ABSTRACT
In order to address long lasting human–wildlife conflicts and persistent poverty around Bwindi, a small national park in the south-west of Uganda, gorilla tourism was introduced in 1993 (Ahebwa, 2012). The purchase of a US$ 500 permit now enables especially wealthy tourists from the North to visit the gorillas in their natural habitat. Through complex processes of habituation, in which they are getting used to the presence of human beings, gorillas are turned into ‘objects of the tourist gaze’ and acquire economic value. However, even before this new relationship to tourism and tourists, gorillas have also enacted other networks. For centuries, gorillas of Bwindi have co-existed with and competed for forest resources with hunter-food gathering and farming communities. From the late nineteenth century onwards, they were captured, studied and designated as “man’s closest neighbor” in a scientific network of biologists. Also, they eventually became “trophies” in an international hunting network or were poached and – as a reaction to that – protected as “endangered species” in a conservation network, initiated by the work of Dianne Fossey (see Van der Duim, Ampumuza and Ahebwa, 2014)
