The Return of Diversity
                                                    Mark Reed

Dwarfed by the towering trees that lattice the sky above them with their branches, a group of people in cagouls form a twisting line through the forest. The guide is cutting a new path in search of a part of this forest which has not been either cultivated or grazed. Again and again we come across the tell-tale cow-pats and move on, clambering over more fallen trees and crossing more of the streams that appear everywhere on this mountain. Our 11-member expedition was composed of students from Aberdeen and Dundee Universities in Scotland, and we were joined in the field by five students from Makerere University in Uganda. We came to Mount Elgon to explore the effects that people are having on this fragile mountain ecosystem that so many people depend on for their survival. Millions of people, radiating out for miles from this lonely volcanic mountain on the border between Uganda and Kenya, depend on it to supply them with water. Its patchwork of lower slopes grow maize, plantain and other crops, and hidden under the canopy of the montane forest are the pervasive wanderings of cattle. They leave no part of the mountain untouched. I remembered the despairing expression on the face of the officer at Park Headquarters:  "They’re everywhere" he had said. I hadn’t fully believed him until now, as I listened with disbelief while our guide told us he knew another place where the cattle couldn’t have reached. It was getting late. We had been hearing the sound of rain on the canopy above us for the last few minutes, and now large drops were beginning to land all around us. We began to head back to camp.

That evening we discussed our options around the camp fire. The team who were studying current land uses could be based anywhere, but for the teams that were looking at the birds, small mammals and vegetation, we had to find a place without people. The next morning a reconnaissance team began the trek to higher altitudes in search of a suitable place. The day after that, the second upheaval of equipment and belongings began. Fifty porters with packages of various shapes and sizes on their heads or backs, wound their way up the small paths through the forest, until they came out onto the grasslands of Benet. Near here was Piswa Hut, one of the Park’s ranger posts where we would base our work for the next two and a half months.

Before leaving for Uganda, we had spoken to the leader of a 1962 expedition to the area, Euan Thomas. What we now saw before us would have shocked him. He had spoken to us of a village which had a unique importance in African culture. No-where, except for isolated areas in Ethiopia and Tanzania, had rectangular houses been built before the Europeans arrived. European rectangular houses were widely copied across Africa, but this was one of the only places to have evolved the design themselves. Euan had asked us to see what proportion of houses still used this design, but as we walked across the grasslands, we found them deserted. There was not a house in sight.

Our guide explained. He had been involved in the evictions when the National Park decided to exclude people from that part of the park. The action had taken place in two waves in 1983 and 1990. Our guide had been born in a hut on these very grasslands, but in his capacity as a ranger he had burnt down his mother and father’s house. He told us he did not regret doing it: "We had to show them we were serious." These people have now been allocated land on the more fertile lower slopes and none of the people whom we spoke to had any complaints about how the park had treated them. Most considered themselves to be better off where they are now. Sadly though, no-one lives in the rectangular huts of their ancestors any more, though some use rectangular huts to house animals.

To investigate the present day land-use on Mount Elgon, it was necessary to work from satellite camps lower down the mountain. Sitting outside hut after hut, sipping milk from cows which had been tethered nearby or eating various types of "mush", we were given a privileged insight into the culture of the local Sabiny people. Interviews revealed the a wealth of traditional knowledge, but little knowledge of modern sustainable farming practices or family planning. However, we were struck by the eagerness of these people to learn and be given advice. Equality here has little meaning; it is a word which is laughed at. In these villages a wife can be beaten until she consents to have sex with her husband. And despite recent laws,  female circumcision is still widespread. To western eyes, many of these women seem virtually slaves. They are bought and sold by fathers in exchange for cows, and when the father sends his daughter to meet her new husband for the first time, he gives her a back-pack in which he includes a stick. If the stick is short, the husband should expect an obedient, submissive wife. But if it is long, he should expect a wife who will be difficult to control. He then uses the stick to beat her into submission. But the women of these communities shrug their shoulders at these burdens: this is normal and they are happy. They lay claim to a deep cultural heritage of which they are proud, and there is little for which they will give it up. But in an area where most mothers have at least ten children, and polygamy allows men to father over thirty children, many people are keen to hear that they can do more than just pray that they will have no more children. The National Park and IUCN’s Conservation and Development Project are carrying out a comprehensive programme of education and advice, and data from this study has helped them target needs more accurately.

But things are changing. A few weeks into the expedition, the rest of the Ugandan team arrived after finishing exams at Makerere University in the country’s capital,  Kampala. One night it was Martin and Chem’s turn to wash the pots and multi-coloured plastic plates that we had just eaten from. Despite having both graduated from University, this was a new experience for them both. But with happy (if bemused) expressions, they plunged their hands into the job at hand. They may not be the model modern men that Western women expect, but they would never beat their wives, and much of the rural culture produces the same reactions in them as it does in us.

After a good meal, interrupted only by the blood-curdling calls of hyenas echoing across the nearby valley, we made our way to our tents for the night. The air in this place is cold but clear and delicious, producing the kind of conflicting passion and reticence that a clean sheet of white paper produces in a writer who is about to embark on a great work. Sleep does not come easily when there is a sky so full of stars to gaze at in wonderment. Wandering out onto the grasslands by moonlight, and watching the surrounding stillness and silence in disbelief,  you feel privy to a secret. Walking through the forest each day to discover more about the plants and animals that live in this place, it feels as though we are uncovering layer after layer of this forest’s secrets. But day after day, as we watch the cycles of life and death; falling trees, families of new-born mice, our respect grows for this place, and we feel more as though it has decided to let us in on its secrets. Wandering through the undergrowth each day, it is as though we were learning to read again. Before, the plants were like a blur of symbols on a page; an expanse of green with occasional unusual leaves or stems protruding from the page, but a non-descript (if beautiful) mass of green. But now, as we look around us, we can see the different species; carpets of Pilea and Senicula composing a sentence in the paragraph of shrubs and trees which tower above them. All part of the story that is this mountain.

Making the trek to the crater and peaks of Mount Elgon at the end of the expedition, our minds began to place the findings of our study in the long story of this mountain’s history. Standing on a huge rock in the middle of one of the largest craters in the world, it is impossible to imagine the force of the explosions that had created this place. Pictures and sounds form in the mind, as animals fled the approaching magma, and plants were engulfed in flames. One wonders what plants and animals would have been first to recolonise the barren, steam-filled landscape that must have once occupied this place. It is difficult to resist comparing this first great catastrophe with the human magma from which plants and animals alike have fled in the last century. Elephants and buffalo once used to roam this place, but now our only encounter with these animals is through the smoke and AK-47’s of ten poachers who have just killed six buffalo. Young trees are noticeable by their absence under the forest canopy, grazed to the ground. The ancient forest of this mountain has few heirs to take its place as its tallest members topple with old age.

But hope is growing. Although some forest pastoralists still persist illegally in the area, when the majority of people left the burnt poles of the houses they were born in for lower slopes, some young saplings began to make the journey towards their parents in the canopy above. Under the canopy it is difficult to see much change, due to continued grazing, but the change is most striking in the open areas where djemes once tilled the soil and the sound of children playing in compounds once echoed around mud huts. Now these places are silent; reclaimed by nature, engulfed by a swarm of diversity. A part of this volcanic mountain is breathing a sigh of relief after its second catastrophe, this time wrought by humans. But questions still hang over these formerly cultivated slopes. Can the wounds that humanity created ever heal? And will the full diversity of these forests ever return to Mount Elgon? The trees from which the monkeys swing today cannot conceal a deeply scarred landscape. Only time will show Mount Elgon’s recovery from its second great catastrophe. We feel privileged to have been able to witness its first faltering steps towards recovery and the return of diversity.

Walking out into a mist-filled morning as the landscape rubbs the dew from its eyes, and listening to the strange calls of monkeys as they wake up to the new day, one can feel the harmony of nature in this place. Mount Elgon’s largest human deluge arrived in response to the guns of Idi Amin, as desperate people sought refuge in the country’s high ground from violence and oppression. The dawn of Uganda’s new democracy has turned to morning. And in this new day, a huge effort is underway to utilise this mountain’s vast resources sustainably. Although this country faces a huge conservation challenge, attitudes to the environment have been changing here as fast as the political climate. The relief that is expressed in the irrepressible smiles and friendliness of a people who have experienced so much suffering, is mirrored in the morning mists of this land, as they rise from the wakening forests and mountains of Uganda.

ProjectElgon