Fred de Sam Lazaro:
Every morning, these Batwa men offer tourists a glimpse of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle they remember from their childhoods, starting fires, hunting, harvesting traditional medicinal plants in the forest.
The forest here is also the last remaining habitat of the fabled mountain gorilla, habitat that’s been steadily lost to human encroachment in recent decades. The Batwa lived alongside gorillas since the beginning of time, these men say, but, today, they are some of the last survivors with any memory of it.
In 1991, the government of Uganda reclassified lands the Batwa had lived on for millennia as national parks. That decision pitted the interests of a largely invisible people against those of an animal that had become a global icon for environmental conservation.
Sixty-year-old Stephen Serutokye (ph) still remembers what the Batwa call the eviction like it was yesterday