Gorilla Memory: In the footsteps of Dian Fossey

I wrote this article in 2005. It was run on BBC radio and a version was published in the Sunday Independent.

The best days of my life have always begun by waking in the cool darkness before dawn.

As we drove, the dark shapes of volcanoes loomed above a crimson skyline. The first light filtered through the mist covered peaks of Karisimbi, Bisoke and Sabyinyo. We were in north-western Rwanda heading for the Volcanoes National Park. Villagers were walking down either side of the red soil road. The women wore bright coloured wraps; the men were more soberly dressed. As the light grew stronger, the slopes of the volcanoes turned bright green.

It was the landscape of memory. I had journeyed in Rwanda before, as a journalist during the genocide of 1994, and I had seen so many villages empty of human life, and witnessed so much death in the green valleys of this beautiful country. I remembered how on the roads we would see suitcases broken open, their contents spilled out across the earth – a sign of the fear and helpless panic that had gripped the victims as they tried to flee their killers.

But that was over a decade ago. I was on a different journey now. I had come here with a group of friends from Johannesburg to see the mountain gorillas. It was a vacation, but it was also a journey into a country slowly trying to heal itself. Tourism is a major earner for Rwanda today, and seeing the gorillas is the highlight of a trip to the country.

We got out at the base of Bisoke volcano and began walking through the potato and maize fields on its lower slopes. Our guide was called Eugene and we were hoping to find the Amahoro group of gorillas. Appropriately, perhaps, amahoro means ‘peace’ in Kinyarwanda. Dian Fossey’s tomb lay in the ground a little way distant from our route.

She was an occupational therapist who came to Rwanda to study gorillas full time. She dedicated her life to finding ways to both understand them better and to protect them. In 1985, she was murdered. Her killer has never been caught, although many people suspect that it was gorilla poachers who were responsible.

We climbed further up the mountain and came to the bamboo forests. We walked in silence through their shaded vertical greenness, hearing the leaves rustle as the bamboo swayed in the wind. We hoped to see buffalo or even elephant, but we were not that lucky. Soon we were higher up the slopes, battling our way through a field of stinging nettle onto the steep mountainside covered with thick luxuriant vegetation.

We saw our first gorillas in a small clearing in the forest – a mother and her baby chewing on stalks of bamboo. It is a powerful experience, that first moment when your eyes meet the curious, gentle brown eyes of a gorilla. You find yourself staring into our evolutionary past, voyaging across a genetic distance of hundreds of thousands of years.

It is a moment of tingling excitement and, at the same time, of utter peace, a glimpse of what might have been the destiny of our species.

‘Don’t go too close,’ Eugene said softly. ‘We don’t want to upset them.’

We moved back through the steep undergrowth when one of the babies came ambling towards us, curious and without fear of any sort. The gorillas in the amahoro group are used to human contact, unlike others in the park, but still we were only allowed an hour with them. Discreetly hidden in the bush around us were soldiers armed with AK-47s, protecting both us and the gorillas from poachers.

A baby and its mother rolled over and over together, playing just a like a human mother and her child. Ubumwe, or ‘unity’ in Kinyarwanda, the huge dominant male silverback, looked on as the rest of the group foraged through the vegetation. Watching those animals so peaceful in our presence, I realised that in the last 50 years we have reached a unique moment in our history on this planet. These huge, powerful creatures we once so feared now need our protection to survive. The surviving 700 mountain gorillas exist solely in this tiny reserve shared with Congo and Uganda.

The good news is that since the last census done in 1989, the numbers of mountain

gorillas have been rising slightly. All three countries have suffered civil war or genocide, and it is perhaps remarkable that these creatures have been protected even in the midst of such human cruelty.

At the end of our precious hour, Eugene led us down the mountain slopes. Behind us

there was a brief, eerily clear, drumming sound. ‘That’s the silverback,’ Eugene said.

‘Beating his chest.’ We stopped to listen for a few moments, but Ubumwe had fallen

silent. We walked on, carrying that the memory of one of the best days of our lives out

of the dark coolness of the bamboo forest and into the villages and hillsides around us.