Uganda

Article Outline

Introduction; Land and Resources; People and Society; Arts; Economy; Government; History

VII

History

The earliest inhabitants of Uganda were hunters and gatherers who lived more than 50,000 years ago and whose stone axes have been found near the villages of Mweya and Kagera in the southwest and at Paraa in the northwest. Their descendants retreated to the mountains between 2,500 and 3,000 years ago when Bantu-speaking farmers moved into forested areas and cleared the land for crops. Iron smelting by Bantu-speaking cultures has been dated from 2,500 years ago, and Bantu pottery from 1,500 years ago. Bantu-speakers near the shores of Lake Victoria developed the banana as a staple food about 1,000 years ago. Between 600 and 700 years ago the Chwezi, a Bantu subgroup, established settlements at Bigo in western Uganda. The Chwezi were depicted in legends as supernatural, but probably were the ancestors of the region’s present-day Hima and Tutsi herders.

Precolonial Kingdoms

Between the 14th and the 16th centuries ad Nilotic-speaking herders migrated south from Sudan, displaced the Chwezi, and established dominance over preexisting farming peoples. The Nilotic speakers formed several kingdoms, notably Bunyoro, south of Lake Albert, and Ankole, west of Lake Victoria.

The kingdom of Buganda, located between Bunyoro and Lake Victoria, also developed about 500 years ago. Buganda, probably formed by a defeated claimant to the Bunyoro throne, steadily expanded over the next four centuries, largely at the expense of Bunyoro. The earliest confirmed date in Ugandan history is 1680 when a solar eclipse was recorded during the reign of Jjuuko, an early kabaka (king) of Buganda. As opposed to the omukama (king) of Bunyoro, who was chosen exclusively from the royal clan and whose chiefs had some independent authority, the kabaka of Buganda could be chosen from any clan. By the 19th century the kabaka commanded total authority over his kingdom, and all power and wealth flowed from him. He did not keep a standing army, but adult males were conscripted for war as needed.

By the 19th century the Ankole kingdom had become a caste system in which Hima herders, ruled by a king selected from the royal clan, dominated Iru farmers. Toro, Uganda’s fourth major kingdom, emerged about 1830 when a disgruntled son of the Bunyoro omukama declared the region north of Lake Victoria that he ruled independent.

European Influence

Curiosity about the source of the Nile led to European expeditions into the region. In 1862 British explorer John Hanning Speke was welcomed to the court of Kabaka Mutesa I of Buganda. Speke continued his journey and found the point where the Nile flowed out of Lake Victoria, correctly concluding that the lake was the principal source of the Nile. British explorer Samuel White Baker and his wife, following the Nile upstream, entered Uganda from the north and in 1864 reached and named Lake Albert. On Baker’s second trip, in 1872, Kabarega, the Bunyoro omukama, attacked Baker out of fear that his subjects would become vulnerable to slave raids from Sudan, and forced Baker’s withdrawal. Anglo-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley visited the court of Buganda in 1875 while en route from Zanzibar through the Congo rain forest to the Atlantic coast.

Missionaries

Due to Stanley’s report that the Ganda people of Buganda would welcome Christianity, British Protestant and French Catholic missionaries visited Buganda in the late 1870s. Kabaka Mutesa I was more interested in foreign trade, arms, and military support than he was in foreign religions, but allowed missionaries into his court for diplomatic reasons. The presence of Christian missionaries in Mutesa’s kingdom helped deflect the potential threat of Egyptian annexation of Buganda by Charles George Gordon, the agent in southern Sudan of the Egyptian ruler.

Protestant, Catholic, and Islamic competition for converts, particularly among the pages at the royal court, many of whom later became chiefs, produced three religious factions. Fearing the consequences of disunity, Mutesa expelled missionaries from his court, but his son Mwanga, who succeeded Mutesa in 1884, invited them back. However, Mwanga reversed his decision in 1886 and ordered 22 pages who would not renounce their faith to be burnt to death. The Catholic victims came to be known as the Uganda Martyrs, and were canonized (declared saints) by the pope in 1964. The Islamic, Catholic, and Protestant factions combined in 1888 to overthrow Mwanga, but then warred against each other until Mwanga was restored to the throne in 1889. This period of religious violence firmly established religion as an important basis of politics.

Rise of British Control

The unsettled situation in Buganda was further complicated by competition between Britain and Germany during the Scramble for Africa, in which European nations rushed to claim African territory near the end of the 19th century. Under the Treaty of Helgoland in 1890, Germany ceded its interests in Uganda to Britain, whose government had given responsibility for governing and exploiting the area to the Imperial British East Africa Company. The company’s representative, Captain Frederick Lugard, negotiated a treaty with Mwanga and Catholic and Protestant chiefs in 1891, but the two religious factions remained hostile. To strengthen the company’s position, Lugard recruited a force of Sudanese troops in western Uganda, signing treaties with the kings of Ankole and Toro along the way and thus bringing these areas into the company’s jurisdiction. With his new soldiers—and two machine guns—Lugard and his Protestant allies from Buganda provoked and won a battle against the Catholics in 1892, thus establishing Protestant political supremacy in Buganda and later in Uganda as a whole. Mwanga remained kabaka, but had to sign a treaty accepting British “protection” in 1893.

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History

Precolonial Kingdoms

European Influence

Missionaries

Rise of British Control