This paper attempts to provide a frame of reference for evaluating the role of ordinary rural Africans in national movements, in the belief that scholarly preoccupation with elites will only partially illumine the mainsprings of nationalism. Kenya has been taken as the main field of enquiry, with contrasts and comparisons drawn from Uganda and Tanganyika. The processes of social change are discussed with a view to establishing that by the end of the colonial period one can talk of peasants rather than tribesmen in some of the more progressive areas. This change entailed a decline in the leadership functions of tribal chiefs who were also the official agents of colonial rule, but did not necessarily mean the firm establishment of a new type of rural leadership. The central part of the paper is taken up with an account of the competition between these older and newer leaderships, for official recognition rather than a mass following. A popular following was one of the conditions for such recognition, but neither really achieved this prior to 1945 except in Kikuyuland, and there the newer leaders did not want official recognition. After 1945 the newer leadership, comprising especially traders and officials of marketing co-operatives, seems everywhere to have won a properly representative position, due mainly to the enforced agrarian changes which brought the peasant face to face with the central government, perhaps for the first time. This confrontation, together with the experience of failure in earlier and more local political activity, resulted in a national revolution coalescing from below, co-ordinated rather than instigated by the educated elite.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0021853700008380

Some Origins of Nationalism in East Africa

In 1959 C. C. Wrigley published ‘The Christian revolution in Buganda’. an important essay summarizing a decade of intensive research into Buganda politics during the nineteenth century. There he demonstrated how ‘Ganda society had undergone, immediately before the advent of British imperial power, a genuine revolution, which had brought about drastic changes in ideology and in the structure as well as the personnel of government and that as a result of these [and other] changes it was uniquely fitted to cope with the new situation which confronted it in the last years of the nineteenth century’. This essay seeks to reconstruct an intriguing attempt made by the Bakungu client-chiefs who triumphed in that ‘Christian revolution’ to perpetuate their power in the Buganda kingdom by making further institutional changes during the second decade of the twentieth century. But first it is necessary to discuss the general factors shaping political relationships between these client-chiefs and their European rulers during the first and third decades of this century. In this it is possible to take account not only of several secondary sources published since the appearance of Wrigley's article nearly ten years ago, but also of certain primary materials which have recently come to light.

The Bakungu Chiefs of Buganda Under British Colonial Rule, 1900-1930

The question of populism in Uganda was investigated by Professor D. A. Low in this journal in 1964.1 He argued that the concept of populism was appropriate to describe the political agitation by the independent small landholders and poor peasants against the breakdown of the traditional hierarchical structure of Buganda under the impact of colonial rule. The populists were particularly concerned to reduce their economic disabilities through control of the marketing system for cotton, but at the same time were concerned to articulate ‘the kingdom's corporate solidarity’. To that extent Buganda populism was socially conservative, though it may have seemed radical to the colonial rulers.

White Populism in Southern Rhodesia

Buganda and British Overrule 1900-1955

In May 1961 a small group of men formed the Kabaka Yekka movement in the Kingdom of Buganda. Their simple objective was to unite the Baganda behind the throne, the symbol and guarantee of Buganda's separate identity. The great fear was that the election of a national Democratic Party government in the previous March had marked a decisive stage in the destruction of Buganda's special position within Uganda. Kabaka Yekka's appeal to Ganda loyalty was instantly successful, but it was not until the Kabaka's ministers agreed to accept membership of independent Uganda, and to support Kabaka Yekka in Buganda, that Kabaka Yekka could win popular support and deal effectively with the Democratic Party. But when Kabaka Yekka became an ‘official’ movement, its whole nature and function was changed. There had been differences at the beginning, but now the simple objective barely disguised the contradictions within the movement, while Kabaka Yekka became a means to personal promotion as well as the guardian of the ‘national’ interest. Above all, Kabaka Yekka now included the chiefs, who wanted to preserve the existing political and social arrangements within Buganda. So by February 1962 Kabaka Yekka had become the party for the Baganda and for the status quo within Buganda. It was a party which, because it was identified with the Kabakaship, was able to destroy the Democratic Party in elections for the Buganda Lukiko, and a party which, although in alliance with Dr Obote's Uganda People's Congress in national politics, had aroused sentiments and interests pointing ultimately, if not irrevocably, to Ganda separation.

Patriotism and neo-traditionalism in Buganda: the Kabaka Yekka ('The King Alone') movement, 1961-1962

Is it quite certain that analysts of political forces in Africa are looking in all the right corners? We may perhaps recall that there have been critical lacunae before. After all African nationalism crept up unawares on a previous generation; and if, to take a wider example, one looks at studies of Indian politics before about 1950 there is hardly any analysis of the role of caste. It seems worthwhile, therefore, to go a-probing.

The Advent of Populism in Buganda

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The Advent of Populism in Buganda