west, north and south. Besides these victims of political upheaval there are a number of
other reasons for population increase around Budongo. First, health has improved in the
area after an epidemic of trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness) at the beginning of the
twentieth century (described, among others, by Winston Churchill in his 1908 book
My African Journey). Paterson (1991) has summarized the devastating series of diseases
that afflicted this area (formerly Bunyoro, today Masindi District): trypanosomiasis
entered Bunyoro from north of the Nile in 1904 and in a few years surrounded Budongo
Forest on its western, northern and eastern sides. The cause of this disease, which spread
across Uganda and decimated the human and cattle populations, may have been linked
to the colonial administrators’ efforts to stop the practice of grassland burning which
was a tradition among the local cattle herders as it provided fresh grazing and sup-
pressed the bush land that harboured the tsetse fly (Langlands 1967). In response the
colonial administration evacuated the entire population of these areas in 1909–1912,
and shot most of the large wild animals because it was feared they harboured the tsetse
fly. This included buffaloes, wild pigs, bushbuck and Uganda kob (Harris 1934;
Buechneret al. 1963). Elephants were spared and their numbers increased accordingly.
Large elephant herds moved to and from the Budongo Forest in the early part of the
twentieth century until the Game Department initiated elephant control measures in the
1950s in order to protect valuable timber saplings in Budongo Forest. Together with or
following the outbreak of trypanosomiasis there was an outbreak of rinderpest, a highly
contagious, fatal disease of cattle, which effectively ended the pastoral way of life of the
Bunyoro people of this area, and they were obliged to take up the more agricultural way
of life we see today (for a summary of these events, see Shiel 1996).
Thus what had been a populated area became an empty one, and only after 1936 did
the population begin to build up again, albeit slowly. In the 1950s and 1960s the area
attracted people to come and work at the Budongo Sawmill and the other three mills.
When my wife and I were in Budongo in 1962 there was a local concentration of people
around the mill, and there were a number of traditional villages around Budongo, but
most of the land was covered in Pennisetumelephant grass. After the Amin and Obote
civil wars that devastated the country from 1971 to 1986, there was economic growth,
once again bringing job opportunities to the area. Growth has been particularly strong
around the renovated Kinyara Sugar Works, and there has been a resurgence of commer-
cial optimism leading to the establishment once again of tobacco growing. Today, the
land around Budongo Forest is mostly under cultivation with houses, villages, schools
and markets everywhere.
As elsewhere in Africa, the pace of change for the Budongo Forest has accelerated in
the last few decades. Few parts of Africa have escaped the pressures of human popula-
tion increase, of human conflicts and the damage they have caused, of technological
progress, of large-scale urbanization and of continuing poverty. Standing on the fire
tower we could be forgiven for forgetting for a moment these pressures that are squeez-
ing the life out of Africa. But it is as with the myriad species that are there, almost
unseen from a distance except maybe for the white flash of a hornbill flying at the forest
edge. From a distance the human pressures are almost unseen too. But in the space of
Disease and the human population 11