Re-animating Virunga
Mapping Relational Ontologies Against Rwanda’s Static Enclosures
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.59490/footprint.20.1.8092Abstract
The Virunga Forest and Mountains, spanning Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, are home to the world’s largest remaining population of mountain gorillas. Enclosed by conservation boundaries, research stations, and eco-lodges, the conservation infrastructure sustains both biodiversity and tourism but restricts indigenous interactions.
This article examines how persistent colonial visions of the Virunga landscape—traced to 18th-century explorers like John Hanning Speke—shaped rigid border cartographies and architectures that displaced and confined the indigenous Twa. Denied access to their ancestral forests, the Twa articulate an alternative, egalitarian, and socio-ecologically dynamic vision for the Virunga forests.
Through participatory action research, this article also explores how a Twa community redrafts the landscape using counter-mapping to contest displacement, resettlement borders, and Rwanda’s Vision 2050. Engaging with Robert Rundstrom’s theories, it contrasts colonial mapping as an instrument of geopolitical control with indigenous mapping as a performative, communal act. Ultimately, the article argues that counter-maps function as ‘transectional cartographies,’ reinstating the Twa within the landscape and animating new challenges to the static, extractive enclosures that define Virunga’s conservation model.
Keywords: Rwanda, Political Ecology, Critical Cartographies, Indigenous Knowledge Systems, Environmental Justice.
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