Weekend read: Dildos in the Mist

The local store has started selling coffee from faraway Rwanda, reminding me of my visits there, before, during and after the genocide 30 years ago. Sigourney Weaver played murdered American conservationist Dian Fossey in the film Gorillas in the Mist.

Ms Fossey became an American folk hero for her conservation work over two decades in central Africa until her murder there in 1985.

Dateline: Ruhengeri, Rwanda.  circa 1994.

Beyond this typical African town lie the mist-enshrouded Virunga mountains, habitat of endangered mountain gorillas.

Fossey thought the great Silverback male stood out as nature’s closest relative to man. Gorilla young frolicked in the bamboo of the Virunga, watched over by the Silverback known as Big Daddy. If the youngsters misbehaved he went over and gave them an earnest clap behind the ear.

Credit: Banksy Art

He sat there watching with his human-like hand on his chin, like Rodin’s sculpture The Thinker, like a furry version of it. He picked at his finger nails, picked at his teeth, picked his nose, picked an irritating insect out of his hair, wiped his hand over his face – all much like we do.

Dian Fossey was murdered at her mountain camp, it was said, by a visiting American student who was spirited out of Rwanda, never to be prosecuted there or at home in the US. He may have been one of her lovers, they suspected at the time..

The Belgian and English coffee and tea planters nearby thought she was killed by locals whom she despised and who hated her. “The Mad Woman of the Mountains,” as she was known, spat and ranted at the locals and shot at cattle that wandered into the lower reaches of her domain. In response poachers crept in, laid snares and killed young gorillas with poisoned arrows. There was money to be made from gorilla paws, teeth, heads and skin from the sorcerers of central Africa and markets in China and Asia.

It was In no doubt the madder the Mad Woman became the poaching turned more vengeful.

It later emerged that Fossey kept a diary in which she wrote of having a battery operated vibrator she called Max. The dildo stopped working and no-one in the district would be able to fathom why it had stopped obliging her.  In the end, a visiting ex-pat surgeon took it apart and serviced its overworked circuits and was able to service Dian himself until the repair job was done, according to district legend.

“She was a real character,”  an elderly British owner of a tea estate who knew her well told me. “I’d have her over for dinner when she came down from the mountains. She could finish a bottle of Bourbon in one sitting. I’m surprised she didn’t kill old Leakey.”

Louis Leakey, the world renowned archeologist, in his 60s, had to resist being seduced by the sexual appetite Ms Fossey mentioned in her diaries. On his visits to the Virunga, she was about half his age.