A book cover of Walking with Gorillas by Dr Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka. PHOTO | RUPI MANGAT | NMG
In tandem with the 20th anniversary of Conservation Through Public Health being celebrated now, is the amazing book published this year, Walking with Gorillas by Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, who has made history by becoming Uganda’s first wildlife veterinarian and founder of CTPH, a globally acclaimed community programme ensuring the survival of the mountain gorillas of Bwindi Impenetrable National Park and the local communities.
A recipient of multiple international awards, Gladys narrates her story of carving out a career for herself in wildlife conservation that has her now recognised as an authority on mountain gorillas with her name on the Royal Veterinarian College (RVC) Wall of Achievement as one of the seven alumni with unique careers in the world. RVC is where she graduated from in the UK in 1996.
Life and work journey
When she began working as a wildlife vet in Uganda in the mid-1990s, there were 300 mountain gorillas in Bwindi and listed on the IUCN Red list as ”Critically endangered”.
Today Bwindi’s population of mountain gorillas is 459 and increasing, mostly thanks to CTPH. The global population (found only in Bwindi and the Virunga mountains straddling Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo) is 1,063.
The last in a family of six siblings, Gladys was born into a family of political leaders on January 8, 1970, in Kampala with Idi Amin coming into power the following year.
Uganda descended into a decade of turmoil during Amin’s rule of terror marked by looting and bloodshed. Soon after her second birthday, her father, William Wilberforce Kalema, a former Cabinet minister under President Milton Obote, was abducted and murdered by Amin’s soldiers. She attributes much of her success to her mother Rhoda.
With an innate love for wildlife, despite growing up in a culture that sees animals having no souls, by age 12 Gladys had decided she wanted to be a vet. At 19, she enrolled at the Royal Veterinary College in the UK where she was the only woman of African origin in her class.
Her focus now was on not just becoming a vet but a wildlife vet to save Uganda’s decimated wildlife.
In an exciting time, she treats captive wild species in UK zoos, but the groundbreaking moment is when she attends a talk by Dr Barkley Hastings, the first vet to work on the mountain gorillas in Rwanda which fuels her growing interest in the primate.
As a student, her journey takes her to conducting research on chimpanzees and on mountain gorillas in Uganda. But it also coincides with one group of gorillas contracting scabies, the first disease outbreak discovered at the Uganda Wildlife Authority in 1996.
The group was raiding the farms on the edge of the forest and the farmers erected scarecrows dressed in their discarded clothes full of scabies-causing mites. Humans have built a resistance to scabies, but the gorillas have not.
This realisation was to change her life.
In 1996, Dr Gladys returned home as the country’s first wildlife vet and employed at the Uganda Wildlife Authority to set up the veterinarian unit.
Despite the lack of funds, her passion blazes through the pages of how she struggles to treat wild animals in the wild and with each success, she convinces donors to fund the unit that eventually become fully fledged.
After four years at UWA, Gladys realised that if the mountain gorillas of the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest were to survive, the marginalised community living in poverty alongside the gorillas had to be fully involved with healthcare topping the list.
It led her to found Conservation Through Public Health in 2003 that has become a trailblazer in the world of wildlife and human conservation — despite being told by people that she would never attract funding because she was black.
The One Health model, later adopted by the United Nations as the One Health Approach focuses on people, animals and the environment.
When Gladys founded CTPH, her focus was on preventing zoonotic diseases transmitted between people and the gorillas working with the Village Health and Conservation team.
Today, the programme has expanded phenomenally, providing the villagers with access to education and health-care centres where there is treatment for scabies, HIV/Aids and family planning including establishing tele-centres and engaging the coffee farmers in fair trade coffee under the brand Kanyonyi, the silverback who was her favourite gorilla.
Village counselling
With the gorilla population increasing and the land remaining static, villagers are counselled on family planning and on re-investing the money to become self-sufficient and provide education for children.
In an interview, Gladys states: “Big families means many mouths to feed, increasing land wrangles and forest fragmentation.”
The Covid pandemic brought gorilla tourism to a grinding stop. It saw poaching for bush meat (to put food on the table) re-surface resulting in the death of one gorilla.
After successful launches in Uganda, the US and UK, Walking with Gorillas will be launched in Nairobi in the coming months with Gladys in attendance. Published by Arcade Publishing 2023, the book is available on Amazon.
Since then, there’s been no gorilla killed in a snare.
Big win: July 2022, at the International Union of Conservation (IUCN) meeting in Rwanda, CTPH presented a policy brief with International Gorilla Conservation Programme and the Africa CSO Biodiversity Alliance on responsible great ape tourism, which was adopted, laying the protocol for gorilla tourism in the wake of the Covid pandemic to ensure the lives of both the ape and the human.
After successful launches in Uganda, the USA and the UK, Walking with Gorillas will be launched in Nairobi in the coming months with Dr Gladys in attendance.
Published by Arcade Publishing 2023, it is available on Amazon.
Gorillas remain the single most important item on Uganda’s tourism menu according to the Uganda Tourism Board. With conservation taking the mountain gorilla off the edge of extinction, the mantle is still left to the country to keep things from slipping back. This was part of the launch of the book “walking with Gorillas” authored by Dr. Gladys Kalema a renown Gorilla conservationist.
Dr Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka recalls a cheeky monkey that inspired her younger self to dream big. Today, as the country marks the 30th anniversary of gorilla tourism, she’s a key reason for its success.
A silverback family from the Mubare group of gorillas in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. Nick Penny
Uganda’s great apes owe a debt of gratitude to a pet vervet called Poncho. The monkey belonged to the Cuban ambassador to Uganda in the 1970s; he would sit on the gate of the neighbouring house in Kampala, where a young Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka lived with her family.
“I was fascinated by his fingers and fingernails that looked exactly like mine – so human,” she writes in her recently published memoir, Walking with Gorillas: The Journey of an African Wildlife Vet.
“He was my first venture into studying primates.”
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka and a ranger track gorillas in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. Jo-Anne McArthur/Unbound Project
It was a time of tremendous political upheaval. Kalema-Zikusoka’s parents had both been involved in politics; when Idi Amin staged a coup in 1971, her father – a tireless advocate for social upliftment and a member of the overthrown government – was assassinated.
“I was only two years old, so I never got to know him,” she says. “And writing the book, I realised he had had so much impact on my life.”
Gorilla Conservation Coffee’s product helps small-scale coffee farmers make a living in the region surrounding Uganda’s endangered gorillas.
This legacy is self-evident as I sit down with Kalema-Zikusoka at her cafe in Entebbe, near the shores of Lake Victoria. An offshoot of Gorilla Conservation Coffee, the social enterprise supports smallholder coffee farmers from around Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, stronghold of Uganda’s endangered gorilla population, a short flight west of here.It’s one of many initiatives spearheaded by her organisation Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), which she founded in 2003 with the aim of empowering communities and so improving outcomes for the gorilla population.This visionary disposition bloomed early: in high school, Kalema-Zikusoka helped revive the school’s Wildlife Club, and persuaded the principal to take students on an excursion to Queen Elizabeth National Park.
“There were very few animals, so it was a big disappointment. I couldn’t believe that there were hardly any lions,” she recalls. “I thought, maybe I should be a vet who works with wildlife. But such a position didn’t exist in Uganda at the time.”Nonetheless, Kalema-Zikusoka pursued studies at the University of London’s Royal Veterinary College in the UK. It wasn’t until after the first gorilla tourists had arrived in Uganda in 1993 that she got to work with the primates while on a student research placement at Bwindi. Trekking with tourists, she was struck by the potential for conservation-led economic growth.An adult blackback gorilla shelters from the rain. Jo-Anne McArthur/Unbound Project
“I got to understand the role of tourism in conservation and how communities are benefiting from tourism,” she says.
This positive impact had been demonstrated in neighbouring Rwanda, where gorillas were attracting crowds. Uganda, by comparison, was flailing – even though about half the mountain gorilla population – now estimated to number 1063 – is found in Uganda (they also range across the Democratic Republic of Congo).
Dr. Kalema-Zikusoka leads tourists on a gorilla trek in Bwindi. “Once a community member meets a tourist, they’re much less likely to poach, much less likely to destroy the habitat.” Jo-Anne McArthur/Unbound Project
The experience also underlined the risks inherent in human-gorilla interaction: shared DNA renders great apes susceptible to human-borne diseases. As tourism improved, so the risks to habituated gorillas increased. After her stint at Bwindi, Kalema-Zikusoka presented a report to the then executive director of Uganda National Parks, Dr Eric Edroma, outlining the risks and the critical need for a dedicated wildlife vet. He told her that when she graduated, the job would be waiting for her.
The following year, degree in hand, she returned home and set up a vet unit with the Uganda Wildlife Authority.
Dr Kalema-Zikusoka helps a gorilla called Kahara to her feet after rectal prolapse surgery.
“There were so many firsts,” she recalls. “No-one thought you should even touch a wild animal to treat it. It was always [about] breaking barriers. I’d meet resistance, but then I’d also meet people who were supporting me. I worked with them, and we’d get it done.”
Kalema-Zikusoka shaped her job description on the run: one day she’d be translocating giraffes, the next she’d be deep in the rainforest removing a snare from a gorilla’s limb. In-between, she married and had two children, lobbied for funding and built networks with government departments, academics and conservationists including primatologist Dr Jane Goodall. In the forward to Kalema-Zikusoka’s book, Goodall calls her an “inspiring example” who “has made a huge difference to conservation in Uganda”.
Soon after the vet unit’s launch, the intractable link between human and gorilla health was amplified when a baby gorilla died during a scabies outbreak. The infection was traced to impoverished communities living on the park’s periphery; gorillas would often forage in their gardens. CTPH was established in response to the predicament, and in the two decades since has achieved untold success.
CTPH team members always masks when monitoring gorillas, who are susceptible to human diseases because we are so closely related to them. CTPH
“We’ve made a lot of progress,” Kalema-Zikusoka says. “Gorillas are herded back [from community land] before they get sick. Since people are getting more healthy and hygienic we haven’t had a scabies outbreak, [and] giardia has almost disappeared in the gorillas. And as we attend to people’s health and their needs, they care more about the gorillas because we show them that we are not only concerned about the gorillas and the forest and the wildlife, but we also care about them. So, they’re more likely to want to protect the wildlife.”
Collecting gorilla poo is an important part of the job. Jo-Anne McArthur/Unbound Project
Such is CTPH’s success, it has won international funding and recognition for its work – which now includes environmental preservation, family planning programs and support for sustainable agricultural practices such as the coffee project. A laboratory monitors gorilla health and a community lodge offers accommodation overlooking a ripple of mist-plugged valleys at Buhoma, Bwindi’s primary gateway.
Dr Kalema-Zikusoka’s memoir was published in March and is available in Australia.
When COVID-19 struck in 2020, CTPH rose to yet another seemingly insurmountable challenge. Appointed to the government’s COVID-19 taskforce, Kalema-Zikusoka was able to prioritise an immunisation program for rangers and insist on mandatory vaccinations for tourists. She’d long lobbied for a mask mandate for gorilla tourists, and the pandemic helped facilitate this directive. But Bwindi’s habituated gorilla troops remain exposed.
“[Tourists are] wearing masks, but they still want to get close to the gorillas,” she says. “We are continuing to test for respiratory viruses, but also looking at other things like bacteria, salmonella, typhoid.”
And though the great apes have demanded the lion’s share of her time, Kalema-Zikusoka hasn’t forgotten the residents of Queen Elizabeth National Park, where her dream to become a wildlife vet took root all those years ago. Now stable, its lion population is nonetheless vulnerable. As tourism has cast a lifeline to gorillas, so she hopes it might change the fate of wildlife in Uganda’s lesser-known parks.
“The savannah parks are not getting enough tourists,” she says. “It is not enough just to see the wildlife – if you visit the communities, they’re less likely to kill the gorilla, the chimp, the lion, the elephant.
“Once a community member meets a tourist, they’re much less likely to poach, much less likely to destroy the habitat.”
As once a curious child who encountered a pet vervet and a park bereft of lions was wont to choose an unconventional path – one that would change the course of Ugandan conservation.
Catherine Marshall travelled to Uganda as a guest of the Uganda Wildlife Authority.
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 I first started working with gorillas, there were no women at all working in conservation in Uganda, there were no female rangers at all. Now we have female rangers, trackers, and porters. More women are getting involved in conservation in that way. I’m pretty happy about that,” says Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka.
Over time Dr. Kalema-Zikusoka, known as ‘The Gorilla Doctor’ has shifted her focus to also working in public health because it turns out community health and gorillas go hand in hand. In Uganda’s forest communities inside Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, there’s tension between humans and wildlife. People are living in very close proximity to the gorillas, and Dr. Kalema-Zikusoka has made it part of her life’s work to educate locals on the importance of health and hygiene for both themselves and for the conservation and future of Uganda’s mountain gorilla population. She does this through her NGO, Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH). And, Gorilla Conservation Coffee is a social enterprise that’s part of CTPH was launched after Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka visited farmers living adjacent to Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. Here she learned that the farmers were not being given a fair price for their coffee and were struggling hard to survive, forcing them to use the national park to meet their basic family needs for food and fuel wood.
COVID-19 helped people to understand just how devastating the effects of human-to-gorilla transmission of a virus can be, but this is something the pioneering wildlife veterinarian has been working on for many years prior to the pandemic. Today she continues to work, day in and day out, to protect the health of gorillas, as well as that of the communities with whom they co-exist—with a strong focus on empowering women by improving their livelihoods through access to healthcare.
A female mountain gorilla in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park. Uganda is home to half the world’s population of mountain gorillas. There are 587 of them in Bwindi. Image by Alicia-Rae Light.
Alicia-Rae Light: How did you get your start as a veterinarian?
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “I always wanted to be a vet since—I grew up with lots of pets at home. I started a wildlife club in high school, and it took off from there. We took kids to the national parks and I thought, I want to be a vet who works with wildlife. Someone at the wildlife club offices told me about the mountain gorillas and I was so excited to hear about them but they told me we couldn’t visit them because they weren’t yet habituated for tourism. That was in the late eighties. Later when I went to the Royal Veterinary College in the United Kingdom, I got to choose an animal to work with during training and I chose Uganda’s mountain gorillas.”
Alicia-Rae: Was it hard to get involved with working amongst the gorillas since they weren’t yet habituated?
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “It took a few years. Between the time I heard the gorillas weren’t yet habituated to the time that I was in vet school, they had habituated two families for tourism. A doctor who worked in mountain gorilla conservation in Rwanda came to set up the International Gorilla Conservation Programme office, an NGO, in Uganda. She was my supervisor and mentor, and she was very instrumental in ensuring that healthy, safe practices were set up to ensure that people weren’t making gorillas sick with human illnesses. I was looking at that closely, seeing how tourism was affecting gorillas by looking at their fecal samples, which I was given permission to do by the director of Uganda’s National Parks. Eventually, I was hired as the first-ever veterinarian for the Uganda Wildlife Authority.”
Alicia-Rae: What was it like spending time with these incredible primates when gorilla tourism had just begun?
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “It’s been a journey. It was a really exciting time as they had only been working with them for about a year, so the gorillas were not as habituated as they are now, they were quite a bit shyer. It was just an amazing time to be there and there were very few tourists. Not that I don’t like tourists, but it was quite nice to have so few people there and the locals are so charming, friendly, and hospitable.”
Alicia-Rae: When did the gorillas first come in contact with a human illness?
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “The first disease that came to gorillas from people was scabies, a skin disease that came from people living around the park who had very little access to healthcare. That’s when we knew that we needed to improve community healthcare. I made it an imperative part of my work, improving the health of people who interact with the wildlife and live in close contact with them.”
Doctor Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka tracking gorillas in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. Image courtesy of Conservation Through Public Health.
Alicia-Rae: Tell me a little bit about Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), the NGO that you co-founded with your husband Lawrence?
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “With CTPH, We realized that we also needed to look at people’s livelihoods because many people are unhealthy because they were poor. So now we have an active wildlife health program and an actual community health program. We treat the livestock as well and strengthen community-based healthcare for people and get them to also do conservation outreach. We’re integrating human health and animal health together and meanwhile, we’re also integrating wildlife conservation or everything together.
The fact that now people know that COVID-19 can spread from people back to the wildlife, especially the closely related wildlife, like the gorillas and chimps, and even onto cats and other species.
So that got everyone thinking about what we’ve been talking about for so many years: The impact of genetic disease on conservation and on public health. Finally, people really started to understand what CTPH has been trying to do all these years and advocating for. When the pandemic began I was getting calls from people saying or emails saying, ‘Oh, we understand what you’re trying to do now you know, human health equals wildlife health.”
Doctor Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka with members of the Bwindi Coffee Growers Cooperative. Image courtesy of Gorilla Conservation Coffee.
Alicia-Rae: Tell me a little bit more about Gorilla Conservation Coffee?
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “My husband Lawrence thought it would be a good idea to help coffee farmers around Uganda. We noticed that a lot of the coffee farmers were not being hired and so they weren’t benefiting from being close to gorillas like other community members who could get jobs as rangers or porters who carry tourists and luggage, sell crops for meals, or work at different accommodations. The coffee farmers were being left out and were still going into the forest to poach and collect firewood just to survive.
So, we started to engage them as well. That also became a tourist activity because tourists could now go to coffee safaris and visit the coffee farmers. The tourists ended up being the main people who were buying the coffee. Not only the ones visiting Bwindi, but also in other parks because it was being sold in lodges all over Uganda, even the shops in Kampala, and Entebbe Duty-Free.
When we started the Gorilla Conservation Coffee enterprise, we thought most of the sales were going to be outside Uganda, because Ugandans don’t really drink coffee that much, we mainly drink tea.
So it’s all been part of sustainable tourism because we give the farmers better prices than the market price. But the coffee has to be very good so that we get repeat customers. Some people will buy the coffee to say, ‘Oh, let’s help the poor people living next to the gorillas. And then they’ll just buy once because it doesn’t really taste good, thinking they’ve just done something good for the gorillas, but what brings them back is that the coffee tastes really good.”
It’s like even if you can’t come to visit the gorillas, you can support them by buying Gorilla Conservation Coffee because then we’re able to provide an income for people who would otherwise be poaching during the pandemic. So, because of gorilla conservation, it meant that some people got an income during the pandemic during lockdown—the coffee farmers.”
Left: A barista making a coffee inside Gorilla Conservation Coffee in Entebbe, Uganda. Right: The little coffee shop in Entebbe. Images by Alicia-Rae Light
Alicia-Rae: Can travelers come to visit any of your projects in Bwindi?
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “We have a camp in Buhoma called the Gorilla Conservation Camp with the best views of the forest. Our office is based right in the park! It’s where pre-pandemic we hosted students and researchers who are studying the gorillas. They get an immersion when they’re with us because we work with the gorillas and they also learn about the community issues and get more involved in our work.
It’s rustic, it’s not like the high-end accommodation you find in Bwindi, but to me, it has the best view in Bwindi of the forest—it’s amazing. People can also go to the Gorilla Health Center and learn about the community work we’re doing. That’s something that we offer to tourists and also the students and volunteers who come to visit. Some come and stay at the camp, but even if they don’t stay at the camp, they can still come to meet me, see the health center and we do a presentation or a seminar.”
Alicia-Rae: How are you educating the community and what kind of impact has it had on the gorillas since the most recent, unfortunate poaching of Rafiki was poached—a 25-year-old silverback who was part of the Nkuringo gorilla group?
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “We have become much more intensive about it since the pandemic. There wasn’t much poaching in Bwindi before COVID-19 because there was so much tourism. But when the pandemic began and tourism had to be suspended for six months, not only because of the global lockdowns and preventing people from making each other sick but to prevent people from making the gorillas sick. During that time poaching went up drastically and that’s what led to the spearing of Rafiki. It was very sad, but after Rafiki was speared, we realized that we now needed to address hunger.
Rafiki’s killer was given 11 years in jail, which is the longest anyone has ever been given for killing a wild animal in Uganda. It was a very strong message, but as long as people are hungry and desperate because tourists stop coming, it will keep happening. Their whole livelihood was focused on tourism. People were very hungry and the money from tourism that was helping them to buy food wasn’t there. People had stopped doing things like farming since tourism came along, and took jobs as porters instead because in one day you could make what someone farming could make in one month or one week.”
Dr. Gladys In the field in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. Image courtesy of CTPH.
Alicia-Rae: So how have you addressed the issue of hunger with a long-term solution in the region?
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “We realized that we needed to address hunger immediately so we started to provide them with fast-growing seedlings. We first went to the most vulnerable—the people from the village where the poacher came from, the Nkuringo Sector. We selected about 1000 homes there together with the Uganda Wildlife Authority, wardens, rangers, and village conservation team to identify the people who were the poorest. Of course, that included the poacher’s wife, a young woman in her early twenties. She’s the poorest of the poor, everyone there has a piece of land, and she doesn’t even have that. She’s living on her grandfather’s land in a small hut with three children under the age of three. When we gave her the seedlings she created a garden to put her crops in.
But those are the kind of people who find it worth it to go into the forest to poach for food, during covid, because they were hungry and could feed their families, or because they could sell the meat they poached at the local market.
We’ve done a small survey and we have our volunteers following up on them to see how they are growing. One thing that came out of the survey is that the biggest impact COVID has had on them is hunger.”
Alicia-Rae: What if something like Covid happens again? What can be done to protect those communities going forward because they’re so heavily reliant on tourism?
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “Well, that was part of the reason also where we provided them the fast-growing seedlings—we gave them 10 different types to plant. It wasn’t just emergency food relief for them to have something to eat today. But it was also for them to get back into sustainable farming, which they used to do before tourism began, that was the only way they survived. So that when tourists come back, the money from tourism doesn’t go to feed their stomachs as they’ll have their own food source. Instead, that money can go towards other things, like paying school fees. Hunger is the most basic human need followed by other things. If the only way that they can feed themselves is through money from tourists, then that’s a dangerous situation to be in. This way they will always have food, and the money from tourism does other things to support their work.”
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka hard at work in Entebbe. Image courtesy of CTPH.
Alicia-Rae: I know that you’re very involved with women in conservation in Uganda, can you tell me more?
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “I think it’s important to engage women in conservation and Ride for Women in Bwindi is a shining example of that. We need to remember that women are half of the equation. If we’re only engaging the men, like the reformed poachers, which is another group we started to engage a lot more after Rafiki was killed, we’re missing the mark. When we approached them, the wives said, ‘Look, we tell our husbands to go and poach because we need the food for our home.’ So, we know we really need to engage the women because they are the ones who their husbands will listen to when they say don’t go back to poach.”
Alicia-Rae: Are there many opportunities for women to work in Bwindi?
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “There wasn’t but Ride for a Women provided that. During the pandemic, a lot of them were about to be laid off but we got them to make masks for the rangers and everyone else instead of the traditional Kitenge clothing and tablecloths that were being sold to tourists pre-pandemic.”
Alicia-Rae: Are there rangers who are women?
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “There are many rangers who are women, but the majority are men. When I first started out working with gorillas, there were no female rangers at all. It was not the job for them; the mindset was a female ranger or tracker doesn’t take people to the gorillas. Now there are more female rangers, and we even have female trackers and porters.”
Member of the Batwa Pygmy Tribe in Bwindi who used to peacefully co-exist with the mountain gorillas until Bwindi became a protected national park. Image by Wildplaces Africa.
Alicia-Rae:What was it like being the only woman in a field traditionally dominated by men?
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “They used to say women can’t go to the gorillas, but I did. And other women are doing it now so I’m really pleased about that.
I was so excited about being with the gorillas and the work I was doing for conservation. That it didn’t bother me too much, but. And the men were very kind, you know, they would walk slowly so that I don’t get tired because they’re not necessarily fitter than women. I have to say. So that’s just how we were made.
It’s good that we’re having more women getting involved in conservation in that way— I’m pretty happy about that. When I first started out like twenty-five years ago, there were no women working here working in conservation. But eventually, I’m glad that I inspired other women.”
Alicia-Rae:Tell me about CTPH’s health education workshops?
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “We realized that if the gorillas could catch diseases from humans they could also catch it from other things. Like if people don’t cover their rubbish heaps or they defecate in their gardens, or if they leave dirty clothing, or scarecrows, and the gorillas come into contact with it, they are going to pick up other diseases. So, I was tasked with that job to hold these health education workshops about this issue—and that was my first time working in public health. And that was a turning point in my life.”
Alicia-Rae Light:Then what happened?
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “We selected the villages where gorillas were coming out of the forest and going into the human communities. Together with the district health authority, we were talking to the communities talking about hygiene, community conservation, and how their health and hygiene affect conservation. Talking about why this was a problem, helping them understand. I was about to say this is the solution until the warden touched my arm and said, let them come up with the solution.
They came up with much more varied and better solutions than I was proposing for them, which was a big eye-opener for me as a vet trained to solve people’s problems. I wasn’t trained to listen to what people have to do to solve their own problems.”
Alicia-Rae Light:What were their solutions suggested and how were they different from yours?
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “One thing that they said to me that I didn’t expect to hear is that they wanted health services to be brought closer to them—and that was not among my solutions, mine was to be more hygienic, don’t defecate in the gardens.
And I just thought, wow, that’s amazing—I just didn’t realize that they didn’t get health care. I knew that the further away you go from the capital city, there are fewer services but I didn’t realize that they had no health services at all.
They were like, look, you need to continue to give us this education, it shouldn’t just be a one-off that you come today, you should be continuous.
And then also they said that we needed to strengthen the human gorilla conflict team and get them gumboots and make sure that they’re motivated.”
Alicia-Rae Light:The young women in the villages must have been very inspired by you…
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “The women were whispering to each other saying wow, we must educate our girls. Look at her, you know, she’s standing up in the communities and talking to us. She’s leading a team of men. They really liked that. Girls there get pregnant at 15, and become a wife of someone, there was hardly any girl’s education. And that’s important because once the girls are educated, they influence their families a lot. You know, when you live in a home, few women are educated.”
