concerns and problems of the people to whom we must address ourselves if we want the
forest to survive. We have to know why they value it, how they regard it and why they
(not we) might want to keep it rather than see it cut down. Thus, if it offers cures for
sorcery, that is something we need to know.
Second, there is a more practical reason. The health of people living around the forest
is inextricably linked with that of the apes living inside it. Several chimpanzee sites have
experienced disease epidemics and deaths from contacts with human beings living in
the area, or visiting. Projects such as the BFP are currently rethinking methods of safe-
guarding wild apes from the dangers posed by human beings who may bring with them
viruses or bacteria to which the apes have no immunity. The Max Planck Institute of
Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, together with the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin
and a number of other laboratories, is spearheading the use of new diagnostic methods
to assess the health of great apes living in Africa, and advising projects such as BFP on
how to deal with everything from mild disease outbreaks to severe epidemics in their
study populations. In future we can expect to see collaborative, multi-site studies and
the development of new ways of diagnosing diseases in the field and in the laboratory.
It is already clear that the disruption of ape habitats caused by large-scale human immi-
gration or other movements of people can lower the animals’ resistance and render them
more prone to human infectious diseases. We are starting with screening programmes
for intestinal parasites, bacteria, viruses and blood parasites, working with non-invasive
samples such as faeces and urine. As ape populations become more and more hemmed
in (and this is happening everywhere), we need to do all we can to improve health and
hygiene in the human population and to minimize the impact of human activities
in forested and other areas where the apes live. This project has barely started at the
present time.
Cash
If sorcery and ‘charming’ are unusual and puzzling to the Western reader, cash surely is
not; we are all too familiar with the subject. A preoccupation with cash has in recent
decades become the norm for the people around the Budongo Forest.
Just how cash-minded the newer and younger residents who live around Budongo
Forest are was described by Mikala Lauridsen, who spent a year living in Nyabyeya
Centre, in very close daily contact with her hosts, a Ugandan family, one of whom was
her interpreter (Lauridsen 1999).
Lauridsen’s background concern was with the question of collaborative forest
management (Driciru 2001) and conservation around Budongo, but her foreground con-
cern was with the people themselves, who they were and what their chief concerns were.
She writes that much of the literature on local participation in forest management ‘draws
on the assumption that forest groups have a traditional relationship with the forest
environment, and that there is important traditional knowledge available’ (p. 1) but, as
she points out, people around Budongo are living in a modern context and are
participating in a global economy. In this economy ‘work’ is defined by wage-earning,
200 The human foreground