Updated 15 October 2026

colonial history Uganda conservation is a fascinating chapter in Uganda’s rich and complex story, shaped by the forces of geography, trade, and human movement across East Africa. Most of Uganda’s best-known protected areas began as colonial game reserves, forest reserves and sanctuaries created by the British between the 1920s and the early 1960s. Colonial rule decided where the parks are, who was allowed to use them, and how they are policed, and it largely kept local people out. Independent Uganda inherited that system, saw it collapse in the 1970s and rebuilt it from the 1990s with a much greater role for communities.

Knowing this history helps explain much of what you see on a gorilla trip, from the sharp edge between Bwindi’s forest and the farms around it to the Batwa cultural walks and the revenue-sharing projects in nearby villages.

Uganda’s colonial history and its impact on wildlife conservation

Wildlife as crown property

Britain declared a protectorate over Buganda in 1894 and extended it over the rest of what became Uganda in the following years. Before that, wildlife was managed under local customs. Kingdoms and clans had their own hunting rules, totem animals that members would not kill, and royal rights over ivory and certain skins. Colonial game law replaced these with a single idea: wild animals belonged to the state, and using them required a licence.

In practice, licences favoured European settlers, officials and visiting sport hunters, while much subsistence hunting by Africans was redefined as poaching. A Game Department was set up in the mid-1920s, and much of its early work was elephant control: shooting elephants that raided crops, with the ivory going to the government. Conservation and hunting were not opposites in this period. Reserves were often created to keep game stocks available for licensed hunting.

How the reserves and parks were made

Several of Uganda’s protected areas lie where they do because of disease rather than wildlife. The sleeping sickness epidemics of the early 1900s killed many thousands of people around Lake Victoria and along the Nile and Lake Albert. The colonial government responded by moving whole communities out of tsetse-infested areas. Wildlife spread into the emptied land, which was then gazetted as game reserves. The country around Murchison Falls is the best-known example. The Toro Game Reserve, created in 1926 and now the Toro-Semliki Wildlife Reserve, is usually cited as Uganda’s oldest protected area.

The National Parks Ordinance of 1952 created Uganda’s first two national parks, Murchison Falls and Kazinga. Kazinga was renamed Queen Elizabeth National Park after the Queen’s visit in 1954. Kidepo Valley followed in 1962, the year of independence. Its creation pushed the Ik out of hunting grounds they relied on, and the hardship that followed later became widely known through the anthropologist Colin Turnbull’s book The Mountain People.

The pattern was the same across colonial Africa. Parks were imagined as untouched wilderness, which meant that the people living in or using them had to be moved, usually with little consultation or compensation.

Bwindi and Mgahinga under colonial rule

The gorilla parks followed a slightly different path. In 1930 the Ugandan slopes of the Virunga volcanoes were declared a gorilla sanctuary, the forerunner of today’s Mgahinga Gorilla National Park. In 1932 parts of Bwindi were gazetted as crown forest reserves, the Impenetrable Central and Kayonza reserves, which were later combined. The main motive was protecting timber and water catchments. Gorillas were known to live there but were not the reason for protection. The forest stayed open to licensed timber cutting and mining for decades, and it became an animal sanctuary in 1964, after independence.

Forest reserve status took the forest out of customary ownership but did not yet remove its oldest inhabitants. The Batwa, forest hunter-gatherers who had lived in Bwindi, Mgahinga and the Virungas for generations, continued to use it, as did farmers who collected honey, medicine and building materials. Their eviction came later, when the forests became national parks in 1991. Although that was an independent Uganda’s decision, it followed the colonial logic of conservation without people. Our guide to the history and ecology of Bwindi covers the forest’s protection in more detail.

Independence, collapse and recovery

Uganda became independent in 1962 with a working park system and some of the richest game populations in Africa. For a decade there was strong continuity, often with the same staff and rules. Then came the Idi Amin years (1971–79) and the wars that followed. Soldiers, officials and organised gangs poached on a massive scale, and elephants, rhinos and other large mammals were shot out across most parks. Both of Uganda’s rhino species were extinct in the wild by the early 1980s. Our article on wildlife in the Idi Amin era tells that story in full.

The rebuilding from the late 1980s is where Uganda began to move away from the colonial model. Bwindi, Mgahinga and the Rwenzoris became national parks in 1991, and gorilla tourism started in Bwindi in 1993. In 1996 the national parks service and the game department were merged into the Uganda Wildlife Authority, with a mandate to share benefits with neighbouring communities.

Today 20% of park entry fees and a US$10 levy on every gorilla permit go to frontline communities, and local people work as rangers, trackers, porters and guides. The mountain gorilla’s recovery to more than 1,000 animals across the Virunga–Bwindi region is the clearest sign that this approach works.

What the colonial legacy means today

Some colonial foundations remain. Park boundaries mostly follow lines drawn by colonial surveyors, which is why Bwindi’s forest ends abruptly at tea gardens and potato fields. The principle that wildlife belongs to the state, the licensing of use and the paramilitary ranger force all descend from colonial game law, even though the current Uganda Wildlife Act dates from 2019. Conflicts over crop raiding, access to forest resources and land claims by displaced communities also have roots in that period.

The Batwa are the most visible unresolved case. They received little or no compensation when the gorilla parks were created, and many still live in poverty on land bought for them by charities. Uganda’s Constitutional Court ruled in 2021 that they had been unlawfully evicted and were owed compensation, which had not been settled at the time of writing. Visitors can support Batwa-led tourism such as the Batwa Trail in Mgahinga, where Batwa guides tell their own history in the forest they once lived in.

For travellers, this history is worth carrying into the forest. Rangers and guides are often happy to talk about it, including what the park has meant for their own families, if you ask respectfully. For the wider story of how the colonial reserves became today’s network of ten national parks, read our history of Uganda’s national parks.

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