Spencer Mawby - The End of Empire in Uganda: Decolonization and Institutional Conflict, 1945-79

The End of Empire in Uganda

Decolonization and Institutional Conflict, 194579

Spencer Mawby

Books about history are also the products of the historical circumstances in which they are written. While I like to believe that the text of this book was not directly determined by the politics of Brexit or forebodings of ecological catastrophe or the ever-stronger grip of information technology upon the human imagination, I am pleased to acknowledge that it was influenced by the many people who have helped me write it and by the common frame of reference which we share as citizens of the early twenty-first century.

It is customary to mention the work of librarians and archivists in providing assistance to authors but I hope the familiarity of such sentiments does not detract from the genuine sense of gratitude one feels towards those who make archival research possible. I would therefore like to thank both the visible front-line staff and the often unseen workers at the institutions I visited over the course of the last five years. They are listed individually in the first section of the bibliography of this book. While each institution has its own character that gives colour to the research experience, what they had in common was a commitment to the preservation of the records on which historians rely.

My visit to Uganda would have been less fruitful, and probably unfeasible, were it not for the willing cooperation of a number of people. For many acts of kindness, great and small, I would like to thank Deus Tumusiime, Nemah Umuziga, Godfrey Asiimwe, Shane Doyle, Lucy Taylor, Derek Peterson, George Roberts and Katherine Bruce-Lockhart. Much of my time in Uganda was spent either in the Africana section of Makerere Library or in the National Archives. In both institutions the staff proved friendly and accommodating. I would like to pay particular tribute to Justine Nalwoga and her staff for their tolerance of my constant queries and requests.

With regard to the often complex protocols of publication, the editors at Bloomsbury, including Brian Wallace, Kumeraysen Vaidhynadhaswamy, Emma Goode, Dan Hutchins, Abigail Lane and Maddie Holder, offered helpful and professional guidance. Teaching and research at the University of Nottingham continued during the preparation of the manuscript, and although it is somewhat invidious to single out individuals from an inspiring group of colleagues I would like to extend my particular gratitude to Gwilym Dodd, Jrg Arnold, Claire Taylor and Michael Craven (who is more or less an honorary member of the Department of History whether he likes it or not). More geographically distant academic friends who provided good counsel include Gareth Curless, Christopher Prior and Adam Biscoe. And yet again Bryan White proved a scrupulous proof-reader at a crucial stage in the preparation of the text.

The usual ups and downs of life continued during the course of research and writing. I would like to recognize the durability and good humour of my mother, Sheila Mawby, who continued to offer sage advice about the practicalities of working life, despite enduring some tribulations of her own. Over the last few years I also acquired a new set of familiar relations with whom I shared my thoughts more often than they may have found entirely convenient. Among the many topics we discussed was my ambivalent relationship with adjectives. In that spirit I would like to offer my largest thanks to the curious Amal Oumazzane, the indefatigable Tarik Oumazzane, the intrepid Ghizlane Kassioui and the observant Peter Jones to whom this book is dedicated.

With the declaration of the countrys independence in October 1962, Milton Obote took over responsibility for Ugandas political affairs from the British colonial Governor, Walter Coutts. Now that the most powerful political figure in the country was a man born in Uganda and raised by a farming family from the northern district of Lango, it was possible to imagine that decolonization was complete. Yet anybody interested in conducting an audit of the new nations most powerful people might well be persuaded that Obotes premiership was an anomaly. The head of the Ugandan army in 1962 was the son of a British army officer who was educated at Stowe school called Bill Cheyne; the bishop responsible for administering the countrys Anglican Church was Leslie Brown, who had gone to school in London and whose first ecclesiastical appointment was to a curacy in Portsmouth, and the editor of the countrys most influential newspaper, the Uganda Argus, was Charles Harrison, a journalist from Manchester who had served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War and later became the East African correspondent of The Times. Other significant Ugandan institutions also bore the imprint of imperial connections. The influence of British practices upon the legislature was unmistakeable. Although the debating chamber of the new parliament building in Kampala was by 1962 populated by Ugandan legislators, the presiding office or clerk was an imperial bureaucrat from Malta called Philip Pullicino, who had previously worked in Belize and Zanzibar. The leader of the Ugandan Trade Union Congress (UTUC) was Humphrey Luande, who was suspected of being a harbinger of foreign influence because for many years his salary had been paid by British and American labour organizations. His origins in the border regions with Kenya also meant that for some observers of the labour scene, including Obote, Luande embodied the dominant role of Luo outsiders in Ugandan trade unions. Although a marginal figure in most modern histories of Uganda, Luandes career attests to the role of institutions as vehicles for external influence even after Africanization. In foreign affairs, Uganda joined the Commonwealth at independence. As a later Secretary-General of the organization described in his memoirs, relations between members of that organization in 1962 continued to be largely conducted through institutions and organs of the British government.

Europeans like Cheyne, Brown and Harrison were gradually replaced as the leading representatives of army, church and press by Africans like Shaban Opolot, Erica Sabiti and Ateker Ejalu. The biographies of these men had two common features of significance for the future of Ugandas institutions. The first concerned their geographical origins. National institutions in newly independent states often drew from groups previously at the margins of economic and political life. Obote and Amin, who came to prominence despite being born far from the centres of power, were only the most significant examples of this larger trend in Ugandan history. Opolot, Sabiti and Ejalu were also figures from the periphery in the sense that none of them originated in the most populous region of Buganda, whose elites had gained most from the imposition of indirect colonial rule. A preoccupation with ethnic identity might be regarded as misleading were it not for a second biographical commonality, which was that all three men had mastered the forms and practices of British institutions. In the case of Sabiti and Opolot this apprenticeship became a vocation: they entered the Native Anglican Church (NAC) and the Kings African Rifles (KAR) as young men and after many years of attachment rose to the top of the sacerdotal and martial hierarchies. Ejalus principal commitment was to the nationalist cause but his first forays into journalism were as a student in Britain and he utilized the skills he learned there in the cause of Obotes Ugandan Peoples Congress (UPC). The exposure of Opolot, Sabiti and Ejalu to British methods corroborates the point often made by African nationalist politicians and scholars that political independence did not automatically portend a transformation in cultural, social and economic life. The trajectories of Ugandan institutions after 1962 were continuous with their past orbits. Rather than an ephemeral manifestation of colonial influence, the introduction of institutions during the colonial era embedded concepts, regulations and organizational patterns which shaped Ugandas later history. The institutional infrastructure of decolonization introduced new formal elements into Ugandan life that were intended to facilitate imperial retreat and enable the perpetuation of British influence. Ugandans responded to these developments by seeking ways in which institutions could be made to serve their own purposes. Differences over what these aims should be continued to cause conflict within and between institutions after independence. Before elaborating on these themes it is necessary to sketch the historical and historiographical context of decolonization in Uganda.