The Nineteenth-Century Nubian Mutiny in Colonial Uganda: A Social-Historical Perspective

Abstract

This article examines how and why the nineteenth-century Nubian mutiny in colonial Uganda was not only a military mutiny as widely perceived by many scholars but a social uprising as well. Recognised for their military skills and discipline by the British in the early nineteenth century, in 1897, the Nubian soldiers serving in the British army mutinied against their British masters whom they accused of breach of a social contract made between themselves, under their leader Selim Bey, and Fredrick Lugard on behalf of the British at Kavali in the southwestern corner of Lake Albert in 1891. I use archival written materials augmented with oral histories of both the Nubian and non-Nubian participants, to provide an in-depth socio-historical account of the nineteenth-century Nubian mutiny in Uganda.