Preserving Primates

What was particularly striking about tracking the gorillas in the Virungas was both their nonchalance in our presence and their peaceable behaviour.

- Basabi Banerjee

Rwanda, the ‘land of a thousand hills’, has much to offer tourists, but the mountain gorilla is indisputably its top attraction. Unlike their cousins the lowland gorillas, the Virunga species (named after the mountain range they inhabit), do not breed in captivity; tracking them in the wild, therefore, is the only way to view these magnificent primates.

The population of the critically endangered mountain gorilla plummeted to 250 in the 1970s and the awe-inspiring efforts of the famous American primatologist Dian Fossey, did much to curtail poaching. Her efforts resulted in her murder, probably by a hostile poacher, at her research centre on the slopes of Mount Karisimbi in 1985. The cinematic account of her life, ‘Gorillas in the Mist’, generated global interest in the mountain gorillas she was studying and trying to protect.