Buganda in the context of "Mengo Crisis"

Uganda, officially the Republic of Uganda, is a landlocked country in East Africa. It is bordered to the east by Kenya, to the north by South Sudan, to the west by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to the south-west by Rwanda, and to the south by Tanzania. The southern part includes a substantial portion of Lake Victoria, shared with Kenya and Tanzania. Uganda is in the African Great Lakes region, lies within the Nile basin, and has a varied equatorial climate. As of 2024 it had a population of 49.3 million, of whom 8.5 million lived in the capital and largest city, Kampala.

Uganda is named after the Buganda kingdom, which encompasses a large portion of the south, including Kampala, and whose language Luganda is widely spoken; the official language is English. The region was populated by people of various ethnicities before Bantu and Nilotic groups arrived around 3,000 years ago. These new inhabitants established influential kingdoms such as the Empire of Kitara. The arrival of Arab traders in the 1830s and British explorers in the late 19th century marked the beginning of foreign influence. The British established the Protectorate of Uganda in 1894, setting the stage for future political dynamics. Uganda gained independence in 1962, with Milton Obote as the first prime minister. The 1966 Mengo Crisis marked a significant conflict with the Buganda kingdom, as well as the country's conversion from a parliamentary system to a presidential system. Idi Amin's military coup in 1971 led to a brutal regime characterised by mass killings and economic decline, until his overthrow in 1979.

Ganda or Luganda (/luːˈɡændə/ loo-GAN-də; Oluganda [oluɡâːndá]) is a Bantu language spoken in the African Great Lakes region. It is one of the major languages in Uganda and is spoken by more than 5.56 million Ugandans Baganda and other people principally in central Uganda, including the country's capital, Kampala. Typologically, it is an agglutinative, tonal language with subject–verb–object word order and nominative–accusative morphosyntactic alignment.

With at least 5.6 million first-language speakers in the Buganda region and 5.4 million second language speakers fluent elsewhere in different regions especially in major urban areas like Mbale, Tororo, Jinja, Gulu, Mbarara, Hoima, Kasese etc. Luganda is Uganda's de facto language of national identity as it is the most widely spoken Ugandan language used mostly in trade in urban areas. The language is also the most-spoken unofficial language in Rwanda's capital Kigali. As a second language, it follows English and precedes Swahili in Uganda.

The Protectorate of Uganda was a protectorate of the British Empire from 1894 to 1962. In 1893 the Imperial British East Africa Company transferred its administration rights of territory consisting mainly of the Kingdom of Buganda to the British government.

In 1894 the Uganda Protectorate was established, and the territory was extended beyond the borders of Buganda to an area that roughly corresponds to that of present-day Uganda.

The endongo is a musical instrument, considered the national instrument of the Baganda people of Uganda. It is a member of a family of lyres which can be found, with variations, in many areas throughout East Africa. The endongo is specifically a Kiganda bowl lyre, with the face of the bowl covered with the skin of either a monitor lizard or ant lizard.

The endongo is found within the interlacustrine area of Uganda, which are “the kingdom-states around the northern, western, and southern shores of Lake Victoria and the area between Lake Victoria and the chain of lakes: Lake Albert, Lake Edward, Lake Kivu and Lake Tanganyika”. The bowl lyre present in Uganda is played by two particular tribes, the Basoga, who name the instrument entongoli, and the Baganda, who call it the endongo.

The Baganda (endonym: (A)Baganda; singular (O)Muganda; in Luganda or plural Waganda in Kiswahili or Ganda in old English texts), are a Bantu ethnic group that share a common culture, history and language and clans, and are primarily native to Buganda, a subnational kingdom within Uganda. Traditionally composed of 52 clans (although since a 1993 survey, only 46 are officially recognised), the Baganda are the largest people of the Bantu ethnic group in Uganda, comprising 16.5 percent of the population at the time of the 2014 census.

A single individual is called a Muganda whereas several people are called Baganda. The word Abaganda refers to "The Baganda People" and Omuganda refers to "The Muganda person".

The history of Buganda is that of the Buganda kingdom of the Baganda people, the largest of the traditional kingdoms in present-day Uganda. Muwawa refers to the pre-kingdom territory before Kabaka Kintu unified the clans, leading to the formation of the Kingdom of Buganda, which is the modern-day name for the region and its people.

Kato Kintu Kakulukuku (fl. Late 13th century), known in Bunyoro as Kato Kimera was the first kabaka (king) of the Kingdom of Buganda. "Kintu" is an adopted by-name, chosen for Kintu, the name of the first person on earth in Buganda mythology. Kato Kintu gave himself the name "Kintu" to associate himself with the "father of all people", and he may have renamed his wife, from Nantuttululu to Nambi, because that was Kintu's wife's name.