Gorillas in the System

On my first visit to Rwanda in 1992, I picked up a postcard in a souvenir shop. It was illustrated with hibiscus flowers, Ituri dancers, and a map showing protected areas in green and all manner of wildlife: a crested crane, buffalo, lion, giraffe, chimpanzee, long-horn cow, and two zebras munching on grass.

But where were the mountain gorillas?

As the director of an organization working to protect them, I was surprised by their exclusion. Seriously? The big fellas? National Geographic’s poster ape, the star of countless books, articles, documentaries, and films? Had they not seen the episode of BBC’s Life on Earth where David Attenborough, sotto voce, says, “There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than with any other animal I know.”?

Naively, I had come to the landlocked African state expecting to find an all-singing, all-dancing, gorilla-loving nation. Instead, I quickly discovered that most Rwandese were ambivalent about the charismatic great apes living in their backyard.

What, then, were their chances of surviving? To make a difference, we needed to change people’s attitudes, and the system. And so we committed to a decades-long process.

I kept the postcard pinned to my office bulletin board to remind everyone of how much work we still had to do.

A lot has changed since then. Nowadays, you can’t escape gorilla-themed billboards everywhere in Rwanda, from Gorilla’s Coffee and Silverback Tea to Virunga Gin and Virunga Mist Beer. It’s clear that these incredible creatures have a wider appeal than just wildlife tourism. Every year, Rwanda celebrates the “Kwita Izina” gorilla-naming ceremony in the Virunga volcanoes’ foothills, where the gorillas live in their forested mountain home. New gorillas born since the last ceremony get their names. The event draws politicians, diplomats, business leaders, and international celebrities, and it’s filled with singing and dancing.

Meanwhile, the mountain gorilla population has increased by more than fifty per cent. This is a rare conservation success story. So, how did we get to where we are now?

Woman in the Mist

Late afternoon on September 24, 1967— a day now celebrated as World Gorilla Day — in a saddle between two volcanoes, Karisimbe and Visoke, Dian Fossey established the Karisoke research centre and began a groundbreaking gorilla study in Rwanda that continues to this day. In her book Gorillas in the Mist, she describes the site she chose:

“Distributed throughout the meadows, like so many powerful sentries, stood magnificent Hagenia trees, bearded by long, lacy strands of lichen flowing from their orchid-laden limbs. The entire scene was backlit by sunlight, giving all a specular dimension no camera or eye could believe. I have yet to see a more impressive spot in all of the Virungas or a more ideal location for gorilla research.”

She would live there until her death eighteen years later. Undoubtedly, her steadfast vigil was a deterrent to poachers and encroachers. She gave the gorillas their best chance of survival when they needed it most. But in seeking to protect the gorillas by strictly prohibiting people from entering their habitat, she adopted a brutal management style, resisting attempts by the wildlife authorities to allow tourists into the park to generate income for their protection, sometimes firing her pistol above the visitors’ heads. She reportedly kidnapped and held for ransom the child of a suspected poacher. Villagers called her Nyirmachabelli, “the old lady who lives in the forest without a man”. She was murdered on Boxing Day 1985 by unknown assailants.

Paradigm Shift

Seven years after her death, I travelled to Rwanda as part of a delegation from the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund to commemorate the 25th anniversary of her gorilla study at Karisoke. We followed the same trail she had climbed a quarter of a century earlier. Not much had changed.

In my memoir Gorilla Tactics: How to Save a Species, I describe my first impressions:

“From the park boundary, we continued on foot. Mount Bisoke rose up steeply before us. The climb was steep but not as strenuous as I feared. My motivation to get there gave me wings. We reached Karisoke after dark. Guards carrying lanterns met us on the path and guided us into camp. Hurricane lamps hung outside the cabins, faintly illuminating the corrugated tin walls and surrounding foliage. Jungle sounds were everywhere.”

Awestruck by my encounter with wild mountain gorillas, I came away determined to make a difference. But to ensure their long-term protection, it was clear to me that a paradigm shift in conservation was necessary, away from the “fortress” method that Dian Fossey favoured.

Fortress conservation, a holdover from colonialism, is responsible for displacing millions of Indigenous and local people across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, sometimes through violent evictions or harassment by eco-guards. The model has since proven to be ineffective.

Community-based conservation, on the other hand, is a bottom-up approach to protecting biodiversity and natural resources, which places local people at the centre of decision-making.

At the time, Rwandese communities were given no stake in the park, no say in decision-making. Indeed, when we interviewed people living alongside it to determine their motivation for encroaching on it, they told us they believed the park belonged to European aristocracy.

Growing up in Africa and Asia, I was predisposed to embrace a community-based approach. Of course, the people; not despite the gorillas, but because of them, and the resources their ecosystem can sustainably provide those who have the most to gain from its protection.

Community-based conservation

Revolutionary at the time, we set up a comprehensive conservation programme: opening dialogues with a broad spectrum of local actors, conducting surveys, advocating at the ministerial level for people-driven stewardship models, and partnering with small-scale organizations on dozens of grassroots projects next to the Virungas.

Our CREDible approach — Conservation, Research, Education and Development — maintained front-line protection, such as anti-poaching patrols and scientific research, while advocating for conservation education in Rwandese schools, and mitigating human encroachment in the gorilla habitat by offering development alternatives to the communities.

We learned that the reasons for encroachment were varied: fetching water, honey harvesting, collecting traditional medicines. To mitigate this, we teamed up with local contractors and grassroots societies who were already working in the region and created alternatives. We built water cisterns in schools. We bought Langstroth beehives and installed them outside the park (“let the bees do the encroaching”). We employed a micro-agriculturalist to demonstrate how herbal medicines could be cultivated in small plots. We provided micro-credit loans.

In short, acknowledging the deep connection between human cultures, languages, and ways of life and the ecosystems they inhabit, which in turn influence and are influenced by biodiversity, we embraced Virunga’s biocultural diversity.

As a result, what was ultimately achieved in the Virungas is nothing less than systems change.