Academic literature on the topic 'Apolo Kagwa'

Abstract My article contributes to the current debates on travel, with special emphasis on Africans’ travels to China. I theorize travel writing from a South-South perspective, thereby bypassing the European colonial era, which is usually considered the watershed of travel writing. Besides, I interrogate the uncritical praise of China by the Ugandan traveller, Taddeo Bwambale Nyondo, as well as the absence of criticism of the country even when there are moments when this criticism could have come in handy. I argue that Nyondo is a subaltern writer, who visits a highly-industrialized country from which he hopes his country can learn key lessons on development, which makes him similar to Ham Mukasa and Sir Apolo Kagwa who visited England in 1902 and recorded their impressions of the country in Uganda’s first written travelogue, Uganda’s Katikiro in England (1904). By juxtaposing the contemporary writer’s views of China with the earlier travellers’ view of England, I hope to create a dialogic relationship with this earlier travelogue tradition, thereby giving readers the opportunity to see the connections and disjuncture between these two periods (i.e., 1900s and 2000s).

Reliable data relating to Buganda's pre-1800 past has come to historians in the form of a thin trickle. Students of more ancient Ganda history have been compelled to rely on the accounts by literate Ganda composed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most notably the work of Apolo Kagwa. The effective usage of these accounts is fraught with difficulties, difficulties which are well-documented in the case of Buganda and which have been explored by, in particular, Wrigley, Kiwanuka, Rowe, and Henige. These writers have justifiably questioned the validity of such recorded political history. The idea that Buganda was governed by a Western-style royal dynasty, with a chronologically-structured succession list, was first put in writing by Speke, who provided the earliest such kinglist.Over the ensuing forty years this kinglist was gradually lengthened and virtually set in stone, largely through the writings of Kagwa. The explanation of precolonial Ganda government in die terminology of Western constitutional monarchy doubtless served very well the purposes of the new colonial power, which was able to claim that it was merely backing up an extant political organization able to articulate the practices of ‘civilised’ governance. This arrangement also clearly suited the Ganda, as Wrigley and Twaddle have suggested. Both authors incisively argue that the Ganda kinglist was manipulated to meet the challenges of the colonial period.There seems little reason to doubt, and every reason to believe, that the recording of Buganda's more ancient past (for which there is no corroborating written source) was indeed often carefully engineered to produce the desired results. The attempt to ‘clarify’ local power struggles, the legitimization of particular claims to authority, and die opportunity to provide the world with the definitive account of one's own ‘national history’ (an opportunity, surely, which few could resist) were all factors which have combined to demand skepticism among historians concerning the historicity of ‘traditional’ accounts.

Apolo Kagwa was katikiro or chief minister of Buganda from 1889 to 1926. His career well exemplifies the thesis that, in the context of colonial intrusion, collaboration could be the most effective form of resistance. His co-operation with the British probably saved the Ganda monarchy, while earning him a knighthood. Not least among the achievements of this remarkable man was the publication, in 1901, of his Bakabaka b'e Buganda, ‘The Kings of Buganda’. Over half the book is a compilation of oral history, based on what Wrigley calls ‘the five generations of primary and secondary reminiscence’ (p. 12) : that is, the span of memory from ego's grandfather/grandmother to ego's grandson/granddaughter. It reaches back to about the middle of the eighteenth century. The remainder of the book is Kagwa's recension of oral tradition having to do with the more distant Ganda past. Wrigley tells us that Kingship and State is ‘an extended commentary’ on Kagwa's work, but warns us that it is ‘at least as much about tradition as it is about Buganda’ (p. 7). It is, and unfortunately so, for Wrigley locks his inquiry into the unprofitable debates of the 1970s about the nature of African tradition.

Semei Kakungulu enjoyed at least nine lives in the area of the Uganda Protectorate immediately before, during, and after the imposition of British protectorate rule there at the close of last century, in his successive roles as elephant hunter, guerrilla leader, Ganda chief, border warlord, British ally in military campaigns, “native collector,” colonial client-king, President of the Busoga Lukiko, and leader of the anti-medicine Bamalaki and Bayudaya separatist sects. The purpose of these notes, however, is not to provide more details about these successive phases in Kakungulu's extraordinary career, but rather to comment briefly on the nine major surviving vernacular accounts of his very full life.John Rowe remarks that “it was natural that biographies, particularly of men of heroic proportions, should also [have been] mobilized in the struggle against moral decline” after the First World War by Ganda vernacular authors, along with works of moral admonition and military memoir once uncritical admiration for British Christianity gave way to a more guarded and wary respect for things British with the increased penetration of Buganda by both British rule and mercantile capitalism. Rowe may also be right in saying that the many biographies of Kakungulu in Luganda “may have reflected the particular attraction of a non-conforming heroic figure who turned his back on the ‘establishment,’ carved a kingdom for himself in the east and virtually thumbed his nose at Apolo Kagwa and the British.” Certainly, this is a major attraction as regards my biographical interest in the man! But, as I hope the following notes on his nine principal vernacular lives may indicate, there are also other explanations.

AbstractThis article explores the intellectual history of dreaming practices in the eastern African kingdom of Buganda. Whereas Muslim dissenters used their dreams to challenge colonial authority following the kingdom's late nineteenth-century religious wars, political historians such as Apolo Kaggwa removed the political practice of dreaming from Buganda's official histories to deplete the visionary archives from which dissenters continued to draw. Kaggwa's strategy, though, could only be pressed so far. Recently unearthed vernacular sources show that Christian activists, such as Erieza Bwete and Eridadi Mulira, continued to marshal their dreams and literacy to imagine competing visions of Buganda's colonial monarchy. Earlier scholars had argued that modernity and literacy would displace the political function of dreams. This article, by contrast, proposes that sleeping visions took on new, more complicated meanings throughout the twentieth century. Literacy offered new technologies to expound upon the political implications of dreams and a vast repository of symbols to enrich interpretative performances.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries the kingdom of Buganda in East Africa endured rapid changes which threatened its autonomy and power, including repeated civil wars, conversion Christianity, and the gradual transition to British colonial rule under the Uganda Protectorate. Apolo Kagwa (1864-1927) played important roles throughout, serving as prime minister and then as regent to two Bugandan kings, while also being knighted by the British. Kagwa needs to be recognized for his creative work in adapting politics and culture to protect and preserve the integrity and future of Buganda; this new biography informed by recent historical scholarship advances this. Pursuing his own interests, but also those of the kingdom, he mediated political and cultural change with the intent of renovating Buganda, heeding local politics while adeptly anticipating and manipulating British interests in the region, to help prepare and secure Buganda for the colonial period.