ABSTRACT
Uganda experienced two great waves of migration. The first brought the Bantu-speaking peoples from further west in Africa, and the second, the Nilotic people from Sudan and Ethiopia. These broad families are still geographically split today, the Bantu in the center and south of the country and the Nilotic peoples in the north. The colonial boundaries created by Britain to delimit Uganda grouped together a wide range of ethnic groups with different political systems and cultures. These differences prevented the establishment of a working political community after independence was achieved in 1962. The British established the Mailo System in which land parcels were assigned to various levels of local royalty with the British Crown taking ownership of areas undesired by Ugandans. The sheer size of the number of parcels necessitated the training and employment of local Ugandans as surveyors, with mixed results with regard to the quality of the surveys and descriptions of calls.
