Bunyoro

Bunyoro, officially the Kingdom of Bunyoro-Kitara, is a kingdom of Bantu speakers in western Uganda. Founded around the late sixteenth century, it was for long periods one of the strongest powers of the African Great Lakes region, rich in salt and iron. Its king, the Omukama, led some of the most determined resistance to British rule in East Africa, and the kingdom survives today as a traditional monarchy within Uganda.

According to Nyoro tradition, the kingdom was founded by Rukidi-Mpuga after the break-up of an older realm called Kitara. He was the first king of the Babiito dynasty, who claimed descent from the earlier Bachwezi. Tradition says he was born in Bukidi, the Luo-speaking country to the north, to a Bachwezi father and a Luo mother, and his name Mpuga, meaning a cow with white spots, is said to refer to his mixed ancestry. Nyoro and Tooro traditions also claim that Buganda, later Bunyoro's great rival, was founded by Rukidi's twin brother, a claim the Baganda strongly reject. The earliest royal tombs are thought to lie around Kakumiro.

Historians including Jean-Pierre Chrétien, Henri Médard and Christopher Wrigley conclude that in the first one or two centuries of Babiito rule Bunyoro was the leading power of the region. Babiito princes founded ruling houses in Kiziba, in northern Busoga and west of the Rwenzori mountains. To the north, Alur, Acholi and Lango chiefs sent tribute or gifts to the Omukama, and the historian Ronald Atkinson traced a strong Nyoro influence on western Acholi between about 1680 and 1780. Wealth came from the Kibiro and Katwe salt works, from iron, and later from ivory; Bunyoro's smiths were highly regarded, and their hoes and salt were traded even with Buganda for barkcloth and bananas.

Nyoro society distinguished the Babiito royal clan, the Huma, who were cattle herders, and the Iru, who farmed and worked iron. Unlike in neighbouring Ankole or Rwanda, the line between Huma and Iru was not rigid, and people of Iru origin could rise to high office. A distinctive custom is the empaako, a set of twelve praise names, such as Amooti, Akiiki and Abwooli, given to children and used in greetings as a sign of respect and belonging. Nineteenth-century European visitors recorded sophisticated medicine in Bunyoro, including a caesarean delivery observed by the European visitor Felkin in 1879.

From the late eighteenth century the kingdom was weakened by internal divisions and lost territory to Buganda, and by the mid-nineteenth century it was much smaller, though still wealthy from trade. Chwa II Kabalega, who ruled from 1870 after a succession war, set out to restore its strength through trade and war. He created a standing army, the Abarusura, defeated the explorer Samuel Baker's forces in 1872, and won a victory over Buganda at Rwangabi in 1886. When Britain extended its protectorate, it declared war on Bunyoro on 1 January 1894. Kabalega resisted for nearly five years, at times from hiding in Acholi country, until he was captured with Mwanga II of Buganda on 9 April 1899 and exiled to the Seychelles. He died in 1923 on his way home.

Under the British Empire, Bunyoro was placed under Baganda administrators, and the Banyoro rose in revolt in 1907. An agreement in 1933 restored some autonomy. After independence, Milton Obote's government disbanded the kingdom in 1967. In 1972 Idi Amin renamed Murchison Falls as Kabalega Falls, and in 2009 Kabalega was declared a national hero of Uganda. The kingdom was restored in 1993 and recognised under the 1995 constitution. Its present king, Solomon Iguru I, is the 27th Omukama, and the Bunyoro sub-region had about 2.79 million people in the 2024 census.

Our 1815, 1878, 1880 and 1900 maps label Bunyoro. The outline drawn there lies largely within today's Democratic Republic of the Congo, whereas the kingdom's heartland was in what is now western Uganda; the shape should be read as a rough approximation. From 1914 the area is shown within Uganda.