RwandAir In-Flight Magazine

Murchison Falls

The rebirth of a Ugandan treasure

Story and Photos by Mark Darrough

Enormous Marabou storks circled Queen’s Tower as we approached Kampala, their four metre cloak-like wings and sharp pointed bills bringing to mind the folk creatures of Grimm’s Fairytales. Motorcycle taxis (boda-bodas) darted through the city’s relentless midday traffic. My driver pointed to the east, to the lake port of Jinja, where nearby lay the fabled source of the Nile River.

Kampala lies on a series of hills just northwest of Murchison Bay, a narrow inlet extending from Lake Victoria, the world’s second largest freshwater lake. Europe’s mad dash to discover the mythical source of the Nile led to the sighting of the lake by British explorer John Hanning Speke in 1858.

The city’s historic influence from British colonialists and Arabic and Asian merchants from old Swahili trade routes is, today, best illustrated by the Anglican cathedrals, mosques and Hindu temples positioned on the city’s lush green hills. Kampala is a dizzying blend of this foreign influence and the wild heartbeat of urban Africa, where men sprint with heavy wheelbarrows of sorghum down skyscraper-lined boulevards.

I would soon discover that an older African spirit, one of great rivers, myth, and wild savannah lands, was to be found in the northeast of the country, at a place called Murchison Falls. There, I would also find a paradise once spoiled by the reckless pursuits of man, now reviving because of man’s commitment to save it.

After a six-hour ride north of Kampala, we reached a high grassland escarpment scattered with acacia, tamarine and mango trees overlooking the sprawling Lake Albert to our west.

We were on the continental divide; from here the Congo River basin flowed west to the Atlantic Ocean, the Nile north to the Mediterranean Sea. The sun was setting as we descended upon the lake’s old trade port, Butiaba, where at the turn of the 20th century King Leopold’s infamous wealth of elephant ivory and rubber was carried on porters’ backs to the rail line heading east toward the Indian Ocean.

We had reached the floor of the expansive Albertine Rift Valley, where 30 percent of Africa’s biodiversity exists on a surface area covering seven percent of the entire continent. At the valley’s northern end lay Murchison Falls National Park, its name echoing 19th century explorations to find the Nile’s true source. Four years after stumbling upon the massive Victoria, Speke succeeded in finding the river’s exit, near Jinja. Yet during his attempt to follow the river’s course north to Sudan, an outbreak of tribal warfare forced him to turn away from his route downriver.

Speke’s party approached the river again at Gondokoro station near modern day Juba, South Sudan. There he met fellow English explorer Samuel Baker, who set off upriver and achieved what Speke could not: linking the river at Gondokoro to Victoria, thus mapping the final stretch of the river’s 6,500-kilometre journey from Egypt’s delta to its most southern source. Along- side his wife Florence Baker, an orphaned slave girl he had stolen from a sultan in the Ottoman Empire, he reached a great waterfall where the Nile squeezes through a narrow gorge only six metres wide—one of the most powerful surges of water found anywhere in the world. He named it Murchison Falls, after Director of the National Geographic Society, Sir Roderick Murchison.

“The fall of water was snow-white, which had a superb effect as it contrasted with the dark cliffs that walled the river,” wrote Baker in his diary. “The graceful palms of the tropics and the wild plantains perfected the beauty of the view. This was the greatest waterfall of the Nile.”

Murchison’s powerful falls form the central feature of the park today. On its journey from Jinja to Lake Albert, the Victorian Nile bisects the park and serves as the lifeline for its immense grassland ecosystem, home to a diverse number of Africa’s most celebrated reptiles, mammals, and river birds.

Late that night I sat on the porch of a safari tent at the picturesque Murchison River Lodge, listening to the grunts of hippos coming from the marshy shoreline just 20 metres away. The next day we ferried across the river to the north bank and were soon driving through endless rolling plains of tall golden grass and scattered acacia trees.

A family of 15 elephants roamed through a long, narrow strip of Borassus palm trees called “Elephant Corridor.” The trees weren’t indigenous to Uganda, but to Sudan’s savannahs in the north. Elephants cannot digest the trees’ hard fruit seeds, and over time the trees began growing all over the park from the dung scattered by elephants migrating from Sudan.

We passed a pair of male Rothschild giraffes clashing their long necks against each other in a playful test of strength; nearby stark white cattle egrets were perched atop the enormous backs of water buffalo, feeding from their insects, while long-faced topi antelope sprinted through large herds of indigenous Ugandan kob.

The northern end of the park is flanked by the White Nile flowing from Lake Albert to the Mediterranean. Two men paddled 50 metres from the shore beyond a pod of hippos. I asked our guide if they were fishing. “They act like they are fishing when the guides are here,” said Lawrence, a park ranger. “But as soon as we leave, they will land their boats and check their snares for animals.”

Lawrence highlighted a troubling conflict between man and animal, one that almost brought Africa’s most heralded park to the brink of complete devastation. The fall of the park in the seventies and eighties can be attributed to a number of factors. On one side was the political turmoil of post-independent Uganda, where amid the fervor of nationalism enacted by brutal dictator Idi Amin, the park was degazetted and closed off to foreign tourists. Amin’s soldiers, and later the notorious guerillas of the Lord’s Resistance Army, used the park—and the animals—as they pleased.

Yet what plagued the park far more, claims anthropologist and archeologist Kara Blackmore, was the militaristic modernisation of the poachers from surrounding communities. “Poachers went from using bows and arrows to AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades,” said Ms. Blackmore back at the lodge that night.

Dr. Iain Hamilton, head of Save the Elephants, recalls from his 1980 post-Amin survey, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more intense slaughter of elephants than in Uganda in the late 70s.” The population of the park’s elephants dropped from roughly 15,000 in the 1960s to less than 200 in 1982, the final year of Dr. Hamilton’s four-year survey. Other animals had also dropped off just as significantly: lions, antelope, hippos, and buffalo were all nearing the point of extinction.

One animal did not survive. Local legend claims that a ranger shot the last white rhino for its horn profits in 1983—an ironic tragedy illustrating the lack of provision for Murchison’s rangers who, according to Ms. Blackmore, were “once at the top of their game, internationally speaking.”

Yet the true testament to the park is not its downfall—from Africa’s most visited park in the sixties to a slaughter field in
the seventies—but its recovery. Through the dedication of the government’s Uganda Wildlife Authority and conservationist groups like Save the Elephants, animal populations have steadily risen the past two decades. Even rhinos have been successfully re-introduced to a large protected sanctuary 60 km south of the park, with the aim of someday bringing them back to Murchison.

The next day I sat on the bow of a small riverboat heading to the falls. Countless pods of hippos raised their enormous snouts along the shorelines, Nile crocodiles lay in tall papyrus grass absorbing the heat of the midday sun, and families of elephants, once a scarce sight along the river, disappeared into a thick, dark acacia forest beyond the marshlands.

Mounds of white foam began floating past the boat, and the distant roar of the waterfall grew louder as the river narrowed into a lush green gorge. The immense power of the approaching waterfall was spellbinding. Centuries ago the king of the gigantic Bunyoro kingdom would stand on the river’s south bank and line up the most beautiful of the Bunyoro women, enticing his warri- ors to jump the six meter width of the falls. If they survived, each would have his pick of women standing downriver.

It was a magical place shrouded by history and lore. Ms. Blackmore had told me of Iron Age pottery and ancient stone tools she found near the base of the falls, and of Baker’s battles with marauding slavers who dominated East Africa’s ivory trade on his journey to the falls.

Driving south to the adjacent Kaniyo Pabidi Forest to trek chimpanzees, I thought of the park’s history and fascinating diversity of landscape and wildlife.

Ms. Blackmore had argued, “Where else do you find, sandwiched into one park, the oldest mahogany forest in East Africa, the savannah landscapes with its leopards and lions, and the most powerful surge of white water in the world?”

Nowhere else in the world, I thought, a giant red sun dipping beneath Lake Albert as our Land Cruiser raced along a dirt highway south toward Kampala.