The national parks and wildlife reserves that make Uganda one of Africa’s premier wildlife destinations today were not created in a political vacuum. They were established largely during the British colonial period, drawing on conservation philosophies, administrative structures, and land tenure systems that reflected the priorities and prejudices of colonial governance. The relationship between colonial history and contemporary conservation in Uganda is complex, contested, and directly relevant to understanding why certain landscapes are protected, who benefits from that protection, and who bears its costs. For visitors to Uganda’s gorilla forests and other protected areas, this history provides essential context for what they are experiencing and why it looks the way it does.
The colonial framework: game reserves and exclusion
British colonial administration in Uganda, formalised through the Uganda Protectorate established in 1894, brought with it a European model of wildlife protection that was fundamentally different from the relationships that pre-colonial Ugandan societies had maintained with wildlife and the land. Colonial game laws, beginning with the Game Ordinance of 1906, established the principle that wild animals were the property of the crown rather than of the communities living alongside them. Hunting was regulated through licensing systems that effectively restricted legal wildlife use to Europeans and wealthy Africans who could afford permits, while criminalising the subsistence hunting that had been a normal part of life for generations of rural communities.
Game reserves were established in the first decades of the twentieth century, beginning with the Toro Game Reserve in 1926 and the Bunyoro Elephant Sanctuary in 1929. These reserves created areas where wildlife received protection but human habitation was not necessarily prohibited — a model that differed from the American national park concept that the colonial administration would later adopt more comprehensively. The reserves established the administrative habit of defining geographic boundaries for wildlife management and the legal habit of treating wildlife as a resource to be managed by the state rather than by local communities.
Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda’s most visited national park today, was established as Kazinga National Park in 1952 and renamed after the queen’s coronation the following year. Its establishment required the removal of approximately 3,000 people from the Busongora county area, who were resettled outside the park boundaries without adequate compensation or support for their relocation. This pattern of human displacement in the service of wildlife protection was repeated at park establishments across Uganda and across colonial Africa, creating legacies of dispossession that have shaped the political contestation surrounding protected areas to the present day.
Bwindi and the pre-independence conservation period
The forests of what is now Bwindi Impenetrable National Park were first designated as forest reserves under colonial administration in 1932, with the Impenetrable Forest Reserve established to protect timber resources and watershed values rather than specifically to protect wildlife. The designation as a Crown Forest Reserve removed the forests from the customary land tenure system and placed them under colonial forestry department management, beginning the process of separating local communities from forest resources they had used for generations.
Mountain gorillas were known to colonial administrators but were not the primary motivation for forest protection in this early period. The connection between forest protection and gorilla conservation became more explicit in the decades following independence, when the global conservation community’s growing interest in mountain gorillas coincided with the development of international protected area standards and the influence of international conservation organisations on Ugandan government policy. The 1991 gazettement that created Bwindi Impenetrable National Park from the existing forest reserve, and that led to the eviction of the Batwa people, was a post-colonial decision but one made within an institutional framework and conservation philosophy that colonial administration had established.
Independence and the inheritance of colonial conservation structures
Uganda achieved independence from Britain in 1962 and inherited a protected area system, a wildlife law framework, and a professional wildlife service that were substantially products of the colonial period. The new Ugandan government faced immediate choices about whether to maintain, modify, or dismantle these inherited structures. The political pressures were complex: conservation offered the prospect of tourism revenue and international prestige, but protected areas also represented land removed from agricultural production in a country with a rapidly growing population and significant land pressure.
The immediate post-independence period saw significant continuity with colonial conservation structures, partly because the professional cadre of wildlife managers trained under colonial administration continued to operate the system, and partly because international conservation bodies including the International Union for Conservation of Nature actively supported the maintenance of Uganda’s protected area network as part of a global agenda for wildlife preservation.
The Idi Amin period from 1971 to 1979 produced catastrophic disruption to Uganda’s wildlife and conservation infrastructure. Poaching, which had been significant before Amin but controlled by a functioning wildlife service, became systematic and industrialised under a regime that directed anti-poaching resources toward other purposes and whose military was actively involved in wildlife trafficking. Elephant populations, which had numbered in the tens of thousands in Uganda’s parks, were devastated. The wildlife service’s human capacity, carefully built over the colonial and immediate post-independence period, was disrupted by the political instability and economic collapse that characterised Amin’s rule and its aftermath.
Rebuilding conservation after Amin: the 1980s and 1990s
The recovery of Uganda’s wildlife and conservation institutions from the devastation of the Amin period and the subsequent Milton Obote conflicts of the early 1980s was one of the significant conservation achievements of the late twentieth century. Uganda Wildlife Authority, established in 1996 as the successor to the Uganda National Parks and Game Department, was created with a mandate that explicitly combined conservation objectives with community benefit distribution — a significant departure from the purely exclusionary conservation model inherited from the colonial period.
The community revenue sharing programme that now channels twenty percent of gorilla permit revenue to communities surrounding Bwindi and Mgahinga was introduced in the late 1990s as a deliberate attempt to address the community-exclusion legacy of both colonial and early post-independence conservation. It represented an acknowledgement that the costs of conservation had been borne disproportionately by local communities and that the benefits needed to be distributed more equitably if conservation was to be genuinely sustainable over the long term.
Contemporary conservation and colonial legacy
Contemporary gorilla conservation in Uganda operates within institutions and laws that have been substantially reformed since independence, but that remain shaped by the colonial frameworks in which they were originally constructed. The boundaries of national parks were drawn by colonial administrators according to ecological and administrative logics that did not necessarily reflect community land use patterns or local knowledge of the landscape. The legal framework that makes poaching a criminal offence derives from colonial game law. The professional culture of the wildlife service carries forward traditions of expertise and practice that were developed within a colonial context.
This history does not diminish the genuine achievements of contemporary conservation in Uganda: the mountain gorilla’s recovery from near-extinction, the community development outcomes of the revenue sharing programme, and the professionalism of Uganda Wildlife Authority’s management of a complex and contested landscape. But it does provide essential context for understanding the tensions that persist around protected area management: between communities and park administrators, between customary resource users and formal legal frameworks, and between the conservation imperative and the development needs of a country where poverty and land pressure remain significant political realities.
For visitors, engaging with this history adds moral and intellectual depth to the gorilla trekking experience. The forest of Bwindi is not simply a nature reserve — it is a landscape with a human history of considerable complexity, and the encounter with gorillas within it takes place within a political and economic context that repays thoughtful attention. The best guides in Bwindi know this history and are willing to discuss it with visitors who show genuine curiosity. Asking the question is often all that is required to access a perspective on the landscape that transforms it from backdrop to subject.
