This is still a thorny question. Jean-Pierre Chretien, in his The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History (2003) points to its remarkable power and persistence as a vehicle for irredentist claims by modern Banyoro. The traditions' key "resided in the desire to demonstrate continuity between the Bacwezi heroes of the ancient 'kingdom of Kitara' and the new Babito dynasty" of King Rukidi (or Winyi) in the sixteenth century (102). Europeans in the nineteenth century saw these Bacwezi and Kitara as signs of ancient 'Caucasoid' influence on the region, which was handy in the service of discounting the possibility of autochthonous political sophistication among people in Eastern and Central Africa. In the colonial space, some of the new African elite embraced these ideas, especially in connection with the sub-imperialism of indirect rule. As you can imagine, this makes separating fact from fiction a huge huge mess.

As Chretien puts it, the archaeology suggests that six centuries ago Kitara was more a vague system of political and economic organization than anything unified, with the group of modern kingdoms really emerging in a space of ecological or demographic crisis that was transformative. Instead of a kingdom as we might think of it, he calls the Cwezi entity of the era before Bunyoro as "a quasi-initiatory model" (108) that recognizes shared culture and mythology but not a clear singular hierarchy. Whether a mythical ruler or throne (think Oduduwa at Ile-Ife for Yoruba) existed and became this nebulous legend out of proportion to the actual condition in hindsight, or whether Kitara was as large as its more recent advocates (who tellingly speak of 'Bunyoro-Kitara') claim, is not clear.

At the same time, Richard Reid in his more recent (2017) History of Uganda suggests that Kitara was a real, but transient, agglomeration of small states in western Uganda that came under the rule of a Chwezi (Cwezi) dynasty that in turn employed a connection to older divine kings (Batembuzi) to proclaim their own status as semi-divine. But the largest sweep claimed, from the Nile down through the Rift Valley entire, is almost certainly a mythical construction (107), even though there is a clear connection between material cultures and thus trade and migration among that whole region. The Chwezi dynasty is hard to pin down on this point, which is one of the reasons that the nature of Kitara as a state and its structure remain really very foggy. There is material evidence, and there are traditions, but they aren't as conclusive as anyone would like--and like old ideas of 'Greater Rwanda' that are employed by nationalists in that country today, Kitara has major political uses for those in Uganda who claim connection and, perhaps, seek to counterbalance the older preference given to Buganda.

[ed: italics]