To the outside world, Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park is a model of successful conservation of wildlife amid declining populations in other parts of Africa. But while elephant, giraffe and buffalo populations have grown as much as sixfold, the people inside the park live with a colonial legacy that restricts both their livelihoods and their access to sacred sites, Mongabay’s Ashoka Mukpo reported in April.
The national park is a 1,978-square-kilometer (764-square-mile) protected area and among more than 700 UNESCO Biosphere Reserves meant to foster harmony between people and their environments. It’s home to elephants, hippos, big cats and almost 600 bird species, as well as residents of 11 “enclave” towns who are the descendants of the Indigenous Basangora and Bantu people, the region’s precolonial inhabitants, Mukpo wrote.
Katwe, one of the enclave towns, used to be a highly contested area because of its proximity to a volcanic lake and its large salt deposits. It became part of the British protectorate of Uganda after the British East Africa Company captured the town, killing thousands of Basangora.
The locals were forced to give up pastoralism and settle in fishing villages as the British demarcated the savanna into game reserves.
“They created the park without the consent of the people,” Katwe-based tour guide Nicholas Kakongo told Mukpo, “and they cut us off from interacting with the animals.”
While the park has become a valuable asset for Uganda, which is aiming for higher tourism earnings, residents of the enclave towns have suffered under the Uganda Wildlife Authority’s (UWA) enforcement of strict conservation laws. Mukpo has reported on extrajudicial killings allegedly carried out by wildlife rangers.
Locals are also prohibited from visiting sacred sites or gathering firewood and plants for traditional medicine. Women who enter the park to collect firewood have been arrested and jailed. One woman remained in custody for six weeks as her family raised the money to pay her fine. She got sick and died after release.
“We used those sacred sites to guide us in our everyday activities. The system was embedded in our DNA — you can’t just come and stop people from accessing [them],” Kakongo said.
Some conservationists side with the park’s rules, which they say are only being criticized by those with bad intentions.
“We have no wildlife outside of the parks, there’s a tiny amount,” Michael Keigwin, Uganda Conservation Foundation founder, told Mukpo. “The same people who are complaining today [once] removed industrial amounts of meat and ivory outside of Uganda to make profit.”
But for Kakongo, the hope is that sacred relationships between humans and wildlife are rebuilt.
“I‘ve been swimming in that lake for 40 years, I‘ve interacted with hippos there, I‘ve collected firewood in the protected area. I‘ve interacted with the elephants,” he said.
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Banner image of an elephant in Queen Elizabeth National Park. Image by Ashoka Mukpo/Mongabay.
This story first appeared on Mongabay
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