The Batwa or Twa people are a small ethnic group also known as Batwa Pygmies. For about 60,000 years and until very recently, these people lived as hunter-gatherers in harmony with their environment in the lush equatorial forests of the Great Lakes area, a territory located between the borders of Rwanda, Congo and Uganda.
In the last centuries, the area of these forests was considerably reduced to create new cultivation areas, with small portions of isolated forest remaining. This strongly affected both the Batwa people and all biodiversity, but in 1992, after the Bwindi forest was declared a World Heritage Site, the life of the Batwa people in south-western Uganda changed forever. The aim was to protect 350 endangered mountain gorillas living on the edge of this forest. As a result, the Batwa were evicted from the park with nowhere to go, no possession of any land and no compensation.