Kagera

This was the country of the Haya kingdoms — a set of small, well-organised states on the western shore of Lake Victoria — and, to the west, of Karagwe, whose king Ndagara ruled from about 1820 until 1853 and was succeeded by Rumanyika. Karagwe lay on the caravan road to Buganda, and its rulers were the hosts every nineteenth-century European expedition to the lake had to deal with.

Under colonial rule and for the first decades of independence the area was called West Lake Region. Its present name comes from the Kagera River, which forms the border with Rwanda — and from the war fought over it.

In October 1978 Ugandan forces under Idi Amin invaded and occupied the Kagera Salient, the wedge of Tanzanian land north of the river, and Radio Uganda announced that the border had moved. Tanzania declared war, drove them out, and went on: a combined Tanzanian and Ugandan rebel force took Kampala in April 1979 and Amin fled. Tanzania lost 373 soldiers and around 1,500 civilians, the war wrecked an already fragile economy, and Kagera itself was left badly damaged. The region was renamed afterwards.

Two later disasters are still remembered here. The ferry MV Bukoba sank on the crossing to Mwanza on 21 May 1996; the official death toll was 894, and the real figure is thought to be higher. And on 10 September 2016 a magnitude 5.9 earthquake struck near Nsunga, killing at least 19 people and destroying hundreds of houses in and around Bukoba.

The Haya are the largest people of the region, with the Nyambo in Karagwe, the Subi, Zinza and Hangaza elsewhere. Haya society was organised around the kingdoms, and something of that formality survives in how the region presents itself — in the weight its churches and schools carry in local life.

The Mushonge museum on the Kamachumu plateau holds a reconstructed royal house of the kind the Haya kings lived in: a great domed structure of poles and grass, built without nails and dark inside as a cathedral.

Bukoba itself is a small, green, unhurried lake town — a cathedral, a market, a long beach, and a waterfront where the lake looks like the sea. It is a full day's sail or a short flight from Mwanza, and psychologically closer to Kampala than to Dar es Salaam.