TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/83/83capbks.1

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                8                                                                  August 15, 1983

BOOKS

Under the Volcanoes


    Gorillas in the Mist
    by Dian Fossey
    Houghton Mifflin; 326 pages; $19.95


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