The Guardian UK
written by Simon Collis
Saturday July 17, 2010
We've barely entered the national park when our guide stops suddenly and holds up a hand to call for silence. His eyes gaze deep into the forest and he crouches. We do the same. Our hearts beat fast. Has he spotted something already? A golden monkey? A forest elephant?
Without warning, he yells, claps his hands and chants an ancient prayer to Biheko, god of the forest, just as his ancestors have always done. Stephen is no ordinary guide, and this, the Batwa Cultural Trail, is no ordinary walk in the woods. The woods in question are the dense forest of Mgahinga Gorilla national park, a 33 sq km area among the volcanic Virunga mountains in the far southwestern corner of Uganda. Though small, the park is home to a vast diversity of plant, animal and bird life, including the famed mountain gorilla, a mainstay of Uganda's tourist industry. Yet these rare beasts are not the only ones to lay claim to the Virungas.
Stephen is one of the Batwa, the "Pygmy people" indigenous to these mountain slopes. Evicted from their homes when the forest was gazetted as a national park in 1991, they are now a displaced ethnic group threatened with extinction. And though interaction between tourists and Batwa is hardly a new thing, control over excursions has always rested solely with outsiders. The Batwa, mainly excluded from Ugandan society, sing when they're told to, dance when they're told to and must be grateful for what they're given. Now, for the first time, the Batwa are taking control. This trail is the first time that the Batwa have had a direct stake in the tourism they're engaged in, bringing income direct to their communities.
These nomadic hunter-gatherers are widely acknowledged to have been the first human residents of forest areas stretching across much of what is now Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo. As other ethnic groups arrived, cutting the forest to provide land for crops and livestock, Batwa populations became fragmented – but at least there was enough woodland for their environmentally sustainable way of life to endure.
For Ugandan Batwa, everything changed in 1991 with the creation of formal conservation areas that outlawed all human activity in the Virungas and in nearby Bwindi. Suddenly forced to live outside of the forest, unable to return to hunt small animals, collect wild honey or gather fruits, the Batwa found their traditional skills and vast knowledge of the forest ill-suited to life outside it.
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