Hommage à Dian Fossey

The Karisoke Research Center was created in 1967 by Dian Fossey, a Californian therapist who, encouraged by the anthropologist Louis Leakey, decided to devote her life to studying and protecting wild Mountain Gorillas. She received financial support from the US National Geographic Society and the National Foundation for Science as well as moral and administrative support from the Office Rwandais du Tourisme et des Parcs Nationaux. lnitially, she was alone, and in the line pioneered by George Schaller she got pacifically in c lose proximity with free living families of gorillas and followed and observed them for years. In the early seventies, she got a Doctorate in Zoology at Cambridge University UK, and was joined in Rwanda by students and co-workers from all over the world, to whom she transmitted a refined knowledge, thus ensuring that her work might be developed and continued. She and her co-workers as well as the present team at work in Africa have accumulated a bulk of data on the feeding ecology, home range, group structure, demography of gorillas. They have also got invaluable insight into and intimate knowledge of familial behaviour, sociology and psychology of these great apes, an approach much the same as real ethnology. Dian Fossey, who was accustomed to living with shy and peaceful apes, was murdered in december 1985. Her work is being continued under the official recognition by the University of Butare (Rwanda), the Office Rwandais du Tourisme et des Parcs Nationaux and thanks to contributions by scientists from different universities in the world, mainly Cambridge (A.H. Harcourt) and Chicago (D. Watts). This work is important. It shows the Gorilla as a mirror for mankind. Gorillas and men have evolved from a common ancestor but whereas gorillas remained in a stable ecological niche, men evolved in an open landscape and got, with bipedal locomotion, hand liberation and brain development, all the capabilities - communication with articulated language, tool making, consciousness, reasoning - which allowed them to expand all over the world and to dominate nature and other animals. There is the point. Today we are able to compare the fate and hopes of both the threatened isolated populations of Virunga Gorillas and of a triumphant Man. Men and Gorillas have chosen different strategies and philosophies of life. There is a sharp contrast between the peaceful conservative way of life followed by gorillas, and the creative, imaginative, always improving way of life developed by men. But do we use wisely our extraordinary mental and technological power ? Studying gorillas forces us to emphasize that important question : shall we continue to distroy over the world all the living forms different from us and depending upon our final decisions ? Or shall we live peacefully with nature in a new alliance ? Observing gorillas questions us about our wisdom and the Karisoke team working on gorillas and preserving them brings us to criticizing our attitudes and to reconsidering our own nature.