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Adventure in the Kidepo valley

Thursday September 12 2013
kidepo

Waterbuck and warthogs graze near the UWA hostel in the Kidepo Valley National Park. Photo/Benjamin Jumbe

Uganda’s remaining virgin wilderness, Kidepo Valley National Park, has survived many threats. Conservationists have battled with poachers for decades but now the exploration for minerals by big companies is posing a danger.

Tucked between mountains where the borders of Kenya, Uganda and South Sudan intersect, Kidepo appears like a massive bowl. Located 520km northeast of Kampala in the Karamoja sub-region, its rugged beauty alive with the variety of African game, the park is a wilderness of savannah, acacia, borassus palms and lots of sausage trees, whose alcoholic fruit is a delicacy for elephants.

Last year, CNN Travel voted Kidepo Africa’s third best safari destination after Kenya’s Maasai Mara and the Central Kalahari Game Reserve of Botswana. The park scores highly on its spectacular landscape, serenity and animal life. Officials at the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) are well aware of this, and are keen to translocate more game into the park to attract more tourists. They are considering returning the greater kudu, oryx and rhino.

Johnson Masereka, the conservation area manager, said they are also enhancing security in the area, which has porous borders, to reassure visitors. They are also seeking funds to help in the translocation of the animals.

The oryx has not been sighted in Kidepo since the 1990s, while the last black rhino, according to Africa Geographic, was killed around 1984. The grant gazelle and roan antelope have also disappeared from the park.

But Kidepo is the only park in Uganda that has ostrich and cheetah, even if the two species are endangered due to poaching and exploration for minerals.

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The local Karimojong who vacated the area for the park’s borders to be extended to the current 1442km², have all along protected its wildlife, according to game ranger Phillip Akorongimoe. This claim is supported by a 1974 documentary, The Wild and the Brave, which received an Academy Awards nomination.

The documentary is an account of cultural conflicts evolving into friendship between two men and their wives in Kidepo’s wilderness. One man was the then chief warden Iain Ross, a Briton, and his Ugandan successor Paul Ssali, who, according to the New York Times, was trained by Ross to conserve Kidepo’s ecosystem.

Repopulating the area

Kidepo was started in 1954 as a controlled hunting area for local communities, who did not kill female animals for purposes of repopulating the area. In 1958, it became a game reserve, and later a national park in 1962.

The Karimonjong were asked to make way for the animals in 1963. Two years later, the park’s headquarters were moved from Opotipot to Apoka, a place where people gathered to share the animals they killed.

But, whereas the Karimojong developed a conservation culture, other communities from neighbouring countries such as the Turkana of Kenya and Toposa of South Sudan continued to hunt there.

In the park is a cemetery where the first six Karimojong rangers to be killed by the poachers are buried.

“They fought for the protection of wildlife,” said Akorongimoe. “Since then, the local community took it as their responsibility to protect this park from poachers.”

Despite the occasional forages by the Toposa and Turkana, Akorongimoe said that the pastoralist Karimojong also kept away the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), the rebel force that operated between 1987 and 2005 in the nearby Acholi land, which borders Kidepo to the west. After they were driven out of the country into the Congo and Central African Republic, the LRA has lately turned to elephant poaching for ivory to fund its activities.

Kidepo has been described as one of the few remaining African savannah grasslands — an ideal destination for anyone who wants to get away from the urban hustle and bustle.

On a game drive northwards, one may chance on the rare cheetah or ostrich. But there are plenty of warthogs, Jackson’s hartebeest, waterbucks and zebra. On a daytime drive, a visitor will see plenty of the graceful giraffes, which were returned to Kidepo in 2004 from Lake Mburo National Park.

Tourism warden Leslie Muhindo said there are lions and leopards in Kidepo, but they are a rare sight. There are hyenas too. When we took a night-time drive, we saw four lions out on a hunt.

Threat of extinction

According to the National Geographic, Kidepo has the biggest buffalo herds in Uganda. These graze in herds of about 1,000. Although they are preyed on by lions, the buffaloes are not under threat of extinction.

The elephants stay in the eastern part of the park towards the Kenyan border and the Kidepo River. When the river dries up, they migrate to the Narus River valley, which has water throughout the year.

The only primates to be found in Kidepo, are the ant-eating patas monkeys, which can survive in the semi-arid savannah.

There are up to 475 bird species in Kidepo 28 of which cannot be found in any other park in Uganda.

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