Protectorate of Uganda
The Protectorate of Uganda was a protectorate of the British Empire from 1894 to 1962. In 1893 the Imperial British East Africa Company transferred its administration rights of territory consisting mainly of the Kingdom of Buganda to the British government.
In 1894 the Uganda Protectorate was established, and the territory was extended beyond the borders of Buganda to an area that roughly corresponds to that of present-day Uganda.
History
Background
In the mid-1880s, the Kingdom of Buganda was divided between four religious factions – Adherents of Uganda's Native Religion, Catholics, Protestants and Muslims – each vying for political control. In 1888, Mwanga II was ousted in a coup led by the Muslim faction, who installed Kalema as leader. The following year, a Protestant and Catholic coalition formed to remove Kalema and return Mwanga II to power. This coalition secured an alliance with the Imperial British East Africa Company, and succeeded in ousting Kalema and reinstating Mwanga in 1890.The IBEAC sent Frederick Lugard to Uganda in 1890 as its chief representative and to help maintain the peace between the competing factions. In 1891, Mwanga concluded a treaty with Lugard whereby Mwanga would place his land and tributary states under the protection of the IBEAC.
In 1892, having subdued the Muslim faction, the Protestants and Catholics resumed their struggle for supremacy which led to civil war. That same year, the British government extended their support for the IBEAC to remain in Uganda until 1893. Despite strong opposition to getting involved in Uganda, the government felt that withdrawal of British influence would lead to war and the threat of a fellow European power encroaching on Britain's sphere of influence in East Africa it shared with Germany in 1890.
On 31 March 1893, the IBEAC formally ended its involvement in Uganda. Missionaries, led by Alfred Tucker, lobbied the British government to take over the administration of Uganda in place of the IBEAC, arguing that British withdrawal would lead to a continuance of the civil war between the different religious factions. Shortly after, Sir Gerald Portal, a representative of the British government on the ground in Uganda, proposed a plan of double chieftainships – whereby every chieftainship would have one Protestant and one Catholic chief. On 19 April 1893, the British government and the chiefs of Uganda signed a treaty giving effect to this plan.
On 18 June 1894, the British government declared that Uganda would come under British protection as a Protectorate.
1894–1901
The Uganda Agreement of 1900 solidified the power of the largely Protestant 'Bakungu' client-chiefs, led by Kagwa. London sent only a few officials to administer the country, relying primarily on the 'Bakungu' chiefs. For decades they were preferred because of their political skills, their Christianity, their friendly relations with the British, their ability to collect taxes, and the proximity of Entebbe to the Buganda capital. By the 1920s, the British administrators were more confident and had less need for military or administrative support. Colonial officials taxed cash crops produced by the peasants. There was popular discontent among the Baganda rank-and-file, which weakened the position of their leaders. In 1912, Kagwa moved to solidify 'Bakungu' power by proposing a second 'Lukiko' for Buganda with himself as president and the 'Bakungu' as a sort of hereditary aristocracy. British officials vetoed the idea when they discovered widespread popular opposition. Instead, British officials began some reforms and attempted to make the 'Lukiko' a genuine representative assembly.File:The White Elephant, Punch 103.png|thumb|Punch cartoon depicting Uganda personified as a White elephant which the East Africa Company is attempting to sell to Britain
Although momentous change occurred during the colonial era in Uganda, some characteristics of late-nineteenth-century African society survived to reemerge at the time of independence. The status of Protectorate had significantly different consequences for Uganda than had the region been made a colony like neighbouring Kenya, insofar as Uganda retained a degree of self-government that would have otherwise been limited under a full colonial administration.
Colonial rule, however, affected local economic systems dramatically, in part because the first concern of the British was financial. Quelling the 1897 Sudanese mutiny under the leadership of protectorate commissioner George Wilson CB had been costly—units of the British Indian Army had been transported to Uganda at considerable expense. The new commissioner of Uganda in 1900, Sir Harry H. Johnston, had orders to establish an efficient administration and to levy taxes as quickly as possible. Johnston approached the chiefs in Uganda with offers of jobs in the colonial administration in return for their collaboration.
The chiefs were more interested in preserving Uganda as a self-governing entity, continuing the royal line of Kabakas, and securing private land tenure for themselves and their supporters. Hard bargaining ensued, but the chiefs ended up with everything they wanted, including one-half of all the land in Buganda. The half left to the British as "Crown Land" was later found to be largely swamp and scrub.
Johnston's Uganda Agreement of 1900 imposed a tax on huts and guns, designated the chiefs as tax collectors, and testified to the continued alliance of British and Baganda interests. The British signed much less generous treaties with the other kingdoms without the provision of large-scale private land tenure. The smaller chiefdoms of Busoga were ignored.
Buganda administrators
The Baganda immediately offered their services to the British as administrators over their recently conquered neighbours, an offer which was attractive to the economy-minded colonial administration. Baganda agents fanned out as local tax collectors and labour organizers in areas such as Kigezi, Mbale, and, significantly, Bunyoro. This sub-imperialism and Ganda cultural chauvinism was resented by the people being administered.Wherever they went, Baganda insisted on the exclusive use of their language, Luganda, and they planted bananas as the only proper food worth eating. They regarded their traditional dress—long cotton gowns called kanzus—as civilized; all else was barbarian. They also encouraged and engaged in mission work, attempting to convert locals to their form of Christianity or Islam. In some areas, the resulting backlash aided the efforts of religious rivals — for example, Catholics won converts in areas where oppressive rule was identified with a Protestant Muganda chief.
The people of Bunyoro were particularly aggrieved, having fought the Baganda and the British; having a substantial section of their heartland annexed to Buganda as the "lost counties", and finally having "arrogant" Baganda administrators issuing orders, collecting taxes, and forcing unpaid labour. In 1907 the Banyoro rose in a rebellion called nyangire, or "refusing", and succeeded in having the Baganda subimperial agents withdrawn.
Meanwhile, in 1901 the completion of the Uganda Railway from the coast at Mombasa to the Lake Victoria port of Kisumu moved colonial authorities to encourage the growth of cash crops to help pay the railway's operating costs. Another result of the railway construction was the 1902 decision to transfer the eastern section of the Uganda Protectorate to the Kenya Colony, then called the East Africa Protectorate, to keep the entire line under one local colonial administration. Because the railway experienced cost overruns in Kenya, the British decided to justify its exceptional expense and pay its operating costs by introducing large-scale European settlement in a vast tract of land that became a centre of cash-crop agriculture known as the "White Highlands". A major part of the territory eventually left out of the "East Africa Protectorate" was the Uganda Scheme, in which the British Empire offered to create a Jewish nation-state. The offer was made to the Zionist movement which rejected it, refusing to accept anything other than the ancient Land of Israel.
In many areas of Uganda, by contrast, agricultural production was placed in the hands of Africans, if they responded to the opportunity. Cotton was the crop of choice, largely because of pressure by the British Cotton Growing Association, textile manufacturers who urged the colonies to provide raw materials for British mills. This was done by cash cropping the land. Even the CMS joined the effort by launching the Uganda Company to promote cotton planting and to buy and transport the produce.
Buganda, with its strategic location on the lakeside, reaped the benefits of cotton growing. The advantages of this crop were quickly recognized by the Baganda chiefs who had newly acquired freehold estates, which came to be known as mailo because they were measured in square miles. In 1905 the initial baled cotton export was valued at £200; in 1906, £1,000; in 1907; £11,000; and in 1908, £52,000. By 1915 the value of cotton exports had climbed to £369,000, and Britain was able to end its subsidy of colonial administration in Uganda, while in Kenya the white settlers required continuing subsidies by the home government.
The income generated by cotton sales made the Uganda kingdom relatively prosperous, compared with the rest of colonial Uganda, although before World War I cotton was also being grown in the eastern regions of Busoga, Lango, and Teso. Many Baganda spent their new earnings on imported clothing, bicycles, metal roofing, and even cars. They also invested in their children's education. The Christian missions emphasized literacy skills, and African converts quickly learned to read and write. By 1911 two popular journals, Ebifa and Munno, were published monthly in Luganda.
Heavily supported by African funds, new schools were soon turning out graduating classes at Mengo High School, St. Mary's Kisubi, Namilyango, Gayaza, and King's College Budo — all in Buganda. The chief minister of the Buganda kingdom, Sir Apollo Kaggwa, personally awarded a bicycle to the top graduate at King's College Budo, together with the promise of a government job. The schools, in fact, had inherited the educational function formerly performed in the Kabaka's palace, where generations of young pages had been trained to become chiefs. Now the qualifications sought were literacy and skills, including typing and English translation.
Two important principles of precolonial political life carried over into the colonial era: clientage, whereby ambitious younger officeholders attached themselves to older high-ranking chiefs, and generational conflict, which resulted when the younger generation sought to expel their elders from office in order to replace them. After World War I, the younger aspirants to high office in Buganda became impatient with the seemingly perpetual tenure of Sir Apollo and his contemporaries, who lacked many of the skills that members of the younger generation had acquired through schooling. Calling themselves the Young Baganda Association, members of the new generation attached themselves to the young Kabaka, Daudi Chwa, who was the figurehead ruler of Buganda under indirect rule. But Kabaka Daudi never gained real political power, and after a short and frustrating reign, he died at the relatively young age of forty-three.