Uganda-Pearl of Africa with Long History

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The present country of Uganda was forged by the British between 1890 and 1926. The name, Uganda was derived from the ancient kingdom of Buganda. The earliest inhabitants of Uganda were the stone age people. The people were gradually absorbed or replaced in the first millennium A.D. by the incoming agriculturalists and pastoralists. At the time of the European exploration, there were over thirty ethnic groups in Uganda. And those four ethnic communities could conveniently be divided into four broad linguistic groups namely: the Bantu, the Luo, the Atekerin and the Sudanic.

At present, it is difficult to demarcate the confines of any one of the ethnicities described above. Colonialism, education, monetization, easy transport and urbanization have led to the break up or at least the loosening up of the cultural ties, thereby leading to intermarriages and intermixtures which make it difficult to categorize, let alone demarcate the confines of different ethnicities of Uganda. However, cultural ties still bind people and though intermixing has happened on a large scale since colonialism, people still prefer to identify themselves by their ethnic backgrounds. This has been the cornerstone of ethnicism in post-colonial Uganda.

Giovani Miani, an Italian who was working for the Egyptians, was the first European to set foot in what is now recognized as Uganda. He visited northern Uganda at Nimule and …