Immaculate Tumwebaze, the Kataara Women’s Poverty Alleviation Group Chairperson in a coffee garden at the fringes of Queen Elizabeth National Park. PHOTO/ZADOCK AMANYISA
What you need to know:
Reformed poachers, who are now farmers are supported through training in sustainable coffee farming and processing.
This improves the coffee quality, increases production and protects wildlife habitat.
Growing human populations in communities neighbouring protected areas have continued to become a major threat to the rising number of wildlife populations across Uganda. The continued habitat loss on the side of protected areas frustrate wildlife conservation efforts.
Human activities such as agriculture and industrialisation have forced hundreds of animal species into migration and facilitated human-wildlife conflict because activities exert more pressure on natural resources, which serve as natural habitats for animals.
In the past, people living around Queen Elizabeth National Park and Bwindi Impenetrable National Park would go into the parks for poaching and timber cutting as sources of food and livelihood.
These daily struggles caused mayhem because many members of the public lost their lives after they were killed by law enforcement teams and animals. In Rubirizi district, a number of family heads died guarding their crops against elephant raids
“Most of us are widows because our husbands were shot dead by rangers. They were found hunting in the park. Elephants destroyed our gardens and we felt like killing them in order to compensate ourselves with ivory. But we were aware that this was illegal,” Birungi Mwanje, a member of Kataara Women’s Poverty Alleviation Group (KWPAG), a group running projects that minimise environmental impacts on Queen Elizabeth National Park shares.
Coffee growing
To address this conservation challenge, communities in south western Uganda, have been organised into Arabica coffee growing and value addition groups. The two strands of growing and value addition have proven to be alternative sources of livelihood.
According to Moses Agaba, the group coordinator of KWPAG, women have since actively participated in growing of coffee and value addition.
“Most of these are widows whose husbands died in the park. They used to sell meat obtained from the park as a source of livelihood. Today, they are now busy processing coffee and they are earning a living. A woman who is busy roasting coffee cannot send her son to the park for meat,” says Agaba.
The group known as Kataara Women’s Roasted Coffee Beans, collects red coffee berries from their own gardens and out growers, process it into roasted berries or powder and sell it to tourists or hotels, where they get more yields.
“From out growers, we buy one basin of red coffee at Shs2,000 and after processing it, a basin goes for up to Shs 374,429 and to us, this is a profitable business. We cannot go back to the park,” women coffee farmers say.
During the peak season, the group fetches up to Shs2 to 3 million per month, whereas during off season, they get Shs600,000-Shs800,000. Immaculate Nyangoma Tumwebaze, the group chairperson, says they chose coffee growing after they found out that coffee cannot be eaten by elephants. Aside from coffee farming, do they do other activities such as turning elephant dung into paper and art objects, which they sell to earn money. Coffee growing also helps the residents protect their soil from erosion
Supporting community tourism
When tourists visit the Kicwamba community, where KWPAG is located, they support community tourism by visiting coffee gardens, processing centres, where they pay to see value addition activities and also end up supporting different interventions that protect the park.
In Rubirizi District, coffee contributes 68-70 percent to the economy, according to Habib Kaparaga, the district secretary for finance and administration. Areas engaged in coffee growing include Kicwamba, Katerera, Ryeru, Kirugu and Kyabakara.
Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park, where 1,063 mountain gorillas live today, is surrounded by isolated and impoverished communities. In the past, due to their close proximity both inside and outside the national park, preventable infectious diseases would spread between humans, gorillas and livestock.
This along with habitat encroachment, poaching and economic instability threatened the existence of the mountain gorillas, until Dr Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, the first Wildlife Veterinary Officer of the Uganda Wildlife Authority Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH) came and established Gorilla Conservation Coffee as a social enterprise for neighbouring communities.
CTPH promotes biodiversity conservation by enabling people, gorillas and other wildlife to coexist through improving their health and livelihoods in and around protected areas and wildlife rich habitats.
Need for livelihood
Dr Zikusoka discovered that coffee farmers in Kanungu District were not being given a fair price for their coffee and were struggling to survive, forcing them into national parks to meet their basic family needs, specifically food and fuel wood.
Gorilla Conservation Coffee pays a premium of Shs1,872 per kilogramme, above the market price, according to Edward Sekandi, the CTPH operations manager.
“These are mainly former poachers, now reformed. They are converted into coffee growing. It is an intensive, engaging and profitable activity that they no longer want to go back to the park,” says Sekandi.
GCC prevents residents from practicing deforestation for charcoal and rallies them into shade tree planting in their coffee gardens in order to mitigate the impacts of climate change.
Sekandi says farmers are encouraged to use organic manure in their coffee gardens instead of artificial inputs, which he says spoil the soil structure.
Reformed poachers, who are now great farmers are supported through training in sustainable coffee farming and processing. This helps them to improve the coffee quality, increase production yield and protect the endangered gorillas and their habitat.
“When you are tracking gorillas, you tour coffee farms. We buy coffee from farmers and sell it to traders, roasters and retailers and the donations from every bag sold, goes to the work of CTPH,” says Dr Zikusoka.
Markets
The coffee is 100 percent premium Arabica, which is selectively harvested for only red ripe cherries, handpicked, wet processed and dried under shade. This coffee is tested for quality at every level. The coffee is roasted and packed to quality standards.
Each cup has a unique aroma with hints of caramel, butter notes and almond, with a citrus taste and a sweet finish. The group’s first blend is named after Kanyonyi, the former lead silverback of the Mubare gorilla group, located in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park.
The coffee is majorly sold in the US, Canada, UK, New Zealand, France and South Africa. GCC makes a special effort to support women coffee farmers, helping to provide opportunities for economic empowerment, disrupt male financial dominance and break and stereotypes.
When Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka started out there were no black women in her field. She talks about creating roles for African leaders in wildlife and how protecting people is core to protecting the animals they live near
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, Ugandan vet and founder of Conservation Through Public Health, which aims to protect wildlife by improving human health and livelihoods. Photograph: Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Media
As a black African woman in a space often dominated by white, western males, the path to becoming a conservation leader didn’t always seem open to Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka.
“I remember a warden came to talk to us at wildlife club [at school] about mountain gorillas, which had just been discovered in Uganda and were being habituated. The people involved were white American researchers,” she says.
Kalema-Zikusoka grew up in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, and by 17 was running the wildlife club at Kibuli secondary school in Entebbe, 25 miles (40km) to the south. After graduating from the University of London’s Royal Veterinary College in 1996, she established the Uganda Wildlife Authority’s first veterinary department and became the country’s first wildlife vet.
“I wasn’t sure if this job existed for me,” she recalls. “I didn’t know any wildlife vets in Uganda. When Idi Amin came into power [in 1971], he chased away the British, the Indians and made life very difficult. The people who kept the wildlife going were Africans, but it was a struggle.” Kalema-Zikusoka’s father, who was a minister in the previous government, was one of Amin’s first victims, killed when she was two years old.
When Kalema-Zikusoka became the country’s first wildlife vet it was all the more unusual because she was a woman. “Being a wildlife vet was seen as a very unusual job for a woman. When I started working, there were no female rangers. I was the only woman going out in to the field. People looked at me very strangely.”
Kalema-Zikusoka collects gorilla faeces, which will be analysed to monitor the health of the troop. Photograph: Jo-Anne McArthur/#unboundproject/We Animals Media
“There are more Africans involved in conservation than 20 years ago,” she says. “There are still very few women, but it’s better than it used to be. What’s lacking is African leadership. Very few Africans are leading these efforts. We founded the African Primatological Society because of that. I was being invited to conferences to give keynote speeches about primates in Africa and only 10% of people there were from Africa. We had to change that.”
There needs to be a homegrown movement of African conservationists and leaders to prevent species declining
“African leaders are better able to meet the needs of the wildlife and people because we have a greater understanding,” she says. “Our relatives had to deal with human-wildlife conflict, or some people’s grandparents were poachers, so we understand the situation better. There needs to be a homegrown movement of African conservationists and leaders to prevent species declining.”
Cover of Kalema-Zikusoka’s book Walking with Gorillas. Photograph: Handout
Many charities have snappier names than Conservation Through Public Health, but few “do what it says on the tin”, says Kalema-Zikusoka, whose pragmatic strategy is to protect gorillas and other wildlife by prioritising human health. She first met a mountain gorilla in Bwindi, western Uganda, in 1994, just one of the extraordinary moments in her life recounted in a new memoir, Walking With Gorillas: The Journey of an African Wildlife Vet. “I felt a strong connection,” she says. “I met just one silverback, Kacupira. I also felt they’re so vulnerable, so few in number. I felt we needed to do something to make sure they didn’t go extinct.”
In the 1970s, it was feared the world’s largest primate – found only in the Virunga Mountains that border the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Uganda and in Bwindi Impenetrable national park – would go extinct. But their numbers have been steadily rising, thanks to conservation efforts. The last census, in 2018, counted 1,063. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) updated their status from critically endangered to endangered.
“Humans are so closely related to gorillas and chimps, and we can make each other sick,” says Kalema-Zikusoka. “I realised people around the park had very little healthcare – many lived 20 miles from the nearest health centre. Some diseases are preventable with good hygiene, like tuberculosis, scabies … I wanted to set up an NGO that improves the health of the people, because it was difficult to keep gorillas healthy if their human neighbours weren’t healthy and hygienic.”
Tackling poverty is also central to the CTPH mission. “It’s core to protecting wildlife. As long as people are poor and don’t have food, they’re going to want to enter the forest to poach. We found this out during Covid – poaching really increased during the pandemic when there were no tourists.
“After a poacher killed Rafiki, the lead silverback in the Nkuringo group in 2020, we felt we needed to provide fast-growing seedlings to vulnerable people for food – pumpkins, kale, cabbage, beans … Once you give them something to eat, they’re less likely to enter the forest. So food security became another component of our whole model.”
Kalema-Zikusoka and staff at CTPH with members of the Batwa community in Bwindi Impenetrable forest. Photograph: Jo-Anne McArthur/#unboundproject/We Animals Media
Conservationists face many challenges to stop wildlife disappearing in many parts of Africa. “The biggest issue is habitat loss, which we need to deal with by promoting family planning around protected areas,” says Kalema-Zikusoka. “People were having 10 kids per family on average around Bwindi. By implementing family planning, you reduce poverty and disease. Women have more control over their bodies. And it’s very helpful for wildlife because there’s less need to enter the park to poach. Family planning is an issue all conservation NGOs need to take up.”
Kalema-Zikusoka divides her time between Entebbe, where she lives with her husband and two sons, and Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. Despite being chief executive of CTPH, she still spends much of her time out in the field with the gorillas and local communities. “I’m always there,” she says. “That’s what gives me energy. I’m a very practical hands-on person.”
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Outward Voices is a collection of personal essays from individuals who are doing their part to protect our planet. For Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, founder of Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), an organization dedicated to the co-existence of wildlife, humans and livestock in Africa, the success of mountain gorilla conservation is a lesson that human and wildlife welfare are inextricably connected.
Sometimes, it’s hard not to feel despondent about the planet’s future. We know that the Earth is warming up, that climate change is real and that it is happening under our watch. The evidence is irrefutable—we are now seeing and feeling the impacts of environmental damage on a daily basis.Everything from extreme weather conditions—such as droughts, floods and mudslides—to insect swarms and the emergence of new diseases are all attributable to climate change. It is a huge worry for us, for future generations and for all the species we share this planet with.However, we also have many reasons to be hopeful about our planet’s future. We have learnt so much about cleaner, greener energy recently—and the cost of renewable energy has reduced dramatically. Today’s generations and young people are also much more environmentally conscious, aware and concerned than previous generations. And under pressure from their constituents, governments are also more committed to a greener future, as are businesses that are having to adjust their products to meet the demands of their environmentally conscious consumers.This is all really exciting as it pushes us towards a positive climate action tipping point—a critical place when it comes to realizing positive and lasting change. When greener technologies and tools are so good and cheap, and consumer demand for cleaner, greener services and technologies is so strong, momentum is built and change is much faster.
In a recent report to the UN (March 20, 2023), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said: “Urgent climate action can secure a liveable future for all. There are multiple, feasible, and effective options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to human-caused climate change, and they are available now.” This is really positive and motivates us to keep pushing for improvements.When I look back to the start of my conservation journey, I find hope in the story of the mountain gorillas. When I started out as Uganda’s first wildlife vet, they were critically endangered and widely predicted to be extinct by the turn of the millennium. It was a huge worry. However, in 2018—thanks to enormous efforts of all partners—mountain gorillas were reclassified from critically endangered to endangered, in recognition of their sustained positive population growth.Of course, the future of mountain gorillas is not yet secure, and the recent emergence of new diseases and viruses, such as COVID-19—examples of issues which are exacerbated by climate change and over-exploitation of resources—poses an increasing threat to their survival. Nevertheless, the redirection of their population trend to one of growth is one of the greatest conservation successes. It is something I am immensely proud to have contributed to.It also gives me hope at times when I feel overwhelmed by the continuing conservation and environmental challenges ahead of us. Nature is incredibly resilient and the more chance we give it to recover, the more it will amaze us with the speed at which it can. We just need to give it that chance.The reclassification of mountain gorillas from critically endangered to endangered was a huge step for many individuals and organizations who had been working to secure a better future for these primates. Photo: Ryoma Otsuka
One of the most important things I realized at the start of my career in conservation—and the reason that I established Conservation Through Public Health to support co-existence between gorillas and humans—is that we cannot successfully conserve wildlife without improving the health and wellbeing of people as people cannot live without a healthy and clean environment.The health of people, wildlife and the environment is intrinsically interlinked; one cannot be addressed without the others. I talk about this in more detail in my recently published book and memoir, Walking With Gorillas: The Journey of an African Wildlife Vet about my journey in conservation leadership.As we consider our place on Earth, whether during Earth Month or beyond, I urge all readers to remember that their health, well-being and livelihoods are dependent on the conservation of our natural resources, environments and biodiversity—and to take action now to protect these for themselves and for their children and future generations.
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Two one-year old baby mountain gorillas play together in the forest of Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in southwestern Uganda Saturday, April 3, 2021. AP / AP
Countless natural disasters made worse from climate change and the degradation of our natural world feel like a steady drumbeat in the news. It’s hard not to feel discouraged, especially when we hear about the enormous amount of species that have gone extinct due to climate change and human activity. But there is hope.
This week’s edition of the Joy Beat celebrates the hard work and dedication of a world-class conservationist and wildlife veterinarian: Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka. She’s the founder and CEO of the grassroots non-governmental organization Conservation Through Public Health, and her new memoir dives into her career caring for Uganda’s mountain gorillas. She joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath.
Arun Rath: First off, tell us about how you first got involved in conservation efforts in Uganda. I believe you started quite young, right?
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: Yes. I first got involved in conservation efforts when I revived a wildlife club at my high school in Uganda. I was very excited to go to the national parks. But when I saw that there was very little wildlife because it had been culled during the President Idi Amin era, I thought that I should become a veterinarian who works with wildlife.
I’d grown up with so many pets at home, and I really wanted to be a vet by the age of two. But by the age of 18, I felt like I wanted to be a vet that works with wildlife. Then, I got an opportunity to work with captive chimpanzees, and then I also got to work with chimpanzees in the wild and, finally, with mountain gorillas in the national park, one year after gorilla tourism had just begun. And I became Uganda’s first wildlife vet.
Rath: Tell us a bit more about your first encounter with gorillas and how you came to become enamored with these animals.
Kalema-Zikusoka: My first encounter with gorillas was really exciting. First of all, it took me a week before I could see them because I developed a nasty cold. But once I got better, we went to visit them, and that day we only saw one gorilla. We could be within five meters of distance with him.
I looked into his eyes, and it was a really deep connection. They’re very intelligent. I felt that they were so vulnerable, and we need to do something to protect them. At that time, there were so few left in the world, and that made me feel like I wanted to be a full-time wildlife veterinarian because I felt we needed to do something to prevent them from going extinct.
Rath: It’s interesting because Uganda has such fantastic natural beauty and wildlife, but you just reminded me in this conversation that we’re talking about the post-Idi Amin period when the wildlife had not been taken care of. Talk about what the situation was and how the country had recovered in terms of the natural landscape.
Kalema-Zikusoka: During the Idi Amin era, the president himself was hunting elephants in the national parks. The national parks were supposed to be a safe haven for wildlife. The wardens tried to stop it, but eventually, they couldn’t anymore, so elephant poaching went up. Later, when the army overthrew Idi Amin, some of the soldiers also ate meat from the forests and the national parks, so a lot of numbers went down, and the elephants and rhinos were pushed to extinction.
Then, in 1987, mountain gorillas were discovered. They thought the only population was in the Virunga Mountains, but suddenly, in ‘87, after doing genetic studies, they found out that there is a second population. Having seen how Rwanda was benefiting from mountain gorilla tourism, Uganda started to habituate them, and a few years later, tourism began.
That completely transformed the situation in Uganda because gorilla tourism is now raising so much revenue that some of it was going to support the other national parks that don’t get enough tourists because they don’t have enough wildlife or it’s not easy to get to the wildlife. It really transformed the landscape.
When I first started working with gorillas, there were only two groups habituated for tourism. Now, there’s 22 groups. So at any one time, you can have almost 180 people in the park, whereas before, there were only 12 people.
It’s transformed people’s lives. Most people employed by the park are from the local communities, and we are also engaging them in our nonprofit, so it’s really transforming the whole area.
“You can’t protect the gorillas and their habitat without improving the health and well-being of the people who they share their fragile habitats with.”
Rath: My next question was going to be about how your NGO, Conservation Through Public Health, and how public health ties into wildlife conservation. But I feel like you gave us a bit of a preview on that. Talk about that some more.
Kalema-Zikusoka: Actually, one of the very first cases I had to deal with as Uganda’s first wildlife vet working for the national parks, which later became the Uganda Wildlife Authority, was a skin disease outbreak on the then-critically endangered mountain gorillas. They called me and said the gorillas are developing white, scaly skin. So I wondered what it could be, and a human doctor friend of mine told me the most common skin disease in people is scabies.
So I went with a drug called ivermectin, which is very good for any parasites. When we got there, it turned out to be scabies. The baby gorilla had sadly died, but the others recovered with treatment. Their hair started to grow back and stop scratching.
We started asking ourselves, “Where could this have come from?” The two groups habituated for tourism was spending a lot of time outside the national park because their habitat had been cut down, and they were always going out to look for banana plants. It had been cut down because of the high human population density. We found that those people were very poor and they had very little health care. When we met with them, they said they wanted to improve the situation because they don’t want to make the gorillas sick, and they wanted to be more healthy and have better well-being.
This made me realize you can’t protect the gorillas and their habitat without improving the health and well-being of the people who they share their fragile habitats with. A few years later, we founded Conservation Through Public Health.
I did research looking at tuberculosis in people, wildlife and livestock, and I understood how the public health system works in Uganda. All of this information helped us to found Conversation Through Public Health.
Rath: As I mentioned at the top, it seems like most of what we hear about wildlife and conservation is typically bad or terrible news — almost panicking. It’s nice to be able to talk to you about hopeful stories like this, about how wildlife can rebound. Can I ask you for any additional hope? Are there ways in which what you’ve accomplished in Uganda could apply in other places? Are there other ways that we could do what you’ve been able to pull off there?
Kalema-Zikusoka: Actually, we have found that as the health of the community is improving, people are not poaching as much. We show them that we care about them and their health, which is a basic human right, and not only about the wildlife and the forests. We’re very excited about that.
Tourism has also helped. Communities are much happier. I’ll say that there are other countries in Africa where the numbers of gorilla species are going down, but the mountain gorilla population has almost doubled over the past 25 years and is still growing, which is exciting.
In other countries in Africa, where there are no community benefits, there isn’t much support for communities — there’s still a lot of hunting. This particular model could really work, and it could also work in other areas with other wildlife.
I’ve actually been speaking at the Wilson Center today, and the very question they asked was like this. They said, “We would love to scale up our approach to other parts of the world.”
‘True friendship between people and wild animals is possible’: Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, who has seen Bwindi gorilla numbers grow from 300 to 500. Photograph: Jo-Anne McArthur/#unboundproject/We Animals Media
Under the watchful and resourceful eye of award-winning conservationist Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, Uganda’s threatened mountain gorilla population has made an impressive recovery – as has the local community
The Bwindi Impenetrable Forest is tucked away in a remote corner of southwest Uganda. Meaning “place of darkness” in the Runyakitara language, this dense, mist-swathed rainforest makes for a good hiding place for half of the world’s remaining mountain gorillas. The other half, which the American primatologist Dian Fossey so famously befriended, live in Rwanda’s Virunga national park.
These majestic but shy creatures – whose existence now generates about 60% of Uganda’s tourism revenue – like to hide, especially when they know veterinary intervention is afoot. The gorillas are always outsmarting the humans – if they see someone carrying a dart gun (for sedation, vaccinations, medicine, etc), they’ll walk backwards so as not to expose their backs, where the dart needs to land. They also like to mock-charge at humans, stopping suddenly to indicate they mean no harm, yet leaving no doubt as to who holds the power. And if they’re really not feeling the presence of humans, they’ll outright charge at you.
“If the silverback charges, no one will be able to visit that group,” says the award-winning Ugandan wildlife vet and conservationist Dr Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, via Zoom from her home in Entebbe, which she shares with her husband, Lawrence, and sons, Ndhego, 18, and Tendo, 14. “In order for him to accept humans, you have to stay very calm, keep your voice down and avoid eye contact. That’s how it should be with wildlife – they should be in charge.”
Out of the mist: a silverback gorilla in the impenetrable forest of the Bwindi national park in Uganda. Photograph: Kim Paffen/Getty Images
We’re here to discuss the 53-year-old’s forthcoming memoir, Walking with Gorillas: The Journey of an African Wildlife Vet, a humbling account of a life dedicated to the survival of Bwindi’s endangered gorillas and their human neighbours. You may not have heard of Kalema-Zikusoka, but the book’s foreword by Dr Jane Goodall gives some indication of her status in the conservation world. “It is hardly surprising that this remarkable woman has been the recipient of countless awards and prizes,” writes Goodall (in 2021 she was named the UN Environment Programme’s Champion of the Earth, and last year won the Edinburgh Medal for her contribution to science). “She has made a huge difference to conservation in Uganda.”
That difference has largely been achieved through gentle tenacity and impressive networking skills, even since her student days – Kalema-Zikusoka introduced herself to Goodall as an undergraduate at the Royal Veterinary College in London after attending one of her talks. And when she realised her dream job didn’t exist (while still at RVC), she wrote to the person who might be able to create it – the head of Uganda national parks – to say she wanted to become its vet.
And so in 1996, aged 26, Kalema-Zikusoka became Uganda’s first ever wildlife vet. At this point, there were only about 300 Bwindi gorillas left in the forest. After nearly three decades of tending to them, she now estimates a total of about 500 – the last census in 2018 counted 459, enough to downgrade the mountain gorilla from critically endangered to endangered.
It’s an achievement that has prompted invitations to sit on numerous international conservation boards, including the Dian Fossey-founded Gorilla Organisation, for which she volunteered while at RVC, “stuffing envelopes late into the night,” says its executive director Jillian Miller. Since the late 1990s, Kalema-Zikusoka has been a trailblazer of “community conservation”, notes Miller, at a time when most conservationists took “a top-down, colonial” approach. “Gladys was a natural at getting the support of local people.”
‘Gladys was a natural at getting the support of local people’: Dr Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka tracking gorillas in Bwindi. Photograph: Jo-Anne McArthur/UNEP
Born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1970, as the youngest of six siblings, Kalema-Zikusoka grew up against the backdrop of Idi Amin’s military dictatorship. Aged two, her father, William Wilberforce Kalema, a former cabinet minister under President Obote, was abducted and murdered by Amin’s soldiers. For her safety, Kalema-Zikusoka was sent to boarding school from the age of seven, variously in Uganda, Kenya and the UK, and in the 1980s her mother, Rhoda Kalema, now 93, became one of Uganda’s first female members of parliament, for the Uganda Patriotic Movement.
That was not without danger either – she was arrested three times and once jailed for her politics. The legacy of both parents “enduring many hardships” is, writes Kalema-Zikusoka in Walking with Gorillas, what inspired her to “dig deep to find my courage”.
As a child, though, animals were her escape from the “cloud of terror”, and she’d retreat to the strays turned pets that her older siblings brought home. Bby the age of 12, her heart was set on becoming a vet – not a respected vocation in Uganda, she explains in her memoir: “People don’t place much value on pets in a developing country with so much human suffering.” After a school safari trip, where she saw how Amin’s rule had decimated Uganda’s animal populations, she knew wildlife veterinary practice was her calling.
Her first encounter with a wild gorilla, at 24, was “a life-changing experience” – and not just for that heart-pounding moment of “deep connection with one of our closest cousins,” as she writes. She had volunteered for a Ugandan study while at RVC, collecting Bwindi gorilla faeces and discovered that gorillas visited by tourists carried a greater parasitic burden. “What struck me,” she recalls, speaking from the sparsely decorated study in which she wrote her memoir, “was how similar we were to each other and yet we are putting their lives at risk. We had to do something about it.” That lightbulb moment has guided her work ever since. “When you improve the health of humans, you improve the health of the animals,” she explains. This holistic approach to conservation, of which Kalema-Zikusoka was an early advocate, is now known as One Health.
Field trip: standing outside the mud hut Dr Gladys lived in while studying parasites and bacteria in mountain gorillas in Bwindi
It’s why you won’t find any cosy photos of Kalema-Zikusoka cuddling wild gorillas, like Fossey and Attenborough. Unless veterinary treatment is required, she and her team of rangers, porters and trackers maintain a distance of 10 metres from the gorillas. Sharing 98.4% of our DNA with them means we can easily make each other sick with zoonotic diseases – those transmitted between animals and people, such as Covid, TB and scabies. Even back in 2011, she was encouraging tourists to wear masks on gorilla treks, and during the pandemic went to great lengths – including lobbying the Ugandan government for priority testing for Bwindi people – to ensure none of the mountain gorillas caught the virus (they didn’t).
Another zoonotic pandemic is “inevitable, sadly,” says Kalema-Zikusoka, whose expertise led to her appointment on the WHO’s Special Advisory Group for the Origin of Novel Pathogens (founded in 2021 to determine the source of Covid and prevent the next pandemic). It’s inevitable, she explains, “because we are disrupting wild animals’ habitats so much.” As observed with the Bwindi gorillas, “when you destroy habitats, those animals will go into people’s gardens”. Mountain gorillas, by the way, find backyard banana plants irresistible, and the ensuing proximity to humans enables “diseases to jump back and forth” between species. While the next zoonotic pandemic could be caused by avian influenza, she thinks it will “probably be [caused by] another coronavirus. It’s the worst kind of virus. As a respiratory illness, it’s highly contagious, but the majority of people don’t die, so it just keeps going and going. And it’s able to mutate.”
Given the great apes’ sensitivity to human disease, is gorilla tourism really in their best interests? It’s complicated. Kalema-Zikusoka sees tourism as a necessary evil. It’s true, she writes, that habituated gorillas – those accustomed to humans – are more vulnerable to disease and poaching and yet, “The mountain gorilla, where there is a thriving tourism industry, is the only gorilla subspecies whose population is growing.”
Hands-on experience: Dr Gladys during the translocation of elephants from Mubende to Queen Elizabeth national park
What about the local community’s best interests? There are about 100,000 people living in parishes bordering the national park. Well, it could go either way – and has, over the years. After the Bwindi mountain gorilla was discovered in 1987, the early days of Uganda’s gorilla tourism triggered a messy vicious cycle. As the gorillas lost their fear of humans, “They’d go into people’s gardens and catch human diseases,” says Kalema-Zikusoka. Meanwhile, driven by poverty, villagers would head into the forest to chop down wood and lay snares for bush pigs and duiker (a kind of antelope), which led to loss of habitat, gorillas being snared and people getting sick from diseased bushmeat. Plus, the locals grew resentful of gorilla tourism, knowing how much westerners were paying and that none of it benefited them.
Through Kalema-Zikusoka’s many bridge-building interventions, that vicious cycle has been transformed into a virtuous one, with several programmes being expanded to other parts of Uganda and beyond. In 2003, she founded Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), an NGO through which she could fundraise and still run One Health programmes in Bwindi. She recruited her husband, a Ugandan telecoms entrepreneur whom she’d met while studying for her masters at North Carolina State University, as treasurer, and her former research assistant, Stephen Rubanga, as secretary; CTPH now has 35 employees.
Instead of parachuting in outsiders, local volunteering has been key to its success. This empowers the Bwindi people and encourages them to be stewards of their own environment. To keep the gorillas away from those bananas, Kalema-Zikusoka formed the Gorilla Guardians – local volunteers to herd gorillas back to the national park. Twenty years on, Bwindi’s 119 gorilla guardians are “a source of pride to the community,” she says. She also introduced family planning to Bwindi, in a way that was sympathetic to the community. What went down best, she found, was contraceptive injections every three months (more convenient; less explaining to do to sceptical husbands), administered by trained volunteers from the villages. And she established volunteer health visitors from each village who’d teach households about hygiene and sanitation. Now, “when gorillas forage in their gardens,” she writes, “they find cleaner homes with no dirty clothing on scarecrows, no open defecation and no uncovered rubbish heaps.” With the gorillas falling sick less often, tourism has prospered.
Lunch on the go: a silverback enjoying a snack in Bwindi. Photograph: Paul Wild/500px/Getty Images/500px Plus
And now that the locals get a share of the tourist dollar – through selling food, crafts and accommodation, or as porters, guides and rangers – they see an incentive to protect the gorillas (many rangers are former poachers and enjoy better pay and more regular work). A few years ago, a very elderly silverback was found dining on villagers’ bananas and berries, but the locals let him graze. When he died a few days later, aged around 50, about 100 members of the community attended his funeral. “This act of kindness signified how far conservation efforts have come in Bwindi and that true friendship between people and wild animals is, indeed, possible,” says Kalema-Zikusoka.
Yet it’s a fragile ecosystem. When Covid hit and tourism halted, poaching and poverty returned. It may not surprise you to hear that Kalema-Zikusoka created a solution, providing 1,000 of Bwindi’s most vulnerable households with seedlings of fast-growing food crops – pumpkins, maize, ground nuts, beans, onions, tomatoes, amaranthus, spinach, kale and cabbages.
Community conservation is an expensive business, though. The proceeds of the memoir will go straight back to CTPH, she says, adding with her ready giggle, “You know what it’s like when you have your own organisation – you end up giving everything to it.”
In 2015, Kalema-Zikusoka founded Gorilla Conservation Coffee as another way to sustain her work. Although it hasn’t yet broken even, this social enterprise now supports 500 fairly paid, well-trained coffee farmers, 120 of whom are female. The premium Arabica roasted coffee can be bought in Britain (through moneyrowbeans.com), the US, Canada and New Zealand.
The need for funding is relentless, and anyone who’s ever tried to fundraise will know how difficult that is. Yet in 20 years, Kalema-Zikusoka estimates that they have raised more than $6.5m. How? “Gladys is always cultivating allies and donors wherever she goes,” says Miller. Driven more by purpose than ego, it seems, she sees herself less as a leader and more “someone with an urge to get things done”.
‘Now locals get a share of the tourist dollar, they help protect the gorillas’: Dr Gladys and staff with some of the members of the Batwa pygmy community in Bwindi. Photograph: Jo-Anne McArthur/#unboundproject/We Animals Media
It’s all the more remarkable given the hangover of colonialism in African conservation, plus the fact that Kalema-Zikusoka is still a hands-on vet 15% of the time. When she founded CTPH, she was told by African colleagues, “You’re Black, so you won’t be able to raise the money.” Although things are changing, conservation NGOs are still “mainly run by white people,” she says, “and it’s easier for those NGOs to raise money. The funding comes from America, UK, Europe and it’s easier, I think, for people to give money to others from their own country.”
The point is, notes Edward Whitley, a financial adviser and founder of the Whitley Awards, which champion such grassroots conservation organisations, that “entrepreneurial conservationists, like Gladys, are skilled at finding creative solutions to problems that we, on the outside, may not even know exist”. Kalema-Zikusoka won the Whitley Gold Award in 2009 (“the green Oscars,” as she calls it) for outstanding leadership in nature conservation and has since received £140,000 in funding from the Whitley Fund for Nature.
Does Kalema-Zikusoka have any enemies? She laughs heartily. “I probably do. Whenever you’re disrupting the status quo, you’re likely to. Some people hate vets – old-school conservation has always been: ‘Don’t touch the animals, don’t interfere with nature’.” She has, in her time, encountered “chauvinistic, racist bullies”. “You still find such people in governments, in donor agencies.” She has learned not to take it personally. “I don’t need them to like me,” she says, “but you still need to win them over – let them see you’re working with them, not pushing things upon them; make them feel like their point of view is important – if you’re going to have a big impact.”
Walking With Gorillas: The Journey of an African Wildlife Vet by Dr Gladys Kalema-Zikosoka is out 27 April (Arcade Publishing, £20), or at guardianbookshop.com for £17.60
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