Was Colonialism Good For Uganda Essay Research

Was Colonialism Good For Uganda. Essay, Research Paper

IntroductionThe past is another country, where it is only possible to go as a tourist, and which we will never fully understand. We can describe what we see, but it is far more difficult to know why people acted in the way they did, or what they believed, and why they believed it.

Uganda too is another country, which did not even exist before the white man went there. Even the name reflects the ideas of the first explorers, whose gateway into the new territory was via the Buganda tribe, whom they were later to use as their colonial agents as British rule was extended.

Those who .discovered. Ugandan and the source of the Nile which the first explorers were seeking – men such as Speke and Stanley – and the soldiers and administrators who came after them undoubtedly believed in the superiority of European culture in a way which we today would consider unacceptably racist. Although they were impressed by the sophistication of Bugandan society, they implicitly assumed that Africa was more backward than Europe, that Africans would benefit from exposure to Western standards and practises, and of course from Christianity. To a degree this allowed them either to justify or even to suppress what now looks to be the crude reality that their underlying agenda was the extension of British influence, the promotion of British commerce, and the expansion of the British Empire, all without reference to the actual wishes of the Ugandan people. But then, even in Britain at thattime, democracy was a new idea and many people, including women, still did not have the vote.

Having said that, many Ugandans would today accept that their country had at some stage to be brought into contact with the modern world, and even that they were comparatively lucky in being colonised by the British rather than by, for instance, the Belgians whose brutal rule in the Congo was far crueller than that of the British Protectorate in Uganda. Moreover, the fact that the arrival of the British in Uganda was not accompanied by the theft of African land for white farmers – as it was in Zimbabwe or Kenya – meant that some of the bitterness and resentment felt about European rule in some African countries was not a feature in Uganda. So race relations, even today, are more relaxed in Uganda than in many parts of the Continent.

In this project I have tried to explain the history of the arrival of white men in Uganda, and how this process left some important fault lines in Ugandan society which were to haunt the newly independent stage once the British had left.

Can the Victorian explorers who first came to Mutesa.s tent be blamed for what was to happen a hundred years. later. Even if they could, what would be the point of doing so. It seems to me that the best we can hope to do is to try and understand how and why things happened, in order to try harder to think about what might be the cultural assumptions with which we see the world, and which the future will surely find to be similarly strange and foreign.

For one day we shall be the past, the inhabitants of another country for those who will look back and wonder why we acted in the way we did, what we believed, and why we believed it.

The beginning of foreign intrusion-

Kabaka Mutesa- King of the Baganda

By 1800, the tribal groups in the country we now call Uganda were fairly cut off from the outside world.. But in the mid-19th Century the first Swahili-speaking slave traders arrived on the East Coast of Uganda. Their leader was a man called Ahmed Bin Ibrahim. He soon made contact with the dominant regional power, Buganda . Buganda at that stage was ruled by a man called Kabaka (i.e. King) Mutesa, who allowed Ibrahim to operate from Kampala, the capital. Mutesa even collaborated with the traders in slave-raiding parties in the neighbouring regions. But soon Ibrahim, although claiming he had merely come for business purposes, tried to impose the idea of embracing Islam upon Kabaka Mutesa, and more Arabs arrived in Buganda.

After 1850 Europeans started to trickle into Buganda and the region. The first was John Hanning Speke who came in 1862 in search of the source of the Nile.

It is important not to be too romantic about life in the Kingdom of Buganda when white men arrived. When Speke showed Mutesa how guns worked by shooting four cows, Mutese gave a rifle to a page and asked him to test it by shooting a man in the outer court, which the page promptly did. From Speke.s account, nobody around Mutesa even bothered to ask who had been killed.The discovery of the source of the Nile prompted interest in the area from Egypt, which feared that the source could fall into hostile hands given the importance of the Nile for the economic life of Egypt. But attempts by the ruler of Egypt, Khedive Ismail, to incorporate the source of the Nile into the Equatoria Province of the Egyptian Empire were thwarted by Mutesa and the Bunyoro King Kabelaga, who defeated armies and Egyptian agents such as Samuel Banker. The Buganda and the Bunyoro had long been rivals for supremacy, but found themselves as partners in the effort to resist colonialism.The final blow to the Egyptian scheme was eventually to be delivered by the Mahdist revolt in the Sudan (included in the Egyptian empire since the 1820s), which effectively blocked Egyptian advances