Episode 5 – Born From Here/ Nkanzarirwa Hanu

"Our culture has become a story, told by somebody else." – Ekibahigire Abias, Batwa Community Member.

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Clouds constantly rise and fall in the hills of Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. This is known as Muntaba and is a place the Batwa would not visit as it is meant to be spiritual and sited with gold.  

The Batwa were once forest dwellers who used to live in Ekyuya, Semuliki, Bwindi, and Mgahinga, their ancestral lands in Uganda. In the early 1990s, government authorities evicted the Batwa from the forest and their home in the name of free land for wildlife and forest conservation. The evictions left the Batwa struggling to survive and facing extreme discrimination on the margins of their former home. These forests lie within the biodiversity-rich Albertine Rift eco-region and are sites of global biodiversity importance, famously home to half of the world’s population of endangered mountain gorillas.

In Episode 5, Born From Here/ Nkanzarirwa Hanu, we travel to the edges of the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Kanungu District in Southwestern Uganda. Looking to the dense green hills that hold fields of sunflowers and ridges overlooking sacred trees, listeners hear the lasting impacts on the health, culture, and livelihoods of the Batwa 30 years on from evictions. The episode features Batwa herbalists, artists, and rare insights from Elders on their experiences of living in and out of the forest.  

Each episode is paired with another side of the same story – a B-side where the landscape, then, speaks for itself. Sounds captured in the environment are turned into sound art, and musical expressions unearth from the land.

Topista Tindimurekura, Batwa Community Member gathers firewood from land purchased by an NGO near the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest  Bwindi Hub, Uganda. © Photo Babtiha George. Courtesy of Land Body Ecologies.