The rich, rainy country along the north shore of Lake Victoria from Buddu to Busoga, with the Ssese islands.
Its people speak North Nyanza Bantu languages, ancestral to Luganda and Lusoga, and in these centuries were turning to bananas as their staple, which let dense, settled villages grow (Schoenbrun). Power lay with clan heads and with shrines; the kingdom of Buganda, whose first king Kintu is a figure of tradition, is later (its dynastic list is usually taken back to about the fourteenth century), as are the Soga principalities.
Who holds it
- Name
- Not named
- Title
- Clan heads (later called bataka)
- Since
- Not pinned
- Confidence
- low
What it holds
- The north shore from Buddu to Busoga
- The Ssese islands
- The country south of Lake Kyoga
How things stand that morning
Self-governing clans; no kingdom yet.
Customs
Clan heads and clan lands; shrines of the lake and of the clans' spirits.
Where the sources disagree
Evidence: Historical linguistics (Schoenbrun) and later traditions; little excavated evidence for 1200.
On the map: Rough outline.
Sources and studies
- D. L. Schoenbrun, A Green Place, A Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender, and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th Century (1998)
- J. E. G. Sutton, A Thousand Years of East Africa (1990)
Last revised 4 November 2026. Published 4 November 2026. Suggest a correction on the OMNIA Discord.