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 people slowly migrated to other regions and intermingled. By the mid-19th century, when the first non-African visitors entered the region that later became the Uganda Protectorate, there were several 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 people 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 several 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 neighbor. 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 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.
The Uganda Protectorate
Uganda was a colonial creation that was formed by joining the kingdoms of Buganda and Bunyoro. In 1894, Uganda became a protectorate of the British Empire and was thereby administrated by the British. This collection provides a unique opportunity to explore this administration in Uganda in more detail. The collection compromises of over 50,000 pages of progress reports written by various government departments in Uganda.
This collection, drawn from the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office records, contains a wealth of information on how Uganda was run by the British. The documents within the collection are dated between 1903 and 1961, just before Uganda’s independence from Britain in 1962. While there are some reports from the early 1900s the majority of the collection includes reports from the 1920s onwards. The documents are conveniently divided between 9 volumes, each compromising of reports from different government departments at the time. The volumes include Administration 1909-1961, Finance 1929-1962, Judicial and Police 1912-1960, Natural Resources 1903-1961, Social Services 1908-1961, Transport and Public Works 1912-1961, Trade and Commerce 1910-1961, Development Corporation and Boards 1948-1961 and Miscellaneous Reports 1923-1961. The subject matter varies between each report. Topics such as education, medicine, housing, accounts, forestry, agriculture and railways in Uganda are touched on within the reports.
The collection offers a unique perspective on the British administration in Uganda via official government reports. British colonial rule in Africa has received extensive scholarly attention. The documents within this collection would be particularly beneficial to researchers and students who are not only interested in the economic history of an East African country, but also the social history. The documents would be useful for researchers who are studying how Uganda changed after independence in 1962. In particular, a comprehensive look at the yearly reports reveals how the structure of the colonial government changed over time. As the content pages at the front of each report list the departments that existed at that time.
Uganda Under Colonial Rule works hand in hand with another British Online Archives collection in the Governing Africa series titled ‘Colonial Africa in Official Statistics, 1821-1953’. That collection uses statistics to tell the history of different African countries, like Uganda, through its accounts, population data, and lists of its officers. The government reports, within this collection, explain why those statistics are at the levels recorded, which in turn helps to build a full picture of Uganda under colonial rule.
Growth of a peasant economy
Early in the 20th century Sir James Hayes Sadler, who succeeded Johnston as commissioner, concluded that the country was unlikely to prove attractive to European settlers. Sadler’s successor, Sir Hesketh Bell, announced that he wished to develop Uganda as an African state. In this, he was opposed by a number of his more senior officials and in particular by the chief justice, William Morris Carter. Carter was chairman of a land commission whose activities continued until after World War I. Again and again, the commission urged that provision be made for European planters, but their efforts were unsuccessful. Bell himself had laid the foundations for a peasant economy by encouraging the Africans to cultivate cotton, which had been introduced into the protectorate as a cash crop in 1904. It was mainly because of the wealth derived from cotton that Uganda became independent of a grant-in-aid from the British Treasury in 1914.
In 1914, at the outset of World War I, there were a few skirmishes between the British and Germans on the southwestern frontier, but Uganda was never in danger of invasion. The war, however, did retard the country’s development. Soon after the war, it was decided that the protectorate authorities should concentrate, as Bell had suggested, on expanding African agriculture, and Africans were encouraged to grow coffee in addition to cotton. The British government’s decision to forbid the alienation of land in freehold, and the economic depression of the early 1920s, dealt a further blow to the hopes of European planters. The part to be played by Europeans, as well as Asians, was now mainly on the commercial and processing side of the protectorate’s agricultural industry.
As the output of primary produce increased, it became necessary to extend and improve communications. Just before World War I a railway had been built running northward from Jinja, on Lake Victoria, to Namasagali, the intent being to open up the Eastern Province. In the 1920s a railway from Mombasa, on the Kenyan coast, was extended to Soroti, and in 1931 a rail link was also completed between Kampala, the industrial capital of Uganda, and the coast.
The depression of the early 1930s interrupted Uganda’s economic progress, but the protectorate’s recovery was more rapid than that of its neighbours, so that the later years of the decade were a period of steady expansion.
Political and administrative development
In 1921 a Legislative Council was instituted, but its membership was so small (four official and two nonofficial members) that it made little impact on the protectorate. The Indian community, which played an important part in the commercial life of the region, resented the fact that it was not to have equal representation with Europeans on the unofficial side of the council and so refused to participate until 1926. There was no evidence of a desire on the part of the Africans to sit in the council, since the most politically advanced group in the community, the Ganda, regarded its own lukiko as the most important council in the country.
In light of the Africans’ indifference toward the protectorate legislature, it is not surprising that they opposed the suggestion, made in the later 1920s, that there should be some form of closer union between the East African territories. An interest in “tribal” traditions was one source of this opposition, but there was also fear, among Africans as well as Asians, that they would be dominated by Kenya’s European settlers.
An important development was the beginning of government interest in education. The protectorate administration set up an education department in 1925, and, while aid was given to the missionary societies, which had already opened a number of good schools in Buganda, the government also established schools. This led to the gradual replacement of older chiefs (men of strong personality who usually lacked a Western-style education) by younger, Western-educated men who were more capable of carrying out government policy and more amenable to British control. In Buganda, too, the government began to interfere more actively in the kingdom’s affairs in order to increase efficiency. The main result was that the people showed less respect to non-Bugandan chiefs, which caused some of the chiefs to resent the curtailment of their powers.
World War II and its aftermath
During World War II the protectorate faced the task of becoming as self-sufficient as it could. More important for Uganda was the attempt by the governor, Sir Charles Dundas, to reverse his predecessors’ policy and to give more freedom to the factions striving for power in Buganda. The old policy was revived, however, after an outbreak of rioting in 1945. Also in that year the first Africans were nominated to the Legislative Council, and in succeeding years African representation steadily increased. An important step was taken in 1954 when the African council membership increased to 14 out of a total of 28 nonofficial members; the 14 were selected from districts thought to be more natural units of representation than the provinces that had previously existed. In 1955 a ministerial system was introduced, with 5 nonofficial African ministers out of a total of 11. The success of the council was undermined, however, by the erratic participation of Buganda, which viewed a central legislature as a threat to its autonomy. This feeling reinforced the resentment Bugandans harboured after Mutesa II had been deported in 1953 for refusing to cooperate with the protectorate government. He returned two years later as a constitutional ruler, but the rapprochement between Buganda and the protectorate government was lukewarm.\
In the immediate postwar years the protectorate administration placed greater emphasis on economic and social development than on political advance. From 1952 the government rapidly expanded secondary education, while legislation was enacted and a loan fund established to encourage Africans to participate in trade. A relatively ambitious development program was greatly assisted by the high prices realized for cotton and coffee; coffee overtook cotton as Uganda’s most valuable export in 1957. In 1954 a large hydroelectric project was inaugurated at Owen Falls on the Nile near Jinja, and in 1962 a five-year development plan was announced.
The Republic of Uganda
In the late 1950s, as a few political parties emerged, the African population concentrated its attention on achieving self-government, with focus on the Legislative Council. The kingdom of Buganda intermittently pressed for independence from Uganda, which raised the question of the protectorate’s future status. Discussions in London in 1961 led to full internal self-government in March 1962. Benedicto Kiwanuka, a Roman Catholic Ganda who was formerly chief minister, became the first prime minister, but in the elections in April 1962 he was displaced by Milton Obote, a Lango (Langi) who headed the Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC) party. At further discussions in London in June 1962, it was agreed that Buganda should receive a wide degree of autonomy within a federal relationship. Faced with the emergence of Obote’s UPC, which claimed support throughout the country apart from Buganda, and of the Democratic Party (DP), which was based in Buganda and led by Kiwanuka, conservative Ganda leaders set up their own rival organization, Kabaka Yekka (KY), “King Alone.”
Obote’s first presidency
Uganda became independent on October 9, 1962, although it was divided politically on a geographic as well as an ethnic basis. By accepting a constitution that conceded what amounted to federal status to Buganda, Obote contrived an unlikely alliance with the Ganda establishment. Together the UPC and KY were able to form a government with Obote as prime minister and with the DP in opposition. Obote agreed to replace the British governor-general by appointing Mutesa II as the country’s first president in an attempt to unify the alliance further, but this move was unsuccessful. Although Obote was able to win over some of the members of the KY and even of the DP so that they joined the UPC, tension grew steadily between the kabaka on the one hand and the UPC on the other. The Ganda leaders particularly resented their inability to dominate a government composed mainly of members of other ethnic groups. There were also divisions within the UPC, because each member of parliament owed his election to local ethnic supporters rather than to his membership in a political party. Those supporters frequently put pressure on their representatives to redress what they saw as an imbalance in the distribution of the material benefits of independence.
Faced with this dissatisfaction among some of his followers and with increasingly overt hostility in Buganda, Obote arrested five of his ministers and suspended the constitution in 1966. Outraged, the Ganda leaders ordered him to remove his government from the kingdom. Obote responded by sending troops under the leadership of Colonel Idi Amin to arrest the kabaka, who escaped to England, where he died in 1969. When Obote imposed a new republican constitution—appointing himself executive president, abolishing all the kingdoms, and dividing Buganda into administrative districts—he also lost the support of the peoples of southwestern Uganda. Internal friction subsequently grew in intensity, fostered by mutual suspicion between the rival groups, by assassination attempts against the president, and by the increasingly oppressive methods employed by the government to silence its critics.
At independence the export economy was flourishing without adversely affecting subsistence agriculture, and the economy continued to improve, largely because of the high demand and high coffee prices. To answer accusations that the profits from exports did not benefit the producers enough, Obote attempted in 1969 to distribute the benefits from the prospering economy more widely. To this end, he published a “common man’s charter,” which focused on removing the last vestiges of feudalism by having the government take a majority holding in the shares of the larger, mainly foreign-owned companies. To unite the country more firmly, he also produced a plan for a new electoral system in 1970 that would require successful candidates for parliament to secure votes in constituencies outside their home districts.
These proposals met with a cynical response in some quarters, but the government was overthrown before they could be put into effect. Obote had relied heavily on the loyalty of Idi Amin, but Amin had been building support for himself within the army by recruiting from his own Kakwa ethnic group in the northwest. The army, which had previously been composed of Acholi and their neighbors, Obote’s own Lango people, now became sharply divided. Simultaneously, a rift developed between Obote and Amin, and in January 1971 Amin took advantage of the president’s absence from the country to seize power.
Tyranny Under Amin
Amin’s coup was widely welcomed, as there was hope that the country would finally be unified. Several Western countries, including Britain, who feared the spread of communism, were also relieved at Obote’s overthrow: they had become suspicious that his policies were moving to the left. Amin promised a return to civilian government in five years, but problems with his leadership were soon apparent. Amin had little Western-style education and virtually no officer training, so he often resorted to arbitrary violence to maintain his position. In one incident, he destroyed the one potential center of effective opposition by a wholesale slaughter of senior army officers loyal to Obote.
To win more general support among the Ugandan population, Amin ordered all Asians who had not taken Ugandan nationality to leave the country in 1972. His move won considerable approval in the country because many Africans believed that they had been exploited by the Asians, who controlled the middle and some of the higher levels of the economy, but the action isolated Uganda from the rest of the world community. Although a few wealthy Ugandans profited from Amin’s actions, the majority of the commercial enterprises formerly owned by Asians were given to senior army officers who rapidly squandered the proceeds and then allowed the businesses to collapse.
Most people in the countryside were able to survive the total breakdown of the economy that followed in the mid-and late 1970s because the fertility of Uganda’s soil allowed them to continue growing food. In the towns an all-pervading black market developed, and dishonesty became the only means of survival. This economic and moral collapse stirred up criticism of the government, and during this period the country experienced several serious coup attempts.
In an attempt to divert attention from Uganda’s internal problems, Amin launched an attack on Tanzania in October 1978. Tanzanian troops, assisted by armed Ugandan exiles, quickly put Amin’s demoralized army to flight and invaded Uganda. With these troops closing in, Amin escaped the capital. A coalition government of former exiles, calling itself the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF), with a former leading figure in the DP, Yusufu Lule, as president, took office in April 1979. Because of disagreement over economic strategy and fear that Lule was promoting the interests of his own Ganda people, he was replaced in June by Godfrey Binaisa, but Binaisa’s term of office was also short-lived. Supporters of Obote plotted Binaisa’s overthrow, and Obote returned to Uganda in May 1980.
Obote’s second presidency
In December 1980 Obote’s party, the UPC, won a majority in highly controversial elections for parliament. The DP leadership reluctantly agreed to act as a constitutional opposition, but Yoweri Museveni, who had played a significant part in the military overthrow of Amin, refused to accept the UPC victory. He and Lule formed an opposition group, the National Resistance Movement (NRM). Museveni led the movement’s guerrilla group, the National Resistance Army (NRA), and waged an increasingly effective campaign against the government.
With the support of the International Monetary Fund and other external donors, Obote tried hard to rebuild the economy. Initially, his efforts seemed successful, but the extraordinary inflation rate resulting from an entrenched black market system worked against him. Urban wage earners couldn't keep pace with rising prices, and salaried civil servants grew frustrated at the government’s inability to increase their pay in line with their needs. In addition, the guerrilla war drew strength from the fact that it was based in Buganda, among people already suspicious of Obote. That strength grew as an ill-paid, ill-disciplined, and vengeful army, consisting largely of Acholi and Lango, ravaged the countryside for loot and took vengeance on their longtime Ganda enemies.
A split within the army itself—in particular, between its Acholi and Lango members—led to Obote’s overthrow and exile in 1985 and to the seizure of power by an Acholi general, Tito Okello. This, however, could not prevent a victory for Museveni’s NRA, and Museveni became president on January 29, 1986. While a new constitution was being drafted, an indirectly elected National Resistance Council, dominated by the NRM, acted as the national legislature.
