Long before any European turned up, the region between the Great Lakes of East Africa — what historians call the interlacustrine zone — was a patchwork of organised kingdoms, with courts, hierarchies and armies. It was settled in waves: Bantu-speaking farmers and ironworkers who occupied the fertile south and centre, and Nilotic-speaking herders and other groups who came down from the north with their cattle. Out of that mix, complex societies emerged over the course of the second millennium AD.
The first great power was Bunyoro-Kitara, a kingdom that tradition links to the semi-legendary Bachwezi (or Chwezi) dynasty and, later, to the Babito, of Nilotic origin. Between the 16th and 17th centuries, Bunyoro was the dominant state in the region, controlling trade routes, salt mines and prestigious ironworking. In its shadow, and often in conflict with it, other kingdoms began to rise.
Buganda, on the north-western shore of Lake Victoria (Nnalubaale to its people), started out as a minor principality and grew at Bunyoro's expense until, by the late 18th century, it had become the most powerful and centralised kingdom in the region. Its king, the kabaka, ruled with a prime minister (katikkiro) and a network of chiefs he appointed himself, in a surprisingly bureaucratic system. Around 1830, Prince Kaboyo broke away from Bunyoro and founded the kingdom of Toro, to the west, beside the Rwenzori Mountains. Further south, in herding country, the kingdom of Ankole (Nkore) organised a society divided between the cattle-keeping Bahima and the farming Bairu. These four kingdoms — Buganda, Bunyoro, Toro and Ankole — would form the backbone of the Uganda that was about to be born.
For centuries, the source of the Nile was one of the world's great geographical mysteries. The answer lay in Uganda. In 1862, the British explorer John Hanning Speke reached the court of kabaka Mutesa I of Buganda and, shortly afterwards, the spot where Lake Victoria pours its waters into the Nile, a set of falls he named Ripon Falls, next to present-day Jinja. Speke declared that this was where the Nile began, sparking one of the fiercest geographical disputes of the 19th century with his former companion Richard Burton.
Others followed Speke. Henry Morton Stanley visited Mutesa I in 1875 and, at the king's own request, sent an appeal to Europe for missionaries to come. The response transformed Buganda: Protestant missionaries from the Church Missionary Society arrived in 1877, and Catholic White Fathers in 1879, joining the Swahili Muslim traders who had already been active at court for decades.
The result was a dangerous rivalry between religious factions inside the kingdom. Under kabaka Mwanga II, Mutesa I's successor, the tensions boiled over: in 1885-1887 Mwanga had dozens of young Christians at his court executed for refusing to obey him — the so-called Uganda Martyrs, venerated today by Catholics and Anglicans alike. By the late 1880s, Buganda had sunk into civil wars between Muslim, Protestant and Catholic factions, leaving the kingdom weakened and exposed just as the European powers were carving up Africa.
The European scramble for Africa sealed the region's fate. The Anglo-German treaty of 1890 (also known as the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty) gave Britain the sphere of influence over what would become Uganda. The first to move in was the Imperial British East Africa Company, whose agent Frederick Lugard intervened in Buganda's religious wars on the side of the Protestant faction. When the company went bankrupt, the British government took over and in 1894 proclaimed the Uganda Protectorate.
The cornerstone of the new order was the Buganda Agreement of 1900, negotiated by Sir Harry Johnston. The agreement gave Buganda a privileged status within the protectorate, recognised the kabaka and his chiefs, and shared out the land under a system — mailo — that turned the elite into owners of vast estates. In return, Buganda cooperated with the colonial administration and supplied agents who helped extend British rule over the rest of the country, including its old rival Bunyoro, which had resisted by force of arms under King Kabalega until he was defeated and exiled in 1899.
Britain governed Uganda through indirect rule, relying on the existing kingdoms and chiefs. It chose to make the territory an economy of small African producers rather than white settlers, as in neighbouring Kenya: cotton, introduced at the start of the 20th century, and later coffee became the basis of its exports. As in other East African colonies, labour and investors were brought in from the Indian subcontinent, and an Asian community came to dominate trade and industry. Buganda's privileged position and that unequal economic structure sowed tensions that would shape Ugandan politics for decades.
After the Second World War, as across the rest of Africa, a nationalist movement grew in Uganda demanding an end to colonial rule. From the start, however, the country's politics were caught up in the old question: what place would Buganda, with its monarchy and special status, have in an independent, unified Uganda? The parties largely formed around that fault line and around religious and regional loyalties.
Out of that landscape came an alliance as pragmatic as it was fragile. The Uganda People's Congress (UPC), led by Milton Obote, a politician from the north, teamed up with Kabaka Yekka ("The Kabaka Only"), Buganda's monarchist party, to win the elections held before independence. Britain granted internal self-government in 1961-1962, and on 9 October 1962 Uganda became fully independent.
The division of power reflected that compromise: Milton Obote became prime minister and, in 1963, the kabaka of Buganda, Mutesa II — known as "King Freddie" — was named ceremonial president of the new state. Uganda was born as a federal republic with recognised kingdoms inside it, a delicate arrangement that tried to reconcile national unity with traditional autonomy. It would last only a few years.
The alliance between Obote and Buganda soon fell apart. Disputes over land, over the sharing of power and over the status of the monarchy itself set the prime minister against the president-kabaka Mutesa II. The crisis came to a head in 1966. Obote, backed by the army and by a young officer named Idi Amin, suspended the 1962 Constitution, seized all the powers of the state and took on an executive presidency.
In May 1966, after an ultimatum from the Buganda Parliament, Obote ordered the army to storm the kabaka's palace on Mengo hill, in Kampala. The attack, led by Amin, left hundreds dead and forced Mutesa II to flee into exile, where he died in London in 1969. It was a point of no return in Ugandan history.
In 1967, Obote imposed a new Constitution that formally abolished all the traditional kingdoms — Buganda, Bunyoro, Toro, Ankole — and turned Uganda into a centralised unitary republic. He also banned opposition parties and concentrated power in the UPC and in himself. Under the banner of building a modern, socialist nation, Obote ushered in an increasingly authoritarian regime that depended on the army. That army, and the man who commanded it, would soon turn against him.
On 25 January 1971, while Milton Obote was attending a summit abroad, General Idi Amin Dada staged a coup and took power. At first, much of the population and even some foreign governments greeted him with relief, weary of Obote's authoritarianism; the new dictator allowed the body of kabaka Mutesa II to be brought home for a state funeral. But it very soon became clear what kind of regime was on its way.
Amin's dictatorship, which lasted until 1979, was one of the bloodiest in post-colonial Africa. His government hunted down, tortured and murdered real or imagined opponents, intellectuals, judges, clergy and entire ethnic communities seen as loyal to Obote, such as the Acholi and the Langi. Estimates of the death toll vary widely depending on the source and are the subject of historical debate: the most frequently cited figures put the number killed at between 100,000 and 300,000 people. It is better to give that range than a single figure.
In 1972, Amin ordered the expulsion of Uganda's Asian community — somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 people, most of them of Indian descent — giving them about ninety days to leave the country and abandon their property. Presented as the "Ugandanisation" of the economy, the measure wiped out the country's commercial and industrial backbone at a stroke and triggered its economic collapse. In 1976, Amin gained worldwide notoriety by allowing a hijacked Air France plane carrying Israeli and Jewish hostages to land at Entebbe airport; a daring raid by Israeli commandos rescued the captives and humiliated the dictator. The end came in 1979: after a Ugandan incursion into Tanzanian territory, Tanzania responded with an invasion which, backed by Ugandan exiles, took Kampala in April and forced Amin to flee into exile; he died in Saudi Arabia in 2003.
Amin's fall did not bring peace. After a brief interim period, disputed elections in 1980 returned Milton Obote to power, in what is known as "Obote II". His government faced a guerrilla war in the Luwero Triangle, north of Kampala, where the army's repression of civilians unleashed another wave of killings that left hundreds of thousands dead. Leading the insurgency, the National Resistance Army (NRA), was a former comrade in the struggle against Amin: Yoweri Museveni.
After years of bush war, Museveni's NRA took Kampala on 26 January 1986 and ended more than a decade of violence. Museveni promised a "fundamental change", stabilised the country, rebuilt the battered economy and, in 1991, allowed the Asians expelled by Amin to return. In a gesture of reconciliation with the old traditions, in 1993 he restored the cultural kingdoms of Buganda, Bunyoro, Toro and Ankole (although Ankole never reinstated its monarch), this time stripped of political power. Under his government, Uganda was also a pioneer in the fight against AIDS in Africa.
Not everything was reconstruction. For almost two decades, the north of the country suffered the brutal insurgency of Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), infamous for its mass abductions of children. And Museveni himself, in power since 1986, gradually wore away the limits on his rule: presidential term limits were lifted in 2005 and the age limit was scrapped in 2017, allowing him to stay on through elections repeatedly challenged by the opposition and by observers. Today Uganda is a young country with fast population growth, oil in Lake Albert about to be tapped, a dynamic economy and huge challenges in governance and rights. And for the traveller, it is still the Pearl of Africa: the land of the gorillas of Bwindi, the source of the Nile at Jinja and the Mountains of the Moon.
The 5 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
Central Uganda is the historic homeland of the kingdom of Buganda, the most powerful of the interlacustrine kingdoms and the one that gave its name to the whole country: "Uganda" is the Swahili form of "Buganda". Here, on the fertile shores of Lake Victoria, the kabakas built a centralised state from the 18th century onwards, with a prime minister (katikkiro), a royal court and a network of chiefs who administered the land in the king's name.
A landscape of hills defines the area and its capital. Tradition says the kabaka's court moved from hill to hill, and it was on those same heights that Kampala grew. It was here, at Mengo palace, that Obote's army stormed the residence of kabaka Mutesa II in 1966, one of the most traumatic episodes in Ugandan history.
The centre is also the heartland of the Baganda, Uganda's largest people, and of their language, Luganda. When Museveni restored Buganda's cultural monarchy in 1993, the kabaka once again became a figure of enormous symbolic weight and a pillar of identity, though without political power. Today the region is home to most of the country's population, economy and cultural life.
Kampala began in the late 19th century as an outpost of the Imperial British East Africa Company. In 1890, Frederick Lugard built a fort on Old Kampala hill, and the city grew up around that core, close to Buganda's traditional capital. According to the most widely told explanation, the name comes from a Luganda expression linked to the impalas that grazed on the hills where the British set up their base.
Like an African Rome, the city spreads across a series of hills, each with its own character: Anglican and Catholic cathedrals, the great national mosque, temples and the royal palace of Mengo. Kampala replaced Entebbe as capital when Uganda became independent in 1962 and grew into the country's political, commercial and educational centre.
Today Kampala is a chaotic, vibrant metropolis, famous for its overflowing markets, its swarms of motorbike taxis (boda-bodas) and a nightlife reputed to be the best in East Africa. It survived the looting and neglect of the Amin years and the civil wars, and has been reborn through the recovery of recent decades as one of the most dynamic capitals in the region.
On a hill in Kampala stands Buganda's most sacred monument: the Tombs of Buganda Kings at Kasubi. The site was originally a palace of kabaka Mutesa I, built in 1882, which became his burial place when he died in 1884. Four kabakas rest here, and the complex is the spiritual centre of the kingdom and an outstanding example of traditional architecture in plant-based materials.
The main building, Muzibu Azaala Mpanga, is a huge circular structure with a thatched dome and an intricate framework of wood and reeds, one of the largest buildings of its kind in Africa. For its architectural value and spiritual significance, UNESCO added the Kasubi Tombs to the World Heritage List in 2001.
In March 2010, a fire whose cause is still disputed destroyed much of the main building, causing deep shock in Buganda and protests in Kampala. That same year the site was placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger, and since then work has gone into rebuilding it with traditional techniques and materials, a symbol of the kingdom's perseverance in the face of adversity.
On the shores of Lake Victoria, about 35 kilometres south of Kampala, lies Entebbe, the quiet garden town that was the administrative capital of the British protectorate from 1894 until independence. Its name means "seat" or "chair" in Luganda, referring to a place where a chief dispensed justice. Its mild climate and lakeside setting made it the centre of colonial government.
Today Entebbe is best known for its international airport, the country's main air gateway. That airport entered world history in 1976, when Israeli commandos stormed the terminal to rescue the hostages from a hijacked plane that Idi Amin's regime had taken in, in one of the most daring military operations of the 20th century. The town is also home to well-known botanical gardens and a wildlife conservation centre.
All of central Uganda faces Lake Victoria, the largest lake in Africa and the second-largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area, shared with Kenya and Tanzania. Locals call it Nnalubaale, and its waters sustain the region's fishing, transport and farming, as well as giving rise, at its northern end, to the Nile.
North of the centre, on the way to Murchison Falls, Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary tells a story of extinction and return. Uganda once had populations of both white and black rhinos, but poaching and the chaos of the Amin years and the civil wars of the 1970s and 1980s wiped them out entirely: by the early 1980s, both species had gone extinct in the country.
Ziwa sanctuary was set up to reverse that disaster. Founded in the mid-2000s on a large ranch, it reintroduced southern white rhinos — some donated from Kenya and others brought from zoos — with the aim of breeding them in a protected setting and, one day, returning them to the national parks. The animals are guarded round the clock by rangers to protect them from poachers.
Today Ziwa is the only place in Uganda where you can see rhinos in the wild, and it offers the chance to track them on foot with the rangers. It is also a symbol of the conservation efforts that went hand in hand with the country's recovery: where looting once reigned, a herd is now slowly growing, in the hope of restocking Uganda's savannahs.
Eastern Uganda holds one of the planet's great geographical landmarks: the point where Lake Victoria pours out its waters and gives rise to the Victoria Nile, which flows 6,700 kilometres before reaching the Mediterranean. For centuries, the river's source was a mystery that had obsessed geographers since Antiquity. The answer came in 1862 from the British explorer John Hanning Speke, who reached a set of falls at the lake's outlet and named them Ripon Falls.
Speke declared that this was where the Nile began, sparking a famous dispute with his former companion Richard Burton, who doubted the claim. The debate was only settled by later expeditions, which confirmed that Lake Victoria was indeed the main source of the White Nile. Ripon Falls were submerged in 1954 when the Owen Falls Dam was built, but the spot where the river leaves the lake is still a place of geographical pilgrimage.
Today travellers come to the source of the Nile, near Jinja, to stand in front of the exact place where the world's longest river begins its journey. It's one of those points on the map that sum up centuries of exploration, imperial ambition and the human urge to make sense of nature.
Jinja grew up on the banks of the newborn Nile and was founded in 1901, in the colonial era. Its position by the river and the lake made it an industrial centre: this is where the Owen Falls Dam (now Nalubaale) was built, opening in 1954, and for decades it was the country's main source of hydroelectric power. Jinja became Uganda's manufacturing heart, with a large Asian community.
Idi Amin's expulsion of the Asians in 1972 hit the city hard. It lost many of its traders and industrialists and fell into decline along with the national economy. Its streets still keep the architecture of those boom years, with colonial and Indian-style buildings and villas.
Jinja has come back to life in recent decades thanks to adventure tourism. The Nile's rapids, some of them class III to V, made it East Africa's capital of rafting, kayaking and bungee jumping, a magnet for travellers from all over the world. New dams downstream changed some of the historic rapids, but Jinja is still the country's big adventure sports hub and the base for visiting the source of the Nile.
Further east, on the border with Kenya, rises Mount Elgon, a huge extinct volcano that millions of years ago may have been the highest mountain in Africa before erosion wore it down. Today its main summit, Wagagai (4,321 metres), still keeps it among the continent's highest peaks, and it has one of the largest volcanic calderas in the world, covering more than 40 square kilometres.
Its slopes, protected as a national park, are home to forests, Afro-alpine moorland with giant lobelias and groundsels, waterfalls and caves formed by lava. Elephants visit some of these caves to lick the salt from their walls. Unlike the region's more famous peaks, Elgon offers trekking that is far quieter and more solitary.
The foothills of Elgon are also home to several peoples, among them the Bagisu (or Gisu), known for their male circumcision ceremony, imbalu, a rite of passage into adulthood held every two years with dancing and music. The mountain is both a natural sanctuary and a place full of cultural meaning for the communities who live on it.
Murchison Falls National Park is Uganda's largest and oldest park, and one of Africa's great natural settings. Its name comes from the falls where the mighty Victoria Nile, after crossing the country from its source, is suddenly squeezed into a rocky gorge just seven metres wide and plunges through with thundering force. The explorer Samuel Baker named them in 1864 after a president of the Royal Geographical Society.
Formally established in 1952, the park was once one of the richest wildlife sanctuaries on the continent, but poaching and the chaos of the Amin years and the civil wars wiped out much of its animal population in the 1970s and 1980s. Since the country's recovery, wildlife numbers have been building up again, and elephants, giraffes, lions, buffalo and antelopes can once more be seen on its savannahs.
The classic experience combines a game drive with a boat trip up the Nile to the foot of the falls, past banks crowded with hippos, crocodiles and birds, including the very rare shoebill. Murchison Falls sums up the Uganda of the great wild river: the raw power of the Nile forcing its way towards Lake Albert and, beyond, on the long journey that will take it to Egypt and the Mediterranean.
In Uganda's far northeast, wedged against the borders with South Sudan and Kenya, lies Kidepo Valley National Park, the most remote and wildest in the country. Its isolation keeps it among the least visited parks in Africa, and that's exactly why it keeps an untouched feel that many consider one of the most spectacular on the continent.
Kidepo is a wide savannah ringed by mountains and crossed by the valleys of two seasonal rivers, the Kidepo and the Narus, whose beds hold on to the water that draws wildlife in the dry season. The park is home to species rarely seen elsewhere in Uganda, such as cheetah, lion, ostrich and greater kudu, as well as large herds of buffalo and elephants.
The region is home to the Karamojong, semi-nomadic herders related to the Maasai, and to the Ik, a small community living in the border mountains. The isolation of northern Uganda, hit for years by conflict and insecurity, kept Kidepo off the tourist routes, but for travellers who make it there, the reward is one of Africa's last great unspoilt savannahs.
Northern Uganda has a history shaped by marginalisation and conflict. During the colonial era, the British recruited soldiers mainly from the northern peoples, such as the Acholi and the Langi, while concentrating economic development in the south, around Buganda. That split between a prosperous south and a neglected north would run through all of Ugandan politics.
After Museveni took power in 1986, the north became the stage for one of Africa's longest and cruellest wars: the insurgency of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), led by Joseph Kony. For almost two decades, the LRA spread terror through massacres and, above all, through the mass abduction of tens of thousands of children, who were forced to become soldiers or slaves. Millions of people were displaced into refugee camps.
From the mid-2000s the conflict pushed the LRA out of Uganda, and since then the north has been going through a slow process of rebuilding and reconciliation. It is in this context of returning peace that remote parks such as Kidepo have reopened to tourism. The region still carries the wounds of the conflict, but it is moving towards a normality that for years seemed impossible.
Bwindi Impenetrable National Park is Uganda's natural gem and one of the most valuable ecosystems in Africa. It's an ancient mountain rainforest, dense and tangled (hence the name "impenetrable"), which survived the ice ages and so holds extraordinary biodiversity, with plant and animal species found nowhere else. UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site in 1994.
Its worldwide fame comes from the mountain gorillas, an endangered subspecies with just over a thousand individuals left on the planet. Bwindi is home to about half of that population, which makes the park an irreplaceable sanctuary. The mountain gorilla came close to extinction, and its slow recovery is one of the great conservation stories of our time.
Gorilla trekking is Uganda's star experience: small groups of visitors, accompanied by rangers and trackers, head into the forest to spend an hour with a gorilla family used to human presence. Permits are expensive and limited, and this controlled tourism pays for the park's conservation and benefits local communities, including the Batwa, the hunter-gatherer people who first lived in these forests.
In Uganda's far southwest, where the country meets Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the small Mgahinga Gorilla National Park protects the Ugandan section of the Virunga volcano chain. Three of these volcanic cones (Muhabura, Gahinga and Sabyinyo) rise within the park, and their forested slopes shelter mountain gorillas that move freely across the borders of the three countries.
The Virunga massif is the mountain gorillas' other great home, alongside Bwindi. It was on these volcanoes, on the Rwandan and Congolese sides, that primatologist Dian Fossey carried out her famous studies, which showed the world how difficult these animals' situation was. Mgahinga is also one of the few places where the rare golden monkey lives, a species from the region's mountains.
The park is part of a cross-border conservation area that links protected areas in Uganda, Rwanda and the Congo, a joint effort to save the gorillas regardless of political borders. The name Mgahinga comes from a local word for the piles of volcanic stone that farmers cleared from their fields on the slopes.
Hidden among green, terraced hills lies Lake Bunyonyi, considered one of the most beautiful lakes in Africa and, according to many sources, one of the deepest on the continent. Its name means "place of many little birds" in the local language, and its waters hold 29 islands of all sizes, each with its own history and legends. With no hippos or crocodiles, and free of malaria thanks to its altitude, it's one of the few lakes in the region where you can swim without worry.
This landscape of hills and terraces is the result of centuries of work by the Bakiga and Bafumbira peoples, who carved the steep slopes to farm difficult ground. The result is a strikingly beautiful patchwork of fields that has made the region an ideal place to rest after the effort of gorilla trekking.
The base for exploring the area is Kabale, a high-altitude mountain town nicknamed the "Switzerland of Africa" for its cool climate and rolling scenery. Kabale is the starting point for Lake Bunyonyi and a regular stop on the way to Bwindi. The densely populated region is the heart of Uganda's southwestern highlands.
Western Uganda, between Lake Albert, Lake Edward and the Rwenzori Mountains, was the land of the Toro and Bunyoro kingdoms. Toro split from Bunyoro around 1830, when Prince Kaboyo rebelled against his father and founded his own kingdom beside the Mountains of the Moon, receiving the symbols of royalty. Like the other kingdoms, it was abolished by Obote in 1967 and restored as a cultural monarchy in 1993.
This is a region of extreme geographical contrasts: within a few kilometres you go from the warm, lake-dotted savannahs of the Rift valleys to the snow-capped peaks of the Rwenzori. That variety of environments explains the remarkable concentration of national parks and wildlife that makes the west the country's great safari circuit.
The region is also part of the Albertine Rift, the western branch of East Africa's great geological fault and one of the most biodiverse places on the continent. Beneath its land, under Lake Albert, major oil reserves have been discovered in recent years. Extracting them opens up huge economic expectations for Uganda and, at the same time, serious environmental debates.
Queen Elizabeth National Park is Uganda's most visited park and one of the richest in wildlife in East Africa. Founded in 1952 and renamed two years later to mark a visit by Queen Elizabeth II, it stretches between Lakes Edward and George, right in the Albertine Rift, with a surprising range of ecosystems: savannah, wetlands, lakes and forest.
Its most famous attraction is the boat trip along the Kazinga Channel, a natural waterway linking the two lakes that has one of the highest concentrations of hippos in the world, plus elephants, buffalo and a wealth of birdlife along its banks. The park has one of the longest bird lists in Africa.
In the southern Ishasha sector, the park keeps a rarity that draws travellers: tree-climbing lions, which have the unusual habit of clambering up into fig trees to rest. Queen Elizabeth sums up classic safari Uganda, with the bonus of combining the big savannah mammals with the lush forests and lakes of the Rift.
North of Queen Elizabeth, Kibale National Park protects one of Africa's most beautiful tropical rainforests and is considered the best place on the continent to see wild chimpanzees. The park is home to thirteen primate species, an exceptional diversity, including large chimpanzee communities used to human presence that can be followed on guided treks.
The chimpanzee, our closest living relative along with the bonobo, shares about 98% of its DNA with humans, and watching its social life, tool use and calls up close is one of the most moving experiences Uganda offers. Kibale hosts long-term research projects that have studied these communities for decades.
Next to the park, the Bigodi wetland, run by the local community, is an example of community ecotourism: local people guide visitors among birds, monkeys and swamp forest, and reinvest the income in schools and local projects. Kibale shows a Uganda where protecting the forest and developing communities try to go hand in hand.
On the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo rise the Rwenzori Mountains, which many identify with the legendary "Mountains of the Moon" that the geographer Ptolemy placed at the source of the Nile in the 2nd century. Unlike the region's volcanoes, the Rwenzori is a massif formed by uplifted blocks of the Earth's crust, and its highest peaks hold one of Africa's wonders: permanent glaciers almost on the equator.
Its highest peak, Margherita (5,109 metres), on Mount Stanley, is the third-highest summit in Africa, after Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya. It was first climbed in 1906 by an expedition led by the Duke of the Abruzzi. The national park that protects the mountain was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994, both for its natural value and for its astonishing Afro-alpine vegetation of giant lobelias and groundsels.
The Rwenzori's glaciers, however, are melting fast because of climate change and could disappear in the coming decades, which would be an irreparable loss. The mountain is sacred to the Bakonzo people, who live on its slopes and see it as the home of a god. Climbing the Rwenzori is one of Africa's great mountain adventures, and far less crowded than the neighbouring peaks.
On the way between Kampala and the southwest, Lake Mburo National Park is the smallest of Uganda's savannah parks and one of the easiest to reach. Despite its size, it offers something special: with no significant numbers of resident elephants or lions, it's one of the few parks in the country where walking and cycling safaris are allowed, moving among zebras, impalas, buffalo and antelopes.
It's the only park in Uganda where impala live (a popular story says they gave Kampala its name) and one of the few home to the elegant sitatunga, a water-loving antelope, in its swampy areas. Its heart is Lake Mburo, one of several lakes linked by wetlands, where boat trips run among hippos, crocodiles and a wide variety of birds.
This land is part of the old kingdom of Ankole, famous for its Ankole cattle with their long, spectacular horns, raised by Bahima herders. Creating the park caused historic tensions with these cattle-keeping communities, and over time its management has tried to balance conservation with traditional uses of the land. Lake Mburo is the gateway to western Uganda's safari circuit.
Hardly anything that happened to Uganda happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
