Ugandan Independence
Uganda became independent on 9 October 1962 with a constitution that gave one of its kingdoms a veto over the rest. The territory the British had assembled was not a nation. Buganda in the south was a centralised kingdom with a monarch, a parliament and a bureaucracy that predated the protectorate, and Britain had governed through it — using Baganda chiefs as agents across regions that had never been subject to them, which was resented for the following century. The north supplied the soldiers, on the standard colonial theory of martial races, and the south supplied the officials and the cotton and coffee. Independence therefore came with a federal compromise. Buganda kept its kabaka, its own assembly and a special status; the other kingdoms got less; and the north got the army. Milton Obote became prime minister at the head of a coalition with the Buganda royalist party, and the kabaka Mutesa II became president in 1963 — an arrangement between two people who had no reason to trust each other. It lasted three years. Obote suspended the constitution in 1966, sent Idi Amin to storm the kabaka's palace, and Mutesa escaped over a wall and died in a London flat in 1969. Obote abolished the kingdoms and made himself executive president. Amin overthrew him in 1971 while he was abroad, and killed something between 100,000 and 500,000 people in eight years. Obote came back in 1980 and was overthrown again in 1985. Museveni took power in 1986 and has held it since.
- Year: 1962 CE
- Category: Political
