ABSTRACT

Travelling in Uganda a century ago, the young Winston Churchill called it ‘from end to end one beautiful garden’. A few decades before, it was the political development of the area that had most impressed its earliest European visitors. They had previously known nothing about Bunyoro and Buganda and the other states that they found in this part of central Africa. Since that time the question of how such developments had taken place has been a major focus of research into the past of the Great Lakes region. Part of the explanation probably lies in the very thing that made such an impression on Churchill. The region is rich in natural resources and potentially highly productive. Although its settlement by early farmers over 2000 years ago (Chapter 22) seems to have been patchy, the population appears to have grown in size and density after about 1000 years ago. A resulting competition for resources probably led to an unequal distribution of wealth, so that a few individuals were able to gain power over many others. This would have involved complex adjustments within the societies concerned but fundamentally it was probably the control of production from an abundant environment that provided the power base of the emerging states.