Elephants too once roamed Jinja

What you need to know:

  • According to the reports, elephants were in existent on more 70 per cent of Uganda’s total surface area. As of this generation’s record keeping negligence, its alarming. For instance, the Uganda Museum did not have any physical specimen of fish by 2017 when I visited.

In the Daily Monitor of August 21, Mr Charles Onyango-Obbo narrates how hippos that once roamed Jinja have disappeared, thanks to the colonial efforts to transform Jinja into an industrial hub and population growth.

He finds this incomprehensible, but even more captivating, elephants too roamed Jinja, until 1950s. These losses exemplify several other losses of interesting plants and animals known or unknown to us.

Mr Onyango-Obbo praises the men and women of the time who made Jinja a great industrial town. Contrary to this, I blame historical development actors for not planning to keep the elephants, hippos and many plants and animals.

If they had done so, Jinja or Uganda would be different and better. Currently, some key infrastructure of the time such as roads, hotels (including the famous Rippon hotel that hosted the Queen of England) and some industries are no more.
The roads around the town are largely impassable, hotels have been abandoned, and several industries closed.

If Jinja had been developed in a manner friendly to the hippos and elephants, Jinja people would be cashing in more from tourism. The current development actors would have access to locally mobilised resources to maintain the roads instead of relying on loans from foreign development banks. The hotels would be thriving to host tourists.

The need to keep our plants and animals less disturbed as we develop is crucial and should be taken seriously by the current proponents of development, not only in urban development but in agriculture, mining, fishing and tourism, to name but a few.

In the story, Mr Onyango-Obbo raises a concern of a poor record of what we have or have lost in Uganda and the negligence of the current generation to improve the records. This is fundamental. It is true, workers during the colonial time were good at this and most of their records of plants and animals remain intact to this day.

In fact, more evidence of presence of elephants in Jinja by 1950s is available from a 1962 report by Brooks and Buss (Brooks & Buss, 1962. The Journal of Wildlife Management, 26(1), 38-50), two colonial scientists, who worked for the then Game and Fisheries Department, Entebbe and Washington State University.

According to the reports, elephants were in existent on more 70 per cent of Uganda’s total surface area. As of this generation’s record keeping negligence, its alarming. For instance, the Uganda Museum did not have any physical specimen of fish by 2017 when I visited.

Laban Musinguzi,
[email protected]