Misanthrope Woman in the Mists

By Stefan Kanfer

On Dec. 27, 1985, a Swahili cry went up in the mountains of Central Africa: "Dian kufa!": Dian is dead. The victim of the slaying was American Anthropologist Dian Fossey, 53, author of the 1983 best seller about her work, Gorillas in the Mist. No one has ever been punished for the machete murder -- a ghastly end for a gentle soul.

Or was she? Farley Mowat, a maverick Canadian with his own obsessions about endangered wildlife (Never Cry Wolf; A Whale for the Killing) has an even greater concern for the truth; he ransacks the victim's diaries, analyzes her work and interviews some hostile associates who believe "she got what she wanted"; "She mistreated everyone around her and finally was done in." A strange figure begins to emerge from the mists. From childhood on, Mowat observes, the coltish, willful Californian was beset with resentments toward the father who deserted his family when she was six. Spiritually restless, she converted to Roman Catholicism, then abandoned the faith. Her social relations were equally unstable. She was involved in many liaisons and underwent an abortion, but no man held her interest for long. Fossey's career was given the best possible start when Paleontologist Louis Leakey signed her on as his research assistant, yet she was never fully confident of her talent or of those around her. In the field or at home, professional and sexual jealousies continued to mar her career. Occasionally she would make intense declarations of affection, but from the moment she stepped into the jungle, simians were her only true loves.

Mowat is scrupulously fair: he shows his subject antagonizing co-workers as she lurches from tantrum to euphoria and back again, but he praises her meticulous observations of animal life and her unceasing struggles with poachers and politics as she fights to save the mountain gorillas from extinction. Her Africa is not the ordered master-and-servant backdrop of Isak Dinesen's tales. Three French visitors make a wrong turn on a back road and get fatally detained by Congolese troops. Fossey angrily tells her family, "They were reportedly tortured . . . hung on racks, finally eaten. The Congo can't be covered by the press, like Vietnam, thus no one knows what really happens." But Fossey knew and pressed on. The stubbornness killed her. Broken in health, stalked by resentful poachers, distrusted by colleagues and local officials, she sensed that she was doomed but could not turn back. Sifting the circumstantial evidence surrounding her death, Mowat finally makes some convincing accusations of government-sponsored assassins. But he concedes, sadly, that Fossey's misanthropy made her an accessory to the crime. "I feel more comfortable with gorillas than people," she once admitted. "I can anticipate what a gorilla's going to do."