TOTEMS OF BUNYORO FULL DOCUMENTARY

One of the three priority areas for Kakakuona Foundation (KF) is the creation of awareness about totems among the Ugandan community. This is out of the realization that whereas most indigenous communities still strongly espouse totem traditions, majority are out of step with the realities thereof. This is particularly prevalent among the young people. The average Uganda youth only knows his or her totem by name; very few have any idea about their actual physical attributes. This discrepancy robs totems of their potential as vectors of nature conservation since they will be more susceptible to harm for as long as their custodians are not aware of their physical disposition. The main objective of the totems awareness program was to educate the masses about their totems as a means to revive the totem cultures as alternative tools for conservation of species and the environment. With a grant from the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI), KF started a pilot project in Masindi District in North-Central Uganda with a mission to spread awareness about totems of Bunyoro. The choice of Bunyoro was premised on the fact that JGI Uganda already has established activities and platforms that would make it easy for us to mobilise and implement the pilot. Secondly, Bunyoro is the main chimpanzee corridor in Uganda, which is JGI’s main target conservation species and as well, being that it is totemic in Bunyoro. This presented the perfect partnership in terms of impacting on the targeted schools and surrounding communities. The selected audience was 10-15-year-olds, school-going children and the communities from where they hail. Six schools were selected, five of which are primary and one secondary school. We were able to reach out to all six schools in Masindi District. These include: Kimanya Lower Primary School, Rwempisi Primary School, Nyantonzi Primary, Budongo Sawmill Primary School, Budongo Secondary School and Karongo Primary School. We had also planned to invited schools within the vicinity of the selected six but only at Rwempsi Primary School were we able to be joined by other schools, while in the rest the neighboring schools are very distant. However, we also realized that we set the target too high as the combined number of children in all six schools was less than the 2,500 that we had set out to reach. That means the estimate was not realistic and thus we had to adjust our expectations according to the circumstances on the ground.