A Political History of Uganda – Chapter Two

Overview

Chapter Two of A Political History of Uganda analyzes the pivotal years from 1860 to 1900, focusing on how colonialism destabilized the kingdom of Buganda through a coordinated three-pronged strategy: military force (the gun), ideological incursion (the Bible), and epistemic subversion (the anthropologist). This trifecta weaponized religion, language, and knowledge systems to fracture Ugandan sovereignty from the inside out.

Excerpt

And so to the coming of colonial rule to Uganda. In this confused period of Uganda history, we shall mainly be concerned with the events in Buganda because this is the kingdom in which the unsettling influence of alien intrusion was concentrated. Such attention as was paid to the other areas of Uganda was secondary for the main centre of events—Buganda. It is proper to begin this section by observing that by the time the interest of the European powers was directed towards this...

Of the first two weapons we shall speak presently and of the third we may note that it was by the grace of the anthropologist that we got the term tribe to apply to Africans and to mean a debased form of nationhood and other perjurious connotations that no longer need recounting. A casual glance at the Concise Oxford (English) Dictionary tells the reader that “tribe is a Group of barbarous clans under recognised chiefs; (in Rom. Hist) each of the political divisions (originally ...

In the light of the fact that Uganda was colonised by Britons, whose native language is English—at the official level anyway—it does not take a great deal of imagination to see why the term “tribe” rather than “community” or any other term was preferred and for reasons that had nothing to do with English grammar.

Strategic Commentary

Karugire’s thesis is not passive history—it is critique with teeth. Uganda’s modernity begins with an epistemic wound. The use of the term “tribe” wasn’t innocent; it was a linguistic downgrade, transforming structured polities like Buganda into caricatures. This semantic violence enabled colonialism to operate not just through force, but through perception. It created fragmentation where coherence once existed, and it embedded categories that Uganda still struggles to shed. Chapter Two is the...