Travellers from Buggala Island in Kalangala District use a canoe to access Nkose Landing Site on June 20, 2022. PHOTO | FILE
Kalangala District or Ssese, as it is locally known, is an archipelago of 84 islands with 64 of them inhabited.
Ever since its creation in 1989, the district has always boasted of its rich tourism potential, owing to its vast cultural, religious and historical sites.
The tourist attractions include, among others, the Bugoma Mapeera religious site in Bugoma Village on the shores of Lake Victoria where the first Catholic missionaries; Father Siméon Lourdel Pere (Mapeera) and Brother Amans Delmas (Amansi) made a stopover before arriving at Kigungu Landing Site in Entebbe on February 17, 1879.
Kalangala Island also has a rich history for Buganda Kingdom but very few tourists visit such places.
Available records from Ssese Islands Tourism Development Association (SITIDA), an entity promoting tourism in Kalangala, show that tourists mostly visit sites on Buggala, one of the 64 inhabited islands of Kalangala.
The records show they stay in Kalangala hotels for only two to three days.
According to Mr Albert Kasozi, the managing director of Buganda Heritage and Tourism Board (BHTB), their biggest hurdle is lack of information about tourist attractions in Kalangala.
“Tourists make decisions to visit a destination based on the information they read; whether online or when they visit an area. However, for Kalangala, little information can be traced on the Internet or at the district headquarters itself,” he says.
“I was told recently that the late Andrewnico Magatto was the first person to erect a hotel in Kalangala, but few tourists know that story. The history of Buganda warriors, the missionaries, all these stories need to be documented well and presented in a way that can attract tourists,” Mr Kasozi explains.
Ms Gladys Nabukeera, the Kalangala District tourism officer, reveals that most tourism sites aren’t developed to standards that could attract tourists.
“Most tourism sites are on privately owned land and landlords have failed to uplift their standards claiming that they lack funds to do so. They have also failed to provide information, which we could use in marketing such sites,” she says, adding: “We are also limited by our meagre budget as a district tourism department to do research.”
She also stresses the need for the government to develop a policy that will compel water transport operators and those in the hospitality business like hotels and beaches to regularly disclose the purpose of visit for their clients to record the right number of tourists that visit Kalangala .
“Such data would be useful to us in improving the tourism sector and planning for it. We also have another big problem – the tour guides , many are not trained enough to tell Kalangala’s story, which forces many tourists to stay for a few days here,” she says
Mr Augustine Kasirye ,the Kabaka’ s chief in Ssese County (Kalangala District), says many authors have distorted Kalangala’s history in their books and other publications .
“The Bugoma site in Mugoye Sub-county is where the Catholic missionaries first stepped their foot in Uganda but some historians wrote about Kigungu in Entebbe as the site where they landed; John Speke, while looking for the Source of River Nile, first came to Ssese islands but it is Jinja, which is being promoted more because it’s what historians wrote. I think if this information is well captured, we would see the number of tourists going up,” he says.
He says Ssese Heritage and Tourism Information Centre has already been set up and artifacts, research and information collected from all tourism sites in the area will be available at the centre . “It is going to be a one-stop centre for all information about tourism sites in Kalangala,” Mr Kasirye adds.
Mr Solomon Lubandi, the proprietor of Sinyaland Museum and Caves, says the government needs to improve water transport on all the islands.
“Tourism development in Buggala is pushed by things like electricity, good road network, safe water and standard accommodation; all that came as a result of the partnership the government made with Kalangala Infrastructure Services. We ask government to also improve connectivity to all other islands,” he says. The Daily Monitor has learnt the many would-be tourism sites on other islands lack standard accommodation facilities, making then unattractive to tourists. In September 2022, Ali Gulam, a tourist from Turkey, visited Kalangala’s Buggala Island to see the beauty of the islands which he has always heard and read about .
After spending a weekend at Buggala, he wanted to tour other islands like Bukasa, Bubeke, Nkese and Mazinga but there was no appropriate transport to these places. All the vessels and ferries that connect the mainland to Kalangala Islands dock at Baggala .
This prompted Gulam to change his programme and return to Kampala . “I have failed to visit other islands as much as I wanted to reach all corners of Kalangala. Honestly, I could not board the canoes I saw connecting to those places, they are not safe ” Mr Gulam said in an interview with this publication then .
The sites in distant islands include; Nanziri falls in Bukasa, Nsiirwe bird sanctuary located on Nsiirwe Island, shrines of Mukasa /Mugasha, a god of Lake Victoria, the cliffs along Bubeke and Mazinga islands.
A 2021 annual report by STDA , indicates that Kalangala receives about 4,000 tourists every year attracted by activities such as sport fishing and bird watching. Despite all the opportunities in tourism, Kalangala still lacks adequate infrastructure in terms of water transport to support the sector.
In 2017, Kalangala District leadership proposed the construction of an airstrip and officials from the Civil Aviation Authority together with a team of investors visited the islands to map out possible locations for the project. However, they failed to find space as the suitable locations such as Bukuzindu were offered to oil palm growers.
On top of the poor inter-island water transport network, some tourists who visit Kalangala are also irritated by the bad roads on the Islands.
