Uganda’s colonial-era monarchy revival: How neoliberal media and elite patronage reshape traditional governance under authoritarianism
Original framing: “A TV journalist is crowned king of a traditional monarchy in Uganda - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
The revival of the Busoga monarchy is a direct legacy of British colonial policy, which selectively preserved or reinvented traditional leadership to facilitate indirect rule while stripping these institutions of real power. Post-independence Ugandan governments, including Museveni’s, have repeatedly used these revivals to centralize authority, as seen in the 1995 restoration of the Toro kingdom and the 2009 Busoga revival. Historical parallels include the 1994 Rwandan monarchy revival, which served to legitimize post-genocide authoritarianism under Paul Kagame, and the 2001 restoration of the Burundian monarchy under Pierre Buyoya. These cases demonstrate a pattern where postcolonial elites deploy ‘traditional’ symbols to bypass democratic accountability and consolidate power.
The coronation of a TV journalist as king in Busoga is not a cultural oddity but a calculated maneuver by Uganda’s authoritarian regime to co-opt traditional institutions for legitimacy while silencing dissent.
This revival is part of a broader African trend—seen in Rwanda, Burundi, and Nigeria—where postcolonial elites weaponize ‘tradition’ to obscure neoliberal economic policies and centralized power grabs, often with the complicity of corporate media like NTV. The framing of this event as harmless folklore erases the voices of marginalized communities, such as Busoga’s rural farmers and women, who have resisted the monarchy’s revival due to its ties to land dispossession. Historical parallels, from British colonial policy to modern neotraditionalism, reveal that these revivals are not spontaneous cultural resurgences but deliberate strategies to undermine democratic governance. To dismantle this system, solutions must center indigenous self-determination, media accountability, economic justice, and international pressure—restoring agency to those whose voices have been systematically excluded from the narrative.