Shifting marginalities in Ham Mukasa and Sir Apolo Kagwa’s <i>Uganda’s Katikiro in England</i>

Kahyana, Danson Sylvester

doi:10.1080/13696815.2016.1246244

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Ham Mukasa was a chieftain's son who had been raised as a page at the royal court and who at the time of travel was acting as secretary to the Bugandan prime minister and regent, Sir Apolo Kagwa, who represented the child king of Buganda, Daudi Chwa. Both Apolo Kagwa and Ham Mukasa were Anglican converts and both had written extensively in Luganda on Bugandan history and biblical theology (Kahyana 2018;Behrend 1998). They were formally invited to attend the coronation ceremony in the capital of the empire along with many other representatives from the realm.…”

Section: East African Travelogues: Authors Texts and Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…First, the kings of Uganda had a long history of changing alliances with coastal Muslim and Christian European forces. Apolo Kagwa and Ham Mukasa had trained in Christian schools from an early age and represented the final banishment of Muslim politics at the court, though many Muslim converts still lived in the country (Kahyana 2018). Crossing Lake Victoria for the first time, Apolo Kagwa and Ham Mukasa are curious to learn about the way of doing things on the Kenyan shore, though they are appalled and astounded at the dirt and simplicity of the people.…”

Section: Shifting Centres and Peripheries: Religious Reframing Of The Imperial World Ordermentioning

confidence: 99%

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“When the Kalmyks saw me, they thought I was their black devil”: Inverting Centres and Peripheries in Colonial Travelogues Written by East Africans

Wilkens¹

2021

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Travelogues are a rich medium through which to explore observations of everyday culture and rituals, perceptions of the world order, and narrative strategies of othering. In this paper, I turn my attention to travelogues written by East Africans (coastal Swahili Muslims, diasporic Shi’i and Parsi South Asians, and Christian Ugandans) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although the authors come from different religious groupings, cultural-linguistic backgrounds and socio-economic milieus, they travel the same routes within East Africa and, occasionally, also to Europe or even as far as Siberia. I argue that the texts (including journals, retrospectives, and ethnographies) must be read as documents of East African cosmopolitanism. Mobility enables the authors to subvert the imperial world order by re-framing it narratively according to their own religious identity. This gives rise to reflections on humanity, equality and the beauty of knowledge, but not to the exclusion of racial and religious bigotry within and between the non-European communities in East Africa. In my analysis, I tease out narrative patterns, observational styles, and literary tropes present in the texts across religious boundaries. As all the texts were either commissioned by Europeans or edited by their translators before publication they do not document naively ‘authentic’ perspectives of East Africans, but reflect the complexities of communication within strict racial hierarchies. In concluding, I discuss the potential of religion to invert colonial centres and peripheries: European metropoles become places of exotic fascination while the familiar practices of co-religionists can turn the ‘hinterland’ into centres of learning.

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Section: East African Travelogues: Authors Texts and Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Shifting Centres and Peripheries: Religious Reframing Of The Imperial World Ordermentioning

confidence: 99%

“When the Kalmyks saw me, they thought I was their black devil”: Inverting Centres and Peripheries in Colonial Travelogues Written by East Africans

Wilkens¹

2021

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Civilisation under Colonial Conditions: Development, Difference and Violence in Swahili Poems, 1888–1907

Burton

2022

Journal of African Cultural Studies

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The People’s Republic of China as Imagined in Taddeo Bwambale Nyondo’s Around China in 300 Days: A Journey Through 30 Cities and Towns (2017)

Kahyana

2020

Afr. Asian Stud.

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My article contributes to the current debates on travel, with special emphasis on Africans’ travels to China. I theorize travel writing from a South-South perspective, thereby bypassing the European colonial era, which is usually considered the watershed of travel writing. Besides, I interrogate the uncritical praise of China by the Ugandan traveller, Taddeo Bwambale Nyondo, as well as the absence of criticism of the country even when there are moments when this criticism could have come in handy. I argue that Nyondo is a subaltern writer, who visits a highly-industrialized country from which he hopes his country can learn key lessons on development, which makes him similar to Ham Mukasa and Sir Apolo Kagwa who visited England in 1902 and recorded their impressions of the country in Uganda’s first written travelogue, Uganda’s Katikiro in England (1904). By juxtaposing the contemporary writer’s views of China with the earlier travellers’ view of England, I hope to create a dialogic relationship with this earlier travelogue tradition, thereby giving readers the opportunity to see the connections and disjuncture between these two periods (i.e., 1900s and 2000s).

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Shifting marginalities in Ham Mukasa and Sir Apolo Kagwa’s Uganda’s Katikiro in England

Cited by 3 publications

References 11 publications

“When the Kalmyks saw me, they thought I was their black devil”: Inverting Centres and Peripheries in Colonial Travelogues Written by East Africans

“When the Kalmyks saw me, they thought I was their black devil”: Inverting Centres and Peripheries in Colonial Travelogues Written by East Africans

Civilisation under Colonial Conditions: Development, Difference and Violence in Swahili Poems, 1888–1907

The People’s Republic of China as Imagined in Taddeo Bwambale Nyondo’s Around China in 300 Days: A Journey Through 30 Cities and Towns (2017)

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