- Since the 1960s, Uganda’s climate has warmed by an average of 1.3°C (2.3°F).
- The warming is partly responsible for an increasing number of catastrophic floods on the Nyamwamba River, in western Uganda’s Rwenzori Mountains.
- In 2020 alone, 173,000 people were affected by flooding in Kasese district, when 25,000 houses were destroyed.
- Many of those rendered homeless by the floods continue to languish in temporary housing camps four years on.
This is the first of a two-part series on climate-related disasters in western Uganda. Part Two will be published next week.
KASESE, Uganda — In March 2020, right as the rainclouds began to gather, Rehema Aryema Namale bought a house here in western Uganda. It cost her 50 million shillings, around $12,000, and her plan was to retire in it. She was looking forward to tending a garden and raising her children there.
Less than two months later, it was gone.
Namale’s house had been built in a suburb of the district capital Kasese, near the banks of the Nyamwamba, a river that begins high in the snowy peaks of western Uganda’s Rwenzori Mountains, flowing through Kasese and past the lions and buffalo of Queen Elizabeth National Park on its 126-kilometer (78-mile) journey to Lake George.
Over the past decade or so, the Nyamwamba has begun flooding more frequently. The flood that changed Namale’s life on May 8, 2020, was one of the worst on record here. Twenty-five thousand homes were destroyed that day.
“The house just went away like that,” Namale said, sitting under a tree in Muhokya, a camp for displaced people where she still lives nearly four years later.
Uganda’s climate is changing. Since the 1960s, average temperatures here have increased by about 1.3° Celsius (2.3° Fahrenheit). The Rwenzori glaciers, once so majestic that they may have inspired a Greek merchant 2,000 years ago to dub them the “mountains of the moon,” are nearly gone. The air above what’s left of them hangs hotter than before. When it coalesces into storm clouds, the ensuing rains can be sudden and torrential, sweeping down the Rwenzori valleys and wiping farms, houses and bridges off the map.
Here, as in many other parts of East Africa, climate change isn’t an abstract concept: it’s a material reality. Every year now, like clockwork, the Nyamwamba reminds people of that in a fury of tumbling boulders and floodwaters.
The angry gods of progress
Long before the internal combustion engine was invented, the climate of the Rwenzori Mountains was an object of reverence and worship. The range is home to the Bakonzo, a subgroup of the Bantu people who spread from West Africa across the continent beginning 4,000 years ago. The Rwenzoris take their name from the Bakonzo word for snow, nzururu. Atop their peaks, Kithasamba is said to reside: “the Great One who does not climb.”
In Bakonzo cosmology, Kithasamba fertilizes the valleys below the range through snowfall, which feeds the Nyamwamba and other rivers as they snake past sacred hills and hidden hot springs on their way to the plains. When the first European explorers arrived in this part of western Uganda in the 19th century, Bakonzo porters intentionally led those who sought to scale the Rwenzori peaks in circles, fearing that their presence would offend its celestial occupants.
The glaciers have shrunk by nearly 90% since 1900, one of a growing number of visible signs of climate change in East Africa. The floods are another.
“You can look at the period from 1964 up to 2007, and the river Nyamwamba had never flooded the way it is flooding now,” said Chance Kahindo, the mayor of Kasese, from behind his desk in the town’s municipal headquarters.
Figures collated by InfoNile show that between 2014 and 2020, the number of people affected by flooding in the larger district of Kasese rose sixfold, to 120,000 people.
Western Uganda’s changing climate isn’t the only element at work in making the Nyamwamba more aggressive. People are also helping to shape it into a deadly force. Upriver, illicit sand mining and deforestation have eroded its banks, loosening boulders that crash downward into homes during the floods.
Some Ugandan environmental officials say that fires that were accidentally started high up in the mountains destroyed wetlands that used to act as water catchments during heavy rains. Others say that new glacial lakes created by warming temperatures are prone to overflowing during those rains, worsening the floods.
Like so much of the chaos in this era of ecological outburst, the disasters on the Nyamwamba’s banks have many causes. The end result is less complicated. Between 2020 and 2022, 35 people were killed by flooding along the river, and 16,063 became homeless.
“The government and other organizations have been helping, but it’s not enough,” said Gideon Thabughakibi, a municipal official from the town of Kilembe, one of the worst-hit in the 2020 floods.
There are other losses as well, more difficult to measure but no less devastating. Dotted throughout the Rwenzori are sites of spiritual and ceremonial importance to the Bakonzo: the Akasesa swamp, where Kalisya, the god of domestic and wild animals, is said to reside; Akathwa, the hill that marks the confluence of the Nyamwamba and Rukoki rivers, known as the dwelling place of the water spirit Ndyoka; the Ekiriba Kyathumba hot springs, where cleansing rituals are performed.
All three have been damaged by flooding in recent years, along with many others along the Nyamwamba and its sister rivers in the mountains. Shrines have been washed away, hot springs filled with mud and silt, medicinal plants swept downstream by floodwaters.
As the glaciers disappear and their sacred spaces lose ground to unruly rivers, some Bakonzo leaders fear that their very identity is at risk.
For others, the worst has already come to pass.
A lost life and a long wait
As the Nyamwamba winds downward from the Rwenzori Mountains, through its cloud-draped foothills and on into the plains, it eventually reaches the town of Kasese in the district of the same name. With just over 100,000 residents, the town grew in the shadow of a copper mine further upriver midway through the 20th century. Motorcycle taxis zip through its wide, tree-lined streets. The Rwenzoris stand watch above, cloaked in mist and then, suddenly, breathtakingly revealed.
The Nyamwamba cuts through the northern outskirts of the city, traversed by a two-lane bridge. Along its southern bank lies the suburb of Kanyangeya. Once a thriving community, today it’s a swamp. Concrete houses and school buildings sink into marshy puddles. After the floods, a dozen or so hippos moved in until wildlife authorities dug trenches to drain them out.
This is where Rehema Aryema Namale’s house stood until it was destroyed in 2020.
Namale and more than 1,600 of her neighbors were relocated to the Muhokya camp, about 10 km (6 mi) south of Kasese. Muhokya is a makeshift setup of mud-brick houses and tents just off the main road. Conditions here are notoriously poor. There are few trees to shelter its inhabitants from the elements. On the other side of the road, Queen Elizabeth National Park, a nearly 2,000-square-kilometer (770-square-mile) wildlife reserve, stretches out toward the blue waters of Lake George.
Occasionally, an elephant or buffalo strays into the camp. To keep them out, an electric fence was built along its edge.
For more than three years, Namale and her neighbors have been waiting for a resettlement package that was promised by the Ugandan government. Life is hard in Muhokya. They have no title to the land, so they don’t farm it. For work, its denizens need to travel into Kasese to do casual labor.
“The government promised the community that they’re going to give us land, they’re going to compensate us, but now we’re in the fourth year,” Namale said. “The prime minister came here and said they’re going to resettle us very soon, but we don’t know what the word ‘soon’ means, it’s losing its meaning.”
Mayor Kahindo said he sympathizes with Namale and the rest of the camp’s inhabitants. But there are other needs, urgent ones, in Kasese, and until the federal government comes up with the money, there’s not much he can do.
“How to bring them back remains a challenge for us,” he said. “The [central] government was trying to buy land for them, but I don’t know what’s happening because it’s been around four years.”
In many places where it’s beginning to show its teeth, climate change isn’t necessarily an evenly distributed catastrophe. Some crops fail; others don’t. Rising seas gnaw the foundations of one family’s house, while just a few doors down it’s business as usual for another. It’s not that everyone doesn’t feel the change, it’s just that there are other problems to tend to as well. Until it can’t anymore, life goes on.
Namale and the others at Muhokya are at the short end of that stick here. Without the resources to move to a better location, they’re stuck. And as time goes by, they slide down the priority list, no matter how much they plead for help.
“We were 224 households, but because of so many challenges, we are now 179 households that are waiting for a settlement from the government,” she said. The others grew tired of waiting and moved on, assistance packages or no.
While they continue to wait, Namale and her neighbors are struggling to make a living while keeping their families safe. Traveling to do day jobs instead of farming at home means they have to leave their children alone for long periods. New dangers have accompanied this change.
“Some of the girls in here have been sexually abused,” she said. “Their parents are single mothers, and when they go to do casual work, the children don’t have anything that they’re doing, they aren’t in school.”
In a statement read out loud at the COP28 climate summit last December in Dubai, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni called for a bureaucracy-free “‘loss and damage” fund to cover the impact of flooding and other climate-related disasters. In what was framed as a historic win for climate-vulnerable countries like Uganda, wealthy countries pledged a total of $700 million for that fund. According to The Guardian, if paid out, that sum would cover less than 0.2% of their needs.
With financial help from the World Bank, Uganda is trying to keep the flooding under control. In some of the bigger towns along the Nyamwamba, stone embankments have been built to contain it. And contractors have been hired to desilt the river, a process of dredging sediment out of its bed to make it deeper and less prone to overflowing. The results haven’t been as hoped. Last year, the Nyamwamba burst its banks twice, destroying bridges and sweeping away heavy machinery used for the desilting project.
Some scientists want to restore wetland catchments far up in the mountains and invest in afforestation projects that could reduce the severity of the floods. But that would come with a heavy price tag. For now, there’s not much standing between the Nyamwamba and more destruction.
And the flooding is also bringing with it another, quieter problem — one that may be taking an even heavier toll on those who live near the Nyamwamba than the sound and fury of its kinetic impacts. In the Rwenzori foothills, near the small town of Kilembe, lies an abandoned copper mine. Along the riverbanks are remnants of its operations in the form of colossal tailings pools — heaps of mining waste long since abandoned and left to rot.
As the Nyamwamba gathers steam year by year, fueled by the planetary toll of fossil fuel consumption, it’s stirring up other wounds of extractives here. Every rainy season, when it bursts its banks, it creeps closer to some of those tailings pools.
Along with glacial runoff from the disappearing home of the Bakonzo gods, when it floods, the Nyamwamba now brings poison with it as well.
Part two to be published next week: How climate-related flooding is stirring up the toxic legacy of an abandoned copper mine in western Uganda.
Banner image: Children crossing the Nyamwamba. Image by Ashoka Mukpo/Mongabay.
Eric Mwesige contributed to this report from Kasese, Uganda.
Citation:
Kahyana, D. S. (2022). Mythopoetic environmental ethics: The names of the Konzo pantheon. Nomina Africana: Journal of African Onomastics, 36(2), 71-83. doi:10.2989/NA.2022.36.2.1.1367
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