The People Vs the Elephants of Bukorwe

The People Vs the Elephants of Bukorwe

Bukorwe is a small village in southwest Uganda, about 6 KM from the Congolese border. It has an estimated population of 3,000 people. Located in between two major national parks, one famous for the rare tree-climbing lions and the other famous for being the home to the last mountain gorillas in the world, the community has become an ideal location for several luxury safari lodges.

Bukorwe is in the same neighborhood with an airdrome complete with a 2 KM runway and an 18-hole golf course as extra amenities for the high net worth individuals it usually hosts.

Despite the millions spent within the community, its opportunities haven't trickled down to its residents. The nearest town has less than 1.5 KM of tarmac paved road, the community still struggles with access to water, young girls double as family caretakers, the schools are poor and the hospitals are few. While there are many scattered coffee plants there are no visible coffee plantations – implying a continued reliance on subsistence farm as a proxy indicator of poverty within the community.

When the community eventually turned to the government for help, they were told a tender had been issued for the purchase of the Mukwatango tree. A strong tree that would be planted along the boundaries to keep the elephants out – but the residents feared it was easily flammable, so they rejected the idea.

In 2012, the residents of Bukwore decided to act in self-defense against the elephants. The simple solution would have been to simply kill the elephants. Instead, the community chose to do the harder thing. To dig a trench along enough, it would serve as a boundary to separate the park from human settlements. A trench so big, an elephant or buffalo wouldn’t be able to jump it.

Every Wednesday, the community came together in an ambitious act of community philanthropy. They gave digging equipment such as hoes, spades, and wheelbarrows. They gave of their labour. They gave water and obushera, a local energy drink made from millet and rich in iron.

Every Wednesday they dug. The trench grew 5 feet deep and about a meter and half wide. However, the elephants soon realized what was happening; the trench was a barrier to lock them out of well-tendered gardens of fruit. So the elephants started to shove the heaps of soil left at the top, back down into the trench to level the ground again. Easily undoing days of human labour, it is easier to fill a trench than to create it. Especially if the heap of the soil that created it is still lying around.

This countermove by the elephants almost broke the community's spirit. They had given so much to peacefully co-exist with the elephants and it was about to come to nothing. Deo Kalegesa, a shy man now in his early 50s, but back then in his mid-40s was the first to define a countermove to what the elephants had done. He determined he was going to dig the trench deeper, from 5 feet to 7 feet. He dug what he could, but the progress was so slow, eventually, his family decided to chip in.

In the end, the village had dug for 6 years a trench from Kyambura up to the Ishasha; the Uganda – Congo border. Only an international boarder could have stopped them from going farther. On the other side of the Congolese border, the Congolese government built an electric fence to separate the elephants from humans.

Seeing what the community's philanthropy and giving had done. The Uganda Conservation Foundation and the Wildlife Conversation Society got on-board to support the maintenance of the trench.more and more just to give back.