Africa | Uganda
In 2025, Magic Lands Alliance expanded its work into Africa, extending its established model of truth-led storytelling, research, and cultural infrastructure developed in collaboration with First Nations communities in Australia.
In Uganda, we are developing a television series and a feature film with local partners and collaborators. These projects focus on historically overlooked stories from pre-colonial and early colonial periods — grounded in land, water, culture, and lived experience — and told through African perspectives.
Further details will be released in 2026 as these projects progress.
Deep Time: Africa & the Nile
Africa is the cradle of humanity, with archaeological and genetic evidence tracing modern humans back more than 200,000 years. The Nile River — the world’s longest river — has sustained ecosystems, belief systems, and civilisations for millennia. In East Africa, Uganda holds a unique position as the source of the White Nile, flowing from Lake Victoria through landscapes shaped by deep geological and human time.
Long before colonial borders, complex societies flourished across the region. The Buganda Kingdom, alongside Bunyoro, Ankole, and Busoga, developed sophisticated systems of governance, land stewardship, oral law, agriculture, music, and spiritual cosmology. For these cultures, the Nile was not simply a river, but a living force — a connector of ancestors, seasons, and worlds.
Colonial Histories Rarely Told
European contact in the nineteenth century — driven by missionaries, explorers, and imperial ambition — profoundly disrupted these societies. Historical figures such as Kabaka Mwanga II have often been reduced to simplified or distorted portrayals in Western narratives, obscuring the complexity of resistance, internal politics, and cultural survival.
Many stories remain largely absent from global consciousness: the experiences of women, wives, spiritual leaders, musicians, healers, and families navigating invasion, religious imposition, and cultural fracture. The expansion of the British Empire imposed foreign legal systems, borders, and belief structures that silenced Indigenous knowledge while reshaping land and identity. These oral histories speak of resilience as much as disruption — yet have rarely been explored through cinema or formal education.
Magic Lands Alliance in Uganda & Africa
Magic Lands Alliance offers a long-term, community-centred approach to restoring balance to these narratives. Working alongside local elders, historians, artists, and educators, MLA aims to:
Create truth-led film and television stories grounded in African worldviews
Preserve and revitalise oral histories, languages, music, and cosmology
Build permanent educational and cultural infrastructure through film production
Generate local employment, training, and creative pathways
Connect African deep-time histories to global audiences through education, festivals, and cultural exchange
From the source of the Nile to the kingdoms that shaped the region, Uganda and Africa hold stories of global significance — not as footnotes to empire, but as central chapters of human history. Magic Lands Alliance exists to help ensure these stories are told with integrity, depth, and lasting benefit for the communities they come from.