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Wake up, Kaaro Karungi.
The badge of Ankole was never coffee. It was matooke and cattle—food and herds, milk and banana groves—the everyday abundance that fed homes, sealed marriages, and defined dignity. To forget this is not modernization; it is historical amnesia with costly consequences.
For generations, Ankole’s economy and identity rested on a deliberate balance.
The pastoral Bahima safeguarded cattle—inyambo with sweeping horns that spoke of wealth, prestige, and ritual meaning.
The cultivator Bairu tended banana plantations and grains—matooke, millet, sorghum—ensuring food security. Between them flowed exchange: milk for bananas, ghee for grain, hides for tools. This was not accidental. It was an intelligent social contract that made Kaaro Karungi—“the good land”—good in practice.
At weddings and giveaways, parents blessed their children not with export figures but with sustenance: “Baana bange, nimukatungye ente n’orutookye.” Wealth meant food first.
A household with matooke and cattle was a household with certainty.
No elder ever prayed for a plantation of coffee to feed grandchildren.
Coffee did exist in Ankole—no one denies it. But it was managed, modest, and complementary, never allowed to cannibalize food systems or grazing lands. Today, that restraint is disappearing. Banana plantations are felled. Pastures shrink. Forests replace food. Coffee expands—cheered by policy, applauded by export statistics—while the stomach economy is ignored.
This is not progress; it is gambling with survival.
The danger is not theoretical. Busoga’s painful lesson—where sugarcane crowded out food crops—stands as a warning. When food becomes secondary, poverty deepens even as cash crops spread.
A family without food is poor, regardless of what grows for export.
Coffee prices are not controlled by farmers. They swing with global markets, buyers’ power, and policy frameworks. The recently passed coffee law intensifies fears of buyer monopoly, where farmers shoulder risk while prices are compressed downstream.
What happens when prices fall?
When diseases strike? When climate shocks arrive?
Ask the hard questions Ankole must face:
What feeds households if coffee wilt wipes out plantations?
What cushions families when prices collapse?
What replaces the daily certainty of matooke when land is locked into a single cash crop?
Food crops cushion shocks.
Cattle diversify value—milk today, bride wealth tomorrow, status always. Coffee does none of this reliably.
Farmers did not abandon matooke out of laziness. They were pushed. Government failed to secure local and international markets for bananas, failed to stabilize prices, and failed to invest in processing, storage, and transport. When matooke prices fell and losses rose, farmers grew demoralized.
Coffee appeared as a lifeline.
But a lifeline tied to volatile markets can become a noose.
Cheering export numbers while ignoring food systems is shortsighted governance. Development begins with what people eat, not what ships out.
Historically, Ankole prospered by balancing cattle, bananas, and limited cash cropping. This balance:
Protected food security.
Preserved cultural identity.
Spread risk across systems.
Sustained soils and social relations.
Replacing this with monoculture—coffee and forests over food and herds—erodes resilience. It also erases identity. When inyambo disappear and matooke becomes scarce, Kaaro Karungi becomes a slogan without substance.
This is a warning, not nostalgia. Ankole does not need to reject coffee; it needs to restore priorities.
Food first: Protect matooke plantations and grazing lands.
Cattle as capital: Preserve herds as living banks and cultural anchors.
Coffee with limits: Grow it, yes—but not at the expense of food and identity.
Markets that work: Demand policy that stabilizes matooke prices, invests in value addition, and opens reliable markets.
Diversify risk: No household should depend on a single volatile crop.
Kaaro Karungi was built on abundance at home, not promises abroad. The pride of Ankole is not measured in export tonnage but in homes that eat, herds that endure, and land that remembers who it is.
If Ankole forgets this, the loss will not be counted in shillings alone—but in hunger, dependency, and a broken inheritance.
About the Writer
Sande Evan Ndahura is a Ugandan writer and public affairs commentator known for historically grounded, time-based political and socio-economic analysis.
Through essays and poems that interrogate power, identity, and development, he consistently challenges policy orthodoxy while centering African cultural wisdom and lived realities.
His work advocates food security, cultural continuity, and people-first governance as foundations for sustainable progress.