TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93HT0584> <link 90TT1942> <title> 1983: Gorillas In The Mist </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1983 Highlights </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> August 15, 1983 BOOKS Under the Volcanoes </hdr> <body> <qt> <l>Gorillas in the Mist</l> <l>by Dian Fossey</l> <l>Houghton Mifflin; 326 pages; $19.95</l> </qt> The local poachers called her Nyiramachabelli, "the old lady who lives in the forest without a man." The natives knew how to needle a middle-aged American woman who had spent the better part of 15 years slogging through Africa's Virunga Mountains with notebook and camera. In fact, little love was lost between the poachers and Dian Fossey. She destroyed their snares, confiscated their caches of weapons and hashish, and persuaded officials to prosecute the killers of her beloved gorillas. It is not hard to understand what launched Fossey's gorilla war. One photo in her book shows the headless, handless corpse of a young male who had fought a rearguard action while his family escaped the spears of trophy hunters. Yes, gentle reader, there are people who will pay to have a massive primate's head on their coffee table and use the severed hands for ashtrays. But they had better get their orders in before the grisly supply runs out. Despite efforts to protect the mountain gorilla (as distinguished from the more numerous lowland gorilla), the great ape is drifting toward extinction. Fossey's compassionate field study offers some solidly documented reasons. Only about 240 survivors of this subspecies of the Pongidae family remain. Their habitat, roughly 225 sq. mi. straddling three countries in central Africa, is being reduced by members of the family Hominadae. Some are Rwandese, other Ugandans and citizens of Zaire. And they have a few survival problems of their own. Mountainous Rwanda, notes Fossey, is smaller than Maryland and one of the world's poorest nations. In order to support its population of nearly 5 million (expected to double by century's end), the "little Switzerland of Africa" keeps encroaching on portions of the gorilla preserve known as the Parc National des Volcans. Fossey first went to Africa on a seven-week safari in 1963, worshipfully following in the footsteps of Naturalists Carl Akeley and George Schaller, whose The Year of the Gorilla popularized the behavior of the Ngagi--Kinyarwanda for the shy beasts that live under the extinct volcanoes of the Virungas. Three years later, Anthropologist Louis Leakey visited her in the U.S. and suggested that she return. She worked in the Republic of the Congo until a civil war mandated a change of habitat. Her rather daring escape to Rwanda was made in a truck named Lily with two pet chickens, and a pistol hidden in a box of Kleenex. By contrast, the naturalist advises that one should never run from a charging gorilla. Bursting through the brush with a shriek that could shatter glass, a startled full-grown male is an invitation to incontinence. But, says Fossey, the display is usually a bluff. A gorilla's immediate response to intruders, she explains, is to protect its family, a group numbering from two to 20 members that is led by a dominant polygamous male known as a silverback. The animals are rarely excited by familiar, unthreatening visitors. Strangers who calmly hold their ground (pretending to eat grass is a disarming tactic) seldom receive more than a harmless swipe. Those who flee risk being bitten. Fossey learned to move among the mountain gorillas like an out- of-town cousin and got even closer when she discovered they enjoy being tickled. Such proximity yielded intimate details. Individual animals can readily be identified by their noses; no two have the same shape. Silverbacks exude two distinct odors. One smells like a human locker room. The other, a pungent fear scent, is released by glands in the armpit. From the author's descriptions, family life resembles a picnic on the grass. Hulks shamble off to nibble vegetation or lie about contemplating their toes. "Naoom, naoom" is the low, belching sound of a contented gorilla. There is a goofy nobility about these domestic scenes that leads one to ask: What do gorillas think about? Certainly not about making off with Fay Wray or Dian Fossey. Food, safety and building a nest for the night seem uppermost in those broad, sloping heads. Females in estrus have one thing on their minds: mating with their leaders who, in turn, worry about rivals. Kinship bonds are strong; encounters between unrelated groups can be bloody, and sometimes fatal to the young. Indeed infanticide occurs often enough to constitute a serious problem for the ape image. For in the end, gorillas are usually judged not as other animals but as near humans. From Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue to King Kong, we have projected our own fears, sentimentality and monstrous selves on these hapless beasts and punished them accordingly. Fossey firmly establishes these animals in the world where they belong. She may give them cute names like Puck, Pantsy and Macho, but she maintains her scientific distance. There are enough kinship studies, spectrographic charts and dung analyses to keep specialists happy. The general reader will be rewarded with adventure, in which virtually nothing has been distorted by preconception or self-absorption. Gorillas in the Mist is a work of direct and refreshing experience. If 1,000 Hamlets were chained to typewriters for eternity, they could not have written this book. -- By R. Z. Sheppard Excerpt "The group was charging from above, when the tall vegetation gave way as though an out-of-control tractor were headed directly for me. Upon recognizing me, the group's dominant silverback swiftly braked to a stop three feet away, causing the four males behind him, momentarily and ungracefully, to pile up on top of him. At this instance I slowly sank to the ground to assume as submissive a pose as possible. The hair on each male's headcrest stood erect..canines were fully exposed, the irises of ordinarily soft brown eyes glinted yellow--more like those of cats than of gorillas--and an overpowering fear odor permeated the air. For a good half hour all five males screamed if I made even the slightest movement. After a 30-minute period, the group...finally moved rigidly out of sight uphill." Case of the Gorilla Lady Murder September 1, 1986 An American scientist is unexpectly charged To the people of the tiny central African state of Rwanda she was known as Nyiramacibili, or "the Woman Who Lives Alone in the Forest." Her real name was Dian Fossey, and she was a one-time occupational therapist from Louisville. For most of the past 18 years Fossey had lived at a remote camp on the slopes of a dormant volcano. There she studied and befriended the rare mountain gorillas, fiercely defending the huge, gentle creatures against the encroachment of poachers. Almost everyone, including her last research assistant, Wayne McGuire, 34, a doctoral candidate from the University of Oklahoma, felt she was more comfortable with the primates that with human beings, and Fossey apparently agreed. "I have no friends," she once said. "The more you learn about the dignity of the gorilla, the more you want to avoid people." Early on the morning of Dec. 27, 1985, Dian Fossey, 53, was found dead in the bedroom of her two-room corrugated-tin cabin. Her face had been slashed in two by the blows of a machete. Her shocked acquaintances and colleagues suspected she had been murdered by the Rwandan poachers against who she had waged war for more than a decade. She had burned their huts, cut their trap lines and paid government guards to bring suspected poachers to her for interrogation. Some of her acquaintances believed the poachers had long ago begun to retaliate by slaughtering her favorite creatures, concentrating on the particular gorillas she had been studying among the 29 groups in the surrounding national park. The Rwandan government, it turns out, had different ideas. Last week it announced it had issued an arrest warrant for McGuire, who stayed on to run the camp after Fossey's death. He left Rwanda in late July, after hearing rumors of his impending arrest. A government official, Jean-Damasdene Nkezabo, disclosed that although McGuire was regarded as the "principal author of the murder," five Rwandans who had worked at the camp were being charged as accomplices. The presumed motive was the theft of scientific research that Fossey had accumulated over the years. The official statements were greeted by widespread skepticism. Declared Biologist Ian Redmond, who knew both Fossey and McGuire and spent two years at the camp: "The charge is nonsense. They've concentrated on trying to find someone who is not a Rwandan." Others questioned whether, if he was really implicated, McGuire would have remained at the camp for seven months and whether he could have expected to gain very much by stealing scientific data to which he already had access. And besides, they argued, McGuire had been in Rwanda just five months at the time of Fossey's death, knew only a few words of French and Swahili, and would have had to converse with his "co-conspirators" in sign language. Nonetheless, the Rwandan government claimed to have "serious, corroborated evidence." Though the U.S. does not have an extradition treaty with Rwanda, a friend of McGuire's told the Washington Post that McGuire was looking for a lawyer and would probably make a statement soon. -- By William E. Smith. Reported by Maryanne Vollers/Nairobi </body> </article> </text>