossey and most of the others were untrained, but acquired academic training during the course of their fieldwork and in this way were able [Page 981]to put their own observations into perspective and so could go on to make further insights. Dian Fossey (gorillas),Jane Goodall (chimpanzees), and Biruté Galdikas (orangutans) were the three who achieved long-term observations and so have contributed most to the field.

Fossey was working as an occupational therapist in California when she met Leakey during a trip to Africa in 1963. In 1963, on his urging, she began studying gorillas at Kabara, in the western part of the Virunga Volcanoes, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (at that time called Zaire). Political unrest made this location unsafe, and she crossed into Rwanda, where she set up a new field station at Karisoke, in the central part of the Volcanoes. (The Virungas span the borders of Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda). Here she stayed, on and off, for the rest of her life. She was devoted to Robert Hinde, her academic mentor in Cambridge, but was always anxious to be back in Rwanda.

Her contacts with gorillas become very close and intimate, and adults as well as youngsters would approach her, touch her, and sit by her while she wrote her field notes. She devised a system of recognizing individuals by the pattern of wrinkles on their noses, which she called “noseprints,” on the analogy of fingerprints. She recorded the relationships of individuals within and between troops, and the means by which new troops are formed and established troops are inherited from father to son.

She was engaged in a continuous war with poachers, who would kill adults to sell their heads and hands as souvenirs to tourists or to capture youngsters for sale to zoos. She also constantly battled government officials who wanted to excise land from the Volcanoes National Park to plant crops, such as pyrethrum, or to graze the cattle herds there. On December 26, 1985, she was found murdered in her cabin. Two men, a camp steward who had been discharged and an American researcher, were initially arrested, but her murder was never satisfactorily solved.

Since her death, tourist visits to see gorillas in the National Park have been instituted. Dian Fossey knew about the plans and had been in two minds about this prospect, but the idea has proved a great success, earning Rwanda far more foreign exchange than pyrethrum or the cattle industry, such that during the massacres and civil war in the 1990s, the gorillas were hardly interfered with. Apart from the understanding of gorillas that she promoted, her enduring legacy is that the Mountain Gorilla still survives and flourishes to this day.

Source: © Bob Campbell.

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