Uganda National Museum

The Uganda National Museum is the oldest museum in East Africa.  It displays and exhibits ethnological, natural-historical, and traditional life collections of the country’s cultural heritage.  It was founded in 1908, after Governor, George Wilson (1862-1943) called for ‘all articles of interest’ on Uganda to be procured.  The museum started in a small Sikh temple at Fort Lugard on Old Kampala Hill.  Between the 1920s and 1940s, archaeology and paleontological surveys and excavations were conducted by Church Hill, E. J. Wayland, Bishop J. Wilson, P. L. Shinnie, and E. Lanning, who collected a significant number of artefacts to boost the museum.  The museum at Fort Lugard become too small to hold the specimens and so was moved to the Margret Trowel School of Fine Art at Makerere University College in 1941.  Later, funds were raised for a permanent home and the museum was moved to its current location on Kitante Hill in 1954.  Among the collections are playable musical instruments, hunting equipment, weaponry, archaeology, and entomology.