Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
AFRICA'S GREATEST LEVELLER
Uganda, January 2014
B
oston had been singing Uganda's praises for weeks, and I was anticipating the country
with perhaps over-eager expectations. 'There is a guesthouse in every village,' he said as
the border point of Mutukula came in sight, 'and you can't fail to find food. There are even
internet cafés. Lev, you will see - Uganda is a different world to these backwaters.'
There is a small rainforest that straddles the Tanzania-Uganda border that teems with
colobus monkeys. Boston and I spent two days hacking our way through the vines until,
eventually, we discovered tracks made by illegal loggers and were able to make steadier
progress north. At Mutukula we made the official crossing. According to Boston, now that
we were in Uganda, we would see civilisation flourish - but, for the first day, there was
only more impenetrable forest. It wasn't until we banked back east to re-join the course of
the river that we would come across our first town and I would see if Boston's bold claims
were true.
A few kilometres north of where the river meets the shore of Lake Victoria sits the fish-
ing village of Kasansero. The phrase has connotations of a small, idyllic community with a
long-established way of life, but Kasansero was more properly known as a 'landing site', a
warren of houses and industry that had sprung up for workers to take maximum advantage
of the lake. Like other landing sites along the shores of the lake, Kasansero had been foun-
ded to harvest the famous Nile Perch that flourish in the lake. In the 1950s, when Uganda
was still a British colony, the prevailing view had been that Lake Victoria was an under-ex-
ploited resource that could feed great swathes of East Africa - and the Nile Perch had been
introduced to the lake to create a new fishing industry. Places like Kasansero appeared all
along the shore, people flocked to the lake to build businesses, and a new economy began
to boom. But, though Uganda's local population benefited, the introduction of the invasive
fish was an environmental disaster. The Nile Perch are brutal predators. With no natur-
al controls on their numbers, they colonised the lake with astonishing speed, condemning
other species to extinction.
