THE DARK ROMANCE OF DIAN FOSSEY
Harold T. P. Hayes
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990
351 pp. illustrations, $21.95
THROUGH A WINDOW
Jane Goodall
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990
222 pp., illustrations, $21.95
Dian Fossey was the best thing that happened to gorillas since Noah's ark. But her head was split open by an African panga, or machete, in the early morning of December 17, 1985.
"It is her monument, her epitaph, that there are more gorillas then ever in the Parc National des Volcans," says Diana McMeekin, vice president of the African Wildlife Federation. "For this alone she deserves veneration."
Perched on the very cusp of extinction, the gorilla population of the world was estimated in 1960 at five to fifteen thousand small lowland gorillas and less than four hundred giant mountain gorillas. By 1973, the latter were down to around 270. In 1990, "there are now 310 (mountain) gorillas," according to McMeekin," and their number is growing not diminishing."
Dian Fossey's raging efforts to save the gorillas have resulted in generous support from foundations and the Rwandan government. Daily patrols monitor the gorillas' health and safety.
The Dark Romance of Dian Fossey is a wondrous, ambivalent book about a wondrous, ambivalent woman. Fossey once painted a self-portrait that "was very schizophrenic," according to one of her student associates, Kelly Stewart. "One half of the face was normal, the other was dark and brooding." It was "a truer representation of the subject" than Stewart realized at the time, and it also symbolizes the Dian Fossey of this book, who did just about everything wrong a person could do for all the right reasons.
Casual followers of the "Gorillas in the Mist" myth will be shocked to discover that Dian Fossey was a liar and a racist, that she kidnapped children, killed cattle, and personally tortured poachers and wanted them shot on sight - all on behalf of the survival of her beloved apes. To all but the most hardened cynic, that she seems to have succeeded points to the power of her positive weapons: her tireless effort in the service of those she perceived as unfortunate and her sense of transcendence in the presence of gorillas, among humankind's closest relatives. She spent hundreds of hours painstakingly tracking and observing the giant mountain gorillas. Their resulting acceptance of her, which she publicized by photos and accounts, won the heart of the public and political protection for the gorillas.
People pressure
Certainly, such activities did not endear her to the surrounding Africans, who were caught in a population explosion that ate up the available acreage and created an almost irresistible demand for more arable land in the country of "the eight Virungas," a volcanic chain stretching westward form
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