Introduction
“Political transitions usually trigger changes in the cultural landscape because place names are largely political discourses and indispensable constituent elements of a political regime’s symbols of power”.Footnote 1 The prompt ruling in the application by John Ssempebwa against Uganda’s capital city authority to change the use of colonial street names was coincidentally pronounced in February 2025, the same month that justice for Africans and people of African descent through reparations was launched by African heads of state and government as the African Union theme of the year 2025. It is noteworthy that the development also followed the commencement of a second International Decade for People of African Descent in January 2025, proclaimed by the UN General Assembly on 17 December 2024 based on the theme: recognition, justice and development of people of African descent.Footnote 2
The African Union perceives reparation to Africa to comprise of initiatives that address historical injustices resulting from enslavement of Africans, colonization and systemic discrimination.Footnote 3 These endeavours include historical acknowledgement of the impact of colonialism and slavery on African societies, promotion of the African cultural heritage that was suppressed or destroyed during colonial times, reform of policies (and of necessity practices) that perpetuate inequality and discrimination, and continued advocacy for reparation, among the eight undertakings identified.Footnote 4 These multilayered, multifaceted, multisectoral and multidimensional approaches are valid at the domestic, regional and international levels. Uganda formally became a British colonial creation (or so-called protectorate) on 18 June 1894Footnote 5 and was administered as such until it obtained its independence on 9 October 1962. The Order in Council vested all government powers in the commissioner, who administered the government on behalf and in the name of the king of Britain.Footnote 6
John Ssempebwa, with the support of two senior Ugandan academics, filed an application against Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) in the High Court of Uganda in June 2024. He sought several orders, declarations and reliefs intended to compel the city authorities to adopt a decolonial approach to memory and recognition. By relying on constitutional provisions to support their averments for reparation, the applicants attempted to constitutionalize the subject.
Summary of the decision
The application was supported by three affidavits by John Ssempebwa, a historian, human rights activist and proprietor of a museum, Professor Samwiri Lwanga Luyiigo, a professor of Uganda history and author, and Dr Busingye Kabumba, acting director of the Human Rights and Peace Center of Makerere University Faculty of Law. They averred that i) KCCA used, and continues to use on public roads, names of individuals that benefitted from or were responsible for heinous crimes including torture, cruel, degrading and inhuman treatment, discrimination and subjugation of the peoples of Uganda (examples mentioned include Lord Fredrick Lugard, Captain William, Sir Edward Colville, Colonel Trevor Ternan, Sir Henry (Harry) Hamilton Johnstone, Sir Gerald Herbert Portal and others like Queen Alexandrina Victoria, King Edward VII, King George VI, Queen Elizabeth Mary Windsor II, the House of Windsor, the Kings African Rifles (KAR), Sir Ernest J Lennox Berkeley and Sir William Mackinnon); ii) honouring colonial figures that were responsible for the conquest, occupation and imposition of a violent, oppressive and exploitative imperial regime distorts history by glorifying colonial offices and the British monarchy while ignoring the harm and exploitation they inflicted upon local populations; iii) honouring colonial agents is also symbolic of ongoing oppressions and perpetuates the notion that colonialism is prevalent and valid many decades after Uganda attained its independence. It undermines the sense of independence from British colonial rule and the Ugandan’s right to self-determination. It also symbolizes and perpetuates a nefarious legacy of violence, domination, control, abuse, impunity and colonial oppression within Kampala and other parts of Uganda, which should come to an end. In their language, it indicates a lack of serious decolonization efforts by KCCA.
The applicants sought orders, declarations and other reliefs to the effect that i) the continued honouring and memorialization of particular British colonial officials or officials of the Imperial British East African Company by naming public roads after them in Uganda’s capital violated the rights of all Ugandans including their right to dignity and to freedom from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment under article 24 of Uganda’s Constitution, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ RightsFootnote 7 and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,Footnote 8 to which Uganda is a party; ii) retaining names of colonial officials on public roads is offensive and hurtful to the dignity and well-being of Ugandans particularly because it glorifies individuals responsible for gross human rights abuses, is insensitive to the suffering of individuals, families and communities under colonial rule and reinforces and perpetuates a harmful legacy of oppression, cruel and inhumane treatment, impunity and racial or cultural supremacy; iii) the continued retention of the colonial officials’ names on public infrastructure in the capital city is a constant reminder of the historical injustices inflicted upon Ugandans during British colonial rule, perpetuating intergenerational trauma and subjugation. It also undermines the right of Ugandans to self-determination and sovereignty by symbolizing the continuation of a legacy of colonial conquest and occupation; iii) KCCA immediately removes the names of colonial administrators, particularly Lord Fredrick Lugard, Captain William, Sir Henry Colville, Colonel Trevor Ternan, Sir Henry (Harry) Hamilton Johnstone, the King’s African Rifles (KAR), Sir Gerald Herbert Portal and others who were instrumental in the conquest, occupation and control of the Uganda protectorate and who implemented laws, regulations, policies, expeditions and practices that resulted in gross human rights violations against Ugandans, from all public roads and streets within its jurisdiction; iv) KCCA investigates and, where found appropriate and justifiable, removes names of the British colonial rulers, beneficiaries, administrators, military officials and / or officials of the former Imperial British East African Company that violate the inherent dignity, human rights and freedoms of Ugandans, and those that perpetuate a nefarious legacy of colonialism within their jurisdiction including Queen Alexandrina Victoria, King Edward VII, King George VI, Queen Elizabeth Mary Windsor II, the House of Windsor, Sir Ernest J Lennox Berkeley and Sir William Mackinnon; v) KCCA takes administrative, legislative and other measures to enforce rules for the renaming of streets and other public places with appropriate names that: a) honour individuals that promote the dignity and fundamental rights of Ugandans, b) promote community harmony and unity and c) exemplify the culture, heritage and values of the people of Uganda; vi) KCCA is prohibited from naming any new public roads or infrastructure after colonial figures known to have committed or benefitted from human rights violations or atrocities against Ugandans.
In response, KCCA challenged the application based on the causal effect; that it lacked evidence of how naming of roads after the British colonial officials of the Imperial British East African Company inflicted direct severe psychological or substantive physical harm upon the applicant. Furthermore, the applicant did not demonstrate how the rights of individuals, families and communities whose right to freedom from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment had been infringed by naming of roads after the British colonial officials. The response affirmed the respondent’s right to name some roads after the British colonial officials and / or officials of the Imperial British East African Company to preserve history.
Ssekaana J agreed with the defendant that the grievance raised was not directly linked to human rights violations, although it needed to be addressed by the city authorities because of the lapse of 62 years since Uganda’s independence. The judge tasked the authorities with gradually choosing appropriate names in honour of persons relevant to Uganda’s historical transformation since independence, to substitute the colonial names that have been used on Uganda’s capital’s public infrastructure for such a long time. The court avoided the seemingly difficult and untreated questions raised by the legacies of colonialism and their effects on the rights of people of African heritage. The court’s order however emphasized the need to rename public infrastructure with appropriate names that promote harmony, unity or exemplify the culture, heritage and values of the people of Uganda.
Self-reflective reparatory justice underpinnings of Ssempebwa
Colonization and collective victimization
The Durban Declaration and Programme of Action confirms that colonialism led to racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, and that Africans and people of African descent, among other marginalized groups, were victims of colonialism and continue to be victims of its consequences.Footnote 9 Establishing racial hierarchies was an intentional approach of the colonial project. The House of Lords debate of the motion advanced by Lord Noel-Buxton on native policy in the empire revealed the pivotal nature of racial superiority as the doctrine that anchored colonialism. Lord Noel-Buxton, a then member of the British cabinet, submitted that the relation of advanced peoples to backward peoples was one of the chief problems of the near future, and the time had come for fuller public attention to the principles of government of backward races – races which, according to him could be described as “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world”.Footnote 10 In response, Lord Snell cautioned the House of Lords about a new outlook that was arising – that Africans were unwilling to accept the allocation of inferiority which had been given to them and he added that they were entirely right because no one had the legitimacy to put a limit to anyone’s intelligence.Footnote 11 It is noteworthy that in 1938, a year after Lord Buxton withdrew his motion from the House of Lords, the Trading Ordinance was promulgated in Uganda, introducing significant changes that propelled structural poverty among Ugandans of African heritage.Footnote 12 The ordinance prohibited Africans from trading within a radius of eight miles from any urban centre. Asians were accorded monopoly of towns and trading centres in Uganda, leaving what Parson described as the most unprofitable of distributive activity, and rural retailing, to Africans.Footnote 13 This relegation strategy, among others, led to intergenerational impoverishment of Ugandans of African descent, and on the other hand to Asian transgenerational prosperity. Similar legislation was promulgated to restrict the liberties of persons of African heritage such as the Black Laws Amendment Act 46 of 1937, which restricted the rights of Africans in South Africa from acquiring land in urban areas.Footnote 14
Delegates of the World Conference against Racism regretted that the effects and persistence of colonial structures and practices have been among the factors contributing to lasting social and economic inequalities in many parts of the world.Footnote 15 Uganda is not an exception. The nation is struggling with a systemic colonial relegation to exportation of raw agricultural products, mainly coffee, tea and cotton, which do not accord it leverage in the global economic markets that are driven by value addition. The UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent highlighted the structural inequalities inherent in the global financial architecture and digital fiscal systems, which particularly disadvantage African countries.Footnote 16
Decolonization as public interest
The court raised controversy about Mr Ssempebwa’s status as a victim of colonial legacies. Colonialism in Uganda introduced systems that privileged persons of European and Asian origin while marginalizing Africans individually and collectively. This victimization has been transgenerational, widespread and a strong influence in contemporary international relations, hence becoming a matter of public interest.Footnote 17
Racial hierarchies were inherent in colonial public administration. While elaborating the two ideals that guided the empire, Lord Noel-Buxton stated that
“one is the idea of trusteeship… ‘that there should be no barriers of race, colour, or creed, which should prevent any [human] by merit from reaching any station if [s]/he is fitted for it’. The rival doctrine is that the white [person] should be not only the political master but should debar the native from acquiring even the professional efficiency of which [s]/he is capable. That is colour bar administration.”Footnote 18
He recalled the crude expression of a South African Minister that one must have either equality and assimilation, on the one hand, or, on the other, the golden rule of Calvinism and of the old republics – no equality in church or state. Neither doctrine accommodated African authenticity since even where equality applied, it required assimilation in favour of the colonizer through systems that alienated humanness from Africanness. The deep-rooted effects of dehumanization and invisibilisation of Africans subsist to date.
Street names have both a retrospective and prospective impact. They could implicate the national narrative of the past,Footnote 19 while “introducing political ideologies into mundane spheres of urban experience and even everyday levels of everyday life”.Footnote 20 During the empire and the Nazi period, designating streets and roadways was a popular means of colonial propaganda in Germany.Footnote 21 Certain jurisdictions have introduced legal and institutional frameworks to undertake renaming processes including Zimbabwe’s Names Alteration Act (1983)Footnote 22 and the South African Geographical Names Council Act 118 of 1998,Footnote 23 which established the South African Geographical Names Council with one of its core objectives as facilitating the transformation process for geographical names.Footnote 24 The mayor of London also established the Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm.Footnote 25 Amidst resistance from certain circles, German authorities have renamed streets that represent the brutal colonial past of Europe’s superpower. In 2006, the city of Munich renamed a street (Von-Trotha-Strasse) dedicated to colonial general Lothar von Trotha, with Hererostrasse, to commemorate the Herero people, against whom he commanded a genocide.Footnote 26 Berlin, the capital of Germany, renamed streets that represented its colonial past with names of liberators. Wissmannstrasse, named after Hermann von Wissman, the German colonial governor in East Africa who had ordered massacres, became Lucy Lameckstrasse, after a Tanzania’s independence activist.Footnote 27 The London Borough of Haringey renamed Black Boy Lane over racial connotations as La Rose Lane, after John La Rose, a publisher and advocate of Caribbean artists, children and workers.Footnote 28 The momentum for these noble actions needs to accelerate in a favourable direction worldwide and more certainly in Africa.
Perpetuation of colonial legacies and the human rights of a people
The Durban Declaration and Programme of Action raised a concern that “theories of superiority of certain races and cultures over others, promoted and practiced during the colonial era, continued to be propounded in one form or another today”.Footnote 29 Honouring the memory of public figures that promote(d) narratives of superiority perpetuates their ideologies while ideologically undermining the dignity of others. The right to respect for the inherent dignity in a human being (in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights) is linked to the recognition of their legal status as bearers of both rights and responsibilities in a particular jurisdiction.Footnote 30 The effect of colonization was to qualify the rights of some in favour of the interests of others. Williamson notes that colonial place names are oppressive historical actions that reinforce colonial claims to territory when retained hence weakening claims to such territory by natives.Footnote 31 Of specific note, the recognition of a colonizer by way of public commendation (in a dedicated street) simultaneously elevates the indignity and subjugation suffered by the colonized. The Constitutional Court of South Africa observed that there hardly was any city, town, street or institution of note in (apartheid) South Africa that bore a name that sought to give honour to black people’s leaders or recognition of their institutions or treasured history because black people generally were labelled intellectually inferior, lazy and lesser beings in every respect of consequence.Footnote 32 All recognition and honour was given to white history and their heroes and heroines to entrench white supremacy and privilege on one hand, and black inferiority and disadvantage on the other.Footnote 33 Furthermore, the discriminatory nature of colonial administration, which comprised of “masters” and their collaborators prevailing upon Africans, did not permit the participation of the latter in naming processes. The priority interests and participation of Africans in urban life were eroded by the Trading Ordinances of 1938,Footnote 34 and so were their rights to claim recognition in such spaces. There is therefore no credibility to retention of the outcomes of (racially) discriminatory processes among contemporary civilizations. It is based on this premise that public administrators globally are rethinking their interaction with names of public infrastructure.
In September 2018, the Swiss town of Neuchâtel decided to rename one of the streets running through the local university district from Espace Louis-Agassiz, a 19th century Swiss-American glaciologist who was an outspoken racist who once admitted he felt sick in the presence of black people, to Tilo Frey, a Swiss born of a Cameroonian mother and the first woman to be elected to the cantonal parliament (in 1969) and the House of Representatives in Bern (1971–75).Footnote 35 This followed a request to the local parliament to reconsider Agassiz’s legacy in the public space. Global advocacy for recognition of the contributions of people of African descent to modern day civilization has yielded some fruits such as in Portugal where 20 toponymic plagues narrating the history of African Lisbon from the 15th century to date were installed in Lisbon in January 2024.Footnote 36
Elsewhere in Africa, the military governments of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger changed French names on streets in their respective capitals.Footnote 37 Birnbaum observes that retaliatory street naming, to indicate disapproval of policies of specific international actors, is not new in international relations.Footnote 38 Senegal has issued a presidential directive requiring replacement of French street names in its capital Dakar with names of Senegalese national heroes.Footnote 39 Similarly, the Town Planning Committee of the City Council of Nairobi passed a resolution in February 1974, whose effect was to Africanize street names from European or Asian names.Footnote 40 These developments are considered by analysts as efforts to reclaim cultural and national identities in contexts of subsisting colonial legacies.Footnote 41 It is important to note the peculiarity of Ssempebwa as requiring the replacement of colonial street names irrespective of quantity. It is not about numbers but the objective impact of a particular name; even one undesirable street name could warrant decolonial action. This is distinguishable from City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality,Footnote 42 which majorly concerned the systemic, country wide disproportionality in recognition – the so-called illegitimate retention of race-based exclusive privilege,Footnote 43 although the effect of venerating the architects of South Africa’s oppressive and colonial past was a concern per se.Footnote 44 The validity of either or both perspectives is contextual.
Conclusion
In the wording of Froneman J and Cameron J, “the time has come to stop objections to name changes based on a cultural heritage that is rooted in a history of colonialism, racism and apartheid”.Footnote 45 Victimization of Africans and African societies by the perils of colonialism is undertreated and seemingly ignored at the national level, hence creating gaps of articulation of the discourse to the regional and international levels. This spans from the colonial project itself, which culminated into falsifying historical facts and emergence of an African history that represents the history of colonialists in Africa more than the history of Africans in Africa. In a debate about benchmarking colonial ideology in the House of Lords in June 1937, Lord Snell confirmed Lord Buxton’s observation that it was most favourable in his own words “to play the game in relation to the backward races”.Footnote 46 Africa cannot afford to lead neo-colonialism or its likeness on, or worst still lag behind the efforts of former colonial powers themselves in confronting legacies of the past. Africans have always refused the inferiority status allocated to them,Footnote 47 and African governments need to give effect to that legitimate reality.
The favourable ruling in the case of John Ssempebwa v Kampala City Council Authority is seemingly made per incuriam [through lack of care]. Ssekaana J omitted to consider the collective harm of colonialism on human rights, decolonization as a subject and the public interest perspective of the matter adequately. The judge did not clarify that erasure of people of African heritage from positive public memory was a strategy to confirm the false narrative of their inability. Of note, KCCA’s response that it had a right to honour history was made in reckless disregard of historical sensibilities and the obligation to ensure self-reflective reparation, to free the public administration conscience of the preference of immortalizing others other than their own models. It poses the questions: whose history is honoured and what impact does public memory serve? This perspective needs to permeate every aspect of African society. Loss of historical significance or distastefulness of a name are part of Kampala City Council’s criteria for renaming streets.Footnote 48 These could serve as grounds of dispensing with colonial street names. Memorializing the past is an expression of power,Footnote 49 and names of public infrastructure should confirm the aspirations of the people including self-governance. There is need for legal and institutional frameworks and formations tasked with aligning memorializing with the reparation agenda of the continent. Self-reflective reparatory justice in Africa needs to be systemic, systematicFootnote 50 and institutionalized, beyond ad hoc responses to campaigns and retaliatory measures. Dr Guéye advocates for “real work of memorial appropriation” with renaming processes ensuring full participation of local populations and new names that reflect African history and cultureFootnote 51 – a human rights-based approach to both process and outcomes, which is anchored in constitutionalism.
Competing interests
None
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