Makerere University
public university in Kampala, Uganda
Makerere University (; Mak, also MUK) is Uganda's largest and oldest institution of higher learning, first established as a technical school in 1922, and the oldest currently active university in East Africa. It became an independent national university in 1970. Today, Makerere University is composed of nine colleges and one school, offering programmes for about 36,000 undergraduates and 4,000 postgraduates. These colleges include College of Natural Sciences (CONAS), College of Health Sciences (CHS), College of Engineering Art & Design (CEDAT), College of Agriculture and Environmental Studies (CAES), College Of Business and Management Sciences (CoBAMS), College of Humanities & Social Sciences (CHUSS), College of Computing and Information Sciences (COCIS), College of Veterinary Medicine, Animal Resources & Bio-security (COVAB), College of Education and External Studies (CEES) and Makerere University Business School (MUBS). In addition, Makerere has another campus in Jinja City, Eastern Uganda.
Makerere University is the alma mater of many post-independence African leaders, including Ugandan president Milton Obote and Tanzanian presidents Julius Nyerere and Benjamin Mkapa. The former president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Joseph Kabila, and former Kenyan president the late Mwai Kibaki are also Makerere alumni.
In the years immediately after Uganda's independence, Makerere University was a focal point for the literary activity that was central to African nationalist culture. Many prominent writers, including Nuruddin Farah, Ali Mazrui, David Rubadiri, Okello Oculi, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, John Ruganda, Paul Theroux, Nobel Prize laureate V. S. Naipaul, and Peter Nazareth, were at Makerere University at one point in their writing and academic careers.
Because of student unrest and faculty disenchantment, the university was closed three times between 2006 and 2016.
“Makerere University” enters the record as public university in Kampala, Uganda. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Makerere, University and public can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q261506. VIAF identifies the subject as 130943651. The Library of Congress control number is n79047552. Authority coordinates are 0.335, 32.568. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1922, 1970, 2006 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “Makerere University” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.