The Ultimate Starter Guide to Ugandan History | A POLITICAL HISTORY OF UGANDA by Samwiri Karugire

 

Compressing the sweeping timeline of a nation's history into a single volume is no easy feat, even for a relatively young state. Authors are constantly forced to make tough editorial decisions about where to begin, what to emphasise, and what to omit. In A Political History of Uganda, historian Samwiri Rubaraza Karugire presents a concise, systematic overview that successfully distils the country's complex political evolution into under 200 readable pages.

A Pre-Colonial Tapestry of Interconnection

Rather than treating Uganda's pre-colonial societies as isolated entities that were only united by British intervention, Karugire opens the book by establishing their deep-seated interdependence. He traces historical interactions across both centralised kingdoms—such as Buganda, Nkore, Toro, and Bunyoro-Kitara—and non-kingdom societies in areas like Kigezi, Acholi, and Lango.

Through examples like the regional salt trade from Bunyoro-Kitara and the grand migrations of Luo groups, Karugire illustrates a vibrant pre-colonial regional economy and social symbiosis. This foundation is critical: it demonstrates that these societies shared intertwined histories long before colonial borders were drawn, while highlighting how colonial rule ultimately interrupted their organic development.

Buganda as the Pivotal Axis

As the narrative approaches the late 19th century, Karugire shifts significant focus toward the Kingdom of Buganda. Because Buganda served as the geographic and administrative nucleus from which the British built the modern Ugandan state, its internal developments heavily influenced the rest of the territory. The text details how local developments, including the religious civil wars, the introduction of Christianity, and the pivotal 1900 Uganda Agreement, shaped the surrounding regions and laid the framework for the emerging political economy.

The Colonial Era and the Path to Institutional Crisis

Moving into the 20th century, the book examines how early colonial policies created structural fractures that would later haunt the independent nation. Karugire analyses:

• The Political Economy: How colonial administrative structures created regional disparities and influenced socio-economic growth.
• Nationalist Movements & Party Politics: The rise of early political parties (such as the DP, UPC, and Kabaka Yekka), exploring their internal frictions, strategic blunders, and missed opportunities for unity.
• Decolonisation: The institution of the Legislative Council (LegCo) during the 1950s and the complex political manoeuvring leading to independence.
• Post-Independence Instability: The rapid escalation of executive tension that culminated in the 1966 Buganda Crisis, the 1967 constitution abrogation, and Milton Obote's shift toward authoritarianism and a one-party state.

The narrative culminates with the 1971 military coup that brought Idi Amin to power. Published in 1980 just after Amin's fall, the book intentionally stops at this turning point, recognising that the post-1971 era marked the beginning of an entirely different structural epoch in Ugandan history.

Verdict

At roughly 197 pages of core text, A Political History of Uganda avoids dense jargon in favour of an accessible, highly structured narrative. Written in the late 1970s, Karugire’s analysis carries an objective tone uncoloured by more recent political developments. For anyone seeking a foundational narrative of Uganda's journey from pre-colonial interregional trade to modern statehood, Karugire’s work remains an essential starting point.

 

The Kabula massacre, Nkore's longest succession war and the ascension of Ntare V

Sometime around 1870, Omugabe Mutambuka, the ruler of Nkore Kingdom, died. His death triggered what would become the longest and bloodiest succession war in Nkore's royal history.

That war eventually brought Ntare V to the throne, but it lasted three years, and by the end, the Nkore royal family had been torn apart and almost destroyed. The effects of that succession struggle would haunt Ntare throughout his reign, which ended in 1895.

Context

In Nkore, succession disputes were common; in fact, they were almost the norm. Rarely did a prince have the support of all his brothers and uncles to become king.

However, Mutambuka had been one of the exceptions. His own rise to power met little resistance, and for most of his reign, it seemed his eldest son, Bacwa, would also have a fairly straightforward path to the throne. Bacwa appeared to have everything: military standing, a loyal following among fighting men, and the respect that came with being the first-born son. By tradition and expectation, the throne seemed to be his.

But that never happened.

During a drunken quarrel, Bacwa killed his cousin. The dead man was the son of Kibangura, Mutambuka's sister, and she never forgave him. Kibangura pressured Mutambuka to banish Bacwa from the kingdom.

Bacwa first went to Mpororo, from where he later made his way to Rwanda. There, he was killed, allegedly by Kibangura's agents.

But Kibangura did not stop there. She demanded that Mutambuka have Bacwa's eldest son, Rukamisa, killed as compensation for the death of her own son. Mutambuka agreed because at the time, he did not know that Bacwa had already been killed in Rwanda.

So by the time Mutambuka finally died, Bacwa's line had been shattered. But it had not completely disappeared. One of Bacwa's surviving sons was a young man named Ntare. At that point, nobody thought much of him.

The War Begins

With Bacwa out of the picture, the real fight was between Mutambuka's surviving sons.

On one side was Rukongyi, who had actually adopted the young Ntare. Rukongyi was supported by several princes, including Makumbi, Nkuranga, and Gandiga.

On the other side was Mukwenda. He was strongly backed by his younger brother, Muhikira.

Most of the other princes supported Rukongyi. One reason appears to be that many people associated Bacwa's misfortunes with Mukwenda's side. But others were afraid of what Rukongyi's camp might do if it won. They feared revenge.

The spark that started the war was a murder that broke every rule and norm around the death of an Nkore king. After Mutambuka's death, the royal purification rites were supposed to be sacred. It was a time when violence was forbidden. But during those rites, one of Mukwenda's supporters killed Rukongyi.

Rukongyi's supporters were shocked. The leadership of their faction then passed to Makumbi, Rukongyi's younger brother.

Makumbi made a decision. He would retreat towards Kabula, near the Buganda border, and try to secure outside support.

The Trap

But Makumbi did not know that Mukwenda had moved faster. Mukwenda had reached out to the Baganda first, and he had won them over to his side.

Makumbi's party then met Mukasa, the chief of Buddu. Mukasa had been sent by Kabaka Muteesa. Makumbi and his followers believed they were meeting an ally.

Mukasa gave them a warm welcome. He invited Makumbi and the leading princes into a large house. The house had been built specifically for the meeting. It was presented as a place for a peace ceremony — a blood-brotherhood ritual, a sacred bond between allies.

But behind the walls of that house, there was a trap. The walls had been lined with bark cloth. And behind that bark cloth, armed men were hiding, waiting.

Makumbi's party were politely asked to leave their spears outside. After all, they were told, this was a ceremony of peace. You do not bring weapons into a ceremony of peace. The request seemed reasonable, so they complied without hesitation. They left their spears outside. Then they walked in.

And that is when Mukasa's men attacked.

The hidden men fell on them the moment the doors closed. What had been presented as a gathering of peace became a massacre. Seventy-eight people were murdered. Many of them were of royal blood.

The Aftermath

The Kabula massacre almost destroyed the anti-Mukwenda cause entirely. The senior princes were gone. The military leaders were gone. Many royal partisans who had committed themselves to the fight were also gone. And those who survived were in shock.

Nkuranga and Gandiga, both sons of Mutambuka, were legitimate claimants in their own right. But they lost heart. They considered abandoning the struggle altogether. And by doing so, they effectively surrendered their claims to the throne.

Ntare did not.

He was younger. He belonged to the next generation. By strict seniority, he was not the obvious choice. But he was the only one still willing to fight.

His claim also had real weight. He was the son of Bacwa, the prince many believed would have become king if he had lived. Ntare had also been adopted by Rukongyi, which connected him directly to the defeated claimant whose following he now inherited. And above all, Ntare was still standing when everyone else seemed ready to give up and flee into exile. To his supporters, that courage mattered more than birth order.

There was also something personal driving him. By fighting Mukwenda, Ntare was not only seeking the throne — he was avenging his father. This was both a succession war and a blood feud.

The Road to the Throne

But the road to the throne was not smooth.

After Kabula, Ntare's battered party returned home to Nkore. They camped in what is now Kashongyi, in Kiruhura District. Mukwenda attacked them there. The battle was intense, the casualties were heavy, and Ntare barely escaped with only a handful of followers. He regrouped. Then he tried to rebuild.

Mukwenda again turned to deceit. He persuaded one of Ntare's servants to give him poisoned beer. Ntare became gravely ill. Before Ntare had recovered, Mukwenda attacked the camp. His forces scattered Ntare's party with ease. Again, Ntare barely escaped. He fled to Buhweju. There, he was treated, and eventually he recovered from the poisoning.

After recovering, Ntare returned to the struggle. He settled at Mugoye, in present-day Ibanda. Once again, he tried to consolidate his position. But Mukwenda soon attacked. This time, the battle was decisive.

The fighting was bitter. The casualties were heavy on both sides. But by the end of the battle, Mukwenda was dead. His brother Muhikira was also dead. The succession war was over. Ntare had won.

What He Inherited

But what exactly had he won?

Not a united kingdom. Not a realm that had peacefully chosen him. Ntare inherited a society consumed by murder, betrayal, and civil war. The royal family had been torn apart. Most of Mutambuka's sons and many of the kingdom's leading princes were dead. Subjects had fought on opposite sides. Families carried memories of relatives killed by fellow Banyankore. Ntare had won because he was the last credible fighter still standing — not because the kingdom had calmly accepted him.

His real achievement came after the war. He held Nkore together through the exhaustion that follows catastrophe. Later, he expanded the kingdom's frontiers through raids on neighbouring peoples, which showed his regime had recovered enough strength to act outwardly.

But the foundation remained fragile. The civil war had consumed most of the ruling class. Nearly every senior prince who might have provided stability, succession options, or internal balance was gone.

Closing Thoughts

Ntare's throne was won through endurance. It was won through war. But the price was severe.

A kingdom survived. A ruler emerged. But Nkore's royal house had nearly destroyed itself to put him there.

My Swahili journey and why Ugandans do not speak the language

I recently decided to start teaching myself Swahili, which is the most widely spoken language in East Africa.

I wanted to learn Swahili (or Kiswahili as it is called in Swahili) because I have been a keen supporter of the East African community initiatives and I am a firm believer in the idea of an East African federation.

However, over the years I have increasingly began to feel like a bit of a fraud because of my inability to speak any Swahili.

I have been finding my inability to speak Swahili at odds with my preaching the gospel of integration and getting East Africans to come together as one.

Because Swahili is the de facto langauage of the East African community, I felt I was not setting the right example myself by not speaking Swahili, which I believe is the easiest step an individual Ugandan can take towards being part of the bigger East African family.

It is now a few weeks into my "Learn Swahili" project and everything is going rather well. I wish I had embarked on this earlier.

However, as I have been studying Swahili, I have also been reflecting on why the language is not spoken as widely in Uganda as it is in other East African countries.

Everybody will tell you that Ugandans do not speak Swahili because it is a language that was long associated with brutal military dictatorships and their soldiers but this, while true, is only a small component of the whole story.

The reasons why Swahili never developed as a widespread lingua franca in Uganda have more to do with opposition to in from the kings of Buganda and the early Christian missionaries.

The British in Uganda had decided in the early 20th century to promote the Swahili language as a means of communication among lower levels of government and as a language of instruction in the early years of education.

However, the Christian missionaries at the time resisted, and worked against this, because they associated Swahili with Islam and they felt that teaching Swahili might somehow give Islam a foothold in Uganda.

This missionary opposition to Swahili might not have amounted to much if the Kabaka of Buganda, Daudi Chwa II, had supported the policy of teaching Swahili.

But Kabaka Chwa was not only opposed to Swahili, he was actually quite emphatic about how he would never allow the language to be taught in his kingdom.

Kabaka Chwa believed that teaching Swahili would lead to a situation where it became the lingua franca of the Uganda Protectorate and he was afraid this would then diminish the cultural influence Luganda, and by extension Buganda, was already beginning to have on the expansion and establishment of British rule in the protectorate.

The Baganda collaborated with the British from the beginning of their establishment of the Uganda Protectorate and they had been rewarded with lands from other kingdoms and communities and Baganda chiefs were being used to spread British rule to other parts of Uganda especially in the East and parts of the West.

This had led to a situation where Baganda had been elevated to a special status by the British and by default Luganda had started to gain an equally special status in local administration and education outside Buganda.

It is against this background that Kabaka Chwa felt that Swahili would diminish this new found status of Luganda and he thus opposed its teaching in Buganda and since the British depended on the goodwill of the Baganda at this time, they acquiesced to the Kabaka's demands.

Because British colonialism spread out from Buganda to the rest of Uganda, when the teaching of Swahili in Buganda was abandoned the Swahili project died for all practical purposes though efforts to teach it continued up to the late 1940s.

In the late 1960s President Milton Obote, through his "Move to the left" initiative had laid out plans to make Swahili a national language and a unifying force in Uganda.

Obote was a great admirer of President Nyerere of Tanzania and he wanted to emulate what the Tanzanian president was doing at the time to do away with tribal identities in Tanzania and create a Tanzanian identity through Swahili.

However, Obote was overthrown before his plans could take off.

Therefore by the time the military dictatorships of the 70s and 80s came around Swahili was already pretty much dead and it has been struggling since.

Anyway, I am committed to my pursuit of fluency in Swahili and I hope by the end of the year I will have attained a level of proficiency that will enable me hold general conversations on most common topics. By the end of next year, I want to be able to write, talk and debate on any topic of interest.

Why can't I call Kampala home?

Recently a colleague asked me what my hometown was and I said Kampala.

  

However, my colleague felt I had not quite understood her question because she chose to rephrase it along the lines of “ I mean where are you from”, to which I repeated “Kampala”.

 

At this point, the clearly perplexed lady said,

“ But you are not a Muganda” and I said  “Yes”.

She added, “ But how then can you be from Kampala?”

This exchange went on for a while but it ultimately ended the same way most such exchanges I have had over the years have ended, which is usually something along the lines of me being told I have no sense of roots or belonging or other things of that sort.

The confusion on my female colleague’s part arose because, for some reason, nobody seems to ever “come from” Kampala.

There is a pervasive mindset in Uganda that only the few thousand people who can trace their family roots to a pre-colonial Kampala are allowed to call it their Home.

I find this quite absurd.

For those that are a bit puzzled at this point, let me attempt to put the exchange with my colleague, and others of her ilk, in context.

Kampala, the city in which I was born and have lived for all but 2 of the 37 years I have been alive, is the capital of Uganda. 

Kampala also happens to be located in a region called Buganda, from which Uganda gets its name and, which is predominantly populated by the Baganda. Baganda make up around 18% of Uganda’s population, which makes them the largest single ethnic group in Uganda.

Also, my parents are from different parts of South-Western Uganda and they are Banyankore. 

Furthermore, Uganda is a largely rural country and people like myself, born and bred in cities and towns, are a relatively small (but rapidly growing) minority.

Finally, in most Ugandan cultures children "belong" to their father and hence take on his name, clan, and by extension, wherever it is he comes from.

You would think that that last point above would pretty much put my issues to bed. After all, if the dominant societal culture says I come from wherever my father comes from then why would I say I come from Kampala?

The thing is that Kampala seems to have its own standards when it comes to these matters.

Let me explain with an example.

If my dad had been born in Masaka, which is in Buganda, and had then moved to Mpigi, also found in Buganda, and I had been born in Mpigi, I am sure I nobody would say I was from Masaka. Most people would simply accept that I am from Mpigi.

However, when it comes to Kampala the same logic does not apply.

I remember spending an exasperating 15 minutes explaining to the fellow who was registering me for a national ID, why I insisted on filling in Kampala as my home district.
 
The man was adamant that the people who had put that section on the form had meant for me to fill in where my father came from, not necessarily where I was born or where I had lived all my life. I had more important things to do than argue with the man so I quickly picked new forms and filled in an answer that was more to his liking and only then was I entered into the system.

I also remember a friend of mine from secondary who had lived in Kyambogo all his life but he filled in Lira when it came to filling in university admission forms section on district of origin. He asked me why I had filled in Kampala and not Mbarara and I told him I had never lived in Mbarara. He said that that did not matter because, according to him, the guys at UNEB (or ministry of education) would be confused by the mismatch between my "home district" and my surname.

By the way, nobody should get the impression that I have no love or attachment to Rwampara County in Mbarara district, (which is where dad was from).  I do like the place. Quite a lot, as a matter of fact.

I like the fact there is extended family all around the area. I like the peace and quiet I enjoy when I am there. Most of the time I spend there is quite refreshing and I enjoy most of the visits I make there once or twice every year.  I might even spend my retirement years over there in the unlikely event that I get tired of living in Kampala

However, despite all the things I like about Mbarara, it just does not feel like home.  When there I somehow always feel like that guest who comes to your house so often that you no longer feel the need to to accord him any special treatment, but he still remains a guest. He is still has boundaries he cannot cross because he is simply not a member of the household. 

I essentially have no sense of history with Mbarara. I have no memories of growing up there. No childhood friends I got into mischief with, no romances and relationships or  special places with deeply held memories attached them. Nothing.

You can pass whatever judgements about what my parents should or should not have done but that is neither here nor there.

Mbarara is just not home in the sense in which I understand the word.

I do however recognize Mbarara as my ancestral home and I see no contradiction in ancestral home and hometown being two very different, and mutually exclusive, things. It seems in this I am something of a minority, at least when it comes to the people I deal with on a regular basis.

Kampala, unlike Mbarara is in my DNA, so to speak.

I have seen it grow in the same way it has been all around me and moulded me all my life.  With its countless street corners full of memories, numerous childhood friends (and some foes), favourite spots that have come and gone, neighbourhoods I lived in that are now barely recognisable from 30 years ago. The good, the bad, the lovely, the memorable and the not so memorable.  Its all there in Kampala.

This city, formerly of seven hills, is the only true home I know. 

So. Guys…why won’t you just let me call Kampala home?