Kampala was not the first point of contact for the missionaries and eventually the administrators of the British Protectorate in Uganda. Entebbe, farther away and closer to the Lake Victoria shores, with a port for the new long-term visitors, was the administrative seat. When Kampala was eventually formed as a commercial centre, it made sense to migrate the government administrative functions to the city. With all of the main functions of the state now in the capital city of Kampala, it became a site that is at once historical and contested, with clear markers of colonial expressions within its blueprint. Kampala, as a capital, belongs to all of Uganda and its proximity to the government makes it a spatial platform for public memory and state-sponsored decoloniality projects. As the colonial government carved out public spaces in the new Protectorate, they used names to signal their conquest and to locate themselves and the Empire within the land. This history within the geography makes denaming and renaming of public spaces in the politically independent Uganda an archive of public decolonisation processes. This chapter explores the narrative of nationalism within Uganda's national spaces and identity, and how political leaders use these spaces, through naming, to project their nationalistic credentials in public decolonisation projects.

Names are often the markers for a society's memory, triggering stories and remembering people and events of importance. Place names are essential markers for the inhabitants of a place to locate themselves within an area, and in relation to physical landscape. These place names make up part of a city's ‘emotional geography’. In colonial Uganda (and other colonised spaces), they became ways to mark territory and insert memories and people from a different place. New names consequently over-wrote any temporal claims to the land from the residents, creating a new spatial territory for which the independence and decolonisation process involved renaming.

These names have mostly gone unnoticed and unscrutinised in postcolonial Uganda, with their histories and significance lost in their utilitarian roles in the city and woven into the dwellers’ lives. But, as argued by other scholars (Till, 2012: Yeon, 1996), it is important to critically analyse these urban space representations.