The 1991 Displacement

The Batwa were not simply relocated. They were severed from the totality of their existence. The forest was not just where they lived — it was their food system, their pharmacy, their spiritual world, their social organization, and their identity. When the boundary closed in 1991, all of this became inaccessible simultaneously.

Their traditional knowledge — an oral encyclopedia of hundreds of medicinal plants, hunting techniques, weather reading, animal behavior, and forest navigation — became largely unusable outside the park. Skills that had taken generations to refine had no context in the agricultural communities where the Batwa were now forced to live. Elders watched their knowledge become irrelevant within a generation.

Spiritually, the loss was equally profound. The Batwa had burial sites deep in the forest near large trees, where the dead were buried standing upright. They worshipped in specific forest locations, offered appeasement to ancestral spirits in sacred places. When they were driven out, these spiritual practices were interrupted. Some Batwa still seek forest access for spiritual and medicinal purposes under CRM arrangements with UWA, demonstrating that the connection remains — but it is now permitted only by the grace of the state that took the land.

A study by Mbarara University in 2020 found that more than one-third of Batwa still identify the forest as their origin. The word the Batwa use for themselves — batware, meaning kings — reflects a self-understanding rooted in belonging to a place they can no longer enter freely.

The figure of 1,403 Batwa in 19 communities adjacent to BINP refers specifically to those living near Bwindi. It does not capture the full Batwa population in southwest Uganda. Additional Batwa communities exist in Kisoro District — in areas around Echuya Central Forest Reserve, Mgahinga Gorilla National Park, and in Kisoro Town itself. These communities share parallel histories of displacement and face the same constrained access to forest resources, but are counted separately or not at all in the BINP-focused documentation.

The constitutional petition filed in 2013 by the United Organisation for Batwa Development in Uganda represents the most direct legal challenge to the Batwa displacement. The case argues that the eviction was unconstitutional and that the Batwa are entitled to recognition of their rights to their ancestral territory and compensation for its loss.

As of December 2025, the World Bank VMGP document notes that the Batwa are "pursuing the matters related to that historical relocation in the Ugandan High Court." The outcome of this case matters not just for the Batwa of Bwindi but for indigenous land rights across Uganda and East Africa.

The Ugandan government has acknowledged in international contexts that the Batwa were wronged. The World Bank's IFPA-CD project, which funds conservation work in Bwindi, explicitly recognizes the Batwa as a Vulnerable and Marginalized Group and requires that they be meaningfully engaged and benefit from project activities. This formal recognition is progress, though it falls well short of restitution.