For decades, the building on Kamukuzi Hill whispered of collapsed grandeur rather than proclaiming it. Mugaba Palace, the former seat of Ankole royalty, had settled into a long slumber of decay. Its roofs sagged, its grounds surrendered to neglect, and its rooms housed not kings but squatters; some 20 families nested inside Gasyonga House alone, the heart of the estate. From a distance, the hilltop compound looked less like a royal residence and more like a casualty of forgotten time, an 11-acre question mark where history had been interrupted by weeds, smoke, and the ordinary press of survival.
Today, the interruption has ended.
What rises from Kamukuzi Hill is no mere repair job. It is a resurrection. After a phased, years-long restoration initiated by Uganda’s Ministry of Tourism, Wildlife and Antiquities, Mugaba Palace has been returned to the skyline of Mbarara, not as a sealed museum piece, but as what heritage architects call a heritage time capsule, a carefully reconstructed environment where the texture of royal life can be felt rather than merely read about. Walking its manicured grounds now, one senses the peculiar tension that defines the best restorations: the building is at once brand new and deeply old, a place where 1954 and the present occupy the same breath.
The palace in shambles
To understand what has been achieved, one must first grasp what was lost. Dr Jackline Nyiracyiza Besigye, the Commissioner for Museums, Sites and Monuments, remembers the first site inspection with sobering clarity.
‘When this place was identified, it was in shambles,’ she recalls. ‘It was dilapidated, and there were small structures within the space.’
The Gasyonga House, the compound’s most significant building, had been subdivided and domesticated by the press of ordinary life. Families cooked where queens once dressed; children slept where ambassadors may have been received. The palace had simply been colonised by the very everydayness it was built to transcend.
The restorers understood that reinstating Mugaba Palace required more than construction crews. It required an archaeology of memory. The project was divided into deliberate phases; first secure the 11-acre site, then rescue the historic buildings, and finally restore the landscape. The initial phase began in 2017 with the perimeter wall and fencing, completed between 2019 and 2020. But even this first gesture was conceived as storytelling. Rather than a blunt security barrier, the wall was designed to introduce visitors to the visual vocabulary of Ankole before they stepped through the gate; the long horn cattle motifs and agricultural symbols etched into the boundary, announcing that pastoralism and kingship still shared this hill.
The architecture of memory
The restoration team prioritised four structures that together trace the evolution of the Ankole royal establishment; the Gasyonga House, Kahaya House, Nyamashore House, and the Drum House. Of these, Gasyonga House carries the heaviest emotional and historical freight. Associated with Sir Charles Godfrey Gasyonga II, the last Omugabe who occupied the palace before the abolition of traditional kingdoms in 1967, the house was treated not as a relic to be sealed behind glass but as a life to be reimagined.
The curators conducted oral research across Ankole, seeking palace staff and elders who could recall how the rooms functioned, where the light fell in the afternoon, and what the royal couple wore when receiving visitors. Photographs were traced, memories cross-referenced, and from this patchwork of evidence, the team reconstructed an interior that breathes.
One of the most arresting details is the clothing. A ceremonial robe belonging to the former king hangs garments representing the public and ceremonial life of his queen, Omwigarire Constance Mary Ndyomwishiki. The surprise is that these are not exclusively traditional pieces. For official functions, the royal couple adopted contemporary fashion of their era, evidence of an elite cosmopolitanism that reached beyond the cattle corridors of the southwest. Seeing their clothing displayed within the rooms gives the house an unexpected intimacy; it is less a monument than a wardrobe suddenly reopened, suggesting that royalty here was not a fossil but a living, choosing presence.
Sourcing the past
If Gasyonga House captures the palace’s final royal chapter, Kahaya House reaches further back. Linked to Omugabe Edward Solomon Kahaya II. This building reflects a period when Indian trade networks had penetrated the Ugandan interior, bringing new materials, forms, and ambitions. By the 1930s, Indian influence was evident in the furniture and architectural detailing of the Ankole elite. The restoration team honoured this layer by sourcing pieces from as far away as the coastal towns of Mombasa in Kenya, hunting for beds and chairs whose silhouettes could convincingly evoke the period without resorting to anachronistic modern substitutes.
The result is a series of interiors that feel inhabited rather than staged. Kahaya House contains two throne rooms where the king once met with chiefs and subjects; shields and ceremonial objects have been positioned to recreate the charged atmosphere of these encounters. But the curators went further still, attempting to reconstruct aspects of the traditional palace that existed before colonial architectural languages took hold. The house thus becomes a blend of colonial, Indian, and indigenous Ankole influences, all visible, none pretending to be the sole truth.
This commitment to honest recreation required the team to acknowledge loss. Where original furniture and fittings had vanished beyond recovery, they did not fake authenticity. Instead, they recreated based on historical evidence, allowing visitors to understand the difference between a surviving artifact and a carefully researched approximation.
‘In heritage, when we talk about recreation, we create according to the demand,’ Dr Besigye explains. ‘Here, the demand was to imagine how this place looked in the 1940s. We are looking at the transition from the pre-colonial period into colonialism, and the objects and interiors show how that transition affected the royal household.’
The furniture becomes evidence of transition, the shift from pre-colonial to colonial life made tangible in the grain of wood and the curve of a chair back.
Reading the walls
Perhaps the most intellectually satisfying aspect of the restoration is not what has been added, but what has been revealed. In several sections, the team deliberately stripped away later plaster to expose the building’s structural autobiography. The contrast is immediate and eloquent. Older walls were constructed from mud and bricks without cement, their massive thickness speaking to an engineering logic that relied on width and weight rather than reinforced binding. Later additions incorporated cement and modern methods, lighter and thinner. Rather than conceal this evolution, the restoration spotlights it. Around the kitchen area in particular, exposed sections allow visitors to stand before the bare bones of the architecture and understand how stability was achieved before Portland cement became the region’s default.
‘The walls themselves tell us about architectural evolution,’ Dr Besigye notes. ‘The older buildings have very wide walls made of mud and bricks without cement. We opened some sections, especially around the kitchen, so visitors can see how these structures were constructed and understand how people achieved strength before the widespread use of cement.’
It is a rare museum that allows its own construction to be part of the exhibition. Here, the masonry does the talking.
The view from the hill
What stands on Kamukuzi Hill today is less a conventional palace than a conversation across time. Built in 1954, the compound bears traces of British colonial planning and Indian decorative influence, yet it remains fundamentally a statement of Ankole royal identity. The restoration does not choose one era over another. Instead, it invites the visitor to walk through layers, to move from the pre-colonial imaginary of Kahaya House to the modern-global wardrobe of Gasyonga House, all while reading the walls that make such transitions physically possible.
Uganda’s traditional kingdoms were abolished in 1967, and for decades afterward, Mugaba Palace existed in a kind of limbo, too significant to demolish, too ruined to honour. The restoration does not bring the kingdom back, history does not rewind, but it does reclaim the dignity of the site. It asserts that the material culture of Ankole royalty deserves preservation not as nostalgia, but as a living reference point.
Dr Besigye’s hope is that the palace will draw tourists to Mbarara and anchor a broader appreciation of southwestern Uganda’s heritage. Yet the deeper achievement may be subtler. By rebuilding not just walls but the sensations of royal life, the clothes, the furniture, the very thickness of the brickwork; the restoration team has created something rarer than a museum. They have created a threshold. Cross it, and for a moment, the hill belongs to another century entirely. Step back, and the modern city of Mbarara glitters below, indifferent but, perhaps, slightly more aware of what it rests upon.