Episode 5 – Born From Here/ Nkanzarirwa Hanu

Land Body Ecologies Podcast is a series of six stand-alone episodes sharing stories of solastalgia from land-dependent and Indigenous communities affected by environmental change. In Episode 5, Born From Here, we travel to the edges of the Bwindi Impenetrable Forests in Kanungu district in Southwestern Uganda. Looking to the dense green hills that hold fields of sunflowers and ridges overlooking sacred trees, listeners hear stories of the ancestral land of the Batwa community.

Clouds constantly rise and fall in the hills of Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. This is known as Muntaba and is a place the Batwa would not visit as it is meant to be spiritual and sited with gold. The Batwa were once forest dwellers who used to live in Ekyuya, Semuliki, Bwindi, and Mgahinga, their ancestral lands in Uganda. In the early 1990s, government authori ...