Shree Sanatan Dharma Mandal Temple, Nakasero

The Shree Sanatan Dharma Mandal temple in Kampala’s Nakasero district traces its community back to some of Uganda’s earliest South Asian settlers, many of whom originally arrived to work on the Uganda Railway under British colonial administration around the turn of the twentieth century before establishing permanent lives, businesses, and religious institutions in and around the capital. Its foundation stone is recorded as having been laid in 1954, with construction completed a decade later in 1964, making it a mid-century landmark of Kampala’s Indian-origin Hindu community that predates the upheavals to come.

The temple is notable architecturally for reportedly having been built entirely without iron reinforcement bars or structural steel, from its foundation up through a dome standing more than four storeys high, and is described in at least one source as the first Shikhara-style (north Indian spired) temple constructed outside India, though this superlative claim has not been independently corroborated here. Like much of Uganda’s Indian community, the temple’s congregation would have been devastated by Idi Amin’s 1972 expulsion order, which forced the vast majority of Ugandan Asians to leave the country; the temple’s survival through that period and into the community’s gradual return from the 1980s onward stands as a marker of continuity for Hindu religious life in Kampala.