Batwa men in Bwindi forest, southwestern Uganda. PHOTO | MORGAN MBABAZI
When the Mgahinga and Bwindi forests in Uganda were declared national parks in 1991, the hunter-gatherer Batwa people who lived there, found themselves homeless squatters. It wasn’t anything new.
In 1952, the Basongora, a pastoralist tribe, and the Banyabindi (cultivators) suffered the same fate when the colonial government evicted them from their ancestral land in Kasese district in western Uganda, to pave the way for the establishment of the Queen Elizabeth National Park. This meant that the evictees had to find new means of survival.
