Kampala is a city that hits all your senses at once: the horns of thousands of boda-bodas, markets overflowing with fruit and fabric, music coming from every corner and green hills dotted with churches, mosques and mansions. It is the capital of Uganda and, at the same time, the heart of the Kingdom of Buganda, the most powerful of the country's traditional kingdoms. Most travellers only know it as a stopover between Entebbe airport and the safari parks, but anyone who gives it a day discovers one of the most vibrant and welcoming capitals in East Africa.
The city spreads across several hills, each with its own story: Kasubi holds the tombs of the kings of Buganda (a World Heritage Site); Mengo, the Kabaka's palace; Namirembe and Rubaga, the great Protestant and Catholic cathedrals that face each other from the hilltops; Old Kampala, the imposing Gaddafi National Mosque. In between, markets such as Owino and Nakasero buzz with life, and neighbourhoods such as Kabalagala and Kololo are where the nightlife and the food scene are concentrated. Kampala is tradition and modernity, chaos and hospitality, all at once.
This guide takes a practical look at Kampala: what to see on its hills, how to get around safely by boda-boda and matatu, how to understand the importance of the Kingdom of Buganda, where to eat a good 'rolex' (the famous egg and chapati wrap) and how to use the city as a logistics base before heading off on safari. With one or two well-planned days, Kampala stops being just a stopover and becomes a memorable introduction to Uganda.
Kampala grew up on the hills where the kings (kabakas) of the Kingdom of Buganda had their palaces and hunted impalas. According to tradition, that is where the name comes from: 'Kasozi k'Empala', 'the hill of the impalas', which the British shortened to Kampala. In 1890 Captain Frederick Lugard set up a fort there for the Imperial British East Africa Company, and the city grew as a colonial centre alongside the nearby administrative capital of Entebbe. With independence in 1963, Kampala became the capital of Uganda. It survived Idi Amin's dictatorship, the war that overthrew him in 1979 and years of instability, before being reborn as the thriving metropolis it is today. Its full history is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of Buganda: Kampala grew up on the hills where the kabakas once reigned, home to the Kasubi Tombs (a World Heritage Site), just a short hop from Lake Victoria and Entebbe.
Read the history of Kampala and the centre →If you only have one day, take a guided tour on the first one: it sets up the rest of your trip and saves you a lot of walking. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 5 activities in Kampala. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Have a look below: tap any of them to see them all.
If you book from here we earn a commission and you pay no more. Prices and availability come from Civitatis.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before Uganda existed as a country, the green hills where Kampala now spreads out were the territory of the Kingdom of Buganda, one of the most organised and powerful African states in the Great Lakes region. From at least the 14th century, the Baganda (the people of Buganda) built a centralised kingdom ruled by a king called the Kabaka. It had a complex court, a clan system, an army and a network of roads and chieftaincies that stretched along the northern shore of Lake Victoria.
The kabakas used to move their palace from one hill to another, so many of the hills of present-day Kampala were a royal seat at some point. Impalas, a species of antelope, were plentiful on these slopes, and the king and his court hunted them. According to the most widely told tradition, that is where the city's name comes from: the Baganda called the area 'Kasozi k'Empala', 'the hill of the impalas', which the British shortened and turned into 'Kampala'.
When the first European explorers and missionaries arrived in the late 19th century, they found in Buganda a sophisticated kingdom and a royal court that negotiated as an equal. The British explorer John Hanning Speke visited Kabaka Mutesa I in the 1860s. From the 1870s, Protestant and Catholic missionaries began to arrive, along with Muslim Arab traders, all competing for influence at court. That religious rivalry would shape the following decades in tragic ways.
The arrival of Christianity at the court of Buganda set off a crisis. The young Kabaka Mwanga II, who took the throne in 1884, grew suspicious as his own pages and officials converted to the new faith and put their religious loyalty above obedience to the king. Between 1885 and 1887, Mwanga had dozens of young Christians, both Catholic and Anglican, executed for refusing to give up their faith. Many were burned alive at Namugongo, on the outskirts of today's Kampala. These are the Uganda Martyrs, canonised by the Catholic Church in 1964 and now venerated at one of Africa's great pilgrimage shrines.
Tensions between the Protestant, Catholic and Muslim factions at court, together with the ambitions of the European powers, plunged Buganda into religious civil wars. Against that backdrop, Captain Frederick Lugard arrived in 1890 as an agent of the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEACO). Lugard built a fort on Old Kampala hill, the same hill where the Gaddafi National Mosque stands today. Its purpose was to protect British interests and to arbitrate between the factions (in Britain's favour).
In 1894, Britain officially declared a protectorate over Buganda, which was later extended to neighbouring territories to form the Uganda Protectorate. The colonial administrative capital was set up in nearby Entebbe, on the lakeshore. Kampala, with its fort, its missions and its closeness to the Kabaka's court, kept growing as a commercial and religious centre. Around the hills rose the cathedrals of Namirembe (Anglican) and Rubaga (Catholic), the mosque, and the Indian and African commercial districts.
During the colonial era, Kampala grew into the protectorate's main commercial and educational centre, while Entebbe remained the seat of government. In 1922, Makerere College was founded on one of its hills. It would become Makerere University, the most prestigious in East Africa and the training ground for much of the continent's intellectual and political elite. The city had a large community of traders of Indian origin, who had been brought over or had arrived during the building of the railway and controlled much of the trade.
Compared with other African countries, Uganda moved towards independence fairly peacefully. On 9 October 1962, the protectorate became independent Uganda, and soon afterwards Kampala replaced Entebbe as the national capital. The first government tried to strike a delicate balance between the central state and the traditional kingdoms, above all powerful Buganda. Its Kabaka, Mutesa II, became the country's first ceremonial president.
That balance soon broke down. In 1966, Prime Minister Milton Obote, locked in a power struggle with the Kabaka, ordered the army, commanded by a certain Idi Amin, to storm the royal palace at Mengo. Kabaka Mutesa II was forced to flee into exile, the traditional kingdoms were abolished, and Uganda headed towards an increasingly authoritarian regime. Kampala, still a young capital, was entering its darkest years.
In 1971, General Idi Amin seized power in a coup. His dictatorship (1971-1979) was one of the most brutal in African history: an estimated hundreds of thousands of people were killed. In Kampala, the underground cells of the Kabaka's palace at Mengo became torture and execution chambers, and their walls still bear messages left by prisoners. In 1972, Amin expelled the country's entire Indian and Asian community, tens of thousands of people, which wrecked the economy and emptied the city's shops and businesses.
The regime ended in war. In 1978-1979, after Uganda invaded Tanzanian territory, Tanzania struck back and, together with Ugandan exiles, advanced until it took Kampala in April 1979. Amin was overthrown and fled into exile. But the dictator's fall did not bring peace. Years of unstable governments followed, then Milton Obote's bloody second term and a civil war (the 'Bush War') in which Kampala again suffered fighting and looting. The city was left half in ruins, its buildings riddled with bullets and its services collapsed.
The turning point came in January 1986, when Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army took Kampala and brought the war to an end. Museveni became president and began a long period of stability and reconstruction. In 1993 the traditional kingdoms were symbolically restored, and the Kabaka of Buganda was crowned again, taking back his cultural role. Slowly but surely, Kampala began to rise from its ruins.
Since the mid-1980s, Kampala has gone through decades of rapid growth. Once a city devastated by war, it has become a bustling metropolis with more than one and a half million people in the city itself and several million in the metropolitan area. It is the economic engine of a fast-growing country. Trade, construction, telecommunications and services have changed its face: modern towers, shopping centres and international hotels now stand beside the old colonial buildings.
That growth has also brought the usual problems of large African cities: legendary traffic, monumental jams, a sea of boda-bodas (motorbike taxis) ruling the streets, pollution and disorderly urban sprawl over the hills and wetlands. Kampala is modern and chaotic, prosperous and unequal, all at once. Well-off neighbourhoods such as Kololo and Nakasero lie just a few kilometres from extremely dense working-class settlements.
Today the city keeps its dual identity. It is Uganda's political and economic capital and, at the same time, the living heart of the Kingdom of Buganda, with its Kabaka, its royal Kasubi Tombs (a World Heritage Site), its rival cathedrals facing each other and its great mosque. For travellers, Kampala is Uganda's urban gateway. It doesn't win you over with orderly beauty but with its boundless energy, its music, its street food and the warmth of its people. From the hill of the impalas to today's hustle and bustle, it sums up the country's intense and contradictory history in just a few decades.
