The Uganda Agreement of 1900—signed between the British Commissioner Sir Harry Johnston and the regents of the Buganda Kingdom on behalf of the young Kabaka Daudi Chwa—is one of the most consequential colonial documents in East African history. It established the terms of British rule in Uganda with a specificity and formality unusual in colonial arrangements, created a land tenure system that persists in modified form to the present day, and granted Buganda a privileged position within the protectorate that generated tensions and conflicts lasting through independence and into the twenty-first century.
What the 1900 Agreement established
The Agreement formalised British sovereignty over Buganda while preserving the Kingdom’s internal governance structure: the Kabaka remained as constitutional monarch, the Lukiiko (parliament) retained legislative functions, and Buganda’s chiefs administered local affairs under British supervision. In exchange for this accommodation, Buganda provided active cooperation with British governance of the wider protectorate—using Buganda’s military capacity and administrative organisation to extend British control into the north, east, and west of what would become Uganda.
The land provisions of the Agreement were particularly consequential. Approximately half of Buganda’s land—some 9,000 square miles—was allocated to the Crown (the British administration) and would eventually include forest reserves, national parks, and areas designated for infrastructure. The remaining land was divided between the Kabaka and his family (about 350 square miles) and the chiefs and notables of the Kingdom (about 8,000 square miles), in a system called mailo land that granted freehold title analogous to the English fee simple. This was a revolutionary departure from the customary land tenure systems of pre-colonial Buganda, in which all land was held by the Kabaka in trust for the people—and it created a landed gentry of Buganda chiefs whose descendants still hold much of the mailo land today.
The Buganda-British partnership and its limits
The partnership established by the 1900 Agreement gave Buganda enormous advantages within the colonial system: literacy rates (driven by missionary education concentrated in Buganda) were the highest in East Africa, commercial agriculture (cotton, coffee) developed fastest in the Kingdom, and Buganda graduates filled the administrative ranks of the protectorate service. But the partnership was always conditional: when Buganda’s Kabaka, Sir Edward Mutesa II (Kabaka Mutesa), pressed in the 1950s for Buganda’s independence separate from the rest of Uganda (which he feared would be dominated by non-Baganda), the British declined and eventually deported him to Britain—demonstrating that the partnership operated within limits set by British strategic interests rather than Buganda’s.
Independence and the Agreement’s aftermath
At Uganda’s independence in 1962, Buganda’s privileged position was preserved in a federal constitution that granted it significantly more autonomy than other regions. This arrangement collapsed within four years: Milton Obote’s government, supported by Army Commander Idi Amin, attacked the Lubiri (Kabaka’s palace) in 1966, forcing Mutesa into exile (where he died in 1969). Uganda was declared a republic, the kingdoms were abolished, and the federal constitution was replaced by a unitary state.
The mailo land system created by the 1900 Agreement remains partially intact in Buganda, creating a complex land tenure landscape in which modern property rights, customary tenure, and historical colonial grants all coexist uneasily. The relationship between the Buganda Kingdom (restored in 1993 as a cultural institution without political power under Museveni’s government) and the Ugandan state remains one of the most politically sensitive dimensions of contemporary Ugandan governance. For gorilla trekkers passing through Kampala and the heartland of the Buganda Kingdom on the way to south-western Uganda, the visible signs of this history—the Lubiri, the Kasubi Tombs, the Bulange (Lukiiko building)—are not merely tourist attractions but active symbols in an unresolved political negotiation that began with a colonial treaty signed in 1900.
