We Had Our Own Games All Along: Uganda, Invictus, and the African Military Movement the World Forgot
Uganda has pulled out of the Invictus Games, and Africa has begun to ask whether others should follow. This platform stays out of another Kingdom’s family affairs. But two things are worth putting on the record: Invictus was never founded by one man alone — the history should be told straight — and Africa has had its own continental military-sports movement since 1994, two decades before Invictus existed. Its name is OSMA. It is time our people knew it.
Let me say at the outset what this piece is and is not. I come from a civilisation of many kings — of Mambos and Ishes and Amakhosi — and our tradition holds a certain dignity: one Kingdom does not meddle in the internal affairs of another. So I will not wade into the family business of the British royal house, nor tell Uganda or Nigeria what their armies should do. That is theirs to decide. But there are two matters of record and knowledge here that a Pan-African research platform is duty-bound to set straight — because history, once bent, tends to stay bent unless someone gently straightens it.
Here is the occasion. On 9 September 2026, Uganda’s Chief of Defence Forces, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, announced on X that Uganda was withdrawing from the Invictus Games — the international sporting movement for wounded, injured and sick service personnel — saying the country did not wish to appear opposed to King Charles III, whom it “deeply reveres,” and would not join “anything that does not have His Majesty’s approval.” It was a striking reversal: Uganda had only joined in July 2026, as the 26th nation and the first from East Africa. The withdrawal, tangled up in the British royal family’s own well-publicised tensions, has set African commentators asking a bigger question — should African nations be tying the rehabilitation of their wounded soldiers to a foreign, royal-centred platform at all? That is a legitimate conversation. And it opens a door to something far more useful than palace gossip.
Invictus Was Never Founded by One Man Alone
Before we turn to Africa, let us correct a small but telling distortion — not to diminish anyone, but because accuracy is its own form of respect. The popular story, endlessly repeated, is that Prince Harry “founded” the Invictus Games, full stop. The truth is richer and more honest: the Invictus Games of 2013–14 were a collective operational effort — many founders, funders, state partners and organisers. Harry was the initiator and patron, genuinely inspired after visiting the 2013 US Warrior Games, and he deserves real credit for that spark. But a spark is not the whole fire.
Whose Approval Should a Sovereign Army Need?
Now to the substance, handled with care. Uganda’s stated reason for withdrawing — not wishing to act “without His Majesty’s approval” — is, whatever one thinks of the palace politics behind it, a revealing sentence. Because it raises, quite apart from any royal quarrel, a genuine question of sovereignty that African nations are entitled to sit with: why should the rehabilitation of an African country’s own wounded soldiers be routed through, and psychologically tethered to, a foreign monarchy’s blessing at all?
Meet OSMA — Africa’s Own Military-Sports Movement, Since 1994
Here is the fact that should reframe this entire conversation, and that this platform most wants every African to carry away: Africa did not need to wait for a prince to invent wounded-warrior sport. We built our own continental military-sports movement in 1994 — twenty years before Invictus existed. It is called the Organisation of Military Sports in Africa. And the tragedy is not that it is small or weak. The tragedy is that so few of our own people have ever heard its name.
OSMA is the African branch of the International Military Sports Council (CISM), governed by an African General Assembly and five Regional Liaison Offices — North, West, Central, East and Southern Africa — with command structures that stay firmly on the continent. Its motto is beautiful in its simplicity: “Friendship Through Sports.” Its purpose is to build peace, cooperation and integration between the armed forces of African states through athletic competition. It is not a charity extended to Africa by outsiders. It is African soldiers, African ministries of defence, African governance — ours, root and branch.
Africa Already Heals Its Warriors Through Sport
Here is the part that most directly answers the Invictus question. People assume Africa needs a foreign platform to give its wounded soldiers the dignity of adaptive sport. We do not. The African Military Games already carry, alongside the able-bodied disciplines, a full range of adaptive events for wounded and injured personnel — and it does so in a way that is arguably wiser than the Western model.
Green: able-bodied disciplines. Gold: adaptive disciplines for wounded and injured personnel — integrated into the same Games.
Notice how OSMA handles the wounded warrior. Rather than separating injured veterans into a distinct, third-party spectacle, it integrates adaptive rehabilitation directly alongside active-duty military championships. Wounded personnel train and compete within the defence infrastructure, as a standard part of military medical discipline — not as objects of a special event, but as soldiers still, healing among their own. There is a deep dignity in that: the wounded are not set apart to be admired; they are kept within the ranks, within the family. Where one model makes a spectacle of recovery, ours folds recovery into belonging. That is not a lesser way. In many respects it is a wiser one.
OSMA Does Not Stand Alone
And OSMA is not an isolated curiosity. It is one thread in a broad, deliberate weaving of sovereign African institutions — the continent quietly building its own versions of the things it was once told only outsiders could provide.
Add to this the sovereign turn in veteran care itself — Kenya’s Military Veterans Act of 2022 and its state-funded Directorate; Nigeria’s Armed Forces Resettlement Centre; South Africa’s Department of Military Veterans with its land, housing and business schemes — and a pattern emerges that is unmistakable. Across the continent, African nations are treating the care of their soldiers, the running of their sport, the financing of their futures, as sovereign duties rather than favours to be received. OSMA is simply the military-sports expression of that same great turning. It belongs to a family of African firsts that the world — and too often we ourselves — have been slow to celebrate.
Know Your Own Before You Mourn Another’s Door
I began by saying I keep out of other Kingdoms’ affairs, and I hold to that. Whether Uganda stays or goes, whether Nigeria follows, whether the British royal house resolves its sorrows — none of that is mine to counsel, and I offer no opinion on the palace at all. If a wounded soldier from any African nation finds healing and brotherhood at Invictus, I wish them nothing but that healing. Sovereignty is not spite, and pride is not the refusal of a friend’s hand.
But I will say this, as a daughter of a continent of many kings who has watched, too many times, our own achievements go unnamed while others’ are trumpeted. The saddest thing in this whole affair is not that Uganda withdrew. It is that when Africa began asking “do we have our own?”, so few of us knew that the answer is yes — and has been yes since 1994. We have OSMA. We have the African Military Games, held in Nairobi before many of today’s soldiers were born, and in Abuja two years ago with over 1,600 athletes and our own wounded competing among them. We have African defence ministries funding it, an African assembly governing it, a headquarters on African soil in Yaoundé. It is ours. It was always ours. And most of us were never told.
So my charge is not “leave Invictus.” My charge is “know OSMA.” Fund it. Celebrate it. Put the African Military Games on our screens and in our newspapers the way we broadcast every foreign tournament. Teach our children that the healing of the wounded warrior through sport is not a gift the continent received from a palace, but a thing our own soldiers built for themselves a generation ago. A people who do not know their own institutions will always overvalue someone else’s. The cure for patronage is not resentment — it is knowledge of what you already possess. Before we mourn a door closing in London, let us walk through the one standing wide open in Yaoundé, that we built with our own hands. Simudzai zvedu; ngatizive zvedu — raise up what is ours; let us know what is ours. Friendship through sports — and sovereignty through knowing.
To the wounded soldiers of Africa — wherever you find your healing, may you find it fully. And to a continent learning, once more, to name its own achievements: the games were ours before we knew to look.
OSMA. The African Military Games. Founded in Conakry, headquartered in Yaoundé, carried by fifty-four nations. Not a gift we were given. A thing we built. Let us finally learn its name.
Simudzai zvedu; ngatizive zvedu. Ushamwari kuburikidza nemitambo — friendship through sports; sovereignty through knowing.
Raise up what is ours; let us know what is ours. We did not need to be given a games. We made one.
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