‘No alternative strategy than to maximize reproduction’ is a strong phrase with which
to conclude the paper. Yet events since Marriott’s study have been proving her right.
There used to be spare land for housebuilding, now there is less and it is becoming
costly. Building poles which used to be obtained free of charge (and legally so) from the
forest are now sold for cash. Meat from the forest is now on sale at bushmeat centres
along the road. Children are everywhere; the local Primary School at Nyabyeya is
severely overcrowded.
Let us consider this school for a moment. A few years ago, the Ugandan Government
introduced Universal Primary Education (UPE). Every Ugandan child is now supposed,
by law, to attend primary school. In a letter (March 2003) I received from the school’s
Head she wrote me that numbers in the seven school years are:
P1 238
P2 150
P3 166
P4 168
P5 93
P6 60
P7 47
P1 is the youngest and P7 is the senior class. There are nine classrooms. The numbers
show us both how overcrowded the school is and also the drop-off as children grow
older. ‘The school has no shutters [for the window spaces], no floor,^77 the walls have lots
of cracks and the roof leaks terribly’, she wrote. This is a common situation in rural
African schools but no better for that.
Local uses of forest products
In 1991 a comprehensive study of the uses made by local people of the non-timber
products of Budongo Forest was made by Kirstin Johnson (Johnson 1993). She inter-
viewed 224 randomly selected community members of Nyabyeya parish. She found that
one-quarter of her respondents were from DRC (Lendu, Okebu and Logo tribes),
over one-quarter were from West Nile District in Uganda (Lugbara and Alur tribes), one-
quarter were indigenous Banyoro, and the rest were from a variety of districts in Uganda.
She noted that many of these people had come to the area attracted by the prospect of
work. In the 1950s and 1960s this work was provided by the Budongo Sawmills Ltd.
(Our 1962 tracker, Manueri, a Bwamba from SW Uganda, was an ex-sawmill employ-
ee. He had left his wife in Bwamba in 1935 to seek money at Budongo and had never
returned. We took him back there to die in 1995 — he looked for his wife but didn’t find
her which, in view of the passage of 60 years, is not surprising.) Today the lure of work
at the Kinyara Sugar Works is bringing hundreds if not thousands more people to live
around Budongo.
194 The human foreground
(^77) Since then a church-based, fund-raising scheme in the English village of Alfriston, E. Sussex, has given
the school a new high-quality cement floor.