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Uganda, [b] officially the Republic of Uganda, [c] is a landlocked country in East Africa. It is bordered to the east by Kenya, to the north by South Sudan, to the west by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to the south-west by Rwanda, and to the south by Tanzania. The southern part includes a substantial portion of Lake Victoria, shared ...
3 days ago · Uganda, country in east-central Africa. Its physical features vary from the tall volcanic mountains of the eastern and western frontiers to the densely forested swamps of the Albert Nile River and the rainforests of the country’s central plateau. Kampala is the capital. Read more about Uganda here.
Uganda People's Defense Force (UPDF): Land Force (includes marines), Air Force, Special Forces Command, Reserve Force Ministry of Internal Affairs: Uganda Police Force (2024) note 1: the Special Forces Command is a separate branch within the UPDF; it evolved from the former Presidential Guard Brigade and has continued to retain presidential ...
- Overview
- Brief overview of the early history of Uganda
- The kingdoms of Bunyoro and Buganda
- The Uganda Protectorate
- Growth of a peasant economy
- Political and administrative development of Uganda
- World War II and its aftermath
- The Republic of Uganda
- Obote’s first presidency and the 1971 coup
- Tyranny under Amin
history of Uganda, a survey of notable events and people in the history of Uganda. The country, located in east-central Africa, is landlocked. Uganda’s borders, drawn in an artificial and arbitrary manner in the late 19th century by colonial powers, encompass two essentially different types of societies: the relatively centralized Bantu peoples of the south and the more decentralized Nilotic and Sudanic peoples to the north. There are many ecosystems in the country, from the tall volcanic mountains of the eastern and western frontiers to the densely forested swamps of the Albert Nile River and the rainforests of the country’s central plateau.
Uganda’s capital is Kampala, which is also the country’s largest city. The city’s extent reaches the shore of Lake Victoria, the largest lake in Africa and chief reservoir of the Nile River.
The early history of Uganda, like much of sub-Saharan Africa, is a saga of movements of small groups of cultivators and herders over centuries. Cultures and languages changed continuously as peoples slowly migrated to other regions and intermingled. By the mid-19th century, when the first non-African visitors entered the region later to become the ...
The organization of the peoples who came to inhabit the area north of the Nile River was mainly based on their clan structures. In this respect the northerners differed markedly from the peoples to the southwest of the Nile. There, peoples were organized into states—or “kingdoms,” as they were labeled by the earliest European visitors. The dominant state was Bunyoro-Kitara, which originated at the end of the 15th century and, under able rulers, extended its influence eastward and southward over a considerable area. To the south there were a number of lesser states, each with a chief who, like the ruler of Bunyoro-Kitara, combined priestly functions with those of a secular leader. To the southeast of Bunyoro-Kitara, the smaller state of Buganda grew as an offshoot of its larger neighbor. By the end of the 18th century, however, the boundaries of Bunyoro-Kitara had been stretched so far that the authority of the ruler began to weaken, and a succession of pacific chiefs accelerated this decline. Simultaneously, the smaller, more compact state of Buganda enjoyed a succession of able and aggressive kabakas (rulers), who began to expand at the expense of Bunyoro-Kitara.
It was during the period of Buganda’s rise that the first Swahili-speaking traders from the east coast of Africa reached the country in the 1840s. Their object was to trade in ivory and enslaved people. Kabaka Mutesa I, who took office about 1856, admitted the first European explorer, the Briton John Hanning Speke, who crossed into the kabaka’s territory in 1862.
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Mwanga, who was restored to his throne with the assistance of the Christian (both Roman Catholic and Protestant) Ganda, soon faced European imperialism. Carl Peters, the German adventurer, made a treaty of protection with Mwanga in 1889, but this was revoked when the Anglo-German agreement of 1890 declared all the country north of latitude 1° S to be in the British sphere of influence. The Imperial British East Africa Company agreed to administer the region on behalf of the British government, and in 1890 Captain F.D. Lugard, the company’s agent, signed another treaty with Mwanga, whose kingdom of Buganda was now placed under the company’s protection. Lugard also made treaties of protection with two other chiefs, the rulers of the western states of Ankole and Toro. However, when the company did not have the funds to continue its administrative position, the British government, for strategic reasons and partly through pressure from missionary sympathizers in Britain, declared Buganda its protectorate in 1894.
Britain inherited a country that was divided into politico-religious factions, which had erupted into civil war in 1892. Buganda was also threatened by Kabarega, the ruler of Bunyoro, but a military expedition in 1894 deprived him of his headquarters and made him a refugee for the rest of his career in Uganda. Two years later the protectorate included Bunyoro, Toro, Ankole, and Busoga, and treaties were also made with chiefs to the north of the Nile. Mwanga, who revolted against British overlordship in 1897, was overthrown again and replaced by his infant son.
A mutiny in 1897 of the Sudanese troops used by the colonial government led Britain to take a more active interest in the Uganda Protectorate, and in 1899 Sir Harry Johnston was commissioned to visit the country and to make recommendations on its future administration. The main outcome of his mission was the Buganda Agreement of 1900, which formed the basis of British relations with Buganda for more than 50 years. Under its terms the kabaka was recognized as ruler of Buganda as long as he remained faithful to the protecting authority. His council of chiefs, the lukiko, was given statutory recognition. The leading chiefs benefited most from the agreement, since, in addition to acquiring greater authority, they were also granted land in freehold to ensure their support for the negotiations. Johnston made another agreement of a less-detailed nature with the ruler of Toro (1900), and subsequently a third agreement was made with the ruler of Ankole (1901).
Meanwhile, British administration was being gradually extended north and east of the Nile. However, in these areas, where a centralized authority was unknown, no agreements were made, and British officers, frequently assisted by agents of Buganda, administered the country directly. By 1914 Uganda’s boundaries had been fixed, and British control had reached most areas.
Early in the 20th century Sir James Hayes Sadler, who succeeded Johnston as commissioner, concluded that the country was unlikely to prove attractive to European settlers. Sadler’s own successor, Sir Hesketh Bell, announced that he wished to develop Uganda as an African state. In this he was opposed by a number of his more senior officials and in particular by the chief justice, William Morris Carter. Carter was chairman of a land commission whose activities continued until after World War I (1914–18). Again and again the commission urged that provision be made for European planters, but their efforts were unsuccessful. Bell himself had laid the foundations for a peasant economy by encouraging the Africans to cultivate cotton, which had been introduced into the protectorate as a cash crop in 1904. It was mainly because of the wealth derived from cotton that Uganda became independent of a grant-in-aid from the British Treasury in 1914.
In 1914, at the outset of World War I, there were a few skirmishes between the British and Germans on the southwestern frontier, but Uganda was never in danger of invasion. The war, however, did hinder the country’s development. Soon after the war it was decided that the protectorate authorities should concentrate, as Bell had suggested, on expanding African agriculture, and Africans were encouraged to grow coffee in addition to cotton. The British government’s decision to forbid the alienation of land in freehold, and the economic depression of the early 1920s, dealt a further blow to the hopes of European planters. The part to be played by Europeans, as well as Asians, was now mainly on the commercial and processing side of the protectorate’s agricultural industry.
As the output of primary produce increased, it became necessary to extend and improve communications. Just before World War I a railway had been built running northward from Jinja, on Lake Victoria, to Namasagali. In the 1920s a railway from Mombasa, on the Kenyan coast, was extended to Soroti, and in 1931 a rail link was also completed between Kampala, the industrial capital of Uganda, and the coast.
The depression of the early 1930s interrupted Uganda’s economic progress. However, the protectorate’s recovery was more rapid than that of its neighbors, and the later years of the decade were a period of steady expansion.
In 1921 a Legislative Council was instituted, but its membership was so small (four official and two nonofficial members) that it made little impact on the protectorate. The Indian community, which played an important part in the commercial life of the region, resented the fact that it was not to have equal representation with Europeans on the unofficial side of the council and so refused to participate until 1926. There was no evidence of a desire on the part of the Africans to sit in the council, since the most politically advanced group in the community, the Ganda, regarded its own lukiko as the most important council in the country.
In light of the Africans’ indifference toward the protectorate legislature, it is not surprising that they opposed the suggestion, made in the later 1920s, that there should be some form of closer union between the East African territories. An interest in “tribal” traditions was one source of this opposition, but there was also fear, among Africans as well as Asians, that they would be dominated by Kenya’s European settlers.
During World War II (1939–45) the protectorate faced the task of becoming as self-sufficient as it could. More important for Uganda was the attempt by the governor, Sir Charles Dundas, to reverse his predecessors’ policy and to give more freedom to the factions striving for power in Buganda. The old policy was revived, however, after an outbreak of rioting in 1945. Also in that year the first Africans were nominated to the Legislative Council, and in succeeding years African representation steadily increased. An important step was taken in 1954 when the African council membership increased to 14 out of a total of 28 nonofficial members; the 14 were selected from districts thought to be more natural units of representation than the provinces that had previously existed. In 1955 a ministerial system was introduced, with 5 nonofficial African ministers out of a total of 11. The success of the council was undermined, however, by the erratic participation of Buganda, which viewed a central legislature as a threat to its autonomy. This feeling reinforced the resentment Bugandans harbored after Mutesa II had been deported in 1953 for refusing to cooperate with the protectorate government. He returned two years later as a constitutional ruler, but the rapprochement between Buganda and the protectorate government was lukewarm.
In the immediate postwar years the protectorate administration placed greater emphasis on economic and social development than on political advance. From 1952 the government rapidly expanded secondary education, while legislation was enacted and a loan fund was established to encourage Africans to participate in trade. A relatively ambitious development program was greatly assisted by the high prices realized for cotton and coffee; coffee overtook cotton as Uganda’s most valuable export in 1957. In 1954 a large hydroelectric project was inaugurated at Owen Falls on the Nile near Jinja, and in 1962 a five-year development plan was announced.
In the late 1950s, as a few political parties emerged, the African population concentrated its attention on achieving self-government, with focus on the Legislative Council. The kingdom of Buganda intermittently pressed for independence from Uganda, which raised the question of the protectorate’s future status. Discussions in London in 1961 led to ...
By accepting a constitution that conceded what amounted to federal status to Buganda, Obote contrived an unlikely alliance with the Ganda establishment. Together the UPC and KY were able to form a government with Obote as prime minister and with the DP in opposition. Obote agreed to replace the British governor-general by appointing Mutesa II as the country’s first president in an attempt to unify the alliance further, but this move was unsuccessful. Although Obote was able to win over some of the members of the KY and even of the DP so that they joined the UPC, tension grew steadily between the kabaka on the one hand and the UPC on the other. The Ganda leaders particularly resented their inability to dominate a government composed mainly of members of other ethnic groups. There were also divisions within the UPC, because each member of parliament owed his election to local ethnic supporters rather than to his membership in a political party. Those supporters frequently put pressure on their representatives to redress what they saw as an imbalance in the distribution of the material benefits of independence.
Faced with this dissatisfaction among some of his followers and with increasingly overt hostility in Buganda, Obote arrested five of his ministers and suspended the constitution in 1966. Outraged, the Ganda leaders ordered him to remove his government from the kingdom. Obote responded by sending troops under the leadership of Colonel Idi Amin to arrest the kabaka, who escaped to England, where he died in 1969. When Obote imposed a new republican constitution—appointing himself executive president, abolishing all the kingdoms, and dividing Buganda into administrative districts—he also lost the support of the peoples of southwestern Uganda. Internal friction subsequently intensified, fostered by mutual suspicion between the rival groups, by assassination attempts against the president, and by the increasingly oppressive methods employed by the government to silence its critics.
At independence the export economy was flourishing without adversely affecting subsistence agriculture, and the economy continued to improve, largely because of the high demand and high prices for coffee. To answer accusations that the profits from exports did not benefit the producers enough, Obote attempted in 1969 to distribute the benefits from the prospering economy more widely. To this end he published a “common man’s charter,” which focused on removing the last vestiges of feudalism by having the government take a majority holding in the shares of the larger, mainly foreign-owned companies. In order to unite the country more firmly, he also produced a plan for a new electoral system in 1970 that would require successful candidates for parliament to secure votes in constituencies outside their home districts.
These proposals met with a cynical response in some quarters, but the government was overthrown before they could be put into effect. Obote had relied heavily on the loyalty of Amin, but Amin had been building support for himself within the army by recruiting from his own Kakwa ethnic group in the northwest. The army, which had previously been composed of Acholi and their neighbors, Obote’s own Lango people, now became sharply divided. Simultaneously, a rift developed between Obote and Amin, and in January 1971 Amin took advantage of the president’s absence from the country to seize power.
Amin’s coup was widely welcomed, as there was hope that the country would finally be unified. Several Western countries, including Britain, who feared the spread of communism, were also relieved at Obote’s overthrow: they had become suspicious that his policies were moving to the left. Amin promised a return to civilian government in five years, but problems with his leadership were soon apparent. Amin had little Western-style education and virtually no officer training, so he often resorted to arbitrary violence in order to maintain his position. In one incident, he destroyed the one potential center of effective opposition by a wholesale slaughter of senior army officers loyal to Obote.
To win more general support among the Ugandan population, Amin ordered all Asians who had not taken Ugandan nationality to leave the country in 1972. His move won considerable approval in the country because many Africans believed that they had been exploited by the Asians, who controlled the middle and some of the higher levels of the economy, but the action isolated Uganda from the rest of the world community. Although a few wealthy Ugandans profited from Amin’s actions, the majority of the commercial enterprises formerly owned by Asians were given to senior army officers who rapidly squandered the proceeds and then allowed the businesses to collapse.
Most people in the countryside were able to survive the total breakdown of the economy that followed in the mid- and late 1970s because the fertility of Uganda’s soil allowed them to continue growing food. In the towns an all-pervading black market developed, and dishonesty became the only means of survival. This economic and moral collapse stirred up criticism of the government, and during this period the country experienced several serious coup attempts.
In an attempt to divert attention from Uganda’s internal problems, Amin launched an attack on Tanzania in October 1978. Tanzanian troops, assisted by armed Ugandan exiles, quickly put Amin’s demoralized army to flight and invaded Uganda. With these troops closing in, Amin escaped the capital. A coalition government of former exiles, calling itself the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF), with a former leading figure in the DP, Yusufu Lule, as president, took office in April 1979. Because of disagreement over economic strategy and fear that Lule was promoting the interests of his own Ganda people, he was replaced in June by Godfrey Binaisa, but Binaisa’s term of office was also short-lived. Supporters of Obote plotted Binaisa’s overthrow, and Obote returned to Uganda in May 1980.
Dec 26, 2023 · Explore the geography, regions, and landmarks of Uganda, a landlocked country in East-Central Africa. Find maps, facts, and figures about its location, area, population, capital, currency, and more.
- Kampala
- Republic of Uganda
- 197,100.00 km 2
- 241,038.00 km 2
Apr 26, 2023 · Uganda's constitution guarantees press freedom, but the media are "hindered by laws on fraudulent digital activity, anti-terrorism and public order", says the Reporters Without Borders (RSF ...
Explore Uganda's diverse attractions, from the source of the Nile river and the mountain gorillas in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park to the cultural village of Igongo and the chimpanzee sanctuary on Ngamba Island. Find tips, itineraries, activities and guidebooks for your Uganda trip.
