Great Lakes Kingdoms

The Great Lakes Kingdoms group takes in the Rwanda, Baganda, Haya and Shi of the East African lake country and, farther west on the savannas, the Luba, Lunda and Kuba. Cattle-raising Tutsi moved into the Rwandan highlands, where Twa hunters had lived, from the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, and a chiefdom there grew into the centralized Kingdom of Rwanda.

Buganda traces its kabakas to Kato Kintu in the late 1200s. Bunyoro-Kitara was founded in the late 1500s by Rukidi after the older Kitara empire broke up, and was for a time the region's greatest power. In the west the Luba chiefdoms merged into a kingdom around 1500, a model the Lunda copied.