No abstract

East Africa is really what one may call a ‘test case’ for Great Britain. If Indians cannot be treated as equals in a vacant or almost vacant part of the world where they were the first in occupation—a part of the world which is on the equator—it seems that the so-called freedom of the British Empire is a sham and a delusion.The Indian question in East Africa during the early 1920s can hardly be said to have been neglected by subsequent scholars. There is an abundant literature on it and the purpose here is not simply to run over the ground yet again, resurrecting past passions on the British, white settler and Indian sides. Instead, more will be said about the African side, especially the expatriate educated African side, during the controversy in Kenya immediately after World War I, when residential segregation, legislative rights, access to agricultural land, and future immigration by Indians were hotly debated in parliament, press, private letters, and at public meetings. For not only were educated and expatriate Africans in postwar Kenya by no means wholly “dumb,” as one eminent historian of the British Empire has since suggested, but their comments in newspaper articles at the time can be seen in retrospect to have had a seminal importance in articulating both contemporary fears and subsequent “imagined communities,” to employ Benedict Anderson's felicitous phrase—those nationalisms which were to have such controversial significance during the struggle for independence from British colonialism in Uganda as well as Kenya during the middle years of this century.

In 1959 C. C. Wrigley published ‘The Christian revolution in Buganda’. an important essay summarizing a decade of intensive research into Buganda politics during the nineteenth century. There he demonstrated how ‘Ganda society had undergone, immediately before the advent of British imperial power, a genuine revolution, which had brought about drastic changes in ideology and in the structure as well as the personnel of government and that as a result of these [and other] changes it was uniquely fitted to cope with the new situation which confronted it in the last years of the nineteenth century’. This essay seeks to reconstruct an intriguing attempt made by the Bakungu client-chiefs who triumphed in that ‘Christian revolution’ to perpetuate their power in the Buganda kingdom by making further institutional changes during the second decade of the twentieth century. But first it is necessary to discuss the general factors shaping political relationships between these client-chiefs and their European rulers during the first and third decades of this century. In this it is possible to take account not only of several secondary sources published since the appearance of Wrigley's article nearly ten years ago, but also of certain primary materials which have recently come to light.

This article surveys a number of recent attempts to explain Ganda receptivity to change during the last hundred years, and suggests that the supposed Ganda ‘urge to excel’ was as much a result of modernization as its principal cause. The article also stresses that modernization in Buganda has proved an extremely patchy business, but that before any serious attempt can be made to relate the patches to more general theories it is necessary to tackle a variety of prior problems. Among those requiring especial attention in Buganda are political ideologies articulated by particular interest groups, the economic fortunes and misfortunes of political agitators, and certain unintended consequences of particular shifts in British colonial policy.

Semei Kakungulu enjoyed at least nine lives in the area of the Uganda Protectorate immediately before, during, and after the imposition of British protectorate rule there at the close of last century, in his successive roles as elephant hunter, guerrilla leader, Ganda chief, border warlord, British ally in military campaigns, “native collector,” colonial client-king, President of the Busoga Lukiko, and leader of the anti-medicine Bamalaki and Bayudaya separatist sects. The purpose of these notes, however, is not to provide more details about these successive phases in Kakungulu's extraordinary career, but rather to comment briefly on the nine major surviving vernacular accounts of his very full life.John Rowe remarks that “it was natural that biographies, particularly of men of heroic proportions, should also [have been] mobilized in the struggle against moral decline” after the First World War by Ganda vernacular authors, along with works of moral admonition and military memoir once uncritical admiration for British Christianity gave way to a more guarded and wary respect for things British with the increased penetration of Buganda by both British rule and mercantile capitalism. Rowe may also be right in saying that the many biographies of Kakungulu in Luganda “may have reflected the particular attraction of a non-conforming heroic figure who turned his back on the ‘establishment,’ carved a kingdom for himself in the east and virtually thumbed his nose at Apolo Kagwa and the British.” Certainly, this is a major attraction as regards my biographical interest in the man! But, as I hope the following notes on his nine principal vernacular lives may indicate, there are also other explanations.