Last Sunday, the clouds did not smile, at least in and around Kampala. The rain fell like someone had opened a heavenly tank, not bothering to shut it. 

Yet, in the middle of this torrential blessing—or was it mourning?—something spectacular happened. Thousands of Ugandans, draped in Kabaka Birthday Run vests, ran. Not away from the storm, but straight into it. The roads glistened with puddles, the air was heavy with ancestral energy and the people ran—not just for fitness, not just for the Kabaka’s 70th birthday, but for something much deeper: Omwoyo gwa Buganda ogutafa! Or the Spirit of Buganda that never dies.

Buganda is not a location. Buganda is a memory that knows how to survive floods, coups, dictatorships and careless cartographers.

Now, let us not pretend we have not seen what has been brewing. A few days ago, some people quietly dropped a digital bombshell—Buganda had mysteriously disappeared from the official map of Uganda. We are not talking about a village name, not a town, not a street. The entire kingdom. 

Like a magician’s card trick gone too far, the nation watched as an entire cultural identity was erased with a few keystrokes. No explanation. No apology. Just a digital void where Buganda once proudly sat.

But here is the thing they always forget: You can take Buganda off a government map, but you cannot take Buganda out of a Ugandan’s heart. You cannot legislate away memory. You cannot download history and then delete it when it becomes inconvenient. Because Buganda is not just borders. Buganda is a pulse, a pride, a language, a drumbeat that still calls its people home.

And last Sunday, in the middle of rain so heavy it could wash away a boda stage, the message came loud and clear: “We are still here.”

From the elders jogging with walking sticks and defiant smiles, to children being piggybacked through mud by fathers in soaked vests, Sunday was not just a birthday run—it was a subtle but powerful act of cultural resistance. A reminder. A nudge. A statement that said: Wetuli. We exist.

You see, you can rebrand regions, redraw districts or rename rivers—but the people do not forget. They carry Buganda in the songs of the boda guy with a radio strapped to his fuel tank. In the matooke served at a Dubai kafunda where Kadamas meet to remember home. In the clans, in the proverbs, in the respect we still give to a man simply because he says “Nze Muzukulu wa Walusimbi.”

Buganda is in our bone marrow.

And to those who thought the disappearance of the kingdom from a map would go unnoticed, Sunday was your answer. When you try to turn Buganda into a ghost, what you get instead is a thunderstorm of loyalty, literally and metaphorically. Not organised protests. Not hashtags. Just pure, ancestral muscle memory showing up in the rain and running as if the Kabaka himself had whispered in their dreams.

You have to understand this is not politics; this is soul business.

This is why a boda guy who earns shs7,000 a day will still spend shs15,000 on a Kabaka Run vest. It is not logical. It is spiritual. 

Buganda is not a location. Buganda is a memory that knows how to survive floods, coups, dictatorships and careless cartographers.

To all who ran on Sunday—not just through the puddles but through the pain of erasure—you did not just celebrate the Kabaka’s birthday; you reminded the country that there are things you cannot colonise, cancel or cartograph.

And so we say, Wangaala Ayi Ssabasajja Kabaka!

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