ABSTRACT
Historians of colonial Uganda are no strangers to violence. Indeed, the Protectorate itself was to a very large extent conceived in the violence which erupted between two politico-religious groupings of Ganda chiefs emerging from an unusually bloody succession war. This war started when Mwanga II was overthrown by a conspiracy of palace musketeers in September 1888. Subsequently, not only did religious groupings introduced earlier in the nineteenth century by a diversity of Muslim and Christian emissaries to the courts of Mwanga’s father and grandfather, Mutesa I and Suna, become tragically murderous but elements of class warfare emerged dramatically too. This happened when the leading followers of the Muslim claimant to the Ganda throne killed off most of their slaves, ‘because their loyalty could not be relied upon’.1 Into this maelstrom at the start of 1890 marched Carl Peters in pursuit of a German empire in the heart of Africa. Then came Frederick Jackson, Ernest Gedge and Frederick Lugard on behalf of the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC)—Jackson and Gedge on the very heels of Peters, Lugard at the end of the year. During the earlier succession war (1888-90), the Roman Catholic and Anglican Protestant politico religious groupings had emerged essentially in response to the seizure of power at the kingdom’s centre by the Muslim king, Kalema. By the very end of 1889 both Catholic and Protestant Ganda chiefs were uneasily allied against both this particular king and Muslim Ganda generally under the banner of a restored and now ostensibly repentant Mwanga II. Militarily, however, Mwanga’s position was markedly precarious. Should either Catholic or Protestant Ganda chiefs and their followers and slaves withdraw support from each other at any time, the Muslim revolution in Buganda would almost certainly be assured of an instantaneous triumph over the grouping remaining at Mwanga’s side.2
