Holidays in Uganda

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Uganda

A Dispute Settled Only After Its Chief Witness Was Dead

On 3 August 1858, British explorer John Hanning Speke, travelling with Richard Burton but pressing ahead alone while his companion lay ill with fever, reached the southern shore of a vast lake he named after Queen Victoria and immediately became convinced he had found the long-sought source of the Nile. Burton, who considered the evidence flimsy, disagreed sharply, favouring instead the nearby Lake Tanganyika, and the dispute between the two former travelling companions escalated into one of the most bitter controversies in the history of exploration.

Speke returned to Africa in 1860 specifically to settle the question, and on 28 July 1862, having negotiated for months with Mutesa, the king of Buganda, he finally reached the precise point where the Nile flows out of Lake Victoria, which he named Ripon Falls, and sent back to London a famously terse telegram: the Nile was settled. Burton remained unconvinced, and the argument was scheduled for a formal public debate before the British Association in Bath on 16 September 1864. Speke never appeared. He died the day before, apparently by an accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound while out hunting, a circumstance debated ever since. The dispute itself outlived him by more than a decade, only being conclusively resolved in 1875, when the explorer Henry Morton Stanley circumnavigated Lake Victoria and confirmed, seventeen years after Speke's first sighting of its shores, that he had been right all along.

The Ice That Ptolemy Predicted and the Twenty-First Century Is Watching Disappear

Writing in Alexandria around 150 CE, the Greek geographer Ptolemy described a range of snow-capped equatorial peaks, fed by local reports rather than his own observation, which he called the Mountains of the Moon, and identified their melting snow as the ultimate source of the lakes that fed the Nile. For over seventeen centuries the description remained little more than an intriguing classical rumour, until nineteenth-century European explorers identified it with the real Rwenzori range straddling the modern border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an equatorial massif whose upper peaks genuinely do carry permanent snow and glacial ice.

The mountains were first fully climbed in 1906, during an expedition led by the Duke of Abruzzi, whose team also produced the first detailed map of the range's glacier cover, measured at roughly 6.5 square kilometres. Later surveys documented a steady, then accelerating, retreat: the glaciated area had shrunk to about 3.2 square kilometres by 1955, and continued shrinking through the following decades to roughly 1.7 square kilometres by the 1990s and still further by the mid-2000s, a loss exceeding seventy percent of the ice Ptolemy's informants would have described nearly two thousand years earlier. Scientists monitoring the range now generally expect the glaciers to disappear entirely within a matter of decades, a genuinely ancient geographical feature, first recorded in writing before the fall of Rome, on track to vanish from the Earth within the lifetime of people alive today.

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