Dian Fossey

Dian Fossey (January 16, 1932 – c. December 26, 1985) was an American primatologist and conservationist known for undertaking an extensive study of mountain gorilla groups from 1966 until her murder in 1985. She studied them daily in the mountain forests of Rwanda, initially encouraged to work there by paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey. Gorillas in the Mist, a book published two years before her death, is Fossey's account of her scientific study of the gorillas at Karisoke Research Center and prior career. It was adapted into a 1988 film of the same name.

Dian Fossey's grave (cropped)

Fossey was a leading primatologist, and a member of the "Trimates", a group of female scientists recruited by Leakey to study the great apes (Hominidae) in their natural environments, along with Jane Goodall who studies chimpanzees, and Biruté Galdikas, who studies orangutans.

Fossey spent 20 years in Rwanda, where she supported conservation efforts, strongly opposed poaching and tourism in wildlife habitats, and made more people acknowledge the sapience of gorillas. Following the killing of a gorilla and subsequent tensions, she was murdered in her cabin at a remote camp in Rwanda in December 1985. Although Fossey's American research assistant was convicted in absentia, there is no consensus as to who killed her.

Quotes

• It was their individuality combined with the shyness of their behavior that remained the most captivating impression of this first encounter with the greatest of the great apes. I left Kabara with reluctance, but with never a doubt that I would, somehow, return to learn more about the gorillas of the misted mountains.
  • From Gorillas in the Mist (1983) [1]

• I have no friends. The more you learn about the dignity of the gorilla, the more you want to avoid people.
  • Quoted in an interview with the AP (1985) [2]

• We stripped him [a poacher] 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, and ended with sleeping pills. ... That is called 'conservation'—not talk.
  • Letter to primatologist Richard Wrangham (Nov 1976) [3]

• It is only a matter for the President to give the order—KILL—the prisons are already overcrowded and this is the only way we are going to be able to protect the remaining gorillas.
  • From a letter to the American ambassador in Rwanda (1979) [4]

• When you realize the value of all life, you learn to dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future.
  • Fossey's last journal entry before her murder (1985) [5]

Quotes About Fossey

• It’s as if Mother Teresa had just died. But the Mother Teresas of the world don’t get bludgeoned to death in their bedrooms. Dian had some real enemies, and at least one mortal enemy. But you won’t hear this from the [Rwandan] government now.
  • Ecologist Bill Weber (1986) [6]

• Dian Fossey was to gorillas what Greenpeace is to whales. She was prepared to ignore the niceties of diplomatic approaches and just get in there and do the job. She did what she considered right. But she was in many ways like the gorillas. If you’re easily put off by bluff charges, screaming and shouting, you’ll probably think gorillas are monsters, and you won’t go near them. If you’re prepared to sidestep the temper and get to know the person, you’d find that Dian, like the gorillas, was a gentle, loving person.
  • Wildlife biologist Ian Redmond (1986) [7]

• When I got to Rwanda, Dian was extremely warm, welcoming and encouraging. She was also a bit scary, exuding a determined, uncompromising, take-no-prisoners attitude towards poachers, cattle in the Park illegally (of which there were many at that time), and any ‘students’ who didn’t dedicate themselves 100% to the good of Karisoke. Basically, she appeared to fear nothing and was not going to take any nonsense from anyone. At the same time, she seemed like a very emotional person, almost too emotional.
  • Primatologist Kelly Stewart Harcourt (2017) [8]

• She had a perfectly colonial attitude toward the Africans. On Christmas she'd give the most extravagant presents to them; other times she'd humiliate them, spit on the ground in front of them—once I even saw her spit on one of the workers—break into their cabin and accuse them of stealing and dock their pay. Two researchers left Karisoke because of the way she treated the Africans. ... They were loyal to her, but they had to stay because there are few paid jobs in the area and there is a certain cachet to being a tracker. The men never knew when she was going to start yelling at them. When she left camp it was like a cloud had risen, and it got worse over the years.
  • Primatologist Kelly Stewart Harcourt (1986) [9]

• She would torture them [poachers]. She would whip their balls with stinging nettles, spit on them, kick them, put on masks and curse them, stuff sleeping pills down their throats. She said she hated doing it, and respected the poachers for being able to live in the forest, but she got into it and liked to do it and felt guilty that she did. She hated them so much. She reduced them to quivering, quaking packages of fear, little guys in rags rolling on the ground and foaming at the mouth.
  • Primatologist Kelly Stewart Harcourt (1986) [10]

• I think by the end she was doing more harm than good. Dian went out to the gorillas because she loved them and she loved the bush and being on her own, but she ended up with more than she bargained for. She wasn't planning on having to organize and work with and fight with people. She was no good as a scientific mentor, but she couldn't hand over control. She couldn't take the backseat. Her alternative—to leave and die somewhere an invalid—was never something she would have considered. She always fantasized about a final confrontation. She viewed herself as a warrior fighting this enemy who was out to get her. It was a perfect ending. She got what she wanted. It was exactly how she would have ended the script.
  • Primatologist Kelly Stewart Harcourt (1986) [11]

• 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.
  • Zoologist and primatologist Jane Goodall, in a taped message played at the National Geographic memorial fundraiser after Fossey's death [12]

• I warned her. Everybody who was fond of her did. But she didn't want to listen to things like that. She was a law unto herself.
  • Zoologist and primatologist Jane Goodall [13]

• She was caught up in circumstances beyond her control, disasters that upset her mind in the early stages and soured her later years. Others would have quit. She was never physically strong, but she had guts and willpower and an urgent desire to study the gorillas, and that was what kept her up there.
  • National Geographic Society photographer Bob Campbell (1986) [14]

• I only knew the person I had to deal with for eight years, and this was a sad person. She was riding on some kind of dedication she had once had. Why did she hardly ever go out to the gorillas if they were her life-motivating force? She criticized others of 'me-itis,' yet she kept threatening to burn the station down and all the long-term records. She was willing to take down everything with her—Karisoke, the gorillas. When I did a census that indicated the gorilla population was growing quite nicely, she tried to cut off my funding; she wanted them to be dying.
  Dian could have had all the accolades in the world for what she did during the first six years. It would have been natural for others to build on her work, but she didn't have the self-confidence or the character for that to happen. So many people came over here inspired by Dian Fossey, prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt. No one wanted to fight her. No one wanted to take over the place. She invented so many plots and enemies. She kept talking about how nobody could take it up there, how they all got 'bushy,' but in the end she was the only one who went bonkers. She didn't get killed because she was saving the gorillas. She got killed because she was behaving like Dian Fossey.
  • Ecologist Bill Weber (1986) [15]

• Under Dian's direction of the research center, she would not allow a Rwandan to be in sight of the gorillas - claiming it would make the gorillas more vulnerable to poaching. Given that a gunshot or a trap could be effective without being seen, this didn't make complete sense, and now that Rwandans are fully engaged in their conservation poaching is far, far reduced and the gorilla population is thriving.
  • Amy Vedder, an ecologist and primatologist at Yale University and an alumnus of Karisoke Research Center under Fossey (2017) ^{[citation needed]}

• Poachers, cattle herders, park officials, Western conservationists, members of her staff, a couple dozen researchers — the parade of possible suspects extended far back into the past. In pursuit of her singular goal, the protection of the endangered mountain gorilla, Fossey had shot at her enemies, kidnapped their children, whipped them about the genitals, smeared them with ape dung, killed their cattle, burned their property, discredited their work, and sent them to jail.
  • The Dark Romance of Dian Fossey by Harold T. P. Hayes (1990)

• Despite the fame of Fossey and the other Trimates, women, and particularly African women, are still underrepresented in science. We are taking numerous initiatives to strengthen our programs for women in science, including establishing a scholarship fund, as well as aiming to have equal representation of women in our livelihoods and food security work that takes place in the communities living near the gorillas. It is wonderful to be able to extend Dian’s legacy in this special way, perhaps not one that she would have expected.
  • Dr. Tara Stoinski, president and CEO/chief scientist of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, (15 January 2023)