Dian Fossey was an American primatologist and anthropologist who committed her life to the conservation of the Mountain Gorilla by conducting an 18 year comprehensive study about the fateful ape. Dian Fossey founded Karisoke research center in 1967 and anti- poaching campaigns with her staff to protect the mountain gorillas.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!Having been raised with dejection and lack of parental love from the step father following her mother’s divorce with her father, Dian found love and comfort with the animals.
At the age of six, Dian Fossey horse raiding before she worked on a farm with her hospital friend after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Occupational Therapy from San Jose State College in 1954. With the support and funding from Louis and Mary Leakey who were operating anthropological research in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, Dian found her way into Democratic Republic of Congo where she established her camp at Kabara to begin her study about the mountain gorillas in 1967.
On July 9, 1967, soldiers arrived at the camp to escort her and her research workers down, and she was locked up at Rumangabo for two weeks. Fossey eventually escaped through bribery to Walter Baumgärtel’s Travelers Rest Hotel in Kisoro, where her escort was arrested by the Ugandan military. With the advice from Leakey, Dian gave up going back to Congo and started her research on the Rwandan side of the Virungas where she established her camp at a place between Mt. Karisimbi and Visoke, which was to later be known as Karisoke after combining the two names, Karisimbi and Visoke.
Unfortunately, Dian was murdered in 1985 in her tent at her research institute by unknown murders where she was found lying in a pool of blood in the early morning of 27th December, 1985. Fossey is buried at Karisoke, in a site that she herself had constructed for her deceased gorilla friends. Hiking the Dian Fossey grave site is therefore done as a tribute to her great work of protecting the Volcanoes mountain gorillas which are a great attraction to the park and Rwanda today.