by John Fowler
Rick Kramer, the American ambassador’s assistant, was a big fan of Dian’s and invited the four of us over for dinner. Rick and his wife, Theresa, had three young kids. Iambo, the eldest girl, and Stephan, the middle child, had been born in Madagascar to Theresa and her previous husband, a Madagascan. Sarah, a blonde little toddler, was Rick’s and Theresa’s together. While Theresa served coffee, Rick talked about his love of the hardship post, even the effects that a recent water shortage had had on them.
“I mean, where else would we get to drag a garbage can full of pool water into the house just to have clean water?” he said, with affection for his adventures in the third world.
As Rick talked, Dian’s attention was directed at the children. Stuart and Carolyn joined in the conversation, while I, feeling by now permanently muzzled, became merely an observer of Dian. I watched as she sliced chunks from a wheel of Brie on the dinner table and sneaked them to the chubby little Stephan, who eyed his parents warily before taking them. I suspected that his parents didn’t want him to eat so much, but the interaction was so satisfying to Dian that she didn’t care.
After dinner, Iambo and Stephan placed a board game on the floor in front of Dian, who flung a tiny ball at a series of miniature bowling pins. Having witnessed her irascibility and foul mouth, I was struck by her calm demeanor as young Stephan scolded Dian for throwing too hard. Innocent and unthreatening, children and animals seemed immune to her wrath, I surmised as I tried to assess her complex personality.
On another night, we joined Dian at the home of her elder friend Dorothy Eardley, with whom she’d be staying for the next few nights. Dorothy was the ambassador’s secretary, and was planning to retire after that year. The silver-haired simpatico of Dian’s fixed a pitcher of martinis, and she and the gorilla lady had a real rapport as they drank and chatted about past embassy officials and Kigali social life.
“And you know, that’s my avocado tree out back,” Dorothy complained, “and I’m constantly having to chase people out of it before I can even get the first ripe one.”
Dian sat on the floor, legs curled to one side, as she had at Rick Kramer’s house and cleared her throat saying, “Ahem . . . ahem . . . really and truly Dorothy,” the more she drank. The more Dian drank the more she cleared her throat. The telltale “ahem . . . ahem,” would ultimately become all too familiar to me. Dorothy also offered martinis to Stuart, Carolyn, and me. So this is a martini, I thought, and my head swam as I tried to finish mine.
On our last day in Kigali, the four of us climbed back into the Volkswagen with Dian at the wheel. It was a quick ride to a group of shops near the open market. We entered one that looked like an old-fashioned general store, and the young Arab shop owner at the counter recognized Dian and greeted her heartily.
“Mademoiselle, bonjour!” he exclaimed.
Dian acted equally pleased to see him and assumed a coy girlishness as she asked for something in French. With a knowing chuckle, he immediately began removing bottles of Johnnie Walker Red Label Scotch from a shelf and placing them in a cardboard box: three . . . six . . . nine—twelve. Dian also asked for cigarettes, and her friendly salesman happily bagged several cartons for her. Then we were ready for Karisoke.
THREE
THROUGH THE MILLE COLLINES
On January 19, Carolyn and I loaded our belongings into Dian Fossey’s Volkswagen bus. With Stuart in the passenger seat next to Dian at the wheel, we drove away on the winding, dusty dirt road leading to our ultimate destination in the Parc National des Volcans.
The weather was warm and sunny, and driving out of Kigali on its western side, we began to pass a long line of Rwandan soldiers dressed in athletic shorts and T-shirts. They were jogging two by two toward us up the hill that wound its way into town on the northwestern side. As they passed, Dian hung her head out her window, and with her left arm gesturing like a conductor, she started chanting in her deepest voice, “hep, hep, hep, hep.” At first stunned, the soldiers began to smile and echo her with their own chorus of, “hep, hep, hep, hep . . .” until the entire unit was repeating her chant in loud unison. This sudden display of playfulness from Dian made us laugh and put our group at ease as Kigali disappeared behind a wide curve around a hill in the road behind us.
The stucco buildings on the outskirts of town soon gave way to the rich farmland of the Rwandan countryside, dotted with humble thatched mud-and-dung huts that marked individual family farm plots called shambas. Subdivision with each successive generation had parceled the land into infinite ever-shrinking, high-density homesteads. The road climbed and twisted through what European visitors had nicknamed the Milles Collines—Land of a Thousand Hills. Everywhere were people on the move. I recalled reading that Rwanda was one of the most densely populated countries in the world and had over four hundred people per square mile. Back home, the only house I could see from my bedroom window stood silent and vacant, a mile away across a wide cow pasture. Here, the scene in every direction was like a summer holiday weekend in a city park.
There was no point along the road from Kigali that we lost sight of people, men and women with close-cropped hair and round faces, ebony-black from life outdoors. They worked the fields digging potatoes from the black volcanic soil, or picking tea leaves from the flat groomed tops of bright green camellia shrubs. Children ran and played, or worked alongside adults. People stood on the sides of the road, watching us go by. They walked along the roads continuously, traveling toward the next small village or away from the last. They carried anything on the tops of their heads: clusters of bananas, bundles of sticks for fuel. Heavy-looking baskets were balanced with apparent ease. Rows of blue-uniformed schoolchildren carried their schoolbooks this way. I even saw a little girl walking from a small storefront with a single bar of gleaming white soap perched casually atop her head.
The farther we got from Kigali, the more hilly the landscape became. It was a little like driving from my home state of Virginia into the rugged mountains of neighboring West Virginia. In Rwanda, however, the hills were nearly treeless, with cultivation replacing the forests all the way to the tops of their rounded peaks. The road wound around the steep side of each hill, and the cone-shaped volcanic hills grew ever higher. As we got closer to the Virunga Volcano region, patches of blue sky became eclipsed by an endless gray cloud cover, and our conversation turned to questions about gorillas. Our ignorance was met with gruff condescension from Dian. In fact, the farther we drove along the twisting road through Rwanda’s Land of a Thousand Hills, away from the warmth and sunshine of the lowlands, and into the gray, foreboding, overcast sky of the uplands surrounding the Virunga Volcanoes, the more stormy and irascible Dian became, as if reverting to a wildness within herself.
“What do gorillas do when it rains?” Carolyn asked, as a light shower spattered the windshield. “Do they put big leaves over their heads?”
“Eht mwah, eht mwaaah!” Dian growled with obvious disdain.
Carolyn blushed with a sheepish grin as Stuart turned around in his seat and chimed in diplomatically with an explanation.
“The gorillas just huddle together in a group,” he said, “and wait for the rain to pass.”
I felt Carolyn’s embarrassment, but was a little relieved to have Dian’s irritation not directed at me for a change. I felt a little less singled out in that moment. Which way would Carolyn fall, I wondered? On the side of disfavor like myself . . . or would she remain in good standing?
Here was Stuart, outspoken, confident and accepted by Dian. Here too was Carolyn, quiet, yielding, also seemingly accepted by Dian. Where was I in this little array of personalities, and how did I need to behave? None of my efforts to connect with her were working. A little while later we were out of the switchback roads and traveling along a stretch of road flanked by banana trees upslope and down.
“Where do banana trees come from?” Dian asked suddenly, with an unexpected upbeat tone, as if trying to break the iciness she had created. No one answered right aw
ay, surprised by the question.
“Where do they come from?” she asked again, looking at Stuart with a playful tilt to her head. I like trivia, so as our group pondered, I eventually mustered up some courage and offered my little-known fact hoping to make a favorable impression.
“Bananas do have seeds.” I said, with conviction.
Stuart and Carolyn looked toward Dian.
“When you bite a banana you can see tiny dark specks in the cross section,” I elaborated, recalling my own wonderment at having learned this myself.
“Eht mwaaah . . .” Dian growled in her gorilla vocalization of annoyance, while slumping back into her seat. My enthusiasm faltered, so I offered another explanation.
“Shoots also grow out from the base of big banana trees.” I had witnessed this in my own observation of banana trees. “They probably just dig those up and transplant them to make more trees.”
“Sheeeit,” Dian muttered with a hint of a Southern drawl. This was not going over as expected for either of us, and I realized, Dian was not looking for some correct answer from a know-it-all, but rather just a means of stimulating puzzlement and amusing conversation. I had spoiled her fun, and we were back into our quiet, chilly drive through the Land of a Thousand Hills. It was clear that I annoyed Dian, and the silent contempt was embarrassing and painful.
In the silence, Dian steered the old VW bus onward, the road twisting and turning, sometimes up, sometimes down, wrapping around one hillside after another in a series of switchbacks. After rounding one of these tight downward curves, Dian slowed to a near halt before a throng of people. The milling group directed their attention at some commotion ahead. As Dian slowly advanced the automobile, she cursed under her breath.
“Shit merde!”
“What is it?” we asked, craning our necks to see out the windshield.
“Sumu,” Dian said.
“What’s sumu?”
Dian did not offer an explanation, so Stuart chimed in.
“Black magic,” he said, shifting in his seat to face Carolyn and me. “It’s a common practice in Rwanda.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Dian muttered more expletives, as she maneuvered the vehicle through the crowd, almost nudging people out of the way with the bumper, steering along the shoulder of the road by a steep drop-off, “Bloody mother-fucking wogs!”
As we lurched by, we could see a man sitting in the middle of the road with his legs splayed outward. He was behaving erratically. With his arms flailing and eyes rolled back in his head, he appeared as if in some sort of a trance. For all I knew, he could’ve been having a seizure. Although we were curious, Dian did not offer an explanation. I wanted to prod her for details, but knew better by then. I decided that she may not have known what was going on outside our vehicle and she chose silence and mystique over a confession of ignorance. In any case, Dian’s heightened irritation at this cast an eerie pall over the rest of the trip.
The small town of Ruhengeri was the last outpost of Rwandan convenience before traveling on to Karisoke. There, we would stock up on supplies before continuing on the last leg of our journey to the base of Mount Visoke. This little village was not much different from Kigali in general appearance, except it was much smaller and all the roads were dirt or mud. There were the same pale, stuccoed concrete storefronts that might be in any poor country. The higher altitude at seven thousand feet was chilly and damp, and the gray sky hung low above our heads.
The center of town was dominated by a large open square of ground, containing the marketplace. Active and odorous, it rang with the clamor and chatter of hundreds of vendors and patrons. They came streaming in on the roads from north and south to buy and sell the goods stacked on their heads on what Dian told us was the town’s big market day.
We climbed out of the VW to the amusement of the locals who gathered around eyeing us with curious interest. Although European expatriates lived in town, many of the market merchants and patrons came from far afield and rarely saw whites, or wazungu as we were locally called, with the singular form being mzungu. I saw the same bafflement on Carolyn’s face that I felt, not knowing what we were supposed to take to camp. Neither of us dared to query Dian who led Stuart off in another direction to look for kerosene, or paraffin as the locals called it.
While Carolyn walked down one aisle of tables, I perused another. The smell of mud and rotten produce dominated while African hucksters beckoned me from right and left to their wares. As I worked my way into the market, and paused to look at a table covered with onions, potatoes, and cabbages, I heard a woman behind me say the words “Yesu Kristo” in her Kinyarwanda banter. I turned to see her in a group of women all staring at me. I realized with my new beard, and blond hair covering my ears, I must have looked like some missionary textbook Jesus to them.
At other tables, there were all sorts of basic foods and their accompanying unrefrigerated smells. There were tropical fruits and vegetables of many types: pineapples, avocados, oranges, tomatoes, yams . . . but I didn’t know by what means I would be able to prepare meals. I had assumed dining would be a sort of communal effort at Karisoke, and without any information to the contrary I was clueless as to how to grocery shop for survival there, or for how long such supplies would need to last, or be stored. I bought a bunch of tiny five-inch bananas and a large loaf of bread, while no guidance came from our leader. As I was looking at a vendor’s stand that included small brown chicken eggs bundled precariously in pieces of plastic bags, Dian passed by, and I sought some guidance.
“Should I get some eggs?” I asked my leader.
“Get eggs!” she barked.
“But, do you think they’ll survive the climb up to . . . ?”
“Get eggs!” she repeated, with a little more annoyance in her voice, before moving on.
Dian was in an obvious hurry, so I rushed through this last errand before climbing back into the VW bus for our final leg to the Parc des Volcans. Several square five-gallon clear plastic jugs of paraffin sloshed amid the seats of the van, and I had bananas, bread, a half-dozen fragile eggs and the cheese I had bought in Kigali to live on until I could somehow buy groceries again.
As we drove west from Ruhengeri, I could see the ancient volcanoes that would soon be our home. A last bastion of the mountain gorilla’s struggle to survive, they grew ever larger and dramatic as we approached. To the north, along the border of Uganda, stood a row of three of these extinct volcanoes. On the far left of this trio, westward, stood the one called Mount Sabinio with its top ridge of jagged teeth reaching for the sky. On the extreme right, eastward, stood the cone-shaped Mount Muhavura. Between these two, stood the smaller Gahinga, with a crater that gave it a flat-topped appearance. The country of Uganda rolled down the opposite far side of these mountains, out of view from where we traveled.
Directly ahead loomed the two volcanoes, Karisimbi and Visoke, that flanked the research center and from which Dian had derived the name “Kari-soke.” Perching half in Rwanda and half in Zaire, Mount Visoke appeared to have a broad flat top, from our perspective below it. The large deep crater at its summit gave it this appearance when viewed from below. I longed to see the placid hidden lake at the top of this mountain that I had read about in George Schaller’s book on mountain gorillas.
The tallest Virunga volcano, Mount Karisimbi, soars to nearly fifteen thousand feet, and is one of Africa’s highest peaks. From our vantage point, its voluminous girth obscured a sixth volcano, Mount Mikeno, which lay just behind it in the country of Zaire. I would see it soon.
Plump Karisimbi has a beautiful smooth conical shape, and I noticed the striations of vegetation types and altitudinal zones as my eyes traveled up its slope. At the lower elevations, the greenery was lush and dense. This yielded to shorter vegetation and open meadow above the forest zone, before ending with an intriguing distinct black peak at the summit, its lava cone.
While I envisioned the world’s last remaining mountain gorillas roaming
through this lush landscape, gray clouds slowly enveloped the mountain peaks, obscuring our view. As we continued our ascending approach, the cultivated fields at the base of the mountains appeared dusted with snow, but approaching closer, we could see the farms were really covered with tiny daisy-like flowers.
“What’s that flower they’re growing?” Carolyn asked.
“That’s pyrethrum,” Stuart said, “a type of chrysanthemum they get the insecticide pyrethrin from.” Again, he was well informed.
“They’re pretty.” Carolyn responded.
“Eht mwah . . .” Dian growled.
I later learned that in 1969, two years after Dian had set up her study site in Rwanda, nearly forty percent of the mountain gorillas’ habitat in the Parc des Volcans was deforested for cultivation of this cash crop. Ironically, synthetic pyrethrins had largely replaced the need for the flower. They were still being grown, Stuart explained, because they were considered a prestigious export from this humble little country. President Habyarimana himself had reportedly decreed that people in that area must grow a certain percentage of the plant in order to occupy and cultivate the newly available precious land. It was said that over time the locals had come to resent this, because crops like beans and potatoes were more useful and profitable. But the farmers complied and the cool climate and rich volcanic soil provided ideal growing conditions for the tiny white flowers.
“What are the yellow flowers I’ve seen in the pictures of gorillas in National Geographic?” Carolyn asked.
Dian did not respond.
“Yellow flowers?” Stuart said, shifting around in his seat, to show interest.
“Yeah, they’re in the background in the pictures.”
“I don’t know,” Stuart said, looking toward Dian, “Do you know what they are, Dian?”
