Best Books About Uganda Safaris
A good book does more for a Uganda safari than any packing list. Read the right pages before you fly, and the tree-climbing lions of Ishasha, the barbets outside your tent, and the falls where the Nile is squeezed through a seven-metre gorge suddenly carry a century of story. The reading also fills the quiet hours — long transfers on the Masindi road, warm afternoons between game drives, the wait for the Paraa ferry.
This is the reading list we actually recommend to guests: a mix of practical field guides you should carry, and the history, memoir and natural-history writing that makes the Pearl of Africa come alive. We have kept to titles that are in print, accurate, and worth the weight in your bag.
Field Guides Worth Carrying
If you buy only one wildlife book, make it The Kingdon Pocket Guide to African Mammals by Jonathan Kingdon. Condensed from his larger field guide, it packs more than 780 colour illustrations and hundreds of distribution maps into a volume light enough for a daypack. Kingdon was born in Tanganyika and is the founding editor of the six-volume Mammals of Africa, so the identifications are authoritative rather than approximate.
For birds, Birds of East Africa by Terry Stevenson and John Fanshawe is the standard reference. Now in a revised Helm edition, it describes and illustrates all 1,448 species recorded across Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi, with facing-page text and plates. Uganda alone claims more than 1,000 of those species, so a book covering the whole region is exactly what you want.
For trip logistics, the Bradt Guide to Uganda by Philip Briggs remains the gold standard. Now in its ninth edition, it covers Murchison Falls, Bwindi, Queen Elizabeth, the Ishasha plains, Nile rafting and the northeastern circuit in far more depth than any general Africa guide, and includes a colour wildlife section. Briggs is arguably the most experienced guidebook writer on the continent.
Gorillas and the Forests of the Southwest
No Uganda reading list is complete without the mountain gorillas, and the best starting point is The Impenetrable Forest: My Gorilla Years in Uganda by Thor Hanson. A Peace Corps volunteer, Hanson helped launch gorilla tourism in Bwindi in 1993–94, habituating the first groups while building trails, training rangers and navigating village life. It is warm, funny and honest about how fragile — and how hard-won — the tracking experience you will enjoy really is.
Read it alongside Dian Fossey’s classic Gorillas in the Mist. Fossey’s study animals lived in the Virungas, on the borders of Rwanda, the DRC and Uganda’s Mgahinga, so the science and the drama both spill across the frontier. It is the book that taught the world to see gorillas as individuals, and it remains essential before any trek.
Two further titles deepen the picture. In the Kingdom of Gorillas by Bill Weber and Amy Vedder tells the story of the Mountain Gorilla Project and the case for community-based conservation. For a Ugandan voice, Walking with Gorillas by Dr Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka — the country’s first wildlife veterinarian and founder of Conservation Through Public Health — is a superb recent memoir linking gorilla health to the people living at the forest edge.
Churchill and the Age of Exploration
The book most closely tied to Murchison Falls is My African Journey by Winston Churchill, first published in 1908. Then a young Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, Churchill toured East Africa in 1907 and devoted whole chapters to the Kingdom of Uganda, Kampala, a stretch “On Safari” and, memorably, to Murchison Falls itself. It is here that he popularised the phrase that still sells the country — describing Uganda as “the Pearl of Africa” for its magnificence and “profusion of brilliant life.”
Worth noting: the phrase predates Churchill. Explorer Henry Morton Stanley is usually credited with coining it decades earlier; Churchill simply gave it wings. For the deeper exploration story, John Hanning Speke’s Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile recounts the Victorian search that ended at Lake Victoria and the Nile’s outflow at Jinja — the river you will follow all the way to the falls.
Understanding Modern Uganda
To understand the country you are travelling through, read some of its harder recent history. A State of Blood by Henry Kyemba is a firsthand account of the Idi Amin years by a former cabinet minister who fled the regime. For a measured modern reassessment, Mark Leopold’s Idi Amin: The Story of Africa’s Icon of Evil separates the man from the myth, tracing his roots in the colonial army and the British-backed coup of 1971.
Derek Peterson’s A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda draws on recovered provincial archives to explain how the regime actually functioned day to day. If you prefer fiction, Giles Foden’s The Last King of Scotland — later a film — is a gripping novel told through a young Scottish doctor drawn into Amin’s orbit, though it should be read as invention, not biography.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Which single book should I read before a Murchison Falls safari?
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Start with the Bradt Guide to Uganda for planning, then read Churchill’s My African Journey for its Murchison Falls chapter. Together they cover both the practical route and the romance of the place.
- Do I really need a field guide if I have a guide with me?
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Your guide will identify almost everything, but a Kingdon mammal guide or the Stevenson and Fanshawe bird guide lets you follow along, log sightings and keep the memories. Birders in particular should never travel without one.
- Are these books easy to find?
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All the field guides and most of the memoirs are in print and available online; Bradt and the wildlife guides are often stocked in Entebbe and Kampala bookshops too. Older titles such as Speke’s journal are widely available as inexpensive reprints and e-books.
- Which books suit families or younger travellers?
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Thor Hanson’s The Impenetrable Forest and Kalema-Zikusoka’s Walking with Gorillas are accessible, uplifting reads that work well for teenagers and adults alike.
Plan Your Safari
Reading turns a checklist of parks into a place with a past and a future. When you are ready to walk where Churchill walked and track the gorillas Thor Hanson helped habituate, we can build the trip around you — from Murchison Falls to Bwindi and Queen Elizabeth. Browse our Uganda safari packages or explore our Murchison Falls safaris, and tell us which chapter you would most like to live.