80-year-old Caleb Ngambeweza kept his eyes glued to the dense tropical Bwindi Impenetrable forest just ahead of him for most part of the interview. His wrinkled face showed no expression. He seemed to be reminiscing about the old days when his people, the Batwa, lived in that forest.
The Batwa are one of the oldest surviving tribes in Africa, but their culture, identity and language are under increasing threat as the governments continue to send them out of the forests, their ancestral land, without clear alternatives.
The traditional hunting ground of this nomadic community which comprised forested areas shared between Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo were taken over in 1991 for conservation projects to protect mountain gorillas.
On the Uganda side, a 6,700-strong Batwa community was evicted from the now-protected Mgahinga Gorilla National Park and the Impenetrable Forest.
They then scattered in different groups by the outskirts of the forests to places like Mpungu, Buhoma, Kitalito, Kebiroma , Mgahinga, Kisoro among others.
According to Ugandan law, as a nomadic people who had never settled in one location, the Batwa had no claim to the land, therefore, the Ugandan government had no legal obligation to compensate them.
Over time, the government has promised to accommodate them and find them land but the process has been a slow one but in August last year eight years after they filed a legal petition seeking to overturn their 1991 eviction, the country’s constitutional court ruled in their favor.
The court cited Uganda’s legal protections for marginalized groups and directed the government to provide land and other forms of compensation for the eviction and subsequent rights violations.
These communities have failed to adapt to new life as their numbers reduce and life expectancy drops. There are 3,463 (1,685 males & 1,778 females) Batwa in the Bwindi Mgahinga Conservation Area according to a 2016 census by the Bwindi Mgahinga Conservation Trust, nearly half the number it was by the time of displacement.
While the number of the Batwa on the one hand seems to be reducing, the gorillas on the other hand are increasing in the forests. A 2011 census in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park confirmed a minimum population of 400 mountain gorillas up from 302 in 2006.
A 2018 census in the Virunga Massif comprising the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda, and Mgahinga Gorilla National Park in Uganda confirmed a minimum population of gorillas to be 604 up from 480 individuals in 2010.
Bashir Hangi, the Uganda Wildlife Authority spokesperson said that the increase in the gorilla numbers is not because of the absence of the Batwa in the forest but an improved conservation approach that ensures that the gorillas are well looked after.
Adaptation and its hardships
Ngambeweza who now heads a group of about 67 Batwa people in Mpuga Omukikome on the outskirts of the Bwindi Impenetrable forest reminisces about the good old days of the bush. He misses the bush meat, the herbs, and the lifestyle of the forest among others.
“I am this old because for most of my life, I have been eating forest foods and wild meat. I have only used local herbs when I fall sick. Also, God has been good,” Ngambeweza said.
As the tribe struggles to find its footing in new environments, their biggest problem remains the lack of land for residence and farming. Many of the Batwa cling on to the forest edges while others live on small packages of land sometimes bought by NGO’s.
Since theirs was gathering and hunting, the Batwa have since faced difficulty in adapting to farming on the small pieces of land that their communities occupy.
Ngambeweza’s community occupies about three acres of land that was left behind by a great-grandfather but this has become too small to contain them and also leave some space for farming.
With limited farming space, they resorted to working in tea plantations or gardens of the neighbouring Bakiga.
A full day’s work earns one Shs 5,000 ($1.3) which they say is too little.
For example, 70-year-old Geoffrey Kikoko has failed to sustain his 8 children, a wife and 4 grandchildren by just farming on his small piece of land.
The elderly man is forced to trek uphill to pick tea for the payment in a bid to widen his resource envelope.
“If it wasn’t for too much responsibility, I would instead be using some of the money to breed goats but that is not possible. Even the house I stay in is small for all of us and could collapse anytime,” he said.
Housing seemed the biggest challenge to the over 10 families we talked to although many are still failing to get even basics like food, children go hungry for days, especially in the dry season and they barely have no clothes.
Ngambeweza blames this state of affairs on the government’s reluctance to help the situation, the Batwa’s failure to adapt to the new environment, and marginalization by neighbours.
“They don’t like us,” he said of the host Bakiga, a tribe from which his own wife comes from, “they treat us like outcasts.”
Forced from their traditional homeland and lacking resources, the Batwa are now dependent on NGOs and donors for survival.
Many of these organizations come around to give scholarships and scholastic materials to the Batwa children, medical care, and water sources among others.
Ngambeweza believes that although many of the NGO’s have improved their livelihoods, some of them are just using them to get money.
“They normally come and say they will help us. They write our names and other particulars, take our pictures and then they go, they never return,” Ngambeweza said.
Ms Tina Katushabe of Change A Life Bwindi organization, is one of those helping to improve Batwa livelihoods through skills development teaching the men bees keeping skills and weaving to the women among other activities.
“Our approach is that we leave them the right to decide on what they want to do and then we empower them in that field. We do not dictate on what they should have,” Ms Katushabe said.
Culture dying out
Since they are no longer living in the forest, elders worry that their culture, although is already dying out, could eventually disappear in the near future.
“When you ask about the survival of our culture, look, and our school for culture is there,” he said, pointing in the direction of the forest. “Now that we cannot go there, how (then) do we teach our children?”
The Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA), different tour agencies and some NGOs have resorted to adding the “Batwa cultural experience” to their gorilla trekking packages whereby tourists visit the Batwa who exhibit their culture through dances, ancient lifestyle and display regalia.
DRC forces them out
A new report by the Minority Rights Group International has accused park authorizes and the Congolese army in the Kahuzi-iega National Park (Parc National de Kahuzi-Biega, ‘PNKB’) of having carried out large-scale acts of organized violence targeting the indigenous Batwa community living in villages on their ancestral lands inside the park.
The report titled “To Purge the Forest by Force” and was released last week says that the targeted actions by the security forces which began in 2019 are aimed at forcefully evicting the Batwa from the park in which they have lived for years.
“The bulk of this campaign has involved three waves of violent attacks targeting Batwa villages in Kalehe territory inside the PNKB: the first in July-August 2019, the second in July 2021, and the third in November-December 2021. In these attacks, joint contingents of park guards and Army soldiers burned entire villages to the ground, employed heavy weapons such as mortars and rocket-propelled grenades to shell villages, indiscriminately fired on, killed and maimed unarmed civilians, subjected dozens of Batwa women to group rape at gunpoint, and were described by eyewitness sources as burning several Batwa alive and mutilating Batwa corpses, sometimes reportedly taking appendages as trophies,” the report reads in part.
About 20 Batwa have lost their lives in skirmishes since 2019.
This has forced many Batwa to abandon the villages and go to makeshift camps for internally displaced people while others occasionally return to the park to rebuild their homes.
The Batwa of Kahuzi-Biega—one of many Batwa communities throughout Central Africa—are a semi-nomadic forest-dwelling people that have inhabited the forests around Mounts Kahuzi and Biega since time immemorial, organized as small, mobile hunter-gatherer communities while enjoying an egalitarian mode of life deeply rooted in their relationship with their natural surroundings.
The forests, for the Batwa of Kahuzi-Biega, represent the centre of intellectual, spiritual and cultural life, a core part of their collective and individual identity.
Leveraging their intimate knowledge of the region’s plants and animals cultivated over centuries, the community sustained itself through a variety of food, medicinal and fuel sources. The forests were also where the Batwa of Kahuzi-Biega buried their ancestors and performed sacred rites and other cultural practices central to their identity. For this reason, the community derives its distinct identity from its sacred relationship with the forest.
Like their Ugandan counterparts, the Batwa of Kahuzi-Biega have faced decades of severe marginalization and skyrocketing mortality. They too have been forced to live as squatters dependent on non-Batwa host communities, with more restrictions to access the forest in place.
The population of the community precipitously declined in the wake of their violent expulsion, with an estimated 50 percent of those expelled from the forest dying in the following two decades.
A Mutwa community member in Barume’s study is quoted describing the situation: “Since we were expelled from our lands, death is following us. We bury people nearly every day. The village is becoming empty. We are heading towards extinction. Now all the old people have died. Our culture is dying too.”
The park authorities that declined to comment on the findings of the report have always maintained that military operations within the parks are aimed at armed militias and not the batwa people.
Rights groups are now calling on international funders of the park to cut back on their funding and create for relevant authorities to carry out investigations of human rights abuses promptly.
Despite numerous unresolved human rights abuses against Batwa, dating back several years, no independent investigation has been conducted in the PNKB to date.
“The accounts of horror and devastation documented in this report represent examples of the incalculable human toll of an approach to conservation that is founded on the violent dispossession of indigenous peoples’ lands. In the PNKB, this approach has sparked conflict over land, resources and identity, and actively devalues and destroys Batwa life under the hoisted colors of conservation,” the report concludes