Batwa Sacred Sites

For the Batwa, the relationship with Bwindi forest was never simply economic. The forest was not a resource to be used and set aside. It was the total environment within which Batwa life — spiritual, social, material, and ancestral — was organized. The forest spirits governed community life. The ancestors who had lived in the forest were buried within it. The places where ceremonies were held, where the community gathered in times of crisis or celebration, where elders communicated with the dead — all of these were specific locations within what is now the national park.

When the Batwa were displaced in 1991, they did not simply lose a home. They were separated from the relational obligations that their culture placed on the living toward the dead, from the spiritual infrastructure that organized community life, and from the places where identity itself was grounded. The trees under which their grandparents were buried are still there, inside the park. They simply cannot visit without permission — and the process for obtaining that permission is informal, inconsistent, and dependent on the goodwill of individual rangers.

These two requests are straightforward. They do not ask for land to be returned. They do not ask for the park boundary to be redrawn. They ask that elderly Batwa be allowed to identify and document the locations of spiritual significance inside the forest — and that formal, regulated access to these locations be included in the CRM agreements that already govern Batwa forest access for resource collection.

The VMGP document published in December 2025 lists this request in the consultation record. It does not appear in the agreed actions table (Table 7) for the revised VMGP. The facilitators at the December 2025 validation meetings explained to communities that some requests fell "outside the scope and capacity of the Project." Sacred site access was among them.

The gap between the documented request and the project's ability to respond reflects both the limitations of a time-bound infrastructure project and the more fundamental absence of a dedicated cultural rights framework for Uganda's indigenous communities. Sacred site access is not a livelihoods question. It is not an infrastructure question. It is a human rights and cultural heritage question — and it requires different instruments than a World Bank natural resource management project.

The current CRM agreements that Batwa groups have signed with UWA cover resource access: firewood collection, medicinal herb gathering, basketry materials (Smilax auceps, Gouania longispicata), beehive placement and honey collection, and wild yam gathering (exclusive to the Batwa). The BINP General Management Plan formally recognizes "spiritual beliefs and practices" as a Batwa cultural value with conservation importance — specifically citing "valuing the park as ancestral home" and "motivation for protection."

Acknowledging spiritual connection as a conservation value is not the same as guaranteeing access. The CRM framework technically allows "cultural access" as a use category, but translating this into enforceable, scheduled access to specific sites — with elder participation in identifying those sites — has not happened. The request made in 2022 was the mechanism by which it could happen. It was heard, documented, and deferred.

A meaningful response to the Batwa's request would involve three steps. First, a participatory mapping exercise led by Batwa elders identifying spiritually significant locations within BINP — burial sites, ceremony locations, gathering places associated with specific community histories. This is time-sensitive: the elders who hold this knowledge are aging.

Second, the formal inclusion of identified sites in CRM agreements, with specific provisions for culturally appropriate access — meaning access that the community can use without requiring case-by-case ranger approval, at times and in ways that make spiritual practice possible.

Third, a protocol that protects these sites within park management — ensuring that tourism routes, research activities, and infrastructure development do not damage locations of ancestral or spiritual significance without the community's knowledge and input.

None of this requires returning land to the Batwa. It requires recognizing that the relationship between a people and their ancestral places is not extinguished by a park boundary. The trees are still there. The sites are still there. The people who know what they mean are still alive, though not for much longer.