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Her names are still in our minds

By BAHOZE Diane

In 1966, when Fossey began her field study, the mountain gorillas of Rwanda were wild; their only prior human contact having been with poachers. After she and her team established the Karisoke Research Center in a valley between two volcanic peaks in the Virungas, Karisimbi and Visoke Fossey slowly habituated the shy, reclusive apes to her presence so that she could sit near them and observe their daily lives.

She dutifully documented what the gorillas ate and how they vocalized, examined the complex hierarchies and social relationships among the four groups in her study, and noted how females often transferred from group to group all of which she recounts in her 1983 memoir, Gorillas In the Mist.

As it is an every year’s event, “Kwita Izina ingagi” is an event which is not for naming Gorillas and having joy but also it remind us her journey,patient,loyality, she had and all her pains to make our Rwandan Gorillas to be safe in good condition and good environment. We likely to call her NYIRAMACIBIRI but her real name is Diana Fossey.

Diana Fossey was an American primatologist and conservationist known for undertaking an extensive study of mountain gorilla group and she had a heart of loving Gorilla. When she arrive in Rwanda in1967 said this:

“More than a decade later as I now sit writing these words at camp, the same stretch of alpine meadow is visible from my desk window. The sense of exhilaration I felt when viewing the heartland of the Virungas for the first time from those distant heights is as vivid now as though it had occurred only a short time ago. I have made my home among the mountain Gorillaras”

Much Diana Fossey’s success in the study of mountain gorillas came from the help of people she met along the way. This would prove true once again as she moved her focus to Volcanoes National Park on the Rwandan side of the Virungas. In Rwanda, Diana met a woman named Rosmond Carr, who had lived in Rwanda for some years and was familiar with the country.

Fossey’s 18 years of research led to remarkable discoveries about mountain gorillas. But perhaps her greatest contribution to the survival of mountain gorillas as a species was the introduction of what she called “active conservation” tactics—patrolling to ward off poachers and chase away cattle, destroying traps, taking census counts of the animals, and lobbying for the expansion of protected habitat. She was certain that without quick and decisive action, carried out by herself with a team of locals she had hired and trained, long-term gorilla conservation goals would be futile, as there would eventually be nothing left to save.

She started to care about gorillas in Karisoke and she became closer to the Rwandan gorillas. Diana celebrated her daily achievement in collecting data and gaining acceptance among both the mountain Gorillas and the world at large, she became increasingly aware of threats the gorillas faced from poachers and cattle herders.

Diana fought both poachers and encroachment by herds of cattle through unorthodox methods. And she was murdered and her body found in her cabin on morning December 27,1985.

American primatologist Dian Fossey in the wild with the mountain gorillas of Rwanda. (Photograph by Robert I.M. Campbell/National Geographic Creative)

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