The Dark Romance of Dian Fossey
Hayes, Harold T. P.
THE DARK ROMANCE OF DIAN FOSSEY Harold T. P. Hayes/Simon and Schuster/351 pp. $21.95 Florence King The six-foot-one, gun-toting virago whose sobriquet was "the gorilla lady" was not a woman to...
...Martin's Press...
...No one knows what actually happened...
...Naturally I 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990 returned the brat," she wrote to Leakey...
...The only way they survived was to become known as some sort of banshee...
...Knowing the limitations of his own army—"In a crisis, Congolese soldiers tended to drop their guns, take off their shoes, and run"—he hired white soldiers of fortune to protect his position...
...Another saw her threaten a captured poacher with castration...
...When Alexander modestly declined, she spread the story that he was "all over me all the time...
...She refused to live in nursing quarters, living alone for ten years in an isolated cabin deep in the country, where she collected stray dogs instead of boyfriends...
...In their extended siege of Stanleyville years earlier, the Simbas had held 1,100 Belgians and Americans hostage...
...State Department cables flew when she asked the Rwandan government for permission to kill poachers on sight...
...It is now only a matter for the President to give the order—KILL—[because] the prisons are already overcrowded and this is the only way we are going to be able to protect the remaining gorillas...
...One story has it that she was urinated on and otherwise humiliated, but that she escaped actual rape by defying her tormentors with the force of her rage, screaming, "You don't have the balls to rape me...
...Little did he know his latest Galatea would "go bushy," the African version of cabin fever, and nearly start a civil war...
...Her American assistant Wayne McGuire, whom she had bawled out two days before her death, was also convicted in absentia after he returned to the United States, but Rwanda has never tried to extradite him...
...Half-empty bottles of beer and scotch sat on her worktable beside an unloaded pistol...
...It has the ring of truth, considering what we know of Fossey's hell-forleather personality, and might have worked for a woman over six feet tall...
...1=1...
...You don't get out of those kinds of camps...
...When farmers kidnapped her dog, she kidnapped eight of their cattle and spread the word that she would shoot one cow a day until she got her dog back: she got it back by nightfall...
...Hiring the last of the Great White Hunters, John Alexander, to take her on private safari, she laid it on the line: "Here we've been three weeks on safari...
...We shall cut out the hearts of the Americans and Belgians and wear them as fetishes," the Simbas announced...
...We shall dress ourselves in the skins of the Americans and the Belgians...
...Solving Fossey's murder was not the purpose of the late Harold Hayes, who died last year as he was completing this engrossing biography...
...She was found in bed, her head split in two by a machete found nearby...
...This same ex-colonialist, on discovering that Fossey intended to stay and study gorillas come hell or high water, gave her some practical advice: "The only option you've got to stay alive is to make yourself into some sort of spiritual witch...
...At the same time, I told her she should beat the bejesus out of anybody she felt like beating the bejesus out of...
...Her articles on the trip (and the accompanying photos that she "borrowed" from a more experienced photographer whom she neglected to credit) attracted the attention of Louis Leakey, who preferred female assistants for his ape studies because "women were more patient, more sensitive to mother-infant relations, and less likely to arouse aggression in males...
...21.95 Florence King The six-foot-one, gun-toting virago whose sobriquet was "the gorilla lady" was not a woman to cross, but xomebody finally did One December 27, 1985, 53-year-old dian Fossey was butchered at the Karisoke Centre for Mountain Gorilla Research in Rwanda, where she had spent eighteen years...
...So effective were her techniques of terrorizing the Africans that some members of her staff believed she had supernatural powers...
...Whodunit interests him less than whydunit, and here he hits paydirt, for there were very few people in Dian Fossey's embattled life who did not have a motive for murdering her...
...One day, a tracker brought the body of a small child into her camp...
...They believe almost everything is invested with spiritual meaning...
...He asked her to cure it, to bring the child back to life...
...Many [of their victims] died by being forced to drink gasoline, then their stomachs were cut open and set on fire...
...Abandoning her gorilla work to track the killers of a water buffalo, she fired a clip at them and, spotting one of their children hiding behind a tree, she kidnapped the child and offered to exchange him for his father's spear: she got the spear...
...It was at this time that Fossey claimed she was held for two days in a cage and "raped and raped and raped" by black African soldiers...
...And I told her to leave these things lying about everywhere, and to make sure everybody knew they were there...
...The murderer had entered her cabin through a hole cut out of the tin wall...
...They stoked their courage on hashish, and dressed themselves in monkey skins and whatever else might be at hand—lamp shades, women's panties, chicken feathers...
...All over Africa, there have been European women who lived on farms by themselves while their husbands went to war—my mother was one of them...
...Fossey was buried in the gorilla graveyard she started when her special pet, Digit, was killed by poachers...
...The monkeys allowed me to opt out, to get my need for social interaction and social closeness, so I didn't have to pay the price of human interaction...
...Female misanthrope" is almost a contradiction in terms...
...So it was with Dian Fossey, a blip on the radar screen of Smile Button America...
...A National Geographic producer saw her beat four African porters with her walking stick...
...She was as wacky and brutal as today's battlers against "speciesism" who believe in civil rights for spotted owls, but the resemblance ends there...
...She would approach the poacher, holding pliers or machete, looking at that part of their anatomy...
...To stop farmers from grazing their herds on the preserve, she shot a cow and vowed to shoot one a month: the grazing stopped...
...Louis Leakey believed her story, but a son of Congo colonialists did not: "If any African raped a European in that part of the world, you might as well forget that European's existence...
...All during the brutal ritual, Fossey shouted obscenities at the prisoner, a mixture of words that came into her head—English, French, German, Swahili, communicating a feeling of absolute outrage...
...One specially prized victim, a moderate politician named Sylvere Bondekwe, saw his liver cut out and eaten while he was still alive...
...Much of what happened in East Africa at this time was not reported by a press eager to put a good face on newly emerging nations, but Hayes fills in the blanks with some riveting passages: Led by witch doctors, the Simbas believed themselves impervious to bullets...
...In any case, in an America drowning in Happy Talk and the tsktsking tut-tuttery of a President obsessed with the Politics of Nice, a book about a woman who refused a rabies vaccine with the comment, "I'm no more rabid than usual" is bound to be refreshing...
...Word of her incredible courage began to spread...
...The Rwandan government tried and convicted Fossey's African tracker, who allegedly committed suicide in his cell...
...Florence King's latest book, Lump It or Leave It, was published in June by St...
...The most puzzling aspect of the macabre scene was the hair clutched in her stiff hands: it was her own...
...Drawn to children, especially helpless children," she became a physical therapist at a Louisville hospital...
...You've got to do this with such effectiveness and create such a sense of terror about you, people will give you a wide berth...
...Speaking on conditions of anonymity, another female primatologist told the author: "I don't like humans...
...Women are supposed to be the heart of the body social, but ape ladies evidently do things differently...
...I suggested she should make herself into someone no one would want to go near—that she should get wailing systems, smoke bombs, false faces, that sort of thing...
...That Dian Fossey was a Mean 1 Green is indisputable...
...This is precisely what Fossey did...
...Like Celine, whom the French government could not convict as a Nazi collaborator because, as the prosecutor said, he was too much of a loner to collaborate with anybody, Fossey simply disliked people in general...
...She operated entirely alone, committing all her outrages without the help of screaming minions on college break...
...He had no doubt that the white witch could do this...
...And then they would get the feeling there was a woman up there who was behaving totally unwomanly...
...B attorn in the Bay area in 1932, Fossey De ended San Jose State College...
...Joseph Mobutu, fmanced by the U.S...
...The Africans had never seen a woman like Fossey: In a country where women were subservient to men, this giant female mzungu [European]—looming over the pint-sized Hutu and Batwa—was subservient to no one...
...Unlike the tree spikers of Oregon, there was nothing sneaky about her, and she had guts...
...A fervent desire to see exotic animalsled her to borrow $8,000 and go to Africa...
...It was on this trip that her enormous ego first reared its head and gave hints of megalomaniacal excesses to come...
...We could have shacked up together and had a hell of a good time...
...Harold Hayes's shrewd examination of her life raises interesting questions about whether the American commitment to extroversion as a national art form causes naturally aloof personalities to flower into deadly nightshade and seek solace in anthropomorphism...
...for his anti-Communist resistance, swore to put down the Simbas...
...Arriving in East Africa in the sixties "when just to be white was a risk to your life," Fossey found the Ihgboat Annie boldness that ruined her sex appeal an advantage in the face of the Communist-inspired Simba incursions...
...Whenthe white mercenaries, many of whom held Nazi-style racial views, turned against Mobutu and began killing their black comrades in arms, Mobutu ordered all whites killed...
...Completely flat-chested, wheezing with emphysema from her threepack-a-day habit, and often smelly from not bathing, she nonetheless thought every man she met was trying to seduce her, and hurled accusations of sexual harassment when they did not respond to her up-front offers...
...All Africans, you know, live in a spook land...
Vol. 23 • October 1990 • No. 10
