Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (60 page)

In 1955 and 1956, British civil servants in Khartoum had made last-ditch efforts to protect the south with safeguards, but the Suez imbroglio had defeated them.
²³
T. R. H. Owen, the last British Governor of Bahr el-Ghazal, wrote an anguished verse in which he articulated a sense of betrayal, which he shared with his fellow Bog Barons:

‘We much regret -’ ‘Reasons of state demand -’
What? That our clear commitments shall not stand?
That suave appeasement and our craven fears
Annul the confidence of fifty years?
²⁴

THIRTY-FOUR

A Sin not Theirs: The Tragedy of Northern Uganda

In Buganda the British presence had been broadly accepted since 1892 when Frederick Lugard had defeated Mwanga and the Fransa. The support of men like Apolo Kagwa – the Protestant
katikiro
or prime minister, who would soon be knighted -and the Catholic leader, Stanislas Mugwanya, provided an effective counterweight to the still volatile Kabaka Mwanga. A reconstituted
lukiko,
or
kabaka’s
council, began functioning in the mid-1890s, with Baganda Protestants, Catholics and Muslims all represented alongside traditional chiefs. The kingdom of Buganda was to be the core of the new Uganda Protectorate, and Buganda’s institutions were chosen by the British as the template for other kingdoms and territories. Indeed, the cooperation of ‘civilised’ Buganda made it possible for Britain to govern the enlarged and wilder peripheries of the Protectorate. But how large should Uganda be and where should its northern boundaries be set?

The seeds of future disaster were planted by the British when Uganda was extended to include not only Buganda’s enemies, like Bunyoro, but also ethnic groups north of Karuma Falls and Lake Kyoga in territory where Speke and Grant had been the first European visitors and where Baker had established a transitory control. Whatever the desirability or undesirability of including Bunyoro within Uganda, early in 1894 Colonel Henry Colvile, the senior military officer in the Protectorate, took matters into his own hands and, without thought for future consequences, decided that Kabarega, the
omukama
of Bunyoro, would never accept British rule until his army had been defeated. This opinion was based in part on Sir Samuel Baker’s unfairly damning
opinion of Kabarega, but also on Bunyoro’s habit of giving asylum to
jihadist
Muslims and anyone else opposed to British rule. Colvile attacked with 450 Sudanese troops and 20,000 Baganda spearmen and riflemen, who were to prove enthusiastic allies. Kabarega withdrew northwards having burned his capital behind him, and was eventually driven from his country into Acholiland.
¹

The situation became more complicated when Kabaka Mwanga rebelled against the curtailment of his powers and formed an alliance with Kabarega. The two kings were finally defeated and captured in 1898 and exiled to the Seychelles. Mwanga had rebelled despite having signed two treaties, but Kabarega had agreed to nothing and his exile until 1923 was a wholly unjust punishment for someone who had defended his country successfully against Emin Pasha and had merely tried to do the same against Colvile. However, Kabarega was hated by his neighbours and several years before his capture had invaded the kingdom of Toro, capturing thousands of men, women and children, and murdering the two young princes closest in line of succession to the throne. Mwanga would die in exile in 1903, and Kabarega would only be permitted to go home twenty years later. He died at Jinja in Buganda before reaching his kingdom to which he had waited so long to return. One of Idi Amin’s few commendable acts was to rename the Murchison Falls the Kabarega Falls.
²

Up to 1898 British administration did not extend further than the four southern kingdoms and Busoga. They could reasonably have been expected to form a relatively harmonious nation-state. Unfortunately matters were not to remain that way. In 1899 Sir Harry Johnston, recently appointed Special Commissioner to Uganda, made a formal declaration to the effect that the northern limit of the Protectorate lay at 5° North Latitude, a line which took in most of the southern half of Baker’s Equatoria. The Governor of Uganda Protectorate, Sir Hesketh Bell, was a firm believer in employing existing chiefs and kings to implement British rule, so he objected to Johnston’s plan on the grounds that
this extension of territory would bring within the boundaries of the Protectorate tribes who were ‘without Sultans or Kings’, as Speke had described them three decades earlier. Bell was sure that the absence of substantial African chiefdoms would make the north ungovernable since ‘indirect rule’ could not work without paramount chiefs. As late as 1920, there were still only fifty-nine British administrators in the entire country.
³

Sir Hesketh also knew that tribes like the Acholi and Langi had little in common with the people of Buganda with their bark-cloth clothes, their ironwork, elaborately constructed houses, and their monarchy dating back four centuries. The naked Acholi belonged culturally to the Central Sudanic and Eastern Nilotic peoples of the northern frontier region rather than to the more sophisticated Bantu settled around Lake Victoria.
⁴
While keenly aware of the dangers of getting involved with the northern region, Bell also knew that for decades Ethiopian elephant hunters and Arab slave and ivory traders had been selling modern rifles to the Acholi and the Langi. These weapons were now being used in local feuds which he feared might spread south if left unchecked. Sir Hesketh retired before deciding what to do, but in 1911, the new Governor, Sir Frederick Jackson, concluded that unless he soon gained control over this anarchic region, it might be impossible to do so later.
⁵

The British plan was to introduce a Buganda-type administration into all the northern territories, creating in every ‘tribal territory’ a ‘central native council’ consisting of the most prominent chiefs and headmen, with the district commissioner as chief executive. At a level below this council there would be county chiefs, many of whom would be British appointees brought in from Buganda.
⁶

The Langi, Acholi, Madi and Karamajong had much in common, culturally and linguistically. They also shared an informal consensus-seeking style of government under many small chiefs and elders. However, the imposition of centralised government upon each individual tribe, once carried out, inevitably fostered an idea of separate identity based on ethnicity.
This would not help Uganda to develop as a united nation-state.
⁷
The missionaries also promoted pride in tribe by developing written vernacular languages and compiling accounts of tribal history. In truth, the strengthening of tribal awareness suited the colonial power, since if different ethnic groups saw themselves as distinct from each other, they would be less likely to make common cause against their rulers.
⁸

In the 1970s and 1980s a number of anthropologists and historians insisted that many ‘tribes’ had actually come into existence only because it had suited the colonial authorities to consolidate small, often ill-defined ethnic groups in order to create larger, more coherent units of administration.
⁹
But the idea that the Europeans had ‘invented’ new tribes and their traditions was later seen as patronising to Africans who would never, surely, have been as gullible as to accept invented identities.
¹⁰
In the context of northern Uganda, although British administrators and missionaries may well have made the Acholi feel different from the Langi and Madi, there can be no doubt that they nonetheless continued to feel a lot closer culturally to these neighbours than to the Bantu in southern Uganda.

The British saw the tall and robust northerners as potential recruits for Uganda’s army and police, or as migrant labour to deploy in the more developed south; and as a result of the administration’s tendency to recruit Acholi into the army in preference to members of all other tribes, the Acholi’s link with the military grew stronger over the years. Indeed by the 1960s, just prior to independence, the Acholi constituted the largest single group within Uganda’s army.
¹¹
Moreover, since they had good reason to be envious of the otherwise more highly favoured Baganda, it could and should have been foreseen that, by packing the army with Acholi, a time-bomb was being primed for the future. In this way the disastrous decision to include the southern part of Equatoria within Uganda was made immeasurably worse.

After supporting the British since the beginning of the protectorate and being well rewarded for their loyalty, the Baganda and their Cambridge-educated
kabaka
viewed the approach of
independence from Britain with understandable foreboding. Although the Baganda inhabited the largest single kingdom or territory in the nation-state, they only accounted for one-fifth of Uganda’s total population. So they could never hope to do better than rule in an alliance with another party or parties. By 1960, Milton Obote’s leadership of the Uganda People’s Congress seemed likely to propel him to the premiership. Because he was the son of a chief of the northern Langi, he could count on the support of all northerners, including the Acholi with their dominant presence in the army. He could also expect the majority of votes from the Baganda’s traditional enemies such as the Nyoro (people of Bunyoro). This situation did not bode well for the future. Yet after independence in 1962, four years of peace and prosperity followed.

Because Uganda was a protectorate and not a colony most of the land had remained in African ownership. In 1931 there had still only been 385 Europeans working for private companies and only 2,000 Britons working for the government, and these numbers would not change significantly. This removed any post-independence threat of conflict between black and white – of the kind which would develop into major struggles in Kenya and Rhodesia with their large white-settler populations. Also, in 1962, the Ugandan economy was sound, with exports of tea, coffee and cotton booming. However, despite this prosperity, a power struggle between the all-African constituent parts of the country looked all but certain.

Under the constitution, Buganda had federal status and was allowed to retain its own parliament and traditions, though not to be autonomous. The national government was expected to rule the whole country. In pre-independence elections, the left-leaning Milton Obote only achieved a majority in the National Assembly with the support of the
kabaka
’s political party, and so was obliged to cooperate with His Highness Sir Frederick Edward Mutesa II, 35th
kabaka
of Buganda. Obote even had to grit his teeth and approve Mutesa’s appointment as head of state in 1963.
¹²

Milton Obote.

Obote, however, was determined to institute one-party rule and he took a giant leap towards it in 1966 by arresting five Baganda cabinet ministers, dissolving parliament and imposing a new constitution, which denied all the kingdoms the right to have their own parliaments. This was done on the eve of a parliamentary investigation into charges that Obote and his new army commander, Colonel Idi Amin, had been smuggling gold bars out of the Republic of the Congo to turn into cash in Uganda and then re-export this money to pay for a coup in Congo’s eastern province against the American-backed government. In fact much of the money would remain in Amin’s bank account.

The
kabaka
protested about the arrests and tried to negotiate with Obote, pending a court case. Obote had no time for the law and simply sent Amin to storm the royal palace on Mengo Hill. With so many northerners in the army, the troops obeyed their orders in this attack on the privileged southerners. In the assault several hundred Baganda were killed, but Mutesa II avoided
summary execution by scaling a back wall, jumping down into the street and hailing a taxi that happened to be passing. This lucky chance enabled him to escape to Britain via Burundi.
¹³

Although British rule had always depended on Buganda’s active cooperation, no financial help was forthcoming from Westminster when the exiled
kabaka
arrived in London. Fortunately for ‘King Freddie’ (as the UK press would always call him) after leaving Magdalene College, Cambridge, he had been for several years an officer in the Grenadier Guards. A brother officer, Major Richard Carr-Gomm, had been a close friend. The major had subsequently left the army to found a charity with his own considerable fortune, helping homeless and isolated people in the East End of London. Carr-Gomm gave the
kabaka
the use of a rent-free, two-bedroom flat in Bermondsey. Here Mutesa II would live out the last three years of his life, living (not in a council flat as was often claimed in the press) but in cramped conditions nonetheless, with his bodyguard, Major Katende, and his ADC, George Maaolo, and an admiring graduate student, Ignatius Iga, all sleeping in one bedroom, while the
kabaka
slept in the other. The former Attorney General of Buganda, Frederick Mpanga, and C. M. S. Mukasa, the former head of Buganda’s Civil Service, would often visit, as would the
kabaka
’s daughter, Sarah Kagere, and his brother, Prince Harry Kimera.