The Myth Of Stability In Uganda

UgandaToday: The Myth Of Stability In Uganda

S1E3: Containerisation of a Nation Without a National Identity

By Kriss Namakola
Dallas, Texas

Some of the Baganda chiefs with Regent Sir Apolo Kagwa and other leaders associated with the political order established around the 1900 Buganda Agreement. The agreement fundamentally reshaped land ownership, political authority and the relationship between Buganda and the British colonial administration. (Courtesy: Daily Monitor)

Previously in The Myth of Stability

In the previous installment, we examined how Britain enclosed kingdoms, chiefdoms, clans and decentralised societies within one territorial container called Uganda.

It did not encounter an empty political landscape.

Buganda had the Kabaka, the Lukiiko and an established hierarchy of chiefs. Bunyoro had the Omukama and the Abarusura. Among the Acholi, Langi, Alur, Lugbara, Basoga, Bagisu and other communities, authority rested upon different combinations of chiefs, clans, elders, councils and other traditional institutions.

Britain selected institutions that could serve colonial administration and reorganised others into a centralised hierarchy.

But drawing Uganda’s boundaries was only the beginning.

Britain subsequently distributed land, political authority, economic opportunity, legal protection and military responsibility unequally among the people who had been placed inside the new territorial container.

In other words, containerisation created Uganda as a territory, while divide and rule shaped how the territory would function as a political system.

The 1900 Buganda Agreement is often presented as the constitutional foundation of Britain’s relationship with Buganda. It defined territorial boundaries, recognised the Kabaka’s government, established taxation arrangements and fundamentally reorganised the ownership and administration of land.

But beyond constitutional arrangements, the agreement also helped create a dependable African governing class upon which the colonial state could rely.

The agreement allocated land to the Kabaka, members of the royal family, chiefs and other private landowners. Approximately 8,000 square miles were allocated to about 1,000 chiefs and landowners, while another 9,000 square miles, described in the agreement as waste and uncultivated land, came under the control of the colonial administration.

This transformation altered the relationship between land and political authority.

Chiefs who had traditionally exercised authority through allegiance, kinship and reciprocal obligations acquired estates protected by colonial law rather than exclusively by customary institutions.

At the same time, many ordinary people increasingly found themselves living as tenants or squatters under landlords whose claims were protected by the colonial state—the same state that demanded taxes and labour from them.

The Bataka lost important aspects of their customary authority. Chiefs favoured by the colonial administration acquired land and greater administrative influence. The Mukopi, or ordinary peasant, carried much of the economic burden imposed by the emerging taxation system.

Britain therefore did not merely divide Uganda into ethnic communities.

It assigned people unequal positions within the land system, administration, economy, military and legal order—and then governed through the tensions that those arrangements generated.

That was the substance of divide and rule.

Land, Power and the African Intermediary

Direct colonial occupation was expensive.

Britain did not have enough European officials to administer every village, collect every tax, settle every dispute or enforce every government order.

It therefore required intermediaries.

In Buganda, the existing hierarchical political structure provided an administrative framework that Britain could adapt to colonial purposes. Saza chiefs and other local officials collected taxes, mobilised labour, maintained roads, transmitted government directives and exercised administrative and judicial authority.

The colonial government supervised them, but ordinary people often encountered the colonial state through the African chief rather than through the European administrator.

Colonialism acquired an African face.

That arrangement also insulated Britain from much of the resentment generated by its policies.

A peasant facing rent or eviction confronted an African landlord.

A taxpayer confronted an African chief.

A person resisting compulsory labour confronted an African official.

The British administrator remained above the immediate dispute while retaining ultimate authority over the system that produced it.

The Mailo land settlement also divided Buganda internally. Its principal beneficiaries did not represent every Muganda equally. Certain chiefs and landowners acquired lasting economic advantages, while the Bataka and other customary authorities lost significant influence.

Religious affiliation further complicated access to power. Protestant chiefs enjoyed stronger links to the colonial establishment, while Catholics and Muslims often occupied less privileged positions within the political order.

Land has remained one of Uganda’s most politically sensitive resources.

Disputes involving landlords, tenants, bibanja holders, inheritance, eviction and ownership are therefore not simply private disagreements. They are connected to a historical land system in which political authority was converted into legally protected property.

The broader political culture also survived.

Public office became a potential route to private advantage. Access to government could mean access to land, contracts, employment, protection and influence.

Those excluded from patronage networks often did not seek to abolish patronage. They sought their own patron.

Post-independence governments cannot blame every act of corruption, land grabbing or political patronage on colonialism. Uganda’s leaders made their own choices and constructed their own systems of privilege.

But they inherited a state accustomed to governing through selected intermediaries whose personal interests were tied to the survival of the political order.

The Lost Counties and Managed Conflict

Few colonial decisions illustrate the politics of divide and rule more clearly than the transfer of parts of Bunyoro to Buganda.

During Britain’s military campaigns against Omukama Kabalega in the 1890s, the colonial forces relied heavily on Baganda allies, including troops associated with Semei Kakungulu.

Following Bunyoro’s defeat, Britain rewarded its Buganda allies by placing seven Bunyoro counties under Buganda’s administration: Buyaga, Bugangaizi, Buwekula, Rugonjo, Bulemeezi, Buruuli and Bugerere.

Historical accounts also record British military and administrative discussions in which the territories south of the River Kafu were treated as rewards for Buganda’s assistance in the campaign against Kabalega and the Abarusura.

The 1900 Buganda Agreement subsequently formalised the new territorial arrangement.

For the Banyoro living in these areas, the transfer had profound consequences.

It affected land ownership, political authority, cultural administration and local identity.

Baganda chiefs and landlords came to exercise authority over communities that had not voluntarily chosen to become part of Buganda’s political system.

For many Banyoro, the arrangement represented conquest and dispossession.

For Buganda, the counties became part of a settlement that had been recognised and formalised by the British colonial government.

Once again, Britain positioned itself above the quarrel.

The colonial government could present the resulting dispute as a conflict between Buganda and Bunyoro, even though British military intervention and colonial agreements had created much of its territorial and legal foundation.

Each kingdom could consequently view the other as the immediate threat, while both remained dependent on the colonial authority that had created the dispute to resolve it.

The Lost Counties question survived into the independence era.

The Molson Commission recommended that Buyaga and Bugangaizi be returned to Bunyoro. The matter remained unresolved at independence and eventually went to a referendum in 1964, after which the two counties were returned to Bunyoro.

By then, however, the dispute had grown beyond a question of territorial boundaries.

It had become entangled in the political relationship between Milton Obote’s Uganda People’s Congress and Kabaka Yekka, the constitutional position of Buganda and the growing confrontation between Mengo and the central government.

The deeper lesson is not that Baganda and Banyoro are naturally hostile neighbours.

It is that territorial and institutional decisions can transform identity into a political weapon.

Once land, dignity and access to government become attached to communal identity, compromise can be portrayed as betrayal and constitutional disagreement can become an existential struggle.

Uganda continues to experience versions of this problem.

Land disputes become ethnic disputes.

Unequal development becomes a contest between regions.

Political appointments are measured through the lens of community and place of origin.

National resources are interpreted as rewards captured by those closest to power.

The country remains formally united—with one flag, one anthem and one citizenship—but political competition is repeatedly reduced to a deeply troubling question:

Which tribe has eaten more than the other?

Who Administers, Who Labours and Who Controls?

Colonial development was also distributed unevenly across Uganda.

Missionary education, cash-crop production, clerical employment and administrative opportunities became more concentrated in the South, particularly in Buganda, than in many other parts of the country.

Educated Baganda supplied chiefs, interpreters, clerks and other officials required by the colonial administration.

Luganda also acquired considerable importance as a language of administration and missionary education in parts of the country.

At the same time, many northern and eastern communities became important sources of soldiers, policemen and migrant labour.

Colonial officials categorised groups such as the Acholi, Langi and West Nile communities through the racialised theory of the so-called “martial tribe”—the belief that certain African communities were naturally suited to military service.

The theory was neither scientific nor harmless.

It influenced recruitment, employment and the distribution of opportunity.

Colonial policy created social differences and then presented those differences as evidence of inherent ethnic characteristics.

A southerner could encounter a northerner primarily as a soldier, policeman, labourer or watchman.

A northerner could encounter a southerner as a clerk, chief, landlord or beneficiary of greater access to education and commerce.

The structural causes of inequality consequently disappeared behind ethnic stereotypes.

One enduring expression of Buganda’s social perception of military service is the saying “Omuganda tayingira magye”—reflecting a historical reluctance among some Baganda to pursue military careers.

Such perceptions did not emerge in isolation.

The colonial system had encouraged different communities to occupy different economic and administrative roles.

The South was increasingly associated with agriculture, commerce and administration, while the North became an important source of military and labour manpower.

The consequences were profound.

Soldiers recruited disproportionately from communities outside the principal centres of commercial and administrative power could be deployed against populations with whom they had limited local connections.

Southern civilians could therefore come to fear the northern soldier as the coercive arm of the state.

Northern soldiers, meanwhile, could see military service as one of the few available routes to income, authority and national influence.

Independent Uganda inherited this imbalance.

It inherited an army whose composition and institutional culture were not fully integrated into a common national political identity—and a civilian political elite that often distrusted the military.

Soldiers understood that politicians depended on them.

Politicians increasingly understood that military loyalty could determine political survival.

The ethnic composition of the armed forces subsequently changed under different governments.

But the underlying principle remained remarkably persistent: military institutions were repeatedly shaped by questions of personal loyalty, political reliability and the security requirements of the government in power.

That leaves Uganda with a question that has never entirely disappeared:

Does the army protect the constitutional order—or does it protect the government controlling the state? 

The Law and the Unequal Subject

Perhaps the most consequential colonial division was legal.

Europeans and other privileged groups had access to institutions substantially influenced by English law.

Most Africans lived under a system of native administration, chiefs and customary courts operating under colonial supervision.

People occupying the same territory therefore did not always encounter the same state as equals.

The chief could collect taxes, enforce administrative orders and hear disputes involving people subject to his authority.

Executive and judicial power were closely connected.

A person accused of refusing to pay a tax, perform labour or obey a government directive could find himself before institutions belonging to the same administrative structure that had issued the original demand.

Taxation, labour, alcohol production, hunting, movement and settlement became increasingly regulated.

Activities that had previously formed part of ordinary social or economic life could be criminalised when they conflicted with government revenue requirements, labour demands or control over natural resources.

Many Africans consequently experienced the law not primarily as protection from arbitrary power, but as an instrument for securing obedience.

Avoiding the policeman, negotiating with the chief or seeking assistance from a powerful intermediary could become rational strategies for survival.

That political culture did not disappear at independence.

Ugandans still frequently approach public institutions by asking first:

“Who do you know?”

A relative, party official, senior civil servant, police commander or military officer may be expected to make the telephone call that gets a file moving.

This reflects one of the unfinished transformations of independence: the conversion of a state designed primarily to control subjects into a state required to serve equal citizens.

Uganda changed the nationality of its administrators.

It did not automatically change the relationship between government and the governed.

Colonialism explains the origins of that institutional culture.

It does not absolve post-independence governments that preserved, adapted and sometimes expanded its coercive features.

One Territory, Unequal Citizenship

Land, religion, regional specialisation, military recruitment and law were not isolated colonial policies.

Together, they established a system in which different communities occupied different positions within the same country.

Europeans retained political and financial supremacy.

Asians became prominent in commerce, processing and retail trade.

African producers grew cotton and coffee but exercised limited control over credit, export markets and large-scale industry.

Within the African population itself, some communities gained greater access to education and administration, while others supplied soldiers and labour.

Every group could therefore encounter another group standing between itself and power, land or economic opportunity.

The tenant confronted the landlord.

The Munyoro confronted the Muganda chief.

The Catholic confronted the Protestant establishment.

The civilian confronted the soldier.

The African producer confronted the commercial intermediary.

Yet above these relationships stood the colonial state.

The colonial authority controlled the structure connecting them all.

This did not make later conflict inevitable.

Subsequent Ugandan leaders had the opportunity to reform inherited institutions, broaden access to opportunity and construct a common citizenship.

Too often, however, they retained the colonial method:

Reward loyal areas.

Recruit trusted communities into security institutions.

Distribute appointments through political networks.

Use access to state resources as a mechanism for building loyalty.

Treat political disagreement as disobedience.

Uganda’s diversity is not, by itself, the source of its instability.

The danger arises when the state distributes law, security and opportunity according to identity and political proximity.

When institutions cannot guarantee equal treatment, citizens retreat into tribal, regional, religious and personal networks.

When public offices distribute private advantage, elections become struggles for access to state resources.

When the armed forces become identified with a ruler or political faction, communities outside that arrangement can experience national security as political intimidation.

Independence could remove the governor and raise a new flag over Kololo.

It could place Ugandans in offices previously occupied by British officials.

But ceremonies and changes of personnel could not, by themselves, transform landlords and tenants, favoured regions and labour reserves, political insiders and legal subjects into equal citizens.

That required a new constitutional and political dispensation.

Uganda approached October 1962 without one.

And that omission would prove consequential.

Next Week: The Illusion of Independence

In the next installment of The Myth of Stability, we examine how Uganda entered independence with a political settlement that divided sovereignty, weakened democratic legitimacy, empowered the military and made constitutional conflict increasingly difficult to avoid.

The next episode will explore the contradictions at the heart of Uganda’s independence settlement: divided sovereignty, an incompatible governing alliance, the exclusion of a substantial political constituency and an army that was already beginning to discover its influence over civilian government.

The flag had changed. The governor was gone. But had the system changed?

To be continued…

Kriss Namakola
Dallas, Texas