Uganda
Capital: Kampala · East Africa & Horn
The Great Lakes' kingdom country — Buganda, Bunyoro, Ankole and Toro — with royal tombs, bark-cloth craft and the source of the Nile.
Ethnic communities
- BagandaBuganda kingdom, clan totems, bark-cloth (UNESCO)
- Banyoro & BatooroBunyoro-Kitara empire heritage; empaako naming (UNESCO)
- Banyankole (incl. Bahima)Long-horned Ankole cattle culture
- Acholi & LangiNorthern Luo peoples; royal drum and dance traditions
More communities of Uganda
- Banyankole · Ankole's long-horned cattle aristocracy
- Basoga · Busoga's river-kingdom confederation
- Bakiga · Terrace farmers of the misty southwest
- Iteso · Ateker farmers of the eastern plains
- Langi · Lango's Luo-speaking agro-pastoralists
- Acholi · Northern Luo of royal drums and larakaraka
- Bagisu · Elgon's imbalu circumcision nation
- Lugbara · West Nile highland farmers
- Banyoro · Bunyoro-Kitara's empire heirs and salt lakes
- Batooro · Toro kingdom of crater-lake courts
- Alur · Chiefly Luo of the Nile-lake corner
- Karamojong · Ateker herders of the northeastern plains
- Bakonzo · Rwenzori mountain farmers of the snow-peaks
- Jopadhola · Luo island in the Bantu east
- Ik · Mountain-edge foragers of Kidepo's rim
- Batwa · Forest first-people of the southwest
Languages
Major languages: Luganda, Runyankole, Acholi, Lusoga, Swahili, English
Language families: Niger-Congo (Bantu); Nilo-Saharan (Nilotic, Central Sudanic)
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Bunyoro-Kitara
- • Buganda
- • Ankole (Nkore)
- • Toro
- • Busoga
Heritage sites
- • Kasubi Tombs of Buganda Kings
- • Nyero rock paintings
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Uganda
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Sport1949–1997
John Akii-Bua
400m hurdles
Won Uganda's first Olympic gold in Munich in 1972 in a world record, running from the punishing outside lane.
- Sportb. 1996
Joshua Cheptegei
Long-distance running
World record holder at 5,000m and 10,000m and Olympic champion, after a collapse in the 2017 world cross country on home soil that he refused to let define him.
- Music & the arts1931–1982
Okot p'Bitek
Poetry
Song of Lawino, written first in Acholi, gave a poor rural woman the voice to indict the westernised elite, and remains the defining East African long poem.
- Politics & liberation1853–1923
Omukama Kabalega
Anticolonial resistance
King of Bunyoro-Kitara who fought British forces for nearly a decade before capture and exile to the Seychelles. Declared a national hero of Uganda.
- Music & the arts1951–1989
Philly Bongoley Lutaaya
Music
The first prominent East African to declare publicly that he had HIV, and spent his final months touring schools with the song Alone.
- Science, business & activismb. 1996
Vanessa Nakate
Climate activism
Founder of the Rise Up Movement, who turned her cropping from a press photograph at Davos into a wider argument about whose climate voices get heard.
Deep-dive community profiles
Acholi
The Luo chiefdoms of the Uganda–South Sudan borderland — poets of the royal drum and the larakaraka courtship dance, whose mato oput reconciliation rite taught the world a justice that mends rather than merely punishes.
Open deep profile →Alur
Luo-speaking rainmakers of the Albert Nile escarpment, whose chiefs were sought out by their non-Luo neighbours to rule over them — a pattern of voluntary incorporation that gave political anthropology one of its foundational case studies.
Open deep profile →Baamba (Bwamba)
Forest farmers of the Semliki valley at the Rwenzori's northern foot, Central Sudanic in language among Bantu neighbours, who fought alongside the Bakonzo in the Rwenzururu movement for a kingdom of their own and got one, briefly and contentiously, in 2014.
Open deep profile →Bafumbira
Kinyarwanda-speaking farmers of Uganda's volcanic south-western corner, cultivating terraced slopes under the Virunga cones at the country's highest densities, and holding a Ugandan citizenship that regional politics has repeatedly called into question.
Open deep profile →Baganda
The kingdom people of the northern Lake Victoria shore — Buganda's Kabaka monarchy, 52 totemic clans, barkcloth craft and royal drum orchestras built one of Africa's most sophisticated precolonial states, and gave Uganda its name.
Open deep profile →Bagisu (Bamasaba)
The people of Mount Elgon — arabica coffee farmers whose imbalu circumcision festival every even year turns whole districts into a stage, and whose descent from the ancestor Masaba binds a nation to a mountain.
Open deep profile →Bagungu
Fishers of Lake Albert's eastern shore in Buliisa, keepers of a network of sacred natural sites revived through a formal community protocol, and the people directly on top of Uganda's oil fields and the pipeline route out of them.
Open deep profile →Bagwere
Millet and cotton farmers of Pallisa and Budaka in eastern Uganda, a community whose clans trace arrivals from four directions, whose language sits at a junction of Bantu groupings that linguists still argue about, and whose recent history is a case study in what district creation does to a people.
Open deep profile →Bakiga of Rwanda
The mountain farmers of Rwanda's north — terrace builders of the Virunga foothills whose regional identity survived the abolition of ethnicity, and whose distinctiveness from the southern heartland shaped the politics that produced the genocide.
Open deep profile →Bakonzo
The people of the Mountains of the Moon — farmers of the Rwenzori's steep slopes whose god lives on the snow peaks, who fought a sixty-year campaign for their own kingdom, and whose glaciers are disappearing within a generation.
Open deep profile →Banyankole
The cattle nation of Uganda's southwest — whose Ankole longhorn cattle with their vast lyre-shaped horns are among the world's most striking breeds, and whose Bahima herders and Bairu cultivators built the kingdom of Nkore.
Open deep profile →Banyarwanda
The people of Rwanda — one language, one religion, one culture across Hutu, Tutsi and Twa, whose royal court produced the intricate imigongo art and the towering intore dance, and whose 1994 genocide and its aftermath reshaped the continent's conscience.
Open deep profile →Banyole
Farmers of the Butaleja rice flats east of Mbale, whose divination and healing traditions were recorded in unusual depth in the twentieth century, and whose wetlands have become Uganda's rice bowl at the cost of the swamp itself.
Open deep profile →Banyoro (Bunyoro-Kitara)
Heirs of Kitara — the empire of the Bacwezi legends whose Babiito kings ruled from Hoima, whose royal fire never died from crowning to crowning, and whose king Kabalega fought the British empire for a decade from the swamps.
Open deep profile →Basoga
The people between the lake and the Nile — Busoga's federation of chiefdoms under the Kyabazinga, whose bigwala gourd-trumpet royal music is UNESCO-safeguarded, and whose land at the Nile's source shaped Uganda's history.
Open deep profile →Basongora
Long-horned cattle herders of the Rwenzori plains, whose grazing became Queen Elizabeth National Park, who were pushed into Congo and came back in 2006 to find no room, and who keep the Ankole-type Sanga herds that are now a conservation concern in their own right.
Open deep profile →Batoro
The people of the Toro kingdom below the Rwenzori, whose realm broke away from Bunyoro in the 1830s, was abolished in 1967 and restored in 1993 with a three-year-old on the throne, and whose court speech includes a parallel royal vocabulary that must be used of the king and never of anyone else.
Open deep profile →Ik (Teuso)
A few thousand mountain farmers on the Morungole escarpment above Kidepo, made famous by an ethnography that described them as a people whose morality had collapsed under starvation — a portrait they and later researchers have spent fifty years disputing.
Open deep profile →Iteso (Teso)
The largest Ateker (Karamojong-cluster) farming people — of eastern Uganda and western Kenya, who turned from cattle-nomadism to the hoe, kept the akiriket council-circles and the ajosi harvest dances, and became a granary of the Lake Kyoga basin.
Open deep profile →Japadhola (Adhola)
A Luo island in a Bantu sea: Nilotic-speaking farmers around Tororo who broke from the southward Luo migration, settled in forest for protection, and kept their language surrounded on all sides by peoples who speak nothing like it.
Open deep profile →Kakwa
Eastern Nilotic farmers of the tri-border country where Uganda, South Sudan and the DR Congo meet, dispersed across three states, associated in outside memory with Idi Amin and in their own with a rain-chief tradition and with Yumbe's long road back from insurgency.
Open deep profile →Kalenjin
The 'runners of the Rift' — a highland-Nilotic family of Nandi, Kipsigis, Tugen, Marakwet and more, whose age-set republics, koitalel prophets and the Kerio escarpment's terraced fields produced age-old cattle culture and the world's greatest distance runners.
Open deep profile →Karamojong
The cattle-herding warriors of Uganda's northeastern plains — an Ateker people whose generation-set system, sacred akiriket sacrifices, manyatta kraals and deep cattle-cosmology held a proudly pastoral world against a century of pressure to settle.
Open deep profile →Lugbara
The West Nile people of the Uganda–Congo border — Sudanic-speaking farmers whose lineage elders wield the power of the ancestral 'ghost invocation', and whose classic ethnography made their moral world famous in anthropology.
Open deep profile →Ma'di
Central Sudanic farmers of the Nile's west bank at Nimule and Adjumani, whose chiefdoms sit exactly on the Uganda-South Sudan border, whose land now holds one of the largest refugee settlements on earth, and whose rain chiefs still open the hunting season.
Open deep profile →Pokot
The people of two worlds — hill farmers with astonishing irrigation furrows and plains pastoralists with vast herds, joined by one language, the sapana initiation, and the great cattle-culture of the Kerio and Suam valleys.
Open deep profile →Rwandan Returnees
The generation born in exile — Tutsi refugees driven out from 1959 who grew up in Ugandan, Burundian and Congolese camps, built the army that stopped the genocide, came home in 1994 to a country most had never seen, and now govern it.
Open deep profile →Sabiny (Sebei)
Kalenjin-speaking cattle keepers and barley farmers on Mount Elgon's northern slopes, the only Kalenjin people in Uganda, and the community whose women built the alternative-rite movement that Uganda's anti-cutting law was written around.
Open deep profile →