The Bunyoro Kingdom, Uganda
 
IIPT Credo
 

Masindi Town is in the Bunyoro Kingdom which used to stretch from north of the Nile to Karagwe in Tanzania and across Lake Albert into the Congo. It was a powerful kingdom, but in the 18th century the neighbouring kingdom of Buganda began to challenge its supremacy. The two states were engaged in a critical power struggle when the British explorers John Hanning Speke and J. A. Grant reached Buganda

 

in 1862. Speke met the Bunyoro King (Kabalega) in Kijura, now a Masindi suburb and also met Emin Pasha in the district. They had been preceded some years earlier by Arab ivory and slave traders. Other foreigners soon followed. Sir Samuel Baker described a large body of water, which he named Lake Albert and he also discovered Murchison Falls in 1864 naming it after Sir Roderick Murchison, president of the Royal Geographical Society .

In 1894, the kingdom of Buganda became a British protectorate, which was extended in 1896 to cover Bunyoro and most of what is now Uganda.

 
Sir Samuel Baker
John Hanning Speke
 
A carved wooden frieze above the reception desk at the hotel depicts some of the early history of the Bunyoro Kingdom as described above.