About the park

The history of Murchison Falls

Name: Murchison Falls National Park
Address: Uganda

Uganda's oldest park was emptied by a disease before it was ever protected, filled with film stars and famous survivors in the 1950s, stripped almost bare under Idi Amin, and is now being drilled for oil. Here is the documented story, with the disputed parts flagged as disputed.

If you only want the answer

The Victoria Nile here was the frontier between the Bunyoro kingdom and Acholi country until sleeping-sickness evacuations emptied about 13,000 square kilometres between 1907 and 1912. Game reserves were drawn over the silence from 1910, and in 1952 Murchison Falls became one of Uganda's first two national parks. Its heyday drew Hollywood in 1951 and nearly killed Hemingway in 1954, then the Amin and civil-war years cut the elephant population from around 12,000 to a few hundred and the park spent a decade renamed Kabalega. It recovered slowly under UWA, and since June 2023 TotalEnergies has been drilling the Tilenga oil field inside it, with first oil targeted for late 2026.

Bunyoro on one bank, Acholi on the other

The Victoria Nile, which cuts the park in half today, was a frontier long before it was a game-viewing circuit. South of the river lay Bunyoro-Kitara, one of the great kingdoms of the East African lakes, ruled by an Omukama and trading salt, iron and ivory. North of the river was Acholi country, a belt of Luo-speaking chiefdoms whose language still names the park's landmarks: Paraa, the tourism hub, means home of the hippo in Luo. Both peoples farmed, fished and hunted this landscape.

The king who matters most to this story is Kabalega, Omukama of Bunyoro from 1870. He rebuilt Bunyoro's army and fought the British through six years of guerrilla war in and around this country, until his capture in 1899 and exile to the Seychelles. Hold the name; the park will carry it for a while in the 1970s.

A stranger's name, 1864

Samuel Baker and his Hungarian wife Florence were the first Europeans to record the falls, reaching them in 1864 while working upstream from the lake Baker had just named Albert. A hippopotamus charged his boat below the falls before he ever saw them properly. When he did, he judged them the most important object along the entire course of the Nile and named them after Sir Roderick Murchison, president of the Royal Geographical Society, a geologist who never set foot in this part of Africa.

What the falls were called before that morning is genuinely unclear. No pre-1864 local name for the cataract itself survives reliably in the written record; the gorge below the drop carries the name Fajao, and the later name Kabalega was a twentieth-century political act rather than a recovered original. We flag it because plenty of guides invent an ancient name where the sources have none.

Baker's return closes the circle uncomfortably. He came back in 1872 as Governor of Equatoria for the Khedive of Egypt, tried to annex Bunyoro, and ended up burning Masindi in a running war with the young Omukama Kabalega. The man who named the falls and the king the park would later be renamed for spent part of 1872 shooting at each other.

Emptied by a fly, gazetted on the silence

The park's founding fact is an epidemic. Sleeping sickness, carried by tsetse flies, tore through the Lake Albert and Victoria Nile region in the early 1900s, part of an outbreak that killed around a quarter of a million people in Uganda. The colonial administration's answer was evacuation: between 1907 and 1912 the inhabitants of roughly 13,000 square kilometres, Banyoro on the south bank and Acholi on the north, were moved out. The fishing settlements fell quiet, the tsetse stayed, and big game had the emptied country to itself.

Protection was drawn on top of that silence. Colonial records show a Bunyoro Game Reserve created south of the river in 1910 and extended north into Gulu district in 1928 as the Bunyoro-Gulu Game Reserve, while UWA's own materials date the first protection to 1926; the paperwork disagrees, so we give you both. What is not in dispute is the sequence. When Murchison Falls became one of Uganda's first two national parks under the National Parks Act of 1952, there was almost nobody left inside to evict. At some African parks gazetting meant trucks and burned huts, as our Gonarezhou history documents. Here disease control had done the emptying a generation earlier, and the evacuated communities were not invited back.

The heyday, with two plane crashes in it

For two decades after 1952 Murchison was the glamour destination of East Africa. The launch trip from Paraa to the foot of the falls became one of the continent's famous excursions, Paraa Safari Lodge opened in 1954, and by the late 1960s this was Uganda's most visited park and, by claims we cannot audit, among the busiest in Africa.

Hollywood arrived a year before the park legally existed. John Huston filmed parts of The African Queen on Lake Albert and the Nile below the falls in 1951, with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn enduring heat, insects and dysentery on location; Hepburn later wrote a book about the ordeal.

Ernest Hemingway's contribution to the park's fame was surviving it twice on consecutive days. On 23 January 1954 the light aircraft carrying Hemingway and his wife Mary clipped an abandoned telegraph wire strung across the gorge while circling the falls, and crash-landed in the bush. The party spent the night out, was picked up by a passing launch and taken up Lake Albert to Butiaba, and boarded a rescue plane the next day. It crashed on take-off and burned. Hemingway got out with a concussion, burns and internal injuries, reached Entebbe to find the world's press reporting his death, and spent the following days reading his own obituaries. He never fully recovered from the injuries.

Kabalega: the collapse

In the 1960s the park's problem, as its scientists saw it, was too many elephants. Estimates for the wider conservation area ran to 14,000 or more, and concern about what the herds were doing to the woodland led to scientific cropping in the mid-1960s. The cull totals are debated, so we leave them loose. Then history removed the problem in the worst available way.

Idi Amin took power in 1971 and in 1972 renamed the park Kabalega National Park after the Bunyoro king, an Africanisation gesture that was never legally promulgated but stuck for the rest of the decade. The renaming turned out to be the gentlest thing his regime did to the place. Soldiers and commercial poachers with automatic weapons worked the park through the 1970s, ivory moved through military channels, and the 1979 war that removed Amin sent armed men through in both directions. From about 12,000 elephants in 1971, the count fell to 1,420 by 1980 and kept falling through the insurgency years of the 1980s to a few hundred; the 2005 count of 516 was already a recovery from the true low point. The same series, and where UWA's own figures still conflict, is on our wildlife page.

The ruin that tells the era best is a hotel. Pakuba Lodge, built between 1970 and 1974 to a design by the Danish architect Hans Munk Hansen, was the flagship of the state hotel chain and Amin's favourite retreat; the claim that he spent more time here than in Kampala is legend rather than record, and sounds like him. It was looted to the walls after his fall in 1979 and never reopened. Even after the wars ended, the Lord's Resistance Army kept northern Uganda dangerous into the early 2000s, and tourism north of the river only genuinely recovered after that insurgency left the country.

The slow turn

The name came back after Amin fell; the institutions followed slowly. The Uganda Wildlife Authority was created in 1996 from the merger of the national parks and game departments, and the recovery since is measurable: elephant counts of 516 in 2005, 904 in 2010 and 1,617 in 2012, and a giraffe population that has grown into the most important on earth for its subspecies, with animals moved across the river in 2016 and 2017 to found a second herd on the south bank.

Tourism returned the park to the top of Uganda's visitor table, with 145,116 visitors in the 2022/23 financial year and the transit-traffic caveat we unpack on our about page. And in 2022 the Paraa ferry, the crossing that had stitched the park together since the 1950s, made its final runs when the new Paraa Bridge opened to traffic.

Oil: the chapter being written now

Commercial quantities of oil were confirmed in the Albertine Graben in 2006, and the fields overlap the park. TotalEnergies' Tilenga project plans 426 wells from 31 pads across nine fields, one of which lies inside the park north of the Nile; roughly ten of the pads sit inside the boundary. Drilling began in June 2023. CNOOC's smaller Kingfisher field sits on the Lake Albert shore south of the park, outside the boundary but in the same basin, drilling since January 2023. Both feed the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, EACOP, a 1,443 kilometre heated export line from the Hoima area to the Tanzanian port of Tanga.

As we checked it in September 2026: TotalEnergies and the Petroleum Authority of Uganda were targeting first oil in the second half of 2026, with the Tilenga facilities reported 57 per cent complete in late 2025, while EACOP construction stood at 82 per cent in April 2026 with commissioning targeted for July 2026 and first exports projected for October 2026. No first oil had been announced at the time of checking. Satellite analysis published by Mongabay in September 2025 documented 38 kilometres of new roads and nine cleared drilling sites inside the park itself.

The two sides of the argument are at least clear. The government's case is that the oil, about 190,000 barrels a day at peak from Tilenga, will fund development in a poor region, that the surface footprint inside the park is under one per cent, the company's own figure, and that Ugandan law requires restoration when production ends; TotalEnergies points to buried flowlines, soundproofed electric rigs and pads engineered smaller than first planned. Conservation and community groups, among them AFIEGO and the StopEACOP coalition, answer that roads and work traffic fragment the northern game circuit, that noise, light and spill risk sit on top of a Ramsar-listed delta and the Lake Albert fisheries, and that compensation along the pipeline route has left lasting grievances; the European Parliament passed a resolution against the project in September 2022. Our about page documents what UWA's own management plan says about the oil, which is noticeably more worried than the brochures.

What you can see of this history today

The falls themselves are the oldest exhibit. The launch from Paraa runs the same water Hemingway's aircraft circled, and the top of the falls trail climbs from the boat drop at the foot of Fajao gorge to the viewpoint above the cleft, about 45 minutes of the best short walk in Uganda. Baker's approach and Baker's name are both up there, and the second waterfall beside the main drop, Uhuru, has only existed since 1962.

At Paraa, the old ferry ramps still run into the river near the bridge that replaced the crossing in 2022. For some sixty years almost everything the park did crossed here; the queue at the ramp was the closest thing Murchison had to a town square.

On the north bank circuit you can stop at the shell of Pakuba Lodge, stripped to its concrete after 1979. Guides pull in because leopards and hyaenas use the ruins, which is as neat a summary of the Amin era's ending as the park could stage.

The newest layer is impossible to miss: smooth tarmac, well pads and work convoys in the north are the oil chapter in progress. It is the one chapter whose ending nobody knows, and you can watch it from a game-drive track.