Mutesa was crowned Kabaka on his 18th birthday in 1942, three years after the death of his father Daudi Cwa II of Buganda during British colonial rule in Uganda.

He was deposed and exiled by British colonial governor Andrew Cohen, but was allowed to return to the country two years later in the wake of a popular backlash known as the Kabaka Crisis under the terms of the 1955 Buganda Agreement.

Mutesa was born at the house of Albert Ruskin Cook in Makindye, Kampala, on 19 November 1924, the fifth son of the Kabaka Daudi Cwa II, who reigned between 1897 and 1939.

Africans feared that this would lead to their coming under the control of Kenya's white settler community, as had happened in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

[8] Mutesa's forced departure, carried out by Wing Commander Clive Beadon, made him a martyr in the eyes of the Baganda, whose latent separatism set off a storm of protest.

After two years of unrelenting Ganda hostility and obstruction, Cohen was forced to reinstate "Kabaka Freddie", who returned to Kampala on 17 October 1955 under a negotiated settlement which made him a constitutional monarch and gave the Baganda the right to elect representatives to the kingdom's parliament, the Lukiiko.

The federal Prime Minister was Obote, the leader of the Uganda People's Congress (UPC), which entered a governing coalition with the dominant Buganda regional party, Kabaka Yekka.

He had the other four leading members of his party arrested and detained, and then suspended the federal constitution and declared himself President of Uganda in February 1966, deposing Mutesa.

[13] Identified by the Metropolitan Police as suicide, the death has been viewed as assassination by those who claim Mutesa may have been force-fed vodka by agents of the Obote regime.

Mutesa was interviewed in his flat only a few hours before his death by the British journalist John Simpson, who found that he was sober and in good spirits.

[citation needed] After Mutesa's body had been embalmed by Desmond Henley,[14] it was provisionally interred in a vault in the catacombs of St Mary's Roman Catholic Church in Kensal Green Cemetery, West London on Wednesday 3 December 1969.

It was attended by Democratic Party (DP) leader, Ben Kiwanuka, Bishop Adrian Kivumbi Ddungu of Masaka Diocese and Monsignor Anatoli Kamya who represented Kampala Archdiocese.