Uganda

UGANDAN POLITICS OFTEN follow ethnic, regional, and tribal lines with ideological differences being secondary. The country is roughly divided between two major peoples. In the north are the Nilotic; in the south are the Bantu, who have traditionally dominated the country and controlled the military. Uganda is landlocked in east-central Africa and was first populated by Bantu-speaking peoples more than 2,500 years ago. By the 1300s, three tribal kingdoms had emerged, but one dominated, Buganda. In 1862, John Hanning Speke, a British explorer searching for the source of the Nile, became the first recorded European to visit and by 1894 Uganda had been declared a British protectorate. A clerical error is blamed for dropping the “B” of Buganda and renaming the country, but the name ...