Uganda’s first internet cafes came to life in 1996. Now, they barely exist. The history of internet cafes is synonymous with the history of internet access in Uganda. Uganda had less than 5,000 internet users in 1999. That’s around the time when the country’s first internet cafes cropped up, catering mostly to tourists and researchers. For most Ugandans who used the internet during the 2000s and early 2010s, these cafes represented their first experience of going online.