Immigrants and indigenes: the Lost Counties Dispute and the evolution of ethnic identity in colonial Buganda

Abstract

This is a study of ethnic politics in colonial Buganda, one of East Africa's largest and oldest kingdoms. It compares two strategies of ethnic integration: one designed to discipline the enormous, disparate body of economic migrants who sought to share in Buganda's cash-cropping wealth; the other aimed at undermining the irredentism of the Nyoro population of the “Lost Counties”, territory that had been conquered by the British and transferred to their Ganda allies during the 1890s conquest of Bunyoro. Some mechanisms – the requirement to acknowledge the authority of Buganda's king, the universal insistence on Luganda as the language of public life, and the use of the court system as a means of coercion and education – were employed in both contexts. But in Buganda's heartland, most Ganda wanted immigrants primarily for their labour, and viewed the prospect of their integration as landholders, in-laws and chiefs with some alarm. By contrast, in the Lost Counties, the need to assimilate the local Nyoro majority was almost universally accepted by Ganda. Here, customary law was used to suppress Nyoro culture, Ganda names and clans were imposed on Nyoro subjects, and Nyoro were counted as Ganda in censuses. As the colonial period wore on the greater power of the Ganda state was employed in increasingly complex ways to secure the loyalty of the amenable Nyoro elite, and repress the dissident minority. A number of factors explain this divergence. The structure of colonial politics focused Ganda ethnic identity more on territoriality than had previously been the case; Buganda's historic rivalry with Bunyoro encouraged this relatively extreme policy of absorption; the loss of the Lost Counties would weaken Buganda's physical and demographic pre-eminence within Uganda; and Nyoro irredentism, by securing the support of political elites across Uganda, heightened Ganda fears of encirclement by hostile nationalist forces.