Uganda Museum

The Uganda Museum is located in Kampala, Uganda. It displays and exhibits ethnological, natural-historical and traditional life collections of Uganda's cultural heritage. It was founded in 1908, after Governor George Wilson called for "all articles of interest" on Uganda to be procured. Among the collections in the Uganda Museum are playable musical instruments, hunting equipment, weaponry, archaeology and entomology.

The Uganda Museum is the oldest museum in East Africa;^{[citation needed]} it was officially established by the British protectorate government in 1908 with ethnographic material. Its history goes back to 1902 when deputy Governor George Wilson called for collection of objects of interest throughout the country to set up a museum. The museum started in a small Sikh temple at Fort Lugard on Old Kampala Hill. Between the 1920s and 1940s, archaeology and paleontological surveys and excavations were conducted by Church Hill, E. J. Wayland, Bishop J. Wilson, P. L. Shinnie, E. Lanning, and several others, who collected a significant number of artifacts to boost the museum. The museum at Fort Lugard become too small to hold the specimens, and the museum was moved to the Margret Trowel School of Fine Art at Makerere University College in 1941. Later, funds were raised for a permanent home and the museum was moved to its current location on Kitante Hill in 1954. In 2008, the museum turned 100 years old.

The museum has a number of galleries: Ethnography, Natural History, Traditional Music, Science and Industry, and Early History.

The ethnography section holds more than 100,000 object of historical and cultural value. A traditional reed door leads to exhibits on health, knowledge systems, objects of warfare, traditional dressing and other various ceremonial practices in Uganda.

The ethnography gallery, formerly called the "Tribal Hall", is organized around a series of wooden "shop window" cases, each of which holds objects that derive from the traditional cultures of Uganda's people.

The music gallery displays a comprehensive collection of musical instruments from East Africa, which grew from the collection originally established by Dr Klaus Wachsmann in 1948. The instruments are arranged according to the major groups of music instruments: drums, percussion, wind and string instruments.

The Uganda Museum carries out research across the country, with intensive research in the Karamoja region (Napak, Moroto and Kadam), Eastern Uganda at the foothills of Mount Elgon (Bukwo) and the whole of the western rift to Dellu, near Uganda's border with South Sudan. The Paleontological Research Unit has yielded fossils that relate to human evolution. For instance, Uganda Pithecus (fossil skull of a remote cousin of Hominidae) is a fossil ape, aged between 19 and 20 million years, that was discovered in Napak. Paleoenvironmental research around heritage sites has also taken place in eastern and western Uganda.

The Uganda Museum collaborates with Mbarara University, Makerere University, College de Franca, Natural History Museum in Paris and the University of Michigan.