The Luzira head, a pottery figure discovered in a Ugandan prison compound in 1929, has remained curiously anonymous ever since. New archaeological work on the northern shores of (Lake) Victoria Nyanza has defined a formative period of political centralisation at the end of the first millennium AD. The authors show that this period of early to late Iron Age transition is where this remarkable object and related figurative material belongs. This has implications both for the formation of kingdoms in Uganda and for the story of African art more generally. Keywords: Uganda, Luzira, African art, figurines, kingdoms