The history of Uganda

Uganda lies on the high plateau around the northern shores of Lake Victoria, where the Nile begins. Its fertile, well-watered south was home for many centuries to some of the largest kingdoms of eastern Africa, above all Bunyoro, the leading power of the region for generations, and Buganda, which rose to overtake it in the 18th and 19th centuries. Britain made the territory a protectorate in 1894, ruling largely through Buganda, and Uganda became independent in 1962. Within a decade it had fallen under the military dictatorship of Idi Amin, whose regime killed perhaps 100,000 to 500,000 people, and the civil wars that followed were nearly as deadly. Yoweri Museveni, who took power at the head of a rebel army in 1986, still rules the country forty years later.

Stone tools show that people have lived in what is now Uganda for many tens of thousands of years, and for most of that time the region was home to hunter-gatherers, whose descendants, such as the Batwa of the south-western forests, survive in small numbers. In the last millennium BCE, Bantu-speaking farmers spread into the lands around Lake Victoria as part of the Bantu expansion. They made the distinctive pottery known as Urewe ware, and they smelted iron in furnaces efficient enough to produce a form of carbon steel. Over the centuries they cleared much of the forest that once surrounded the lake.

Around 1000 CE the banana, originally from South-East Asia, became the staple crop of the lakeshore, able to feed dense populations with relatively little labour. Further north and west, in the drier grasslands, cattle-keeping peoples grazed their herds. Peoples speaking Nilotic and Central Sudanic languages, including the Luo, the ancestors of the Acholi, Langi, Alur and others, moved into the north over many centuries. The meeting of herders and farmers in the south, trading cattle and grain and linked by ties of patronage, laid the foundation for the first states.

The kingdoms of western Uganda remember a golden age under the Chwezi, a dynasty of semi-divine rulers of a great realm called Kitara, who are said to have vanished mysteriously. The legends are not history, but archaeology has found traces of real states behind them. At Ntusi, a large settlement of farmers and cattle-keepers flourished from about the 11th to the 14th century, and at Bigo, near the Katonga River, a system of ditches over ten kilometres long surrounds what was probably a royal enclosure, built and occupied in the centuries before 1500. Sites like these suggest that power based on cattle wealth was concentrating in this area long before the later kingdoms.

The Chwezi cult survived as a spirit religion, called kubandwa, practised across the Great Lakes region. Many historians link the cattle-keeping elites of the Chwezi era to the Hima, or Huma, pastoralists who later formed the aristocracies of Ankole and the kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi.

Around 1500 a new dynasty, the Bito, of Luo origin from the north, took over the old Kitara heartland and founded the kingdom of Bunyoro-Kitara, whose first king is remembered as Rukidi Mpuga. The Bito kings, called omukama, ruled over both Hima herders and Iru farmers, without the rigid divisions found further south, and for the first one or two centuries of their rule Bunyoro was the dominant power of the region. Bito princes founded or took over smaller kingdoms as far afield as Busoga, Kiziba in what is now Tanzania and the lands west of the Rwenzori mountains, and Nyoro armies raided deep into the south.

Bunyoro's weakness was that every member of the large royal clan could claim the throne, and succession disputes often led to civil war and secession. Its provinces slowly broke away, and in about 1830 the southern province of Toro became an independent kingdom under a rebel prince. Ankole, in the south-west, grew from a small chiefdom into a powerful kingdom of its own under rulers called the omugabe. In the second half of the 19th century the omukama Kabalega, who came to the throne in 1870, revived Bunyoro's power, building a standing army, the abarusura, armed with guns bought from traders, and reconquering Toro.

Buganda began as a small kingdom on the northern shore of Lake Victoria, perhaps between the 13th and 15th centuries. Its own traditions trace an unbroken line of kings, the kabakas, back to a founder called Kintu, while Nyoro traditions claim that its early king Kimera was a Bito prince from Bunyoro; the question remains a point of rivalry between the two peoples. For a long time Buganda was a minor state, raided by its larger neighbour.

From the 17th century it expanded steadily. Its kabakas did something unusual in the region: they weakened the power of the hereditary clan chiefs by appointing their own officials, chiefs who owed their posts entirely to the king and could be dismissed by him. This created one of the most centralised states in sub-Saharan Africa, with an efficient system of tax collection, road-building and military service, a chief minister, the katikkiro, and a council, the Lukiiko. Buganda took territory from Bunyoro, made Busoga to the east a tributary, and built fleets of war canoes that dominated the lake. The early 18th-century kabaka Mawanda was remembered with terror by Buganda's neighbours. By the mid-19th century, under Kabaka Mutesa I, who reigned from 1856 to 1884, Buganda had overtaken Bunyoro as the leading power of the region.

Long-distance trade reached the region in the 1840s, when caravans of Swahili and Arab merchants from Zanzibar arrived at Mutesa's court seeking ivory and slaves, and offering cloth, guns and gunpowder. With the traders came Islam, which Mutesa observed for a time. From the north, Sudanese and Egyptian traders and slavers pushed up the Nile, and the khedive of Egypt sent the British explorer Samuel Baker to annex Bunyoro in 1872; Kabalega's forces drove him out.

The explorer John Hanning Speke reached Buganda in 1862 and identified the outflow of the Nile from Lake Victoria, and Henry Morton Stanley, who visited Mutesa in 1875, appealed for missionaries. Anglican missionaries arrived in 1877 and French Catholic White Fathers in 1879, and many young men at the court converted to Christianity or Islam. Mutesa's successor, Mwanga II, saw the converts' divided loyalties as a threat, and between 1885 and 1887 he had dozens of them killed; on 3 June 1886 many were burned alive at Namugongo. These Uganda Martyrs are now honoured by both Catholic and Anglican churches. In 1888 the armed converts deposed Mwanga, and Buganda sank into a civil war in which Muslim, Protestant and Catholic factions fought for control.

In the Scramble for Africa, the German Carl Peters and the British East Africa Company competed for Buganda, and an Anglo-German agreement in 1890 placed it in the British sphere. The company's agent, Frederick Lugard, helped the Protestant faction defeat the Catholics in 1892, using a Maxim gun. Britain declared a protectorate over Buganda in 1894, part of the expanding British Empire, and then used Ganda soldiers to conquer the rest of the country. Kabalega waged a guerrilla war against them for years, and Mwanga, who had turned against the British, joined him; in 1899 both were captured and exiled to the Seychelles. Bunyoro was punished by losing a large part of its heartland, the so-called "lost counties", to Buganda. A mutiny of Sudanese troops in 1897 was suppressed with Indian soldiers.

The Buganda Agreement of 1900 confirmed Buganda's self-government under its kabaka and gave its chiefs freehold land, known as mailo land, over about half the kingdom. Less generous agreements were signed with Toro, Ankole and later Bunyoro. Ganda agents were sent as administrators over other peoples, which bred lasting resentment; in Bunyoro, a revolt called nyangire, "refusing", forced their withdrawal in 1907. Between 1900 and 1905 an epidemic of sleeping sickness along the lake shores killed an estimated quarter of a million people.

The railway from Mombasa in Kenya reached Lake Victoria in 1901, and Uganda's economy was built on cotton and later coffee grown by African farmers, rather than on white settler estates as in Kenya. Asian traders, many brought originally to build the railway, came to dominate commerce. Mission schools such as King's College Budo and Makerere College, founded in 1922, produced an educated elite, concentrated in Buganda. The north became a reservoir of labour and of soldiers for the colonial army, a division between north and south that would shape the country's later politics.

Ganda leaders feared that independence in a unitary state would swallow their kingdom. In 1953 the governor, Sir Andrew Cohen, exiled Kabaka Mutesa II to Britain when he refused to cooperate, making the kabaka a national hero; he was allowed to return in 1955. The Uganda People's Congress of Milton Obote, a Langi from the north, made an alliance of convenience with the Ganda royalist movement Kabaka Yekka, "the King Alone", and won the elections of 1962. Uganda became independent on 9 October 1962 as part of the decolonisation of Africa, with Obote as prime minister and, from 1963, the kabaka as ceremonial president.

The alliance did not last. In 1964 a referendum returned two of the lost counties to Bunyoro, angering Buganda. In 1966, accused of smuggling gold and ivory from Congo with his army commander Idi Amin, Obote suspended the constitution, and when the Lukiiko demanded that his government leave Buganda soil, he sent the army under Amin to storm the kabaka's palace at Mengo. Many people were killed, and Mutesa escaped to London, where he died in 1969. In 1967 a new constitution abolished all the kingdoms. Obote ruled with a growing secret police and in 1969 moved sharply to the left.

On 25 January 1971, while Obote was at a Commonwealth conference in Singapore, Amin seized power. The coup was welcomed in Buganda and initially by Britain and Israel, but Amin immediately began massacring Acholi and Langi soldiers he suspected of loyalty to Obote. His rule became one of the most brutal in modern African history. The army, recruited increasingly from his own Kakwa people, other West Nile groups and southern Sudanese, was a law unto itself, and the State Research Bureau tortured and murdered suspects in its headquarters at Nakasero. Victims included the former prime minister and chief justice Benedicto Kiwanuka, the Anglican Archbishop Janani Luwum, killed in 1977, the vice-chancellor of Makerere and two of Amin's own ministers. Bodies were dumped in the Nile. The International Commission of Jurists estimated that at least 80,000, and probably around 300,000, people were killed; other estimates reach 500,000.

In August 1972 Amin ordered the expulsion of Uganda's Asian community, around 50,000 people, most of whom held British passports, and gave them ninety days to leave. Their businesses were handed to soldiers and supporters, and the economy collapsed. Amin turned to Libya and Saudi Arabia for aid and broke with Israel. In 1976 he welcomed hijackers of an Air France airliner to Entebbe airport, where Israeli commandos freed the hostages, and an elderly British-Israeli hostage left behind in a Kampala hospital was murdered in reprisal.

In late 1978, with his army mutinying, Amin's forces invaded Tanzania's Kagera region. Julius Nyerere's Tanzania counter-attacked together with Ugandan exiles, defeated Amin's army and its Libyan allies, and captured Kampala on 11 April 1979. Amin fled to Libya and then Saudi Arabia, where he lived until his death in 2003, never facing trial.

After two short-lived interim governments, Obote returned to power in a December 1980 election widely regarded as rigged. Yoweri Museveni, a former defence minister, launched a guerrilla war with his National Resistance Army in 1981, based in the Luwero region north of Kampala. The government's army, dominated by Acholi and Langi soldiers, waged a campaign of terror against the population of the "Luwero Triangle", forcing hundreds of thousands into camps; civilian deaths from 1981 to 1985 have been estimated at up to 300,000 or more. In July 1985 Acholi officers under Tito Okello overthrew Obote, but on 26 January 1986 the NRA took Kampala and Museveni became president.

Museveni restored order in most of the country and, with backing from the World Bank and IMF, rebuilt the economy, which grew rapidly in the 1990s. His government's open campaign against HIV/AIDS, which had struck Uganda early and hard, was credited with bringing infection rates down sharply. In 1993 the kingdoms were restored as cultural institutions, and Ronald Muwenda Mutebi II was crowned kabaka of Buganda. A new constitution in 1995 kept a "no-party" Movement system, under which parties could exist but not contest elections.

The north, however, suffered two decades of war. Alice Lakwena's Holy Spirit Movement was defeated in 1987, but Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army fought on from bases in Sudan, abducting tens of thousands of children as soldiers and sex slaves; at the height of the conflict well over a million people in Acholiland were confined to camps. The LRA was driven out of Uganda in the mid-2000s. Ugandan troops also intervened in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the wars of 1996 to 2003, and from 2007 Uganda sent peacekeepers to Somalia; in 2010 al-Shabaab bombings in Kampala killed more than seventy people watching the World Cup final. Uganda has also become one of the largest refugee-hosting countries in the world, taking in people fleeing South Sudan, Congo and elsewhere.

In 2005 a referendum restored multiparty politics, and parliament removed presidential term limits; in 2017 the age limit of 75 was abolished as well. The opposition leader Kizza Besigye was repeatedly arrested, and in 2021 the singer turned politician Bobi Wine, Robert Kyagulanyi, came second in an election marred by violence. In 2023 Uganda passed one of the world's harshest laws against homosexuality. In the election of 15 January 2026, held under an internet shutdown and amid mass arrests of opposition supporters, Museveni was declared the winner with about 72 percent of the vote; Bobi Wine rejected the result as fraudulent and went into hiding after his home was raided. Museveni's son, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, commands the armed forces and is widely seen as a possible successor.