Gorillas in our midst

• Last Updated: November 21. 2009 12:19AM UAE / November 20. 2009 8:19PM GMT

The effects of the modern world can be felt even in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. Susan Hack reports on a unique initiative which aims to balance the needs of primates with people

From Entebbe the tiny Cessna climbs above Lake Victoria and skips west over swamps towards a range of high-knuckled ridges and the seven peaks of the Virungas chain of volcanoes. After two hours, I spot my destination, the tight emerald canopy of Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, a primeval forest that is home to half the world’s remaining mountain gorillas.

Gary Segal, the manager of the Clouds Mountain Gorilla Lodge, waits for me at the airstrip in Kisoro, a Ugandan trading town near the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The drive to the lodge takes 90 minutes along rutted switchback roads that climb past a volcanic lake and stands of wild trumpet lilies, then cut through a high-altitude mosaic of banana fields and thatched round houses.

Gary tells me women, not men, have terraced these steep hillsides, and we see them clad in bright cloth, wielding hoes or balancing baskets full of bananas, potatoes and runner beans on their heads; weeks of laborious work and a six-hour walk to market will earn them perhaps US$2 (Dh7). Men, who work as carpenters, push bicycles downhill while balancing a desk, chair or door fashioned from the fast-growing eucalyptus trees planted outside the park boundaries.

Deemed “impenetrable” by British colonialists who first designated the forest a protected area in 1932, the 332-square-kilometre park is a biodiverse remnant of the Pleistocene Era with more than 300 tree species, the majority of which are found nowhere else and have no common English names. Re-gazetted as a national park in 1991 to promote gorilla trekking tourism, the forest is more permeable than its romantic name suggests.

More than 90 per cent of Uganda’s energy is still firewood based, and Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) rangers go out on daily patrols to catch illegal wood-cutters as well as bush meat poachers whose snares sometimes inadvertently catch gorillas, who may lose a hand or limb as a result.

The gorillas, for their part, spend as much as 60 per cent of their time outside the park boundary, raiding gardens and farms and alienating the population.

Before we reach the lodge a park ranger riding a motorbike flags Gary down to ask for the loan of a vehicle to serve as an ambulance. A lone silverback had emerged from the forest and villagers shouted and formed a human chain to try to scare him into turning back, but he charged through the line, trampling and badly biting one of the volunteers.

Clouds Mountain Gorilla Lodge is part of a programme aimed at ending the conflict between gorillas and humans and encouraging local people to see the forest as an asset worth protecting.

In 2004, after negotiations with the wildlife authority, some 160 families agreed to sell land along the park boundaries for the creation a 350-metre buffer zone of what has now become second-growth forest.

Trekking has become easier because the gorillas prefer to sleep and search for food in the buffer zone, where there is more sunlight and fresh green shoots, rather than in the farms or high up the park’s densely forested mountain slopes.

The $1.3 million (Dh4.8m) Clouds Mountain Gorilla Lodge, which opened last year, was created to entice tourists, who pay $500 (Dh1,837) for a single gorilla trekking permit, to spend more time and money in the community.

Funded by Usaid and other international donors and gifted to the local villages of Nkuringo, Netko and Rubugiri, it is run by the Uganda Safari Company, which operates three luxury game lodges around the country, in partnership with the Africa Wildlife Foundation and the International Gorilla Conservation Programme.

Set amid gardens, the lodge looks like a colonial tea plantation and has butlers for each of its 10 free-standing stone cottages; there is a central library and dining lounge and bar with high-end South African wines; a spa is in the works. In addition to gorilla trekking, guests can mountain bike, take forest walks along a two-and-half-hour trail between the villages of Nkuringo and Buhoma, and visit lodge community projects, including craft shops, schools and a pig farm that tourism revenue supports.

A reservation for one of just eight daily gorilla trekking permits must be made months in advance. The next morning I walk from the lodge to the Nkuringo ranger station for my 8am hiking appointment and discover I have had incredible luck. Perhaps an indication of the financial crisis, there are no other tourists, which means I have the team of guide, armed rangers and trackers –and a family of 23 gorillas habituated to tourist visits – all to myself.

After a safety briefing, the UWA escorts and I walk down a steep hill into the buffer zone. Sometimes treks can last for 10 hours, but after 45 minutes of walking we ford a stream and find gorilla signs: sleeping nests of ferns; broken vines; and huge coils of brown dung that give me a dramatic impression of a silverback’s enormous size.

We find the gorillas resting after their morning of foraging. The trackers make grunting noises – gorilla speak for “everything’s fine” – and cut vines with their machetes so I can get a better glimpse. A female is nursing twins, and their big sister takes them in her arms so the mother can rest. The whole group is present, including Safari, a silverback named after his tendency to make the group walk long distances, and Rafiki, “friend” in Swahili, who has been known to cuddle gorilla babies and show them off to tourists like a proud father.

On the way back a guide named Herbert Twesigye explains that “Bwindi” means a dark, difficult and fearful place in the local Bukiga language. The paths are covered with vines and dead leaves. In places the canopy is so thick that no light enters, and there is a large swamp deep in the forest centre.

A hundred years ago people thought that demons lived in the swamp. In an African version of a Grimm’s fairy tale, a Bukiga legend describes a family who had to sacrifice a daughter so that the demons would allow them to cross.

“When people converted to Christianity, all those demons went away,” Herbert tells me. “But there are still places in the park where even we guides and trackers do not like to talk.”

The experience of seeing mountain gorillas and a brilliant turquoise and malachite horned chameleon in their natural habitat has left me elated, but back at the lodge Gary says something disturbing. He’s proposed a community visit to the Batwa people, the forest’s original indigenous inhabitants, and mentions that “the Batwa are more endangered than the gorillas”.

The Batwa are pygmies, one of the short-statured hunter gathering peoples who have lived in the forests surrounding Africa’s Great Lakes for the past 4,000 years, long before the migration of Bantu farmers into the region. In Uganda, which has lost 80 per cent of its forest since the 1960s, some 2,000 Batwa have suffered a drastic change from their traditional lifestyle based on hunting small antelope and collecting honey and wild forest fruit.

Evicted from their ancestral land within the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in 1966, they were allowed to use its resources until 1991, when the national park was gazetted to protect gorillas. While mountain gorillas have thrived, their population rising from about 280 in 1991 to more than 345 today, many Batwa have suffered starvation, loss of social cohesion and discrimination among the majority Bukiga-speaking people who dominate schools and local politics and who despise the Batwa as primitive. In 2006, the Uganda Alliance for the Coalition of Pastoral Civil Society Organisations warned that the Batwa were “in danger of extinction”.

About 120 Batwa live in a hillside village that is a 20-minute car ride from Clouds. To give them a stake in the tourism business, the lodge is setting up a programme where Batwa men dye raffia leaves, which Batwa women can weave or sell to other communities to make tourist baskets. Gary has a meeting with tribal elders and offers to drop me off to visit a family still living in the traditional way.

My guide and translator for the $10 (Dh37) expedition is Safari Cielson, a 29-year-old Batwa who greets me at the bottom of a hill planted with banana, passion fruit, and yams – meagre replacements for the traditional Batwa diet.

“These days the Batwa eat goat meat once a year at Christmas,” Safari tells me. “Before we ate meat every day, and we ate many more plants and herbs.” We walk across a dirt road and up a second hill leased from a Bukiga landholder that has been allowed to revert to a wild state.

Along the path Safari shows me wild yams, an orange berry good for sauce, a root for soap, and plants to relieve headaches, malaria and blood loss. “Don’t touch that,” he warns of a yellow flower that blooms every six years. “It’s dangerous for women and can cause an abortion.”

At the top of the hill the forest opens into a meadow dotted with flowering flame trees. “My grandparents told me our people planted flame trees in the places from which they were evicted,” Safari says “So when I see this hill I know it was a Batwa place.”

From the hilltop we gaze over a valley to the slopes of the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. Safari says the Batwa can no longer practice their religion, whose deities are associated with forest locations that are now impossible to visit.

On the hill slope I meet Julius Mugisha, his wife Jane and their five children, who are spending time in a traditional Batwa home of dried vines laid over a frame of tree branches. Julius, whose head does not reach my shoulder, is wearing a rugby T-shirt that comes down to his knees.

The hut has been built for tourist visits, but it does look used. Inside there is a sleeping platform for the adults and fern mattresses for the children. A clay pot sits on a cooking fire near a stack of wooden dishes.

Julius shows me how to make fire by rubbing sticks, and instructs his two oldest children to climb up to a sleeping platform built in a tree fork, a place of safety while mothers foraged for plants and fathers went hunting. Picking up a spear, he throws it at a tree and then falls to the ground shrieking and mimicking a wounded duiker. “Simba, Simba!” he calls the family’s tan and black hound, who would have been trained to finish the duiker off. Instead, Simba, who has been curled up napping, stands, stretches, and yawns.

A small table of tightly woven raffia baskets from Gary’s project sits next to the hut. The family and Safari are shy, still unaccustomed to tourists, and they do not ask me if I want to buy one. But I do because it is beautiful, and it is a way for me to inject some money into the community and to make a small, inadequate gesture of thanks. After all, it seems to me that this family and the Batwa community have paid an incalculable price for mountain gorillas to survive. The ancient forest is evolving a new symbiosis.

On the way back to the car Safari tells me that Mugisha children are attending a new school funded by tourist dollars.

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