Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Three days upriver from Jinja, Boston and I stood in front of what I could only describe
as a vision from hell. On one side, the river cut its course north; on the other, what had
once been virgin jungle was now a fresh plantation of tree stumps, blackened by fire, the
indigenous forest being forced back by flames to make way for farming ground. The Nile
was growing broader the longer we walked and, at this point, was almost a mile wide. But,
as it became more powerful, so too did the opportunity for harnessing its power grow - not
only in the dam we had seen outside Jinja, but in the potential for irrigation and agricul-
ture as well. The river brought farmers here, and farmers meant deforestation. The Nile,
we were seeing, brings life - but it also takes it away.
'Did he really believe that, Boston? The old man?'
Boston scoffed, 'He thought the forest was endless, and in it the animals and fruit would
continue to be there until the end of the world. That's the problem with Africans, Lev -
they don't see a problem with chopping down the trees, especially if there's a profit to be
made. See, the Mabira Forest we passed through - it looks real, but the truth is it's like
those Hollywood movie sets. It's a façade. Go into the woods fifty metres and behind the
old mahogany and teak trees you'll find destruction, where the loggers have been. The
government does nothing to stop it.'
It was true. In the Mabira we'd seen five-hundred-year-old trees sawn down at a rate of
ten a day by teenagers who'd been paid three dollars by the landlord. This was big money
for a poor villager, and with the economics of the industry working like that, what hope
was there for convincing local Ugandan people to leave the forests alone? It's all well and
good preaching the wonders of conservation, but not to men with families to feed and roofs
to keep over their heads.
We spent the next days walking north, but the further we went the more apparent the
devastation became. Instead of hacking our way through jungle, here we walked through
coffee plantations, banana trees and maize fields, all planted amid the shorn trunks, the up-
rooting of their stumps being prohibitively expensive. Seas of white ash made it seem as
if it had been snowing. In the plantations only a few living trees remained, left there delib-
erately to provide shelter from sun for the farmers. On the third day, instead of baobabs,
vines and knotted mahogany, a flat, unrelenting sugar cane plantation stretched for as far
as the eye could see. Gently waving in the wind, the twelve foot high sugar cane was eerily
silent. Boston and I stopped to survey it. Of all the things we had seen, this, to me, seemed
the most atrocious: a ghastly vision of man's victory against nature, and a visible statement
of how consumerism, not conservation, was dictating Africa's future. Sugar - that sweet
crystal craved by millions in the West - had utterly vanquished an ancient biosphere, and
in it millions upon millions of creatures, from the smallest chameleon to the most intelli-
gent of primates.
'It makes you sick,' said Boston as we took off into the cane.
