UgandaArticle Free Pass
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This discussion focuses on the history of Uganda since the 19th century. For a detailed treatment of Uganda’s early history and of the country in its regional context, see Eastern Africa, history of.
The early history of Uganda, like much of sub-Saharan Africa, is a saga of movements of small groups of cultivators and herders over centuries. Cultures and languages changed continuously as peoples slowly migrated to other regions and intermingled. By the mid-19th century, when the first non-African visitors entered the region later to become the Uganda Protectorate, there were a number of distinct languages and cultures within the territory. The northern areas were occupied generally by peoples speaking Nilotic and Sudanic languages, while the central, western, and southern portions of the territory were predominantly occupied by Bantu-speaking peoples.
Bunyoro and Buganda
The organization of the peoples who came to inhabit the area north of the Nile River was mainly based on their clan structures. In this respect the northerners differed markedly from the peoples to the southwest of the Nile. There, peoples were organized into states—or “kingdoms,” as they were labeled by the earliest European visitors. The dominant state was Bunyoro-Kitara, which originated at the end of the 15th century and, under able rulers, extended its influence eastward and southward over a considerable area. To the south there were a number of lesser states, each with a chief who, like the ruler of Bunyoro-Kitara, combined priestly functions with those of a secular leader. To the southeast of Bunyoro-Kitara, the smaller state of Buganda grew as an offshoot of its larger neighbour. By the end of the 18th century, however, the boundaries of Bunyoro-Kitara had been stretched so far that the authority of the ruler began to weaken, and a succession of pacific chiefs accelerated this decline. Simultaneously the smaller, more compact state of Buganda enjoyed a succession of able and aggressive kabakas (rulers), who began to expand at the expense of Bunyoro-Kitara.
It was during the period of Buganda’s rise that the first Swahili-speaking traders from the east coast of Africa reached the country in the 1840s. Their object was to trade in ivory and slaves. Kabaka Mutesa I, who took office about 1856, admitted the first European explorer, the Briton John Hanning Speke, who crossed into the kabaka’s territory in 1862.
Henry Morton Stanley, the British-American explorer who reached Buganda in 1875, met Mutesa I. Although Buganda had not been attacked, Achoiland, to the north, had been ravaged by slavers from Egypt and the Sudan since the early 1860s, and, on the death of Kamrasi, the ruler of Bunyoro, his successor, Kabarega, had defeated his rivals only with the aid of the slavers’ guns. Moreover, an emissary from the Egyptian government, Linant de Bellefonds, had reached Mutesa’s palace before Stanley, so the kabaka was anxious to obtain allies. He readily agreed to Stanley’s proposal to invite Christian missionaries to Uganda, but he was disappointed, after the first agents of the Church Missionary Society arrived in 1877, to find that they had no interest in military matters. In 1879 representatives of the Roman Catholic White Fathers Mission also reached Buganda. Although Mutesa I attempted to limit their movements, their influence rapidly spread through their contact with the chiefs whom the kabaka kept around him, and inevitably the missionaries became drawn into the politics of the country. Mutesa I was not concerned about these new influences, however, and, when Egyptian expansion was checked by the Mahdist rising in the Sudan, he was able to deal brusquely with the handful of missionaries in his country. His successor, Mwanga, who became kabaka in 1884, was less successful: he was deposed in 1888 while attempting to drive the missionaries and their supporters from the country.
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