Uganda

A country built around a kingdom that never wanted to be part of it, and the site of one of the strangest insurgencies of the century. Buganda was a powerful centralised kingdom on Lake Victoria with a bureaucracy of appointed chiefs, and Britain governed the protectorate through it from 1894, giving Baganda agents authority over other peoples and creating resentments that outlasted the empire. Independence came in 1962 with Buganda holding a special federal status; Milton Obote abolished it in 1966 and stormed the kabaka's palace. Idi Amin took power in 1971, expelled the entire Asian population of some eighty thousand people in ninety days in 1972 - destroying the commercial economy - and killed perhaps three hundred thousand before Tanzanian forces removed him in 1979. Obote's return was worse in some regions. Yoweri Museveni took Kampala in 1986 and has governed since. Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army fought in the north for two decades, abducting tens of thousands of children as fighters and wives. Uganda's early and blunt public campaign against AIDS in the 1990s cut infection rates sharply and was studied worldwide. The Nile's principal source is here. Kampala is the capital. The country has about forty-eight million people. English and Swahili are official, with Luganda widely spoken. It is landlocked and lies almost entirely on the East African plateau. Bwindi's forest holds around half the world's mountain gorillas. Churchill called it the pearl of Africa. Lake Victoria, the largest lake in Africa, forms part of its southern border.

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