Our Legacy Since 1923

The Bunyoro Kitara Empire

The Bunyoro Kitara Empire was the second largest and most powerful kingdom in present-day Uganda, and its capital stood near Masindi. The country this hotel was later built in was its own.

The kingdom reached its zenith under Omukama Kabalega, who reigned from 1870 until 1899, and who is remembered above all for his resistance against British colonisation.

Speke, Grant and Baker

In the mid-19th century the explorers John Hanning Speke, James Augustus Grant and Samuel Baker travelled through this region, in the expeditions that led to the first European reports of Lake Victoria and the source of the Nile.

Samuel Baker and Florence, who married the following year, became the first Europeans to see Lake Albert, and “a substantial waterfall on the Victoria Nile” which Baker named Murchison Falls after the then-president of the Royal Geographical Society, Sir Roderick Murchison. The falls still carry that name: the park gate is twenty kilometres from this door, and the falls themselves sixty-seven, through the park.

Florence travelled with him for the rest of his working life. On the 1869 expedition against the slave trade she served as the party’s medic, and when they were beaten at Bunyoro she carried the rifles and the brandy out with her.

Baker came back. In 1872, by then Governor-General of Equatoria in the service of the Khedive of Egypt, he returned to Bunyoro and built a fort at Masindi, beside Omukama Kabalega’s capital. The arrangement did not hold. Fighting broke out that June, much of the capital was destroyed, and Baker withdrew northward. He marched for a week, lost about a quarter of his party, and ended at Patiko, where the fort he built there still stands.

That week is why Masindi sits on the map of his life, and why the Sir Samuel and Lady Florence Baker Historical Trail passes through this town. The trail runs 805 kilometres from Gondokoro, in what is now South Sudan, to Baker’s View above Lake Albert, and was laid out by the explorer Julian Monroe Fisher with the Uganda Ministry of Tourism; fifteen points along it carry markers, and Masindi is one of them. It does not pass the hotel. It passes through it — the line of the route crosses the ground these gardens stand on.

Which is the reason his story is told on this page at all. It is worth being plain about how it ended here: Baker was driven out of Masindi. The trail commemorates an expedition, but the ground it crosses was Kabalega’s, and Bunyoro’s, and still is.

Omukama Kabalega was taken from Bunyoro in April 1899 and spent twenty-four years in exile, most of them in the Seychelles. He was on his way home when he died at Mpumudde, near Jinja, on 6 April 1923, and he was buried at Mparo, outside Hoima, later that month. The royal tombs there are fifty-one kilometres from this gate.

Masindi Hotel opened in 1923. We set the two down together because both belong to that year in this district, and we leave it there.

The Hotel Is Built

Masindi Hotel was established in 1923 by the Uganda Railway as a stopover for travellers on the route west. It was placed deliberately: a rest point on the road between the railhead and the Lake Albert port at Butiaba, for the passengers and crew moving through on the company’s own steamers, lorries and buses. The company was renamed the Kenya and Uganda Railways and Harbours in 1926, and became the East African Railways and Harbours in 1948 — the initials that appear on much of the memorabilia from those years.

The Uganda Railway

The railway itself was built between 1896 and 1901, from the port of Mombasa to Kisumu on Lake Victoria: 1,060 kilometres of metre gauge, almost all of it single track. It was a major engineering feat, driven through challenging terrain and wildlife country, and it cost enough for one Member of Parliament to call the scheme “a gigantic folly” — which is how it came to be known as the Lunatic Line. Despite its name the Uganda Railway did not reach Uganda: every kilometre of the original line lay in what is now Kenya, and passengers for Uganda changed to a lake steamer. On 26 February 1926 the railway and the ports were brought together as the Kenya and Uganda Railways and Harbours, and the main line was not carried through to Kampala until 1931.

Two names reach the hotel from the years before the war, and neither made much of a stay. David, Prince of Wales — later Edward VIII, and later still the Duke of Windsor — came through Masindi in 1928 on his way to Murchison Falls. To the disappointment of anyone hoping for a story, he found no reason to stop.

Twenty years later, in 1948, Elspeth Huxley passed this way. She had not yet written The Flame Trees of Thika, the memoir of a Kenyan childhood that made her name — that came in 1959 — though she was already an established writer on East Africa. Her visit, by the accounts that survive, was as uneventful as the Prince’s.

Both are recorded in The Eye’s centenary account of the hotel. Neither left a photograph or a signed page behind. If you hold one, we would be glad to see it.

By August 1942 the war had brought an unlikely community to the edge of Masindi. Polish families deported to the Soviet Union, released after the amnesty of 1941, were carried out through Iran and East Africa; several thousand of them were settled at Nyabyeya, a few miles down the road from this hotel.

It was a town in its own right. By December 1944 there were 6,435 people living there, with schools, scout troops and a theatre. The settlement closed in 1947 and most of its people moved on to Britain, but the church they built stands at Nyabyeya still, and the Sybir Memorial Museum’s exhibition on that history now travels to Masindi Hotel.

The African Queen

Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart stayed at Masindi Hotel while they were in Uganda filming The African Queen. The movie was shot in 1951, and their time at the hotel became part of the production’s lore. Their stay here provided a brief respite from the demanding filming process.

Bogart and Hepburn were not the only Americans in the party. The director John Huston came out with them, and so did Lauren Bacall — Bogart’s wife, who had no part in the film and made the journey anyway. The Eye’s centenary account of the hotel has the four of them arriving together, Butiaba-bound, with the bar here the last of its kind before the lake.

One more name from that crew is worth keeping. The boom operator was a young Irishman from Dún Laoghaire, Kevin McClory, on one of his first pictures. He stayed with Huston afterwards, produced Thunderball in 1965 and Never Say Never Again in 1983, and spent much of his life in court with Ian Fleming’s estate over who owned James Bond. He came to all of that from a microphone pole carried through Butiaba.

In 1951 Life sent Eliot Elisofon to cover the shoot, and he stayed with it. His pictures of Bogart, Hepburn and Huston at work on the water are in the Life Picture Collection, and the American Society of Cinematographers has published an account of that assignment. We have not copied any of it here - it belongs to the people who made it. Elisofon spent the rest of his life photographing Africa, and his own archive is now at the Smithsonian.

Safari Tourism

The African Queen's release in 1951 put this stretch of the Nile in front of a wider audience, and the hotel felt the demand for the rest of the decade.

Ernest Hemingway

On 23 January 1954 Ernest Hemingway and his wife Mary were reported missing over Murchison Falls. Their sightseeing aircraft had come down near the falls. The plane sent to lift them out crashed on take-off at Butiaba the next day and caught fire, and the battered party was driven down the road to Masindi and put up at this hotel.

The ground search was run from Masindi by J. R. F. Mills, the officer then developing Murchison Falls National Park, who located the wreck and wrote the episode up years afterwards for the Overseas Service Pensioners’ Association. His account closes with the detail that catches the evening best: the gin stock at the Masindi Hotel, he recorded, was “seriously depleted”. The room Hemingway used still carries his name.

Source: J. R. F. Mills, “Hemingway Lost in Uganda”, OSPA Journal No. 92, October 2006.

A Man Reading His Own Obituary

Hemingway had an unusual ritual of celebrating his obituary. The tradition started after he survived multiple plane crashes in Murchison Falls National Park, which led to premature reports of his death.

When he returned to Havana, Cuba, after these incidents, he found that newspapers had published his obituaries. He took to reading them aloud at his favourite bar, the Floridita, enjoying the reactions and the attention it brought. He even collected clippings of these obituaries, reportedly keeping them as mementos of the bizarre experience.

The ritual highlighted his larger-than-life personality, and his singular sense of humour about his own mortality.

Independence

At independence in October 1962 the hotel passed to the Government of Uganda. It was placed under Uganda Hotels Limited, a state company that at the time held about a dozen hotels around the country, and Masindi Hotel stayed in that group for close to thirty years.

The hotels in that group stood for the most part in district headquarters towns, and Masindi Hotel was one of them. It sits beside what is now the Central Police headquarters and the barracks, on the route that brought goods up from Butiaba on Lake Albert. For most of those years the people at the tables were officials on tour, traders, and travellers on their way somewhere else.

Government ownership ended with the privatisation of state companies that began in 1990. Masindi Hotel returned to private hands around the year 2000, and the buildings, the gardens and the shape of the place came through the whole period intact.

Continued Significance

The hotel was privatised in 2000, and the new owner embarked on a continuous process of restoration that has never since stopped.

The names have kept arriving. The Nigerian-American musician Jidenna stayed here in 2019, seventy years or so after the film crew.

Today Masindi Hotel stands as a symbol of Uganda’s rich history and cultural heritage — through its association with the Bunyoro Kitara Empire, the explorations of Speke, Grant and Baker, the railway that changed how people reached it, and the writers and film stars who passed through its rooms.

The National Heritage Award

The first edition of the National Heritage Awards was held in 2013, during the International Conference of National Trusts in Entebbe. The Bhegani family was awarded in the tangible heritage category, for preserving and running the 1923 Masindi Hotel.

The UN cultural agency UNESCO classifies tangible heritage as buildings and historic places, monuments, and artifacts which are considered worthy of preservation for the future. They include objects significant to the archaeology, architecture, science or technology of a specific culture.

Intangible heritage, on the other hand, includes but is not limited to traditional festivals, oral traditions, oral epics, customs, ways of life and traditional crafts. It has become one of the priorities of UNESCO in the cultural domain.

One Hundred Years

In 2023 Masindi Hotel reached one hundred years. The owners were honoured by the Ministry of Tourism, Wildlife and Antiquities and the Uganda Tourism Board during the World Tourism Day celebrations held in Hoima City, the award presented in the company of the Right Hon. Prime Minister of Uganda and the Hon. Tom Butime, Minister of Tourism, Wildlife and Antiquities. Ten years after the National Heritage Award, the same family was recognised again — this time for keeping a working hotel alive through a century of Ugandan history.

The hotel celebrated 100 years with staff, and with friends and family.

From left to right: Hon. Tom Butime, Minister of Tourism, Wildlife and Antiquities; Rahim Mohamed, Director, Masindi Hotel; the Right Hon. Prime Minister of Uganda; Nahida Bhegani, Director, Masindi Hotel; and Hon. Martin Bahinduka, Minister of State for Tourism, Wildlife and Antiquities.

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