Uganda

From the great lakeside kingdoms of the Buganda kabakas to a turbulent modern republic.

Uganda lies at the heart of Africa's interlacustrine region, the well-watered country between the great lakes where Bantu farmers and Nilotic herders met and built some of the continent's most enduring kingdoms — above all Buganda, ruled by its kabaka, alongside Bunyoro-Kitara, Ankole and Toro. In the nineteenth century Swahili-Arab traders, then Christian missionaries, reached the court of Buganda, and religious rivalry led to the killing of the Uganda Martyrs in 1885–87. Britain declared the Uganda Protectorate in 1894 and through the 1900 Buganda Agreement governed by indirect rule, while the Uganda Railway, built largely by Indian labour, bound the country to the coast. Uganda became independent on 9 October 1962 with Milton Obote as prime minister and the kabaka Mutesa II as its first president. Independence gave way to upheaval: Obote's abolition of the kingdoms in 1966–67, Idi Amin's brutal dictatorship of 1971–79 and the expulsion of the Asian community, the war that ousted Amin, a second Obote period and the Bush War, and Yoweri Museveni's seizure of power in 1986. The north was then ravaged for two decades by the Lord's Resistance Army.