A short history of cricket in Uganda

Cricket in Uganda? Yes. Tucked between the Democratic Republic of Congo to the west, Kenya to the east, South Sudan to the north, and Rwanda, Tanzania and Lake Victoria to the south, the east African country's connection to the game might seem tenuous.

More so after their crushing loss to Afghanistan in a men's T20 World Cup match in Providence on Monday (June 3), Uganda's inaugural game as a national team at a global cricket event. Under the cosh for 14.3 overs while Rahmanullah Gurbaz and Ibrahim Zadran shared an opening stand of 154 at a strike rate of 177.01, Uganda recovered well to hold Afghanistan to a total of 183/5. But then they crashed to 58 all out in 16 shambolic overs. Only two of their batters reached double figures. Twice as many were dismissed for ducks.

Uganda's captain, Brian Masaba, looked and sounded suitably baleful when he told a press conference after the match: "It's a much higher level than we regularly play at, so we've got to step up our game by a long way."

Not many would have expected Uganda to win. But their utter uncompetitiveness, particularly at the batting crease, would have left their supporters disappointed. The day had dawned as one of the most significant in the country's sporting history.

Uganda have won 11 Olympic medals, four of them gold, in athletics and boxing. But they have never been to a football World Cup, nor to any others save for the netball and sevens rugby versions. To reach the grandest stage in T20I cricket was their greatest achievement in team sport. To play so far below themselves despite getting there - or perhaps because of doing so - would not have sat well.

"It was a special moment for us, hearing our national anthem and seeing our flag at the World Cup," Masaba said. "It's something I will cherish for the rest of my life. As it was our first game there were a lot of nerves. So it was good to get that out of the way."

Even so, a poor performance doesn't indicate a lack of roots in cricket, which has been played in Uganda for around 120 years. British colonists brought the game to the country at the turn of the previous century, and the national men's team first played in 1914. In Nairobi in September 1958, an East Africa XI formed of players from Kenya, what was then called Tanganyika - now Tanzania - and Uganda took on a South Africa side captained by Basil D'Oliveira.

East Africa played in the inaugural World Cup in England in 1975, and in the 1979, 1982 and 1986 editions of what was the ICC Trophy and has become the World Cup Qualifiers. In 1990, 1994 and 1997, players from Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia were combined into an East and Central Africa team who featured in the ICC Trophy. In the 2001, 2005, 2009 and 2014 versions of that tournament, Uganda extracted themselves from all that cricket by committee and played under their own flag.

After the ICC decided that T20 matches between any of their 104 members should have official international status, Uganda contested their first recognised T20I against Botswana in the Africa Region Final tournament in Kampala in May 2019. They then played Namibia, Kenya and Ghana on the next three days. They would have been up against Nigeria the day after that, but the match was washed out. Such is the way international cricket's other half lives.

Now, having played 91 T20Is - 69 of them won and 19 lost - going into the T20 World Cup, they are among the 20 teams in the United States and the Caribbean. They made it that far by finishing second to Namibia at the Africa Qualifier in Windhoek, the Namibian capital, in November. Uganda's five-wicket win in a low-scoring game against Zimbabwe - their first match against a Test-playing country - was crucial.

Still with us? Good. Here's hoping you know more about Uganda than when you started reading this piece. Including how to find it on a map, courtesy paragraph one above. Maybe all you knew beforehand was the name Idi Amin, the British Army cook who became the country's heavyweight boxing champion on his way to seizing power in a military coup in January 1971. He ruled with brute force: an estimated 500,000 people were murdered by his regime. A war with Tanzania forced him into exile in April 1979.

Along with everything else, Amin's rule had an impact on cricket. In August 1972 the notoriously xenophobic dictator gave Uganda's 50,000-strong south Asian community 90 days to leave the country. They left behind their homes, businesses and even their pets. And their influence on cricket, which was strong - particularly among those of Goan heritage, who in 1923 donated the Lowis Cup as the prize for the country's champion club.

The Kampala Goan Institute won it seven times, but in 1923 the Asian Sports Association (ASA) reached the final against the Uganda Police team. The day before the match Deoniz D'Souza cycled more than 80 kilometres from Jinja to Kampala to play for the ASA. D'Souza scored an undefeated 169, the centrepiece of his side's victory.

All of which was in danger of being written out of the Ugandan cricket story as a consequence of Amin's awfulness. But the country also produced figures like George Mawanda, a prince in the royal Bugunda family who was educated in the United Kingdom and what was then called Ceylon, where he encountered the strange colonial game that stopped for lunch and tea. Mawanda founded the African Cricket Club in the 1930s, and in 1959 - in front of a crowd that included the UK's Queen Mother - he took 6/21 and hit the six that won the match for an All-African XI against Uganda Police.

Mawanda remains revered in modern Ugandan cricket, where a trophy named in his honour in the 1990s is still contested. Surnames like Ndaula, Walusimbi and Kakuza also feature prominently in the annals. As do Busogo College and Ntare School. If you know more than most about the country's history, you will know that Busogo gave the world Milton Obote, the first prime minister of an independent Uganda and twice its president. The incumbent president, Yoweri Museveni, went to Ntare - where he played cricket. John Nagenda, one of the two Ugandans in the 1975 East Africa World Cup squad, became one of his country's most notable writers whose rising political presence made him a target for assassination and forced him into exile. Nagenda later served as an adviser to Museveni.

But it would be inaccurate to cast cricket in Uganda as solely a pursuit of the not so great and the rarely good. Along with the elite and their progeny, genuine cricketers also play the game there. They include the oldest man at the T20 World Cup, Frank Nsubuga, who is 43 years young.

Nsubuga made his debut for East and Central Africa against the Netherlands in Kuala Lumpur in March 1997. More than 25 years later, when he was two months away from his 42nd birthday, Nsubuga was at long-on during an ICC World Cup Challenge League B match against Kenya in Kampala.

Collins Obuya aimed a delivery from left-arm seamer Dinesh Nakrani at the midwicket boundary. The ball flew far and high and seemed destined to fall safely. But Nsubuga made many metres and, still running towards the rope as the ball descended from behind his back, flung himself forward full length, held an outrageous catch in his right hand, bounced back up, kept sprinting, and leapt into the arms of his advancing teammates. Only then did his cap fall off. Pandemonium ensued all round the ground, which was only fair.

The moment has survived on YouTube, and is well worth digging up. Not just for the thrill of it, but also because it answers, emphatically, the question: cricket in Uganda? Hell yes.