At the bottom of the western rift valley on the southeastern shores of Lake Albert lies a small remote village, Kibiro, known for its hot springs and traditional salt gardens.

The village is 35km from Hoima city in Kigorobya sub-county, Hoima district. Standing on top of the escarpment before descending down to the village gives a magical view of Lake Albert while presenting an optical illusion of the waters seemingly curving up into the sky and unable to mark the horizon.

Scattered settlements of mud-and-wattle huts, some grass-thatched while others roofed with shiny iron sheets, extend several kilometres along the plain. However, accessing this village is no easy feat as the main access is a 2km steep, rocky, dusty footpath down the escarpment which is inaccessible by cars.

With the temperatures of the area ranging between 30 and 35 degrees Celsius, this downhill tread can leave one sweating, panting and wobbling to the foot of the escarpment, which, nevertheless, offers an exhilarating hiking experience.

SALT EXTRACTION PROCESS

The people of Kibiro have depended on salt production for centuries,  where salt is extracted from the salt gardens spread across the rift valley. These salt gardens are a historical site that has been in use for over 500 years and are a significant centre for salt production in Uganda.

According to Godfrey Abigaba, the LC 1 chairperson, Kibiro village has about 400 salt gardens which are inherited and allocated to women. If a man marries a woman, he has to provide space for her and the children to work on.

Salt production here is done only by women, and the process is still carried out today using traditional methods that have been passed down through generations. When the sun hits the ground, the salt plate underground melts and the soil absorbs the salt through capillary action. Water from hot springs flows over the area’s salty soil, keeping it moist.

During the afternoon, the women start gently scrubbing the soil, mixing the soil with the salt. The scrubbing is done for 21 days as small heaps of soil are collected. The women then get big saucepans, create a hole at the bottom but fix there a small stone leaving just a tiny space. Sand is then spread around the stone in the middle of the saucepan.

The saucepan is put on three stones, the salty soil is poured into it and water is added. The water then sinks into the soil, dissolves the soil particles and starts dripping while passing through the sand. The sand filtrates the water while it collects in the container below the saucepan. The salty water collected, which is brownish in colour, is then taken home and boiled.

As it boils, evaporation occurs, leaving behind salt crystals at the bottom of the saucepan. The salt is scooped out and made into conical shapes weighing 3kg each. This whole process of salt-making takes a month. The process used to produce the salt in Kibiro constantly reuses the same soil.

This recycling is accomplished by the repeated spreading of the residue soil on the surface which is again mixed with fresh soil to repeat the salt production process. With this unique technique, it is believed that Kibiro will most likely never run out of salt unless the hot springs dry up. Agnes Asiimwe, one of the local women who produce salt, said they sell each cone of salt at Shs 10,000 during the rainy season and Shs 5,000 during the dry season.

“Sometimes we don’t sell the salt directly but, rather, exchange it for food with people from other areas because there is no crop growing in Kibiro. When sold, we get money to feed our families and pay school fees for our children,” she said.

The difference between the prices of salt during the two seasons is because salt extraction thrives under hot temperatures. Harvests shift in size depending on how much soil they can dry in a given period and, therefore, the hotter the earth gets, the larger the quantities extracted. One can produce 100kg of salt in three months under dry conditions and only 10kg during the rainy season.

“When it is a rainy season, we cannot dry enough soil and, therefore, it becomes difficult to obtain the salt unlike during the dry season. During rainy season like now, few women work in the salt gardens since many of them have lost their working areas to water,” Asiimwe said.

WHY ONLY WOMEN ARE INVOLVED

The reason why salt extraction in Kibiro is done exclusively by women is a story etched in history. According to Richard Irumba, a local tour guide, Bunyoro Kitara history has it that the first person who stepped into Kibiro which was by then a large forest was a hunter from Masindi.

When he reached on top of the escarpment, he saw smoke from the hot springs which he followed down the steep slopes hoping to find people cooking, only to find a hot spring. After realizing that the place was unique, he got his spear, planted it in the ground and said nsimbirahanu, meaning I have settled here.

He went back to Masindi and invited his fellow hunters and their families to join him in the area where they settled and formed a new clan known as Basimba. After settling in the area, it is believed that this hunter got a nightmare from the spirits to sacrifice a 16-year-old virgin girl to them if he wanted to live in the place peacefully, which he did.

The opportunity to make the sacrifice presented itself when some members of the new clan had gone hunting. The lady with the qualities as instructed by the spirits was slaughtered and her blood poured around the hot springs and her body was buried at the foot of the escarpment.

The following night as the hunter was sleeping, the spirits appeared to him again and told him that there was going to come salt from underground but the first person to taste it should be a woman and only women would be allowed to extract the salt; that if a man did it, he would be punished by incurable diseases and death – a tradition the people of Kibiro have kept to this day.

Irumba says sacrifices to the place continued but now in the form of animals especially white sheep with the last sacrifice being done in 1997 before the new generations and religions sprung in and abandoned such practices.

THE HOTSPRINGS

Kibiro also prides itself in the presence of hot springs, which consist of several small pools of varying temperatures ranging from warm to extremely hot. The water at Kibiro Hot Springs is naturally heated by geothermal activity underground, reaching temperatures of up to 80 degrees Celsius.

This water flows through narrow channels up to Lake Albert, which is just in the vicinity and because it comes out of a salty rock underground, it is salty as well. The springs are said to be rich in minerals like sulphur, calcium, potassium and magnesium which are believed to have healing properties for various conditions including measles, scabies, fresh wounds,  boils, rashes, joint and muscle pains and respiratory conditions.

Kibiro hot springs offer a unique bathing experience in the several mud pools around, where visitors can apply the mineral-rich mud on their skin before rinsing it off in the natural hot springs; people bathe in the water after it has run about 300m from its source and cooled.

This mud is believed to have rejuvenating and exfoliating effects on the skin. These hot springs are also believed to have spiritual significance to the Banyoro and are commonly used for cleansing rituals by local tribes.

One common belief is that the water has supernatural powers that drive away bad spirits and demons from possessed people.

“These days the cultural beliefs about the hot springs have eroded. But we still get officials from the Bunyoro Kitara kingdom who come here and carry out cultural rituals, but most people come here to bathe in the hot springs to cure ailments,” Abigaba said.

TOURISM POTENTIAL

Besides the artisanal salt mining, which is unique to Kibiro, the place is also an archaeological site because before the introduction of metallic vessels, pottery ware was used during the leaching and boiling processes and this is evidenced by the rich archaeological depositions of potsherds throughout the village, going as deep as four metres and dating to between eight and nine hundred years to the present.

The village, therefore, forms an important cultural site which has combined both archaeology and ethnography through time in the production of ash salt. Due to its cultural value, UNESCO was prompted to add Kibiro to the tentative list of world heritage sites in September 1997.

This is a list of properties countries consider to be cultural or natural heritage of outstanding universal value. Jackline Nyiracyiza, the acting commissioner for Museums and Monuments at the Ministry of Tourism, said there has been laxity on the side of the ministry in pushing the site to be elevated to UNESCO’s World Heritage Site list.

“Previously, we didn’t have enough capacity as a department but we are now well-resourced, and among our priorities is making sure that all the sites that have been on the tentative list for more than 20 years are finally approved to become world heritage sites. We are currently revising our tentative list which we are supposed to submit to UNESCO by February next year,” she said.

But in order to fully realize its tourism potential, Kibiro would require infrastructure development including transport and accommodation facilities. Additionally, the local community would need support in promoting and preserving its cultural heritage and natural resources. Overall, with proper investment and conservation efforts, Kibiro could become a thriving tourist destination in Uganda.

Nyiracyiza says plans of setting up visitor facilities like washrooms and a visitor information centre to make the place more pleasant for tourists are underway and in future, accommodation facilities will also be set up, because the place has a very beautiful scenery and calming environment offered by the rift valley and Lake Albert shoreline.

The local council is also working on the road along the escarpment to make the place easily accessible.

“We have already planned for those facilities and we are going to do the bills of qualities and designs in this financial year so that they can be in the development budget of the next financial year. The place has the potential of attracting foreign tourists and actually just a few weeks ago, it received 34 tourists from Germany. So visitor-ship is not a problem but, rather, the lack of visitor facilities,” she added.

Abigaba noted that the village receives about 50 foreign tourists a month on top of local tourists and students from different schools who go for geographical fieldwork studies.
“The money collected from the tourists is used to help the community. In Kibiro, we have a problem with latrines and, therefore, we have been using this money to construct latrines to maintain sanitation.”