The Living Memory of Place: When Forest Becomes Forbidden
What remains when people are severed from their ancestral landscape?
For centuries, the Mosopisyek people have called the high-altitude forests of Mount Elgon their home. Their lives became intricately woven into the fabric of this landscape; every tree, every stream, every cave held meaning that transcended mere resource extraction. Today, Francis Barbel, one of the last generation born in the forest before the evictions, sits in Yatui village demonstrating the ancient art of beehive construction. His weathered hands work with precision, but the materials tell a different story: plastic sheeting where forest vines once sufficed, with metal wire replacing organic fibres.
“The forest was our teacher,” he says, his voice carrying decades of displacement. “Every sound, every scent, every season had something to show us. Now we must remember the trees.”
When Earth Becomes Memory
In the early morning light of Yatui village, women and children move through the settlement collecting different shades of earth. What was once a simple practice of home decoration has transformed into something more profound: an act of cultural preservation through pigment and pattern.
Chebet, Francis’s granddaughter, learns to distinguish between the red ochre that speaks of iron-rich soil and the pale yellow clay that carries stories of ancient riverbeds. Together, they create natural paints that transform humble mud walls into canvases of identity. The geometric patterns they apply are not mere decoration but a visual language encoding knowledge about seasons, ceremonies, and the sacred geography of a homeland now marked forbidden. The practice reveals something profound about displacement: when people are separated from their landscape, that landscape begins to live within them in new ways. The Mosopisyek’s decorative traditions have evolved from casual cultural expression into acts of quiet resistance – assertions of belonging that refuse erasure.
The Honey of Adaptation
The beehives that now dot the settlement represent both continuity and change. Made from hollowed-out logs and bark where possible, but weatherproofed with modern materials, they embody the Mosopisyek’s remarkable adaptability. In the forest, these hives hung high in the canopy of Elgon teak and red cedar, their placement determined by intimate knowledge of trees and wind patterns.
Francis crafts each hive with the same precision his ancestors used, but something fundamental has shifted. “The bees know the difference,” he observes, watching his colonies work. “They taste exile in the flowers. The honey is still sweet, but it carries different dreams.” The honey produced here lacks the complex flavors that came from the diverse forest ecosystem flavors that once shaped the taste of lakwek, the fermented honey drink central to Mosopisyek ceremonies. More than sustenance, these hives represent repositories of cultural knowledge under constant threat. The specific techniques for wood selection, bee behavior interpretation, and harvest timing embody generations of accumulated wisdom that grows more fragile with each passing year.
“The bees know the difference,” he observes, watching his colonies work. “They taste exile in the flowers. The honey is still sweet, but it carries different dreams.”
The Weight of Last Stories
Francis carries the particular burden of being among the final generation to remember the forest as home. His memories are not merely personal but collective living archives of cultural knowledge that will die with him if not successfully transmitted. This responsibility manifests in his daily routines: the deliberate way he demonstrates traditional crafts, his patient attention to grandchildren’s questions, the stories he tells that serve as both entertainment and instruction.
Some losses resist adaptation entirely. Francis speaks of milk from cows that grazed in the forest’s salt caves, milk believed to carry healing properties for cardiovascular conditions. These animals, descendants of herds that had grazed these mineral-rich pastures for generations, produced something irreplaceable. The therapeutic properties weren’t myth but an observable reality, validated by generations of use. “That knowledge dies with the forest,” Francis admits. “Some things cannot be moved or replanted or remembered into existence. They simply cease to be.”
The marriage traditions, too, face extinction. The elaborate ceremony where a bride’s father would climb a tall tree to place a beehive, then cut away the branches during his descent, leaving only a smooth trunk for suitors to scale – this practice requires specific trees, specific contexts, specific freedoms of movement that no longer exist.
What Remains
Today, the Mosopisyek continue their existence on the margins of their former homeland, practising modified traditions with whatever materials they can access. Their story raises questions that extend far beyond Mount Elgon: What constitutes conservation? Who decides how landscapes should be protected? And what is truly lost when Indigenous peoples are separated from the places that shaped their knowledge systems?
The women still collect earth for pigments, but from degraded soils. The men still craft beehives, but with compromised materials. The healers still practice traditional medicine, but from cultivated rather than wild plants. Each adaptation represents both resilience and irreplaceable loss, cultural knowledge bending to survive, but forever changed in the process.
Francis’s hands continue their ancient work, time moving against him. The forest that taught his people everything remains visible from Yatui village, a green boundary marking the edge of belonging. Inside that boundary, the trees grow tall and biodiversity thrives. Outside, the last forest-born generation grows old, carrying within their bodies and memories a different kind of conservation, the preservation of knowledge that cannot be replanted once it dies.
“The forest remembers us,” Francis says, his eyes fixed on the distant canopy. “The question is whether our children will remember the forest.”
Words and Photography by Patrick Hans Mulindwa
Patrick Hans Mulindwa is an Ugandan conservation photographer and researcher using visual storytelling to highlight climate change, biodiversity, and the lived experiences of marginalized communities. Hans has collaborated with Climate Operation and Africa refocused to spotlight conservation and social justice across East Africa.
