Oh Uganda, Land of Beauty

The story

"Oh Uganda, Land of Beauty" is the national anthem of Uganda. From 1894 until the height of decolonisation in the 1960s, Uganda was a protectorate of the United Kingdom within its colonial empire. In the run-up to independence a subcommittee was formed to choose an anthem for the coming state. It held a nationwide contest and asked that the anthem be "short, original, solemn, praising and looking forward to the future".

George Wilberforce Kakoma wrote both the words and the tune in one day, after hearing on Radio Uganda the night before that the subcommittee had judged none of the entries received so far suitable. His entry was one of four on the shortlist, and it was selected in July 1962. The song was officially adopted in 1962, the year the country gained independence from the United Kingdom, and was first played in public at the celebrations of independence on 9 October 1962.

At only eight bars, the anthem is musically one of the shortest in the world, together with Japan's: Michael Bristow, the editor of the book National Anthems of the World, and Philip Sheppard have both named Uganda's as the shortest. For that reason several verses are usually sung when it is performed at public events such as international football matches. Besides translations into Luganda and Swahili, the anthem has been translated into several other local languages.

In 2008 Kakoma sued the government, saying he had never been properly paid and was owed more than four decades of royalties. He said the government had given him only USh 2,000, less than £1 in 2008, as a "token of thanks". Kakoma died before the Court of Appeal dismissed the case in 2019, finding that the copyright in the anthem was vested in the government and not in its author.

What it says

A short, solemn anthem of praise for the country and of hope for its future, as the contest of 1962 asked.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so the Institute does not print them itself: Genius shows them below, under its own licence.