- Queen Elizabeth National Park, a 1,978-km2 (764-mi2) UNESCO Man and Biosphere Reserve in western Uganda, is one of the country’s oldest protected areas.
- The park was established by British colonial authorities, who relocated many of its traditional occupants and banned most of their livelihood activities.
- The legacy of this dispossession has shaped the relationship between park authorities and the descendants of those who were resettled.
KATWE, Uganda — In 1889, the British journalist Henry Morton Stanley stumbled out of the forests of Central Africa into the town of Katwe, a settlement on the shore of a sulfurous volcanic lake. The lake’s vast deposits of salt were famed across the region, drawing traders and making Katwe a desired prize. The Basangora, local pastoralists known for their cattle-rearing prowess, had waged fierce battles over control of the salt mine, one of the largest in Africa, against rival Bantu kingdoms.
“The possession of Katwe town, which commands the lakes, is a cause of great jealousy,” Stanley later wrote.
He’d arrived in Katwe just as the “scramble for Africa” was heating up, in the wake of King Leopold II’s Berlin Conference where the rules of European colonialism had been set. Not long after Stanley’s departure, Frederick Lugard captured the town. Along with the plains and hills to its east, Katwe would go on to become part of the British protectorate of Uganda, where it remained until independence in 1962.
Stanley, Lugard and their royal European patrons are long gone now. But their ghosts still haunt the landscape, if only in name. The highest peak of the Rwenzori mountains that rise above Katwe is named Mount Stanley, below which lie lakes Albert, George and Edward.
There are still pockets of Basangora living on the shores of these lakes, but the herds of cattle they were known for no longer graze the adjacent savannas, which once formed part of the Tooro Kingdom. Livestock aren’t permitted in what much of the kingdom was replaced by and is now known as: Queen Elizabeth National Park.
The foreman’s maps
In the main room of his small brick house in Katwe, Rajabu Juma leafs through a stack of papers and maps, laying them out on the coffee table next to the cups of tea he’s prepared for his guests, a group of journalists who’ve come to interview him. Katwe’s salt mine is still at the center of the town’s life, and Juma — at 80, now a town elder — is a foreman there. He says his grandfather was born here in 1869, two decades before Stanley’s arrival.
Juma runs his hand lightly over one of the maps, carefully explaining what it shows. These maps are weapons in a long-running fight between Katwe and the Uganda Wildlife Authority — or “ooh-wah” as people call the authority here — over where the town ends and Queen Elizabeth begins.
“We refused the boundaries, we said no,” he says in a tight voice, tracing his fingers along a section north of Katwe. “When they came they didn’t consult anybody. You never consulted the Indigenous people of Katwe to tell you about the park. So we said ‘No, we cannot accept this.’”
Katwe is one of 11 “enclave” towns that fall inside of Queen Elizabeth’s borders. These towns are home to Basangora and Bantu descendants of the region’s precolonial inhabitants. UWA reluctantly tolerates their existence, but the relationship has gotten colder in recent years. The population of the enclave towns is growing, and the authority’s view is that they’re now a threat to the park’s wildlife and ecology.
Queen Elizabeth, a 1,978-square-kilometer (764-square-mile) protected area brimming with elephants, hippos, big cats, and almost 600 different bird species, is a UNESCO Man and Biosphere Reserve. Access to it is tightly restricted and expensive. The enclave towns are allowed to farm and keep livestock, but only within strict boundaries.
Where Katwe’s end is a matter of dispute between the town and UWA, as it is with the other park enclave towns. Both sides have accused the other of breaking their word. UWA says Katwe’s residents surreptitiously moved pillars marking the area where they’re allowed to farm. Juma and others here say the authority used a park boundary rezoning in the late 1990s to grab their land.
“We know the government has more money from the wildlife, and we are beseeching that what we need is to be respected also, because we are human beings and those are animals,” he says.
Already strained, the relationship hit a breaking point a few years ago, when a handful of Basangora herders from another enclave poisoned a pride of lions in retaliation for an attack on their cattle. The incident drew international headlines. Afterward, UWA started to float the idea of resettling the 40,000 people who live in Katwe and the other towns.
That threat has not gone over well here.
“Before the park was established, we had very good living in harmony with animals,” Juma says. “You couldn’t even hunt them. It’s not for the park to teach us how to keep the animals safe. Our great-grandfathers kept them safe.”
Inseparable from its ecological splendor, these conflicts make Queen Elizabeth a prototypical African national park. The landscape here is a vital habitat for threatened wildlife, but it’s also a zone of state power and the canvas for a contested past. The park is a case study in the unsettled questions at the heart of the continent’s classic protected areas.
It begins at the base of the Rwenzori “mountains of the moon,” spreading into a vast expanse of savanna and forest. Queen Elizabeth’s grasslands, once grazed by the Basangora’s herds, are prowled by leopards and lions that stalk waterbuck through brush they share with forest cobras, wild dogs, porcupines and dozens of other species. Tools unearthed here show human activity dating back to the Stone Age.
“Queen,” as its UWA administrators like to call it, is a headline attraction for Uganda’s tourism industry. Nearly 100,000 people visited it in 2022, drawn from across the world by its world-class safari offerings.
Queen is also an arena of contests, large and small. Elephants raid smallholder farms outside of its boundaries at night, wreaking havoc on their owners’ incomes. UWA rangers stalk spear-wielding hippo poachers in the bush, often to deadly effect. Lions pick off cattle brought to graze illegally inside the park. Rebel groups slip over the border from the Democratic Republic of Congo — as they did in the week before Mongabay’s visit — and stage violent attacks on tourists. Fishermen, looking for a good catch, sneak into protected parts of its lakes.
For the humans who live in and near Queen, the fundamental contest is an old one. Park authorities set the rules for what kind of interactions are allowed with its ecosystems. Those rules are restrictive, and often unpopular. Nearly every study, NGO report and baseline assessment published about the park points to a difficult relationship between UWA and the communities here.
UWA says it’s working to change that. But it has an uphill climb ahead. History hangs heavy at Queen Elizabeth, and like Mount Stanley, its shadow is long.
“What they want here is to make a zoo,” Juma says. “Let the government allow people to have a part of the land to grow food.”
Disease and despair
Sitting under a tree in the enclave town of Hamakungu, at the mouth of Lake George, Wilson Asiimwe recounts the early days of Queen Elizabeth. Asiimwe is the local chair of Lake Katwe subcounty, which includes most of the enclaves. As he speaks, a buffalo saunters across the town’s soccer field, passing by children on their way to school.
“When it was turned into a national park in 1952, people suffered a lot,” he says. “They were forced to leave areas where they were doing grazing and fishing and stay in small enclaves as camps. Their economic activities changed. The ones who used to graze didn’t have enough. Very many people died.”
Before the British took control of this part of Uganda, it was home to a mix of different peoples and ever-shifting allegiances between rival kingdoms. Bantu communities generally lived in the hills and practiced farming. The pastoralist Basangora made their way with livestock on the plains. In his writings, Stanley described the “splendid herds” of cattle that were present here and the battles that were fought over them.
Lugard’s expedition to Katwe was followed by a more brutal campaign that saw thousands of Basangora massacred in the region, and their once-powerful kingdom broken. It was just the start of their troubles. As the British were consolidating their control over western Uganda, a wave of sleeping sickness swept through the region.
The epidemic killed off vast numbers of livestock, and by some estimates claimed the lives of 250,000 people between 1900 and 1920. Citing the need to stop the disease’s spread, British authorities culled the Basangora’s cattle and forced them into de facto concentration camps.
“When the grazing ended, people died due to hunger and sleeping sickness,” Asiimwe says. “It was a bad situation, and people were not compensated up to now for the land they lost.”
By the time the epidemic subsided, British hunters had grown used to controlling the ivory trade and were in no rush to allow competition on the savanna, which had been demarcated into game reserves. The Basangora were told that if they wanted to stay, they would have to settle in fishing villages — today’s enclaves — and give up pastoralism. It was the end of their time on the plains.
“They allowed a small majority of people to go back to Lake George and Edward,” says Emmanuel Akampurira, a conservation biologist with the Institute of Tropical Forest Conservation. “The hope was these small populations would be maintained as temporary settlements.”
Unlike nomadic pastoralism, fishing could readily be taxed by colonial authorities. Rather than accept the new lifestyle demanded of them, some Basangora migrated to what was then the Belgian Congo or other parts of Uganda.
In the late 1940s, the British decided to combine the game reserves into a national park. They put the idea to the Tooro Kingdom’s council for a vote, where it was soundly rejected. But saying it was “in the best interests” of Tooro, colonial authorities pushed the plan through anyway, and the park was formally established in 1952. Two years later, it was given its name to commemorate a state visit by the just-crowned Queen Elizabeth II.
“They created the park without the consent of the people,” says Nicholas Kakongo, a Katwe-based tour guide. “And they cut us off from interacting with the animals.”
White jeeps, green fist
Today, Queen Elizabeth National Park is the most popular tourist attraction in Uganda, accounting for a quarter of all visitors to the country’s national parks. Its earnings aren’t public, but based on the number of visitors the park welcomes every year, its entrance fees alone likely amount to millions of dollars — not including the earnings of safari operators, lodge owners, travel companies and tour guides.
The park is a source of national pride in Uganda, as well as a very valuable asset. Tourism is important to the economy — according to the finance ministry, it accounts for as much as 7.6% of GDP, raking in more than $1 billion per year. Uganda wants to push that figure up above $5 billion by 2028. Along with its sister national parks, Queen Elizabeth is a foundational part of the government’s strategy to get there.
For tourists looking to immerse themselves in nature, the park has a powerful appeal. While wildlife populations across the African continent have cratered in recent decades, in Uganda the populations of elephants, giraffes and buffalo have grown as much as sixfold. Once numbering only a few hundred, today there are as many as 5,000 elephants in Queen Elizabeth. It’s a notable success in what has been a bleak era for wildlife in Africa.
But it’s a success that has come at a cost. UWA’s enforcement of Ugandan conservation laws is strict and sometimes deadly. Stories of people being beaten or killed by wildlife rangers are common here. A Mongabay investigation into these accounts found evidence that such killings have gone on for decades, and have occurred in recent years.
The heavy hand extends to activities other than poaching. Gathering firewood and plants for traditional medicine is mostly prohibited. Sacred sites used for ritual practices are off-limits. Outside of small designated areas, livestock are banned from grazing. And the consequences for breaking the rules are often severe.
Angela Muhindo, a 59-year-old teacher from Katwe, says women who enter the park to collect firewood face arrest and jail time. One elderly woman she knew spent six weeks in custody while her relatives looked for money to pay her fine. By the time they’d scratched it together, she’d fallen ill, and not long after returning to town she died.
“When you go [in the park] you pray that God will preserve you,” Muhindo says. “But it’s because of the stomach and the family.”
She’s been trying to teach women in Katwe to make charcoal briquettes from mud and cow dung to use for cooking so they don’t have to sneak into the park for firewood. These don’t burn as well, but you don’t have to risk your life collecting them.
“Don’t think that all the rangers are bad,” Muhindo adds. “They are not all bad. There are ones that are good. They talk with [the women], they escort them, also they know that their mothers are there [in the towns], their grandfathers are there.”
The rules against trespassing have also changed spiritual life in towns like Katwe. Christianity and Islam are both widely practiced, but traditional customs still have long roots. Without access to sites where rituals were once performed, though, they’re waning.
“We have no access to those places,” says Kakongo, the tour guide. “If they find you there, they arrest you. The next morning you appear in court, then you go to prison. We used those sacred sites to guide us in our everyday activities. The system was embedded in our DNA — you can’t just come and stop people from accessing [them].”
‘You are an enemy’
None of this is news to UWA and its supporters in the conservation world. Donor project documents and academic studies are full of accounts of negative local perceptions toward the park, along with proposals for how to change them.
UWA has initiatives that are meant to improve the way conservation is seen around the park. It finances beekeeping projects, works with partner organizations to build elephant-proof electric fences, and has a dedicated unit that responds to “problem animals” that wander into local towns. But if the authority had its way, the park would be emptied of its human inhabitants once and for all.
“The challenge now, is as the human population increases, Queen is facing pressure from both inside and outside,” says Pontius Ezuma, Queen Elizabeth’s chief warden. “So things like poaching and illegal resource use are almost the order of the day.”
Resettling the residents of the enclave towns would be politically explosive. Most people say they don’t think it’s likely to happen.
“I think it’s not possible, because where can the government take them? First of all, you’ll need to convince them if you want to evict them that it isn’t their land,” says David Kureeba, a program director at the National Association of Professional Environmentalists.
UWA’s flagship community relations strategy is a financial scheme to share park revenues. Under Ugandan law, parks like Queen Elizabeth are required to disburse 20% of their entrance fees to towns in the districts that border them.
It’s a well-intentioned law, meant to dispel the idea that the park doesn’t benefit people who are excluded from it or suffer attacks from wildlife. But in practice it’s falling short of expectations. After a two-year delay, in 2024 UWA handed out 1.5 billion shillings in payments, just over $400,000, to the 12 districts surrounding Queen Elizabeth.
That delay was partly due to concerns over how the money was being spent. The funds are channeled through district officials, who have been accused of directing it toward projects that primarily benefit them and their friends.
“We know the money has come, but it disappears between the district and the subcounty,” says Chris Mongly, a local beekeeper. “So we say let the money go to the villages, and let the community people themselves sit and decide [what to do with it].”
The soft-spoken Mongly counts himself as a supporter of conservation. He grew up in Kasenyi, another enclave fishing town. When he was young, a tourist who passed through the town took a shine to him and helped pay for his education. Later, UWA assisted him in setting up his business selling honey.
But he admits that many people here don’t share his outlook.
“These days they have the community conservation office, and they’ve absorbed the pressure,” Mongly says. “But in the past, when [people] looked at a Uganda Wildlife Authority uniform, you are an enemy. In some villages they will even want to kill you.”
An uneasy peace
At their core, the attempts to rehabilitate Queen Elizabeth’s image among its neighbors amount to tinkering at the edges of the conservation model that’s been in place here for a century. That model was born in the frontier of the United States, where the first national parks were established in the late 19th century. Protected areas in this tradition are essentially frozen space: mostly separated from the humans who once lived inside them, wildlife authorities are tasked with preserving them in stasis through borders, law, and occasionally force.
First established by the British, the park’s ordering principles were adopted by the Ugandan government after independence. Whether it’s working or not today is a matter of perspective. Queen Elizabeth is lucrative for the state and the companies that host safaris and luxury getaways. The cordoning-off of the park from its prior inhabitants has also arguably been good for its wildlife, whose populations are stable or growing.
Some conservationists dismiss criticism of the park’s rules as hypocritical, a smokescreen for bad intentions.
“We have no wildlife outside of the parks, there’s a tiny amount. Even inside the parks they’ve been smashed so much while our guard was down, so to speak, with political insecurity,” says Michael Keigwin, founder of the Uganda Conservation Foundation (UCF). “The same people who are complaining today [once] removed industrial amounts of meat and ivory outside of Uganda to make profit.”
Groups like UCF, along with the other conservation NGOs that are active here, play a crucial role in keeping the park running. They equip UWA rangers, monitor wildlife, finance infrastructure, and run programs to reduce conflict with communities. This is par for the course in most of Africa’s national parks. Conservation is an international endeavor, fueled by the global perspective held in cities like Washington, D.C., London, Paris and Berlin. Its successes are often measured in the hard data of wildlife numbers, tourism revenues and park visits.
But these metrics don’t tell the whole story. While benefits accrue to some, including wildlife and the ecosystems that support them, many others are left on the sidelines. The consequences of that exclusion can build up in ways that don’t easily register on a balance sheet, but which carry weight nonetheless.
One red flag at Queen Elizabeth is the widespread presence of conspiracy theories. Murmurs of secret plots are rife in the enclave towns and communities surrounding the parks. Attacks on cattle have been blamed on conservationists for quietly importing lions that don’t know how to hunt buffalo or other wild prey. And the park’s crocodiles, which mysteriously appeared in the 1990s and now regularly kill people in the enclaves, are widely believed to have been intentionally released into the lakes.
“They put young crocodiles, we were netting them and didn’t know them. We thought they were snakes because they were new to us,” Asiimwe says. “So they were introduced, but we don’t know why — to chase away the Indigenous people in the landing sites, knowing we’d have to run away?”
In a world where mistrust toward authorities has a habit of causing sudden disruptions to established order, these are warning signs for conservation here. Most of the support for Queen Elizabeth comes from outside forces. The park’s survival mostly rests on tourism revenues and charitable donations, not organic local relationships with its ecology.
For now, those funding streams are reliable and even growing. But the number of visitors to Uganda’s parks cratered during 2020’s COVID-19 pandemic, and grants to conservation groups were paused or cancelled by the U.S. government earlier this year. If Queen Elizabeth’s support beams were to be kicked out for an extended period of time, it’s hard to tell how people here would respond, and what might happen to its landscape and wildlife.
“My prayer is that the administration should be friendly to the people and know that they are also human beings,” Asiimwe says. “We are all conserving for future generations — both we [the] community and them — because they cannot do conservation alone.”
Painting the way
A painting hangs above the desk in Nicholas Kakongo’s small tourism office in Katwe. Kakongo painted it himself. The scene depicts a utopian vision of the town: Elephants wander near cattle on the savanna; hippos bask in the sun next to fishing boats. There’s a balance of life between animal and human.
The painting, Kakongo says, portrays a different vision for Queen Elizabeth, one where people in towns like Katwe are integrated with nature rather than at odds with it.
“Who knows the facts about the wild animals more than me?” he says. “I’ve been swimming in that lake for 40 years, I’ve interacted with hippos there, I’ve collected firewood in the protected area. I’ve interacted with the elephants.”
The painting also speaks to a sentiment that people in the enclaves often express, even as they complain about UWA or Queen Elizabeth’s rules. The park has a painful history and can be a source of frustration in Katwe and the other towns. But most people are adamant that they want its wildlife to survive and be conserved for future generations.
“We want them to remain there so [our grandchildren] can see their totems, because even now the clans still believe in those totems,” Asiimwe says. “I believe if the park was not there those totems would not be around due to the increasing population.”
These dynamics are familiar to protected areas and national parks like it all across Africa. Threats to nature and biodiversity are real — if conservation rules were totally abolished, it could be catastrophic for the park’s wildlife and ecology. Uganda in the 21st century is not the same as it was in the 19th. Like anywhere else, there are people here who would value the wealth of an agricultural venture or industrial cattle ranch over protecting the environment.
But the alienation of the land’s “traditional custodians,” as Kakongo describes Katwe’s residents, has the potential to be its own kind of threat. Nothing lasts forever, and people here want change. How the generations to come in Katwe and the other enclaves will feel about conservation at Queen Elizabeth may hinge on what it looks like when it does.
“When a man is denied his rights, he can destroy a tree,” Kakongo says, shrugging.
Banner image: Rajabu Juma at his home in Katwe. Image by Ashoka Mukpo for Mongabay.
Related audio from Mongabay’s podcast: Hear this reporter discuss his experience reporting this story and share additional insights, listen here:
Citations:
Akampurira, E. (2023). Understanding conservation conflicts in Uganda: A political ecology of memory approach. Conservation & Society, 21(3), 177-187. doi:10.4103/cs.cs_73_22
Akampurira, E., & Marijnen, E. (2024). The politics of mourning in conservation conflicts: The (un)grievability of life and less-than-human geographies. Political Geography, 108, 103031. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2023.103031
Katswera, J., Mutekanga, N. M., & Twesigye, C. K. (2022). Community perceptions and attitudes towards conservation of wildlife in Uganda. Journal of Wildlife and Biodiversity, 6(4), 42-65. doi:10.5281/zenodo.6522376
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