Protectorate of Uganda

The Uganda Protectorate was declared in 1894 over the kingdom of Buganda and extended over the surrounding kingdoms and peoples in the following decade. Britain arrived through the Imperial British East Africa Company and stayed when the company went bankrupt, in a territory already divided by a civil war between Protestant, Catholic and Muslim factions at the Bugandan court. The settlement that followed shaped everything after it: the Buganda Agreement of 1900 confirmed the kabaka's kingdom with its own parliament and land tenure, and gave Baganda chiefs freehold estates, so one kingdom was governed indirectly and with privileges while the north and east were administered directly and recruited into the army and the police. Cotton and later coffee were grown by African smallholders rather than settlers, which spared Uganda the land expropriation of Kenya and left it comparatively prosperous. Asian traders, many of them descendants of railway labourers, came to dominate commerce and processing. Independence was granted on 9 October 1962 under a federal constitution that made the kabaka head of state and Milton Obote prime minister, an arrangement that lasted four years before Obote sent the army into the palace and abolished the kingdoms. The regional imbalance the protectorate had built - a southern economy and a northern army - is the mechanism behind the coups, Amin's rule and the wars that followed. The kingdoms were restored as cultural institutions in 1993. The protectorate also received the Indian Penal Code and an Indian rupee currency, administered as it was from the same colonial service. Winston Churchill called it the pearl of Africa after visiting in 1907, a phrase the tourist board has never let go of. Its borders enclosed several kingdoms and dozens of peoples who had never shared a state.

• Type: Polity
• Government: Colonial administration