Conservation Ethics and the Batwa

The gorillas needed protection. In the late 1980s, the mountain gorilla was critically endangered. Poaching, habitat loss, and disease pressure made the species' survival genuinely precarious. The decision to gazette Bwindi as a national park addressed a real and urgent ecological problem. The forest itself — one of the most biodiverse in Africa, a UNESCO World Heritage Site — needed protection from the agricultural expansion that was consuming forests across Uganda.

These facts are not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether achieving these legitimate conservation goals required the complete, uncompensated, unconsulted eviction of the only people who had ever lived in the forest. The answer, with three decades of hindsight and substantial research, is no.

The Batwa had coexisted with the gorillas for 60,000 years. The forest was intact. The gorillas were threatened by poaching and habitat loss from agricultural expansion — neither of which the Batwa were responsible for. Removing the Batwa addressed neither of these threats. It simply made the park easier to patrol by eliminating the community that had always lived there.

The Batwa case has been cited in academic literature, policy documents, and advocacy campaigns as a defining example of conservation-related indigenous displacement. It helped catalyze the shift in international conservation policy from "fortress conservation" toward community-based and rights-based approaches.

The World Bank, which finances much of Uganda's conservation work including the current IFPA-CD project at Bwindi, now operates under Environmental and Social Standard 7 (ESS7) — a framework that specifically requires meaningful consultation with indigenous peoples, equitable benefit-sharing, and Free Prior and Informed Consent in specific circumstances. The VMGP (Vulnerable and Marginalized Groups Plan) that this website draws on is itself a product of this policy shift.

The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) — which Uganda has endorsed — establishes that indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinctive spiritual relationship with their traditionally owned lands and to determine and develop priorities for the use of those lands. The Batwa's 1991 eviction violated every principle in this framework.

The Bwindi case is not unique. The Maasai were displaced from the Serengeti in Tanzania to create what became a UNESCO World Heritage Site — also in the name of wildlife conservation. The Baka people in Cameroon and Congo face ongoing exclusion from forests gazetted for conservation. The Adivasi communities of central India have been displaced from tiger reserves. In each case, the conservation goal was legitimate; the method was a human rights failure. The pattern is global, and the Batwa case is one of its most documented instances.

A visitor who comes to Buhoma to see mountain gorillas is participating in an industry built on a conservation success — the gorilla population has grown from approximately 320 individuals in the late 1980s to around 460 today. This is genuinely worth celebrating.

The same visitor is also participating in an economy that was enabled, in part, by the dispossession of the Batwa. The park that protects the gorillas was created by evicting them. The revenue from gorilla trekking permits flows through a system that has historically distributed its benefits unequally, with the Batwa receiving less than the surrounding communities despite having the prior claim.

Holding both of these facts at once — the genuine conservation success and the genuine human injustice — is the beginning of responsible engagement with gorilla tourism. It motivates visiting the Batwa Trail. It motivates purchasing Batwa crafts. It motivates asking lodges what their community benefit policies actually deliver to the Batwa specifically. And it motivates taking the story home, because visibility is one of the most practical things a visitor can offer.

The abstraction of "what repair looks like" becomes clearer when you listen to what the Batwa themselves have proposed in formal consultation processes. In meetings with UWA and the World Bank IFPA-CD project team — including a stakeholder consultation at Buhoma Visitor Centre in June 2022 — Batwa community members and their NGO representatives raised specific, concrete requests.

One recurring request was fish ponds. The Batwa had access to forest streams and fishing rights before displacement. That access is gone. Fish ponds — a technically straightforward intervention — were proposed as a partial substitute for the protein source and livelihood that stream fishing once provided. This is not an abstract demand for justice. It is a practical proposal.

A second recurring position was that Batwa community projects should prioritize Batwa-led NGOs over external organizations. The Batwa have direct experience of programs designed for them rather than by them — of external NGOs capturing funding for work that Batwa-led organizations could do more effectively and with longer-term community ownership. The request is for self-determination in the form it matters most: control over the resources and programs that affect their own lives.

The 2024 renewal of the Bwindi Batwa Forest Experience MoU — an agreement between UWA and Batwa groups giving community members structured access to the forest for cultural and tourism purposes — is a modest example of the kind of concrete arrangement the Batwa are seeking more of. It provides income, cultural access, and a formal relationship with the park that once excluded them. Its renewal in 2024 signals that the relationship is at least stable enough to maintain.