- In October 2023, Mongabay traveled to Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park as part of a reporting series on protected areas in East Africa.
- While there, we heard allegations that Uganda Wildlife Authority rangers have carried out extrajudicial killings of suspected bushmeat poachers inside the park.
- Two weeks before our visit, a man was shot to death inside the park; his relatives and local officials alleged he was killed by wildlife rangers while attempting to surrender.
- The allegations follow other recent human rights scandals related to aggressive conservation enforcement practices in the nearby Congo Basin.
KITABU, Uganda — It’s mid-afternoon in Kitabu, a small town nestled in the hills of western Uganda at the foot of the Rwenzori mountains. Neatly manicured plots of beans and cassava line the road that leads toward it. Women and young children carry bundles of firewood on their heads under the hot October sun. Far below, a vast green-and-brown savanna unfolds into the horizon, dotted with glittering lakes and rivers.
This is Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda’s “most popular tourist destination,” and one of the most important ecosystems in East Africa. Its forests, swamps and grasslands span nearly 2,000 square kilometers (about 765 square miles). There are savanna elephants here, along with lions that nap on tree branches, buffalo, leopards, antelopes, chimpanzees, hippos, and more than 600 different bird species. “Queen,” as the park administrators call it, is a UNESCO “man and biosphere reserve” — one of the few protected wildlife habitats of its scale left on the continent.
The school here in Kitabu isn’t a typical one. It was set up in 2018 by a group of former wildlife poachers, and is one of a few around Queen Elizabeth that get support from donors abroad or, occasionally, from the agency responsible for managing the park, the Uganda Wildlife Authority. Its purpose is to educate orphans whose families can’t afford school fees. Of the students in attendance here, 63 don’t have a father. According to Tadeo Kilolo, the group’s secretary, they were killed in Queen Elizabeth “due to poaching.”
When asked how they died, Kilolo and other members of the group, which include some of the men’s widows, say there have been accidents in the park: errant spears thrown at hippos during hunting expeditions that instead hit one of their companions.
But when pressed, with downcast eyes and in hushed tones, they say the majority met their end in circumstances that are more difficult — and dangerous — to speak about openly. Most were shot to death in the park, they say, by UWA rangers.
A death in Kyondo
As part of a reporting project on protected areas in East Africa, Mongabay visited Queen Elizabeth National Park in late October 2023. While there, we heard accounts of UWA rangers shooting and killing men who had entered the park illegally.
These men were not heavily armed elephant poachers. According to their surviving relatives, as well as other sources in the region, they were subsistence hunters who used spears and snares in pursuit of species like antelope and hippo to eat at home or sell locally. Some of the people we spoke to say the deceased were shot without warning or killed while attempting to surrender. By all accounts, this deadly violence has happened many times at Queen Elizabeth, as well as other national parks in Uganda, over a decades-long period.
Two weeks before we arrived at the park, Tadeo Bwambale, a 49-year-old father of six, entered the park at night along with four dogs and a hunting party armed with spears. The group tracked and killed a hippo, butchering it on the spot. While carrying the parcels of bushmeat out of the park, they were said to have encountered what one relative described as a joint patrol of Ugandan soldiers and UWA rangers.
According to eyewitnesses, the patrol opened fire on the group. Bwambale was shot in the chest multiple times and killed, despite raising his hands and attempting to surrender, they say. The others fled, but not before witnessing his death.
Bwambale’s killing, reported to his community by the surviving members of the party, created an outcry in Kyondo subcounty, which borders Queen Elizabeth.
“We are really grieved by the death of our son,” says a relative, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We are confused about who to ask or hold accountable. The government has just frustrated us. We don’t know what to do.”
The incident took place at a time of heightened tensions inside the park. Days earlier, two tourists were ambushed and killed by the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an ISIS-aligned rebel group based in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo. During Mongabay’s visit, soldiers with the Uganda Peoples’ Defense Forces (UPDF) were deployed throughout the park searching for the attackers.
But Bwambale’s family, along with a local leader in Kyondo, say it was UWA rangers who pulled the trigger.
“I have to be specific: those who are killed in the national park are killed by those park rangers,” says Jovenal Muke, chair of Kyondo subcounty. “The cases we have had, we always receive reports from the national park authorities that we should go and see the bodies of people who were caught when they were poaching.”
Mongabay meets Bwambale’s wife, Frumera Ithungu, and their children at the couple’s home on a tree-lined hill above the park. Next to the modest brick house lies a concrete grave, freshly poured, in which he had just been laid to rest.
“He surrendered, but they still shot him again,” the relative says. “The park wardens are not supposed to kill people, but rather imprison them.”
During Mongabay’s visit to Bwambale’s home, eyewitnesses to the shooting are present, but they decline to speak on the record, citing fears they’ll be targeted by the government.
Bwambale’s family is adamant that he was armed with only a spear when he was killed, and that nobody in his group was carrying firearms. His death, which left his wife with half a dozen children to raise alone, was not an outlier.
Out on patrol
Sergeant Bob Bernard, a 38-year-old UWA ranger, stands on a grassy meadow inside Queen Elizabeth, delivering a briefing to the other three members of his team. Decked in the camouflage UWA field uniform, with his AK-47 slung over his back, Bernard explains that today a journalist will be accompanying the patrol.
“In our patrol, we expect to see a lot of things — either poachers and animals,” he says. “And what we always do when we see a poacher, is we arrest [him]. After arresting him, we always call the investigation team, which comes to take the suspects, who are being prosecuted.”
Moving through the bush in a dispersed military formation, the four-man team scans the horizon for intruders or animals caught in a snare. In all, there are 160 rangers assigned to patrol Queen Elizabeth, who often spend weeks at a time at one of 49 posts dotted throughout the park.
As the rangers move through calf-deep mud in a swampy thicket, there’s a sudden honking snort from behind a cluster of bushes. It’s a hippo, warning the outsiders to move along. Hippos are a favored target of poachers in Queen Elizabeth. Their meat is considered a delicacy in some communities near the park, where traditions of hunting long predate Ugandan wildlife laws.
Today, though, any form of hunting inside Queen Elizabeth is strictly prohibited. Prison sentences for those who are caught can be long, more than a decade. The 2019 Uganda Wildlife Act even allows for life sentences to be imposed on offenders. Despite the risks, though, hunters still regularly enter the park. UWA’s 2017 strategic plan to combat wildlife crime in Queen Elizabeth says that in 2015, an estimated 40% of households in areas around the park hunted for bushmeat at some point during the year.
“If maybe the grandfather was a poacher, that means even the son will also be a poacher, and also the son for this one will also be a poacher. So you find that it is in the family,” Bernard says. “Always they will tell you that it is their culture.”
Bernard’s commander, park warden Pontius Ezuma, says poachers and other trespassers are arrested and tried for violating Ugandan law. “Once they’re apprehended, we prepare charge sheets and take them to a court of law.”
But Ugandan media outlets are replete with reports of poachers and herders who go missing inside national parks. Occasionally, it’s made clear that they were killed by UWA rangers, but more often the euphemistic “killed while poaching” description is published. These reports span decades, and continue to this day.
As recently as September 2024, UWA rangers at Mount Elgon National Park, near Uganda’s eastern border with Kenya, reportedly shot and killed a primary school student who was illegally harvesting firewood.
Donor documents obliquely reference the deaths as well. The description of a beekeeping project in Kitabu supported by a U.K.-based charity mentions poaching as having “reduced the male population of the village.” And UWA’s wildlife crime plan, which ran from 2017-2023 and was prepared by a consultant with support from the U.K. government, acknowledges that “UWA is commonly suspected of involvement in the disappearance of community members inside the park” and that the allegations can have “serious, long-term effects on efforts to build trust with communities.”
In one high-profile incident that took place in 2018, four people were allegedly shot and killed by UWA rangers inside Queen Elizabeth National Park. The deaths caused a stir in the region, provoking Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni to publicly rebuke UWA and call the rangers involved in the shootings “wild and stupid.”
The bodies of the dead poachers were never recovered, and UWA claimed that they’d likely been killed by wild animals — despite the sole survivor and eyewitness returning home with gunshot wounds.
In a tweet related to the incident, Museveni said he would not “tolerate shooting of individuals by game rangers. Our people need sensitization, not to be killed.”
Mongabay did not hear any allegations that Bernard or his unit were involved in any disappearances or other human rights abuses. Beating through the bush under the scorching sun, the UWA sergeant speaks about the importance of preserving Queen Elizabeth’s wildlife for future generations of Ugandans.
But he acknowledges that the relationship between communities near Queen Elizabeth and UWA rangers is strained. When he and other rangers visit nearby towns to shop or have a beer, he says, the reception is often hostile. Research shows that off-duty rangers fear eating or drinking in some towns near the park because of the possibility they could be poisoned.
“You try to explain, but they will never understand,” Bernard says.
UWA rangers also face their own threats. In the decade from 2002 to 2012 alone, 17 were killed in the line of duty, according to the agency’s figures. But its wildlife crime strategy says that commercial bushmeat hunting, the most common form of poaching in Queen Elizabeth, rarely involves the use of firearms.
Bernard says he has some sympathy for poachers, who are often driven by poverty. But his job is to enforce the park’s laws.
“At the end of the day, these animals that we are trying to protect, you’ll come from America and find there’s nothing here,” he says. “So, we have to protect these animals jealously.”
An arms race for elephants
Queen Elizabeth National Park is far from the only protected area in Africa where rangers are alleged to have committed serious human rights abuses. Mongabay’s investigation into killings by UWA follows reports by other outlets of human rights abuses at parks in the Congo Basin and elsewhere.
Underlying most of these allegations is an approach to protected area policing that’s often called “militarized conservation.”
UWA is an independent agency, but it works closely with the national army, and from a distance members of the two are virtually indistinguishable. The agency’s staff have a strict military hierarchy and wear uniforms even in their Kampala headquarters. UWA patrols the inlets and rivers of Queen Elizabeth in commando boats, it maintains an intelligence-gathering network near the park, and carries out raids inside of adjacent villages to search for hidden bushmeat caches.
This style of wildlife law enforcement has a long history, and people who support it say it’s a necessary response to the successive, devastating waves of poaching that swept the continent in the years after independence. Between the 1960s and 1980s, the combination of rising global ivory demand and destabilizing civil conflicts led to an environment that was as deadly for East Africa’s elephants as an earlier slaughter led by European colonial hunters in the 19th century had been.
Amid the chaos of brutal conflicts in northern Kenya and Uganda, the prospect of quick riches from ivory attracted corrupt officials and opportunistic locals alike. In the late 1960s, western Uganda had so many elephants that they were intentionally culled to protect the region’s crops. By the mid-1970s, 90% of them were dead. Neighboring Kenya lost half its elephants between 1970 and 1977, and by the late 1980s, an estimated three were being killed per day.
Many conservationists believed the carnage called for drastic measures. In Uganda and elsewhere, much of the profits of the illicit ivory trade were funneled to senior figures in the army and government. On the ground, the killings were often carried out by people armed with weaponry that far outmatched that of wildlife authorities. Outgunned, and often compromised, they were virtually powerless to stop them.
In the late 1980s, influential figures like Richard Leakey, the first chair of the Kenya Wildlife Service, successfully convinced Western donors and institutions to finance the acquisition of modern weaponry and surveillance technology for wildlife rangers. Enforcement got tougher, and rangers began to shoot back. This move toward more aggressive tactics in protected areas spread to other countries, where in some cases it aligned with elite interests.
In Uganda, militarized conservation opened up new streams of donor funding, but was also useful for establishing security in frontier areas. Murchison Falls National Park had been used as a hideout by the armed rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army in the 1990s, and the ISIS-linked ADF made repeated incursions into Queen Elizabeth during the same period. In 1996, Uganda’s National Parks Department merged with its Game and Fisheries Department, becoming a new agency: UWA.
Due to the security threats present in Uganda’s national parks, soldiers from the UPDF were assigned to accompany UWA on patrols, in a partnership that was cemented by a 2005 memorandum of understanding that set out terms of cooperation between the two forces. UWA’s military posture may have been justified by the continent’s elephant poaching crisis, but it also gave Museveni’s government an armed and disciplined cadre of personnel in Uganda’s border regions.
“Military structures allow Kampala to do surveillance and, in a way, control the wildlife authority,” says Ivan Ashaba, a scholar who’s studied UWA’s development and training.
Viewed purely through the lens of elephant conservation, UWA and its predecessors have clear successes to point to. In the 1970s, there were only a few hundred elephants left in Queen Elizabeth. The last census, taken in 2018, showed a population of nearly 4,000, and the park’s warden says he estimates it’s closer to 5,000 now.
The reasons for the turnaround are varied. Human settlements now block the migration of elephant herds between Queen Elizabeth and neighboring Virunga National Park in the DRC, and global ivory prices have declined significantly in recent years. Queen Elizabeth park warden Ezuma says a concerted government effort to break up trafficking networks has paid off.
“Serious mobilization took place over the years in hunting down these hardcore criminals,” he says. “We have a national task force made up of the army, the police, immigration, UWA, customs, and the other security agencies.”
Now, it’s exceedingly rare to find a poached elephant carcass inside Queen Elizabeth. Rangers still encounter many poachers in the park. But they tend to be poor, local, and after bushmeat instead.
Risk and reward
In late October, Mongabay attends a community meeting in Kitabu, held at a small shack adjoining the school. More than two dozen people show up to talk about the deaths of men from the town and surrounding areas at the hands of UWA rangers.
Some of the attendees are widows who’ve lost their husbands and struggled to support their families after the death of the primary breadwinner. Others are their children, some grown and in their late teens or early 20s. Quietly, a few times breaking into tears, the women describe the far-reaching effects of the killings.
“Back in 2019, my husband died,” says Vera Uziere, whose husband, Emmanuel Baluku, was 45 when he was killed, leaving her with eight children to raise alone. “I am suffering with them at home. Those who went with him returned and told me that he had died.”
In the former poacher group’s office, there’s a handwritten list with the names of men from the town who vanished inside the park or were reported killed. To date, the list has 25 names. Some members of the group tell Mongabay they’re afraid there will be reprisals for speaking to the press.
“There have been instances of violence, but they aren’t really reported,” says Edwin Mumbere, a local environmental advocate. “The reason why is that people feel like they won’t get justice. People are scared of you versus government, they feel like, ‘I’ll lose, I need resources, let me just give up.’”
The motivations for entering the park illegally to hunt are varied. It’s understood to be high-risk, but a single hippo can yield hundreds of kilograms of meat. Some is consumed at home, and the rest sold locally, providing a source of cash in a district where per capita GDP is estimated to be $44 per month.
One former poacher tells Mongabay that a combination of traditional tastes and poverty drives people to hunt in the park, despite knowing that it’s illegal.
“It’s the craving for meat, along with poverty and an inability to provide for oneself that makes us resolve to go and get the meat that belongs to the government,” he says.
Ten years ago, he says, he was butchering a freshly killed hippo with his brother and a group of men when they were discovered by a UWA patrol. He tells Mongabay the rangers started firing at them without warning. His brother was killed, and he suffered a gunshot wound to the leg that would later require amputation.
“After gathering our kill to carry back, the park wardens saw us and shot at us at point blank range,” says the man, who also asks to remain anonymous. “My brother died on the spot.”
Poverty isn’t the only driver of poaching here. Hunting traditions around Queen Elizabeth date back to Uganda’s precolonial era. On the other side of the park, ethnic Banyaruguru hunters make offerings to a hunting deity before each “mission.” There are taboos around which animals can and can’t be killed, and the spears that are used for hunts are still given to some young men upon getting married.
“They still live in their traditional way,” Mumbere says of the Banyaruguru. “They know their fathers used to go to the national park to hunt and bring meat, so they feel it’s still normal.”
The deaths of these men affect entire families, most of whom are already scraping to get by.
“After he died, I now toil to make sure the children go to school,” said Masika Melda, a 46-year-old widow who says her husband was killed by UWA rangers inside Queen Elizabeth a decade ago. “Some of them are not studying, because when I go to try and find fees, I never succeed in getting money.”
Training the troops
Michael Keigwin is the founder of the Uganda Conservation Foundation, an NGO with close ties to the UWA and a major presence in Queen Elizabeth National Park. Keigwin is a former U.K. marine and Deloitte strategist, and his uncle was once the chief warden of Murchison Falls National Park. In a phone interview, he says he doesn’t have much time for traditional conservationists.
“They haven’t a clue about accounting, they haven’t a clue about auditing or management. They know how many spots are on the lesser-spotted dung beetle in the wet season, but that doesn’t really help management at the park,” he says.
In contrast to what he describes as slow-moving academics and conservation NGOs, Keigwin prefers a more proactive approach to supporting the UWA.
“I come with a very different perspective,” he says. “A, get shit done; and B, stop the nonsense.”
Along with running human rights courses and antipoaching programs at Uganda’s national parks, Keigwin’s UCF gets money from donors like the EU to build “joint operations command centers” and other infrastructure for rangers. Another of its accomplishments has been to connect the UWA with U.S. and U.K. military trainers.
“We have endless courses with the U.S. and U.K. militaries, and other consultants coming in to train rangers — not in how to kill people with a pencil, but how to be a better professional, safer, and more proficient in the field,” Keigwin says.
Others, though, say that along with the UPDF-led training that’s mandatory for new UWA rangers, the courses wire the agency into a posture more suited for combat than for encounters with subsistence poachers living near national parks.
“What we see happening with the paramilitary training of rangers in Uganda, is that they are expected to act just as soldiers,” says Esther Marijnen, an assistant professor at Wageningen University who studies conservation in the Congo Basin. “This is part of a broader trend, and we see this happening also across the border in Virunga National Park for example.”
Keigwin bristles at the critique, saying that if UWA lets up, Uganda’s wildlife will suffer the consequences.
“To put this in perspective, we’ve lost 70% of our hippos across Uganda,” he says. “Now if we’re stopping that poaching, we’re the enemy.”
Hippos were classified as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List in 2016, and some sources say their numbers are declining in Uganda. But according to UWA’s figures, overall their population has increased in Queen Elizabeth since the late 1980s.
In 1989, there were 2,200 in the park. By 2018, there were 5,875.
“UWA is trying to uphold the law with a fifth of the rangers they need. They don’t have the capacity from the government to do everything and resolve all of the communities’ problems,” Keigwin says. “[Those] problems are shifted onto UWA, because they want to take, for example, meat out of the park and sell it.”
UWA didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment on this story by Mongabay. But Keigwin, who works closely with the agency, says he has little sympathy for arguments that paint poachers as victims.
“Don’t let people tell you they’re cherubs floating around having chit-chat with cream teas and coffee,” he says. “No, I’ve done patrolling there. I’ve watched them fighting and killing each other. I’ve watched them poach endlessly.”
He’s adamant that UWA doesn’t have a “shoot-to-kill” policy, saying the agency spends “99% of its time trying to make sure that a trigger is never pulled.”
“Their purpose is not to go and kill people,” he says. “One hundred percent not.”
A cycle of violence
Back in Kyondo, Tadeo Bwambale’s widow and children sit in the yard in front of their small house. His death has put them in a precarious spot. Bwambale was in debt when he died, and his creditors are still looking to be paid back. Now, that debt — 1.5 million shillings, or around $400 — is her responsibility. If she doesn’t find the money, her family will lose their home.
“She has no other support whatsoever,” her relative says. “They have nothing to eat, so she’s always having maize porridge for dinner and that’s it.”
The reported killings at Queen Elizabeth are part of a difficult dynamic in modern conservation, especially in Africa. Wildlife face real threats, and without rules to protect them, some species could be hunted to extinction. But the system of enforcement that’s in place in many protected areas often requires tremendous violence to maintain. Over the years, that’s created an environment of hostility and resentment toward conservation in many communities near the park.
It’s a system that isn’t easy on rangers, either. One researcher who spoke to Mongabay on condition of anonymity says he’s interviewed some who have firsthand knowledge of killings. Unsurprisingly, being behind the rifle can leave them with psychological scars.
“One warden told me that the rangers suffer consequences,” he says. “These people you’re killing, they’re pleading for mercy. There’s pain in their eyes. They’re praying to you. They’re asking you, ‘Please, forgive me. At least arrest me.’”
Until something changes, though, he says he doesn’t expect the killings to stop.
“These are not isolated cases, unfortunately,” the researcher says. “This is something that’s been normalized over years and years. And the more that nothing happens to them, the more it kind of builds impunity.”
On the other side, decades of deadly force and harsh policing haven’t stopped local poachers from going into Queen Elizabeth, even knowing the serious consequences they might face. This in itself is an indictment of the approach to conservation in practice here — and in many other protected areas on the continent. For all its violence, it’s not even clear it works.
“He was looking for school fees for the children,” Bwambale’s relative says, standing a few meters from his grave. “You know, when someone has no source of income, wherever they say there is money, that’s where he will go.”
Banner image: Frumera Ithungu holds a picture of her deceased husband, Tadeo Bwambale. Image by Ashoka Mukpo for Mongabay.
Citations:
Moreto, W. D., Brunson, R. K., & Braga, A. A. (2016). ‘Anything we do, we have to include the communities’: Law enforcement rangers’ attitudes towards and experiences of community–ranger relations in wildlife protected areas in Uganda. The British Journal of Criminology, 57(4), 924-944. doi:10.1093/bjc/azw032
Ashaba, I. (2021). Historical roots of militarised conservation: The case of Uganda. Review of African Political Economy, 48(168), 276-288. doi:10.1080/03056244.2020.1828052
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