In humanity’s world of discoveries, inventions, wars and massacres, I want to discuss another name: a symbol of idealism, a scientist and fighter who devoted her whole life to gorillas in a world where humans leave little room for other species. Dian Fossey.
Dian Fossey was born in San Francisco, California, in 1932. Her parents separated when she was six. A year later, her mother Kathryn married businessman Richard Price. Her father George E. Fossey tried hard to maintain contact, but her mother prevented it, and communication gradually disappeared. Her stepfather never accepted her as his own daughter or filled the emptiness left when her family broke apart. He wouldn’t even allow her to eat at the same table. This early trauma and emotional void drew Dian towards animals. Her first pet was an aquarium fish, and that same year she successfully began riding lessons at school.
Later, following her stepfather’s direction, Dian studied business at the College of Marin while spending summers working on a farm, maintaining her connection with animals. At 19, she rejected his insistence and began taking biology courses at the University of California. He wanted a business education; she wanted a career working with animals. Her family withdrew financial support. To earn money, she worked as a clerk at the then well-known White Front store in California, helped in school laboratories and also worked part-time as a factory machine operator.
Although an exemplary student, Fossey struggled with basic sciences such as physics and chemistry. After failing in her second year, she transferred to San Jose College and joined Kappa Alpha Theta, a community-service organisation supporting women in education. She graduated with a degree in occupational therapy. Unfortunately, occupational therapy is little known in our country, with no institution yet offering a degree in it. A sister field to physiotherapy, it supports and rehabilitates people who have lost physical abilities through accidents or similar events, helping organise their social, working and home lives. After graduating, Fossey interned in various California hospitals, mainly working with tuberculosis patients.
In 1955, she began working at a children’s hospital in Kentucky, where she also received a riding award. Shy and private, Dian quickly became well liked and built strong relationships with patients and staff. Working on the family farm of her close colleague Mary White and Mary’s physician husband Henry gave her a sense of closeness and family she had missed for much of her life. Whenever possible, she spent her free time with the horses.
She had to decline Henry’s invitation to Africa because she couldn’t afford it. But in 1963, she borrowed $8,000, equivalent to a year’s salary, and set off on a six-week African tour. In Nairobi, Kenya, she met actor William Holden, owner of the Treetops Hotel. Holden ranks 25th on the American Film Institute’s 100 Years… 100 Stars list and won the Academy Award for Best Actor for Stalag 17. Older readers may remember his black-and-white films. Beyond acting, he actively worked for endangered animals and inspired the establishment of the William Holden Wildlife Foundation.
After that meeting, Dian began an exciting tour with safari guide John Alexander. Over the following seven weeks, they travelled through Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rhodesia. They visited Tsavo, Africa’s largest national park, then Lake Manyara, a salt lake attracting enormous flamingo flocks. They explored Ngorongoro Crater, where some monkey species are said to have lived for three million years, and finally Olduvai Gorge and volcanic Mount Mikeno. In 1959, zoologist George Schaller had carried out pioneering work on mountain gorillas. Fossey met anthropologist Louis Leakey, who worked on early hominin fossils. He told her about his assistant Jane Goodall’s work and discussed the importance of long-term mountain-gorilla research. Fossey broke her ankle during this visit. On 16 October, she stayed at Walter Baumgartel’s small hotel in Uganda. An advocate of gorilla conservation, he saw the tourism opportunities it could bring and introduced her to Kenyan wildlife photographers Joan and Alan Root. They allowed Fossey and her guide to camp beside them near gorilla territory. Within days, she experienced her first encounter with wild mountain gorillas. After spending time with friends in Rhodesia, she returned to Louisville to repay the loan. The Courier-Journal subsequently published three articles about her journey.
When Fossey heard Leakey was visiting Louisville on a national lecture tour, she wanted to share her African newspaper pieces with him, remembering his interest in mountain gorillas. Three years after her safari, Louis Leakey proposed that she undertake long-term gorilla research, as Jane Goodall was doing with Tanzanian chimpanzees. Fossey accepted. He arranged funding, and she left her job and moved to Africa.
While arranging visas and funding, she spent eight months studying Swahili and receiving preparation in primatology. She arrived in Nairobi in December 1966. Leakey and Joan Root helped with permits and an old Land Rover, which she named Lilly. On the way to Congo, she stopped at Gombe Stream National Park to meet Jane Goodall and observe her chimpanzee research methods. Photographer Alan Root accompanied her in obtaining permission to work in the Virunga Mountains.
Fossey began fieldwork at Kabara, Congo, in early 1967, in the same meadow where Schaller had worked seven years earlier. Alan Root taught her the basics of gorilla tracking, and his tracker Sanwekwe remained at camp to help. They needed to stay near the animals, high in the mountains and far from settlements, living in thin aluminium shelters. Once a month, Fossey drove Lilly down the mountain on a two-hour journey to Kikumba for supplies.
She identified three gorilla groups but initially couldn’t approach them. Eventually, by imitating their expressions, movements and sounds, behaving submissively and eating local celery with them, she gained their trust. Later, she credited experience working with autistic children for helping her succeed. Like George Schaller, she distinguished individuals by their noses, first drawing them and later photographing them.
Congo was turbulent when Fossey arrived. Known until 1960 as the Belgian Congo, it had experienced intense struggles over independence and internal separatist conflict. Amid the turmoil, army commander Lieutenant General Joseph Mobutu seized power in a coup and declared himself president. This period, remembered as the Congo Crisis, involved years of upheaval and independence without escape from corrupt dictatorship. Soldiers arrived at Fossey’s camp on 9 July 1967 and took her and her staff to Rumangabo. After two weeks, she bribed her way to escape and reached Walter Baumgartel’s hotel in Kisoro. Ugandan soldiers detained her, and officials warned her not to return to Congo. Following a meeting with Leakey in Nairobi, and the US embassy’s advice, she agreed to work in the Virungas on the Rwandan side. There she met Belgian-born Alyette DeMunck, who knew the area, and accepted her help in finding a suitable camp.
On 24 September 1967, Fossey founded the Karisoke Research Center. Her study area covered 25 square kilometres on Mount Visoke at an elevation of 3,000 metres. Local people called her Nyiramachabelli, meaning ‘the woman who lives alone on the mountain’. Although Schaller’s earlier work had partly accustomed Congo’s gorillas to people, those at Karisoke knew humans only as poachers. Gaining close access took time. The terrain was so muddy and restrictive that even walking required hacking through tall, sharp vegetation with a machete. Combined with harsh seasons, cold and darkness, it quickly drove visiting research students away.
Mountain-gorilla hunting had been prohibited around Rwanda and the Virungas since the 1920s to protect this rapidly disappearing animal. The areas were national parks, but practice differed from law. Enforcement was rare and poaching common, largely because poorly paid park employees accepted bribes. Fossey wrote of three occasions when park officials were involved in capturing infant gorillas. Adults defended their young to the death, and each capture could kill at least ten gorillas. Using her funding, she hired patrols to remove traps around Karisoke. In 1979, four African staff members found and destroyed 987 traps around camp. The 24-person park-ranger team removed none during that period. In the park’s eastern section, outside her patrols, nearly all elephants were killed for ivory and more than a dozen gorillas died.
Fossey helped secure arrests and lengthy prison sentences for several poachers. In 1978, she tried to prevent the export of two young gorillas.
Those gorillas, Coco and Pucker, were to be sent from Rwanda to Cologne Zoo in Germany. Twenty adults had been killed during their capture, with park officials’ knowledge. The young animals were given to Fossey for treatment of injuries sustained during capture and captivity. Her efforts restored their health, but despite her objections they were shipped to Cologne. They lived in captivity for nine years and died in the same month. Fossey considered keeping animals in prison-like zoos for human entertainment immoral and unethical.
Gorillas outside her study groups lost heavily in encounters with poachers. Thanks to her patrols, the groups she studied had been relatively protected until her favourite, Digit, was killed at the end of 1977. Another silverback, Uncle Bert, was named after her uncle. Uncle Bert died from a bullet to the heart while trying to protect his son Kweli from poachers. Kweli’s mother Macho was also killed, but the hunters failed to capture him. The wounds he sustained in that attack became gangrenous, and he died slowly and painfully.
According to Fossey’s letters, Rwandan park authorities, the World Wildlife Fund, African Wildlife Foundation, Fauna Preservation Society, Mountain Gorilla Project and some students sought to take control of Karisoke for tourism, portraying her as unstable. She had lost no gorillas to poachers in the preceding two years, but Mount Sabyinyo also needed patrols. She alleged that the Mountain Gorilla Project there covered up poaching and deaths reported by tourists. These organisations collected much of their public funding in the name of gorilla conservation, with donors believing the money went to Fossey. She used funds to protect animals from poachers and the bushmeat trade, while she believed similar organisations raising money in her name were interested only in tourism. She accused them of calling themselves conservationists to have their flights paid for, without ever pursuing a poacher. She described two philosophies: her own ‘active conservation’ and the international groups’ ‘theoretical conservation’.
Fossey strongly opposed wildlife tourism because gorillas were vulnerable to human-transmitted diseases such as influenza, against which they lacked protection. I want to add a note here. When Columbus, the queen’s jester, reached America, Indigenous peoples also lacked immunity to certain illnesses they had never encountered. After contact with him and his followers, many contracted diseases such as measles and chickenpox, and some died. Many illnesses familiar to us belong to our experience of the modern world rather than untouched nature. Fossey reported gorillas dying from diseases spread by tourists and regarded wildlife tourism as interference with natural life. She said programmes organised by international conservation groups harmed both untouched habitats and gorilla research. Today, however, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, also known as the Digit Fund, encourages tourism, arguing that creating local communities committed to protecting gorilla habitat and stability helps the animals.
Fossey also opposed a European Community project converting parkland into pyrethrum farms, because it reduced gorilla habitat. Agricultural chemicals are a simple example of pesticides: chemical substances, viruses or organisms used against unwanted organisms and animals. Such substances can seriously harm nature and humans. Pyrethrum provides natural protection against many household and storage pests. Modern agricultural chemicals lead pests to develop resistance, drawing people into a narrow cycle of producing stronger substances against increasingly resistant organisms. This is the underlying reason for longing for older farming methods, when meat, vegetables and fruit still seemed like themselves.
On 31 December 1977, Fossey’s favourite gorilla Digit was killed by poachers. He defended his group to the death against six hunters and their dogs. Despite spear wounds, he killed one dog, allowing the others to escape. The hunters cut off his head and hands and sold them for $20 to make ornaments and ashtrays. Research student Ian Redmond later found his mutilated body. Fossey’s group captured one killer, who named the others; three were subsequently caught and imprisoned.
Afterwards, Fossey established the Digit Fund to support patrols against poaching. It continues in the United States as the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International. An international consortium also drew attention to poaching following Digit’s death. At first, Fossey felt ineffective despite these efforts. Funding had helped equip Rwandan park authorities, some of whom were alleged to be involved with poachers.
The deaths of gorillas she had studied closely shifted Dian’s attention from scientific publication and research towards poaching. She concentrated on protection and adopted more direct tactics. She and her staff cut and removed snares immediately after they were set, frightened and humiliated captured poachers, and took cattle as ransom. They destroyed camps and even burned mats in poachers’ houses. Fossey openly challenged local officials to enforce the law and help stop the slaughter.
Early on 27 December 1985, Dian Fossey was found dead in the bedroom of her cabin in the Virunga Mountains, Rwanda. She lay face-up a short distance from her bed. About two metres away was a gap in the cabin wall, apparently cut by the attackers. A servant who found her called Wayne Richard McGuire, her last research assistant at Karisoke. He reported that, approaching to check for life, he saw that a machete blow had split her face diagonally. Furniture was scattered and broken glass lay on the floor. Her 9 mm pistol and ammunition were beside her. She had apparently tried to reach the gun and struggled with the killer. Robbery did not appear to be the motive: valuables, hundreds of travellers’ cheques, the pistol and US bonds remained untouched.
Her final journal entry:
When you understand the value of all life, you will work harder to preserve the future rather than focus on the past.
Fossey was buried at Karisoke, where she had risked her life for mountain gorillas, beside the animals to whom she had devoted it. In the cemetery she built for her gorilla friends, she was laid next to Digit among other victims of poachers. Memorial services took place in New York, Washington and California. According to her final wishes, her assets, including proceeds associated with the later film Gorillas in the Mist, were intended for her fund. She wanted the Digit Fund to continue fighting poachers to the end. Her will did not mention her family or her mother Hazel Fossey Price. Her mother contested it and sought a share. Judge Swartwood ruled that the copyright to her last book and roughly $4.9 million in proceeds from the film then being made should go to her mother, explaining that the document expressed a wish rather than formally leaving all assets to the fund.
After her death, all staff were arrested, including tracker Rwelekana, whom she had dismissed months earlier. Everyone except him was released. He was found dead in prison, reportedly having hanged himself. Rwandan courts convicted Richard McGuire of her murder in absentia. The conviction followed him in America, but there was no extradition treaty between the countries. He received no US sentence, though he faced questioning and suspicion. Back in the United States, he told a Los Angeles press conference that Fossey had been his friend and mentor, her death a tragedy and the allegations abhorrent. Scrutiny continued until he was offered a Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services job in 2005, which was then withdrawn because of the case and allegations.
Books published after her death offered alternative theories. Farley Mowat’s biography Woman in the Mists (New York: Warner Books, 1987), in particular, suggested she might have been killed by interests financed through tourism and illegal animal trading.
After her death, the Digit Fund was renamed the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International and continued operating Karisoke and its monitoring and protection work. Until the Rwandan genocide, former students, some previously opposed to her, managed the centre. During the genocide and ensuing insecurity, the camp was looted and destroyed. Only remnants of the cabin where she lived and died remain. Refugees filled Virunga National Park during the civil war, while illegal logging and burning destroyed large forested areas.
In 2014, on what would have been her 82nd birthday, Google honoured Dian Fossey with a Doodle, introducing this great scientist and fighter to millions around the world.
Kentucky Opera’s Visions programme in Louisville created an opera about her titled Nyiramachabelli, the local name meaning ‘the woman who lives alone on the mountain’.
In the 2011 BBC documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Adam Curtis presented Fossey as a symbol of naturalist ideology and the relationship between nature and postcolonial political gaps in Africa.
In 1988, Warner Bros. and Universal Pictures made Gorillas in the Mist, a drama starring Sigourney Weaver as Fossey and depicting her journey to Africa and experiences there.
The 1984 short documentary Wild Kingdom: Reunion with the Gorillas follows Dr Dian Fossey returning after three years to the gorilla family that had accepted her through long effort in the Virungas. Featuring her photographs and footage, with narration by Marlin Perkins and Fossey, it shares her personal experiences and observations.