History

The Buganda Kingdom was the most powerful polity in the Great Lakes region of East Africa by the nineteenth century, a highly centralised monarchy with a sophisticated administrative structure, a standing army, and a maritime force on Lake Victoria. The Kabaka (king) was a figure of enormous religious and political authority; his palace — a compound of large thatched buildings surrounded by a fence of elephant grass — was the centre of the kingdom. When Kabaka Mutesa I died in 1884, his palace on Kasubi Hill was converted, in accordance with royal tradition, into a mausoleum: the main audience hall became the shrine housing the royal regalia and, later, the physical remains of the Kabaka. This precedent established Kasubi as the royal burial ground of the Buganda line, a role it has maintained through three subsequent Kabakas.

The nineteenth-century history of Kasubi intersects with the arrival of European missionaries and the colonial partition of Uganda. Kabaka Mwanga II (buried at Kasubi) resisted both the British and the missionaries, eventually leading an armed revolt; he was exiled to the Seychelles in 1899. His son Daudi Chwa was installed as a minor under British supervision; Daudi’s son Edward Mutesa II became both the last Kabaka of Buganda and the first President of Uganda at independence in 1962, only to be overthrown by Milton Obote in 1966 and to die in exile in London in 1969 — his remains were returned to Uganda in 1971 and interred at Kasubi. The site was at the time in a state of neglect under the Amin and Obote regimes, which suppressed the Buganda Kingdom; restoration began after the Kingdom’s formal restoration in 1993.