Gorillas – in the midst

 

 

The gorillas were the main attraction of course. Elaine and I had long been obsessed with these wonderful animals. Near where we live, at the related wildlife parks Howletts (near Canterbury) and Port Lympne (between Rye and Folkestone) several gorilla families are kept in captivity, in good conditions. We visit them regularly. They are Western Lowland Gorillas, as are the vast majority of captive gorillas. Between 100,000-300,000 remain in the wild, mostly in Congo and surrounding countries.

The shaggier Mountain Gorilla is much rarer, and classified as endangered. It is estimated there are about 1,000 – up from a nadir of around 250 when poaching was taking its toll in the 1960s and 70s. You will never see them in captivity – they don’t thrive there. They inhabit two upland sites: one at the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, below the five extinct volcanoes of the Virunga Massif (the Rwanda side is now the Volcanoes National Park); and the other in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda.

So that was why we decided to visit Rwanda. In January 2026 we flew to Kigali via RwandAir from Heathrow. We were met by Primate Safaris at Kigali Airport. Our assigned driver, Moses, was to take us on a tour of the country, culminating in a stay at Mountain Gorilla View lodge in Kinigi, at the foot of the volcanoes. This was close to the Congo border. Here we would experience the trek of a lifetime to spend one hour in the presence of mountain gorillas in the wild.

We thought we’d hit Rwanda in the brief dry period between two rainy seasons. But as it happened, the rains came early. Every afternoon of our week there the sunshine was clouded and there was a massive thunderstorm.

Mountain Gorilla View lodge was very comfortable. Also peaceful, as it was not peak gorilla season so not too many of the 36 chalets were occupied. Up here (about 2,000 metres elevation) it was significantly chillier, especially at night, than in the rest of the country. We had a charcoal fire in our chalet and hot water bottles in our bed.

The night before the gorilla trek I was woken by a terrific sound of rain drumming incessantly on the roof, like the end of the world. I was alarmed, thinking the whole place was flooded, the gorillas must have drowned, we were trapped here, that was the end of our trip. But everything was normal in the morning and Elaine pointed out that the chalet had a corrugated metal roof, which was why the rain sounded so dramatic.

We’d set the alarm for 5.10am. After a very limited breakfast in the restaurant Moses picked us up in the Toyota Land Cruiser at 6.30. We had been told that wearing gaiters was advisable in the mud to be expected but we had none. Moses, however, had a pair for each of us. We were driven to the collection and briefing point, which was already teeming with visitors. There were probably up to 10 groups of eight visitors hoping to visit the gorillas this morning. The other six members of our group were all Americans or Canadians. Very cheerful. We were briefed by our leader and guide, who said we’d been assigned a gorilla family called Agasha, which means “Special”. Their location this morning had already been established by the trackers in the field, whom we would meet up with.

So it was back in the vehicle with Moses, who drove us to the starting point, where we were allocated our porters to give us assistance (we’d reluctantly come to the conclusion porters were essential, especially in view of the muddy conditions). So fixated was I on keeping my footing in the treacherous terrain that I had no idea what time we set out walking nor how long it was before we set eyes on the gorillas. Probably a couple of hours.

First we traversed a potato field, then entered a winding trodden path which began to get muddy. Then a pause for another briefing before we entered the forest itself. Here the fun began. The uphill climb was really rocky, muddy and hard to navigate without help. We were told that many of the narrow tracks we traversed between stinging nettles and dense bushes had been made by elephants. I was indebted to my porter, Pierre, who kept hold of me whenever there was peril.

Our party was accompanied by a tracker with a gun. Very discreet, but a sober reminder that elephant and buffalo were present in this region.

Finally we reached a point where our guide gathered us round and gave us final instructions. We had to leave our packs and walking sticks with the porters and put on face masks before proceeding further. The sticks because the gorillas might confuse them with guns. The masks a legacy of the Covid pandemic. Gorillas are susceptible to many of the airborne viral diseases we humans suffer from.

We continued throught the bush, without the help of our sticks, and holding on to our cameras and mobile phones. And suddenly – the head and shoulders of a gorilla appeared above the bushes. It was the group’s silverback!

It was of course Diane Fossey, author of Gorillas in the Mist, who had pioneered the identification, study and conservation of these animal families back in the dark days of poaching in the 1970s. Today tourists are permitted to visit only those family groups that have become habituated to humans. Our family, Agasha, was a descendant of Group 13, so named because it numbered that many animals when first identified. The group had lost its then leading silverback male, and the females, having no confidence in the younger male who tried to lead them, unusually kept the family going by themselves until a foreign silverback intruded and killed the would-be leader. Fortunately this new incumbent did not kill the babies when he successfully took over. He is now old and in exile, perhaps dead – he has not been seen for a while. The silverback we now beheld was his son, previously second in command of the group.

He was very chilled. We observed him languidly picking leaves to eat, and when he wanted to move past us to a new position he was pretty polite, making that low contented grunt our guide had told us about, so that we had time to move out of his way. There were a couple of young ones boisterously playing. Our silverback was joined by three females, one of whom seemed to make overtures by jumping on him as he lay outstretched on the ground dozing but he wasn’t in the mood. Two of the females had babies with them. They all grouped contentedly together, the females grooming, the kids playing. Breakfast was over.

We’d been told to keep a few metres from the animals but not to flinch if they approached closer, and certainly not to run away! You can’t outrun a gorilla. But they were so peaceful.

Our guide called for a moratorium on photography and we contemplated the group. Just on the hour, the silverback got up, and, as if to say, “That’s all, folks!” led the family away. Amazing.

So that was indeed the climax of the show. I am in awe of these majestic creatures, and it was a privilege to be in their presence. We made our way back down the mountain. In the potato field on the edge of the forest we saw a golden monkey on a tree branch. A local woman was keeping guard on the crops against the monkeys.

 

The cleanest country in Africa

 But there is so much more to Rwanda than large primates.

Along the way we discovered it to be an exceptionally interesting country, making huge strides in recovery from the tragic genocide of 30 years ago. The people are friendly, speak good English if they are educated, the main highways seemed to be better maintained than our own and there were signs of prosperity earned by hard work. More bicycles and motorbikes on the roads than I’ve ever seen anywhere else and people transporting improbable loads on them, pushing them up hills. Approaching Huye, we saw a man carrying a wardrobe on a bicycle. No signs of extreme poverty, though, no homelessness. It is said to be the cleanest country in Africa. As in nearby Tanzania, plastic bags are forbidden. There is no litter anywhere. In the cities and towns we frequently saw local women employed by the government to pick up rubbish, sweep the pavements and tidy up.

Rwanda has a longer past as an integral country than most African nations – it was a kingdom for centuries before the European colonists arrived in the 19th century.

On our way to Nyungwe National Park (where we saw chimpanzees), Lake Kivu and the Volcanoes National Park, we stopped at Nyanza to visit a reconstruction of one of the royal palaces of the ancient Rwandan monarchy. It was a really huge traditional thatched hut – a reconstruction because the Belgian colonists demolished the original on a hilltop nearby and built a church there instead.

It was a feudal system, and at its height encompassed the whole of the modern nation of Rwanda. The king came from a pastoralist people who prized their cows. These people were known as Tutsi. The agriculturalists were the original Hutu, and there was a third group known as the Twa, who were hunter gatherers. In reality there was some fluidity between these ethnic groups, but the attempt by the original German colonisers and subsequently the Belgians to impose a hierarchical, racial typology was to have tragic consequences over a hundred years later.

We met the cows. A small herd was kept and tended here. These improbably long-horned royal cows were fantastic and so was the impromptu performance on flute and vocal that accompanied their introduction to us.

We saw something about how the ancient Rwandans lived, and the king and his queens in particular. They drank banana beer in much the way English people in mediaeval times would have drunk ale or mead. To be offered water to drink would have been an insult.

We learned about the history of the people and the coming of colonialism. Following the Berlin Conference in 1884, where much of Africa was assigned to European powers without the presence of any Africans, it was deemed that Rwanda was part of the German Empire. The reigning king was informed in 1894 that his kingdom was now a colony of Germany. After World War I, the country was transferred to Belgium. The then king, Musinga, was deposed and exiled by Belgium (because he refused to collaborate and convert to Christianity) and his son Rudahigwa was installed.

We visited the nearby “modern” palace the Belgians knocked up for him in the 1930s (a rather modest Western house), now a museum with many contemporary photographs on display. He was also given an official car: not one fit for a king, but one of the original Volkswagen Beetles. He was a very tall man. Elaine and I decided we thought this was a not so subtle humiliation.

The Germans, and subsequently the Belgians, elaborated the existing social division of Rwandans (Tutsi, Hutu and Twa) into their racial theories. The Tutsi were deemed to be a superior race, emanating from the North (not so superior as Europeans but above the “Negroid” races). The Belgians incorporated this into their bureaucracy. Probably because of the impossibility of deciding who belonged to which “race”, it was deemed, arbitrarily, that anyone owning more than 10 cows was Tutsi and the others Hutu or Twa. This was printed on their identity cards forever. It is not hard to see parallels here with the Apartheid system or the strictures of Nazi Germany.

Resentment was stoked up of the Tutsi minority by Hutu political parties agitating for independence from Belgium. The Catholic Church aided and abetted this. King Rudahigwa died in mysterious cirumstances. The role played by colonialism in the events leading up to the tragic genocide in 1994 – when the extremist leaders of the now ruling Hutu, urged their followers to exterminate all Tutsi – is usefully discussed in this documentary by a Rwandan film-maker. 

Nearly a million people were killed. In the West, 30 years ago, this was generally portrayed in the news as a civil war between African “tribes” who hated each other for inexplicable reasons. The United Nations was slow to intervene, and might have prevented many thousands of deaths.

It was impossible to forget this history (documented in the Genocide Museum in Kigali, which we visited – also a mausoleum and memorial) as we traversed this now peaceful country; as we passed motorcycles, cornfields, rice paddies, banana trees, school children waving at us while we drove past. Rwandans have had to confront their recent past and to achieve some sort of reconciliation between neighbours who had murdered and raped neighbours.

Rwandans are proud of what they have achieved in the past 30 years. People we met were anxious to know what we thought of their country. They have free health care and education for all. They were also anxious to tell us they were “all Rwandans”, no longer Tutsi or Hutu. And did we know their country was considered the cleanest in Africa?

We didn’t find anyone who had a bad word for Paul Kagame, the current President of the country, born a Tutsi, who as a military general helped end the genocide. (Like the last king of Rwanda, he is a very tall man.) His government appears to be enlightened. But questions have been raised about the legitimacy of the elections he has won, and about human rights records.

In 2022 the Conservative government proposed a plan to forcibly remove some asylum seekers who had arrived in the UK by illegal means to Rwanda. A deal was reached with the Rwandan government to this effect. I believe this plan, cancelled by the incoming Labour government in 2024, to have been cruel and misconceived. But not because Rwanda is some kind of unsafe hellhole. Arguably the migrants might have faced a less hostile reception and a better future in this country than they have in some parts of the UK where racism and xenophobia has fuelled the response to their arrival. We have some way to go to be considered the cleanest country in Europe.

 

Photos & videos by Elaine & Ken Edwards with help from Rwandan guides