by Farley Mowat
As always, Leakey was frantically busy—dashing down to Olduvai, flying off to raise money and receive awards in England, Europe, and the United States, but he had a clear week starting October 8 and he asked Dian to come to Nairobi then.
Leakey made no attempt to hide his pleasure when he met her at the airport. Tall and straight, comfortable in jeans and workshirt with her long, thick hair close-braided, she was one of the most striking women he had ever seen.
“I don’t like doing this,” she told him in explanation of her visit, “but I’m nearly at my wits’ end. Everything’s ganged up on me. I miss Coco and Pucker more than words can say, and I hate to think what will happen to my babies in Cologne. I’m desperate to continue with the census work, but it’s impossible without decent help. The poachers and herders are driving me crazy. And to top it off, I’m afraid I’ve got tuberculosis.”
“Ah, my dear,” Leakey said cheerfully, “what you need is a proper little holiday. Need one myself, come to think of it. You leave it to me and I’ll get something going. Meantime, I shall take you to the best doctor in Kenya and arrange to have him check your lungs.”
Dian underwent a series of tests and was given some drugs for the treatment of her symptoms, but a diagnosis could not be completed for several days. Undeterred, Leakey pushed ahead with his plans, and one bright morning he and Dian left Nairobi for a safari through the grassy plains of south-central Kenya. In the company of this enthusiastic and much admired—if somewhat elderly—companion, Dian put her worries behind her.
The guided Kenyan safari organized by Leakey was a far cry from the exhausting journey Dian had made with John Alexander, her “Great White” hunter, six years earlier. The vehicles were well-sprung and air-conditioned. Camp facilities were elaborate, including sleeping tents with attached shower stalls and big, cozy beds. Superb food was accompanied by vintage wines. Under such sybaritic conditions, Dian succumbed to the romance of star-filled nights on the sweet-smelling savanna. Leakey did more than succumb—he fell deeply, wildly in love.
After a week they returned to Nairobi just in time for Leakey to fly off to London. On the day of his departure he wrote Dian three letters which were as ardent as those of any heavily smitten teenager. He was distraught that they were to be separated by so much space and time but solaced himself with memories of the “heavenly week we had” and with the conviction that they now belonged to each other.
— 9 —
In letter after letter over the next few weeks Leakey continued to pour out his passion for Dian; but it was a oneway flow, and his pleas for a response from her became ever more plaintive. Back in Nairobi in mid-November, he was becoming desperate to see her or at least to hear from her. He proposed that they make another safari together, and when this elicited no response, he wrote to tell her that he was giving her a ruby but needed to discuss the setting and ring size with her. “I want you to have it soon as a deep token of my caring….”
Leakey’s letters had an inhibiting effect upon Dian. As she tried to think of how best to answer one of his outpourings, another would descend upon her. She was embarrassed that the great Louis Leakey, that paragon of strength and purpose, should have become so besotted. She may also have been feeling guilty, since she was becoming ever more interested in Robert Campbell.
Eventually she wrote Leakey a short and rather formal note to accompany a report on a visit she had recently made to Kabara. Perhaps she hoped his ardor would be diminished by it and that their old relationship could be restored, but this was not to be.
Leakey’s reply exuded enormous happiness and relief at having heard from her, and he was authentically pleased to be the bearer of good news from the doctor who had tested her for tuberculosis and who was now convinced she was free of the disease.
Moved by gratitude and perhaps pity for this sixty-seven-year-old lover, Dian responded with a warm and cheerful letter full of news about the gorillas, although sparing about her own feelings. In her journal she wrote distractedly: Don’t know what to do about L. God-what a mess.
His reply, which seemed to arrive by the next post, was ecstatic. It included plans to meet her in Cambridge—a prospect that did not delight her, for she had hoped her long absence in England would cool his passion.
From the hour of her return to Karisoke, Dian had been buried under a mountain of field notes that had to be worked into shape in preparation for her first semester at Cambridge.
She was also extremely busy in the field. Early in November she chanced a journey across the mountains to Kabara in the Congo, although she was fully aware that she might be imprisoned should she be caught by park guards or the military. However, she badly wanted to know what had become of her Kabara gorilla groups.
Although the distance as the crow flies was little more than five miles, it took Dian and two trackers five hours of slogging through a steady downpour to reach that familiar meadow. Once there, she managed to contact only one of her former study groups, which she found sadly depleted. She encountered no soldiers or park guards, but discovered a great deal of evidence of poaching, and the whole region was overrun with cattle. She and her two men took the considerable risk of destroying more than sixty poacher’s snares and demolished several shelters erected by Congolese cattle herders, but this was hardly more than a gesture. Sadly, she estimated that fewer than half the gorillas she had known at Kabara in 1967 still survived.
Not long after her return from this adventure she found herself at even greater hazard.
On November 17 I was just barely nipped by a sickly poacher’s dog on the lower leg, and since it amounted to nothing, I joked about it. But much to my embarrassment, everyone became most upset due to the fact that the incidence of rabies among wild dogs in Rwanda is sixty percent, and of course rabies is one hundred percent fatal without the series of injections.
Everyone pleaded with me to get the injections, but I refused as I just didn’t have the time-Leakey heard about it and even went out to the airport in Nairobi and had needles, serum, etc., sent to me, but I didn’t use them. By my next trip off the mountain, in December, I’d forgotten all about it. I went down to post my mail, shop, and send Bob Campbell off on his way to Nairobi to spend Christmas with his wife. I returned to the mountain, looking forward to the next few weeks alone so as to get all in readiness for going to England. But soon I began to ache all over, became almost too weak to stand, alternately sweating and chilled, was dizzy with buzzing ears, and my temperature was a neat 105°F!
No joking now. I thought I did have rabies-my one medical book on the mountain gave these as initial symptoms-so I knew I was going to die and was really quite provoked as I wasn’t ready yet. Late that evening I crawled to the front door, shot my pistol off to bring the wogs running, and ordered two of them to run directly down to the home of the nearest European, at park headquarters, to ask for medicine as I was very sick. I was proud of these chaps for taking off in the middle of the night with only a flashlight for protection, because the area is thick at night with buffalo, which are the one thing the Africans fear.
I then spent the night just trying to stay awake by dividing my delirium time with reading a pocket book, for I didn’t dare to sleep. By 5:30 the next morning the mattress was soaked with perspiration, yet I was freezing.
Then M. Descamps knocked on the door, and that silly little Belgian looked like a guardian angel. His first words were “Mon Dieu!” as I seem to have been a wee bit blue by then. He ordered the boy to bring a freezing tub of water, hauled me out of bed, and wrapped me in dripping wet, cold towels, which can only be described as pure agony! After some ten or twenty minutes of this fever-reduction therapy I was ordered to change clothes, then “allez!” out the door to a waiting teepoy-an elongated basket affair with stout rims and handles manned by six Africans. I was trussed up into the basket along with piles of blankets, and before I could say kwa heri, the men began carting me off in such a silent and gentle way that I really had no sensation of
movement beyond the passage of tree boughs over my head. It was a rather strange experience. I didn’t really possess all of my faculties, and yet I was so aware of the silence of the porters and the sparkling, crisp beauty of the morning.
When we finally reached the Land Rover, I was becoming more aware of my surroundings. I was taken to the nearest hospital and checked in as a rabies patient by all the French-speaking doctors and nurses in Ruhengeri. No one spoke English and I guess I learned more French during the next three days than I’d learned during the past three years.
That day seemed to be a succession of one painful needle after the next, all accompanied by torrents of French. This is a French-run hospital for wogs, so in between the constant comings and goings of the European staff, there was the wailing of sick babies, the buzz of flies, and the smells of their cooking seemed to permeate my room. To be sure, there were comic highlights-like the French nurse who seemed to eat garlic with every meal and would come into my room to inquire, “Comment ça va?” exuding odors that would cause me to head for the nearest basin.
After three days and nights of this, I figured that my mind was going to crack before my body, so I packed up my knapsack and readied myself to face the doctor to tell him I was leaving. Among my complaints was the fact that there was no drinking water available except what the nurses would bring me from their homes, and the food came from a horrible hotel in Ruhengeri, delivered by the proprietor, who breathed fumes of whiskey and who had to have fixed the toast and tea for the next morning the night before as he never woke up before noon.
Just as I was ready to leave, Mrs. Carr drove up. She had heard that I was in trouble and just dropped everything to come to my rescue-I don’t know when I’ve been so happy to see anybody in my life. Within an hour I was released and on my way to her plantation, where I had to continue the rabies injections for another eleven days. Once there, I was given a lovely bedroom overlooking acres of beautiful garden and was really waited on hand and foot by her staff, all of whom are spoiled rotten, until the rabies series was terminated.
On December 30 I left for camp, and happily this was the same day that Bob Campbell returned to Ruhengeri, so we climbed back up the mountain together, taking a very long time to do so.
As 1970 began, the perennial rain and mist vanished and the forest again glowed with sunshine, tempting Dian out of the cabin in search of the gorillas even before she had recovered her strength. Accompanied by Bob Campbell, she experienced ten near-perfect days that came to a deeply symbolic climax when Peanuts, the young blackback of Group 8, reached out in what was the first friendly physical contact ever recorded between a wild mountain gorilla and a human being.
Peanuts left his tree for a bit of strutting before he began his approach in my direction. He is a showman. He beat his chest, he threw leaves in the air, he swaggered and slapped the foliage around him, and then suddenly he was at my side. His expression indicated that he had entertained me —now it was my turn. He sat down to watch me “feeding,” but didn’t seem particularly impressed, so I changed activities; I scratched my scalp noisily to make a sound familiar to gorillas, who do a great deal of scratching.
Peanuts has just touched Dian’s hand. The photo captures a momentous event—the first photo record of physical contact between gorilla and researcher. Dian is using the technique of imitation of gorilla gestures that won her the confidence of the animals.
Almost immediately Peanuts began to scratch. It was not clear who was aping whom. Then I lay back in the foliage to appear as harmless as possible and slowly extended my hand. I held it palm up at first, as the palms of an ape and a human hand are more similar than the backs of the hand. When I felt he recognized this “object,” I slowly turned my hand over and let it rest on the foliage.
Peanuts seemed to ponder accepting my hand, a familiar yet strange object extended to him. Finally he came a step closer and, extending his own hand, gently touched his fingers to mine. To the best of my knowledge this is the first time a wild gorilla has ever come so close to “holding hands” with a human being.
Peanuts sat down and looked at my hand for a moment longer. He stood and gave vent to his excitement by a whirling chest beat, then went off to rejoin his group, nonchalantly feeding some eighty feet uphill. I expressed my own happy excitement by crying. This was the most wonderful going-away present I could have had.
The icing on the cake was that Bob Campbell recorded the event on film in a sequence that National Geographic splashed over a two page spread. The expression on Dian’s face is one of pure ecstasy.
A week later, on January 11, 1970, Dian was wandering the narrow and venerable streets of Cambridge, trying to find her way to Darwin College, where she was to begin her first three-month term as a doctoral student in one of the world’s most ancient and prestigious centers for the study of natural science.
At first she was charmed by her surroundings and stimulated by the company of her fellow Ph.D. students, but she soon began to have second thoughts.
During the winter in this part of England it is dark until about 9:00 or 9:15 in the morning, then there are a few periods of gray that last until about 4:30 to 5:00 P.M., at which time it becomes dark again. I feel like a mole. Robert Hinde, my doctoral adviser, picks me up about 8:30 for the drive to the Maddingley lab where I spend the days working on my field notes and using computers and sonographic equipment to work up the data.
I’m not particularly happy here as there are so many thousands of rules to follow, the town is so crowded and rushed, the people so terribly self-important, the air so heavy, gray, and smoggy all of the day, and there is no privacy whatsoever. I guess it will all just take getting accustomed to—never had this problem of adjustment in Africa, but now it seems as though I must rely on others for everything, a situation I detest.
Leakey, out of touch and frustrated in Nairobi, continued to plead for news—and for some recognition of his love, but with no success.
Dian wrote briefly that she felt confined and alienated in Cambridge and did not care for all the formalities and protocol. “I don’t feel at ease with the people, and the whole thing doesn’t seem worth it.”
Leakey responded with some news to lift her spirits. He was attempting to persuade Robert Hinde to try and get the time she must spend in England reduced and even suggested that she might forget about earning her Ph.D. He just wanted her to be able to present her data “in the best possible way to the scientific world.” He planned to be in London by February 5 or 6, he told her, and would meet with her then.
Since Leakey’s travel depended on grants from various foundations, he had to hew to a strict itinerary, but when he boarded the BOAC jet for London at Nairobi airport early in February 1970, he was eagerly looking forward to the dinner and “quiet talk” with Dian he had managed to wedge into his schedule.
It was not to be. Leakey was felled by a heart attack shortly after arriving in London and was rushed to a hospital.
Dian wrote to him immediately, but it was nearly a month before she took the ninety-minute train ride into London to visit him in his convalescence. There is no record of what took place between them, but at least there was no rupture in their relationship.
Leakey made a good recovery and, against the advice of friends and medical advisers, continued to work and to travel incessantly. He saw Dian only on a few occasions when their paths crossed in their travels, and she was always careful to limit their encounters to settings where decorum would be preserved.
Nevertheless, Leakey continued to pour out his un-requited love in letter after letter, scratched out in his nearly illegible scrawl, and in notes furtively scribbled at the bottom of their “official” correspondence, which he’d dictated to a secretary. For a time he encouraged Dian to write to him at his personal postal box in Nairobi, assuring her that only he would see the letters.
He pressed her endlessly to accept the ruby which had now been set in a ring. Although she eventually did so only with r
eluctance, it became one of her most precious possessions.
The last letter from him surviving in her files was written early in January 1972 when she was again at Cambridge.
He was despondent; everything seemed to be going wrong for him in his fund-raising efforts. The people who promised to support Biruté Galdikas’s study of orangutans had reneged. He was having trouble getting money for his own research and for a research station at Tigone. He closed with the wish that she could be “near him to calm the awful uncertainty and give him peace.” Perhaps he knew his time was running out. Later that year a second heart attack would put an end to Louis Leakey’s life and loves.
— 10 —
Dian never really enjoyed Cambridge, but by the time she was preparing to leave the university in March 1970 at the end of her first three-month semester, she had reluctantly come to accept the necessity of going there.
You have to obtain a union card in the scientific field. Without a Ph.D. at the least, it is very hard to get adequate grant support or to get really good students to come and work on your project. Without that Big Degree, you don’t cut much ice no matter how good you are.
She planned to return to Cambridge in October for a six-month stay, but was faced with the problem of finding someone capable of caring for the camp and the gorillas during her absence.
This time there was no shortage of candidates. The publication of a cover story by and about her and the gorillas in the January 1970 edition of National Geographic magazine had made her moderately famous, and her mail was filled with requests from all sorts of people wanting to come to Karisoke. However, she had little use for most of these volunteers.
