Kisoro

The plateau around Kisoro belongs to Bufumbira, the south-western tip of Kigezi, a volcanic country of ash soils and crater lakes that was farmed and grazed long before any border crossed it. Its people, the Bafumbira, speak Rufumbira, a form of Kinyarwanda, and the area's older ties ran south and west to the Rwandan kingdom rather than north to the lake kingdoms of Uganda. Those ties were cut on paper at the turn of the twentieth century, when Anglo-German and Belgian boundary commissions fixed the frontiers of the three colonial territories on the summits of the Virunga volcanoes, leaving Bufumbira inside the Uganda Protectorate.

The British administered the whole of Kigezi from Kabale, and Kisoro grew slowly as a frontier post and market at the end of the road, reached by a route that was not surfaced for decades. Gorillas were already known on the Virunga slopes, protected in a colonial game sanctuary from the 1930s, but the flow of visitors came much later.

The twentieth century brought repeated waves of people across the borders: Rwandans from 1959 onwards, and Congolese during the long unrest in the east. Kisoro had become a district in its own right by the early 1990s, and in 1991 the Ugandan side of the Virungas was gazetted as Mgahinga Gorilla National Park. The Batwa who had lived in that forest were moved out, and the town has since turned steadily towards tourism.

Kisoro's culture is the culture of Bufumbira, and it feels closer to Rwanda than to the rest of Uganda. Rufumbira is heard everywhere, in the market and on the radio, and many families have relatives on the other side of the Rwandan frontier. Names, songs, the dance steps performed at weddings, and the hoe-and-terrace farming calendar are all shared across that line.

Christianity is strong, Catholic and Anglican churches and a growing number of Pentecostal congregations filling on Sundays, with a visible Muslim minority around the town's mosque. Life is organised around the church, the clan and the market day, and the exchange of gifts and beer at marriage negotiations still matters.

The Batwa are a distinct and much smaller community. Once hunter-gatherers in the Virunga and Bwindi forests, they were displaced when the parks were created in 1991 and now live on the park margins, among the poorest people in Uganda, campaigning for land and recognition. Several community groups near Kisoro present Batwa history, music and forest skills to visitors, and money from those visits is one of the few local incomes.

Hospitality is formal here: greetings are exchanged at length before any business, elders are served first, and visitors are expected to accept at least something to drink. Photography of people without asking is resented, and the gorilla has become the town's emblem, standing in effigy on its main roundabout.

Kisoro is a small town — roughly 17,500 people at the 2014 census, in a district of several hundred thousand — set in one of the most densely farmed and densely populated corners of Uganda. Almost every slope within sight is terraced and planted, and the fields run to the foot of the volcanoes.

Farming is the living: Irish potatoes above all, which move north by lorry to Kampala, alongside sorghum, beans, peas, maize, wheat and vegetables, with small herds of cattle and goats. Trade is the other pillar. Goods, produce and people move constantly between Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the town's shops, transporters and money changers live off that traffic. A third economy has grown up around the parks — guides, trackers, porters, drivers, lodge staff and craft groups — which is lucrative when trekking is busy and thin when it is not. The area has also served as a reception point for people crossing from eastern Congo during periods of fighting.

Days start cold and early, with the walk to the fields and the boda-bodas warming up on the roundabout; the market fills in the morning, the afternoon brings rain more often than not, and the town is dark and quiet soon after nightfall. Electricity and water supply are improving but unreliable, and land pressure on the terraced hillsides is the district's defining problem.

Kisoro eats like the Kigezi highlands rather than like central Uganda. The Irish potato is king — boiled, mashed or fried, and served with beans or a thin meat sauce at every eating house — and sorghum, peas, beans, maize, cabbage and pumpkin fill out the plate. Matooke, the steamed and mashed green banana of the lowlands, is present but shares the table rather than dominating it.

Millet and sorghum bread, a stiff dark loaf eaten by hand with sauce, is common, as is a groundnut sauce and a dish of beans cooked long and soft. Goat meat grilled over charcoal at the roadside, fried tilapia brought up from the lakes, and small dried fish sold by the cupful in the market are the usual sources of protein; meat is more a weekly than a daily food for most households.

The regional drink is obushera, a fermented sorghum or millet drink taken mildly sweet as a food in itself or left longer to become beer. Banana beer and local waragi are drunk in the town's bars, alongside bottled lagers and sodas. Tea is boiled with milk and ginger, and the market sells beans of the arabica grown on the hills around. Street food runs to chapati, samosas, roasted maize and the rolex.