The inhabitants of Uganda were hunter gatherers untill 1,700 - 2,300years ago who were migrated from central and western Africa. They developed iron working skills and new ideas of social and political organisation, followed by the Empire of Kitara in fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. the first one was Bunyoro-Kitara,and in later centuries, Buganda and Ankole. The name of uganda came from the word Buganda.The region was divided linguasticallyby Lake Kyoga into a Bantu south and Nilotic north. The pastoralist Nilotes of the north were organised by lineage into small clans.While cattle raiding was practiced extensibly, the highly decentralised nature of northern societies precluded the possibility ofof large scale war fare. The intrduction of plantain as a staple crop in the south around 1000 AD permitted dense populatios to form in the areanorth of lake Victoria. one of the early powerful states to emerge was Bunyoro. But due to the internal defect they resulted in the continuous civil wars. According to legend , a refugee from a Bunyoro conflict, Kimara, became kabaka of the contemponous kingdom of Buganda , on the shores of Lake Victoria.
Buganda govt. was based on a stable succession arrangement, allowing the kingdom to grow in size by the mid-nineteenth centurythrough a series of wars of expansion, becoming the ominant power in the region with a force of infantry.
There were three main ethnic groups in Uganda. its population was predominantly rural and its population density was higher in in the southern region.other than african there were non-indegenous races like asian, European and Arabian. Until 1972, Asians constituted the largest non-indegenous ethnic group in Uganda. In that year the Idi Amin expelled 50,000 asians who who had been engaged in trade , industry, and various professions.in the years since Amin's overthrew in 1979, asians had slowly returned reducing the number to 30,000. When Arab traders moved inland from their enclaves along the Indian Ocean coast of East Africa and reached in 1830s. they were followed in the 1860s by British explorers searching for the source of Nile. protestant missionaries entered the country in1877, followed by Catholic missionaries in 1879.
The United kingdom placed the area under the charter of the British East africa Company in 1888, and ruled it as a protectorate from 1894. As several other territories and chiefdoms were integrated, the final protectorate called Uganda took shape in 1914.
