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Example research essay topic: British Rule African Countries - 2,112 words

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Introduction The past is another country, where it is only possible to go as a tourist, and which we will never fully understand. We can describe what we see, but it is far more difficult to know why people acted in the way they did, or what they believed, and why they believed it. Uganda too is another country, which did not even exist before the white man went there. Even the name reflects the ideas of the first explorers, whose gateway into the new territory was via the Buganda tribe, whom they were later to use as their colonial agents as British rule was extended.

Those who discovered Ugandan and the source of the Nile which the first explorers were seeking - men such as Speke and Stanley - and the soldiers and administrators who came after them undoubtedly believed in the superiority of European culture in a way which we today would consider unacceptably racist. Although they were impressed by the sophistication of Buganda society, they implicitly assumed that Africa was more backward than Europe, that Africans would benefit from exposure to Western standards and practises, and of course from Christianity. To a degree this allowed them either to justify or even to suppress what now looks to be the crude reality that their underlying agenda was the extension of British influence, the promotion of British commerce, and the expansion of the British Empire, all without reference to the actual wishes of the Ugandan people. But then, even in Britain at teatime, democracy was a new idea and many people, including women, still did not have the vote. Having said that, many Ugandans would today accept that their country had at some stage to be brought into contact with the modern world, and even that they were comparatively lucky in being colonized by the British rather than by, for instance, the Belgians whose brutal rule in the Congo was far cruelly than that of the British Protectorate in Uganda. Moreover, the fact that the arrival of the British in Uganda was not accompanied by the theft of African land for white farmers - as it was in Zimbabwe or Kenya - meant that some of the bitterness and resentment felt about European rule in some African countries was not a feature in Uganda.

So race relations, even today, are more relaxed in Uganda than in many parts of the Continent. In this project I have tried to explain the history of the arrival of white men in Uganda, and how this process left some important fault lines in Ugandan society which were to haunt the newly independent stage once the British had left. Can the Victorian explorers who first came to Mutesa's tent be blamed for what was to happen a hundred years later? Even if they could, what would be the point of doing so? It seems to me that the best we can hope to do is to try and understand how and why things happened, in order to try harder to think about what might be the cultural assumptions with which we see the world, and which the future will surely find to be similarly strange and foreign. For one day we shall be the past, the inhabitants of another country for those who will look back and wonder why we acted in the way we did, what we believed, and why we believed it.

The beginning of foreign intrusion- Kabaka Mutesa- King of the Buganda By 1800, the tribal groups in the country we now call Uganda were fairly cut off from the outside world... But in the mid- 19 th Century the first Swahili-speaking slave traders arrived on the East Coast of Uganda. Their leader was a man called Ahmed Bin Ibrahim. He soon made contact with the dominant regional power, Buganda. Buganda at that stage was ruled by a man called Kabaka (i.

e. King) Mutesa, who allowed Ibrahim to operate from Kampala, the capital. Mutesa even collaborated with the traders in slave-raiding parties in the neighbouring regions. But soon Ibrahim, although claiming he had merely come for business purposes, tried to impose the idea of embracing Islam upon Kabaka Mutesa, and more Arabs arrived in Buganda. After 1850 Europeans started to trickle into Buganda and the region. The first was John Having Speke who came in 1862 in search of the source of the Nile.

It is important not to be too romantic about life in the Kingdom of Buganda when white men arrived. When Speke showed Mutesa how guns worked by shooting four cows, Mutesa gave a rifle to a page and asked him to test it by shooting a man in the outer court, which the page promptly did. From Speke's account, nobody around Mutesa even bothered to ask who had been killed. The discovery of the source of the Nile prompted interest in the area from Egypt, which feared that the source could fall into hostile hands given the importance of the Nile for the economic life of Egypt. But attempts by the ruler of Egypt, Khedive Ismail, to incorporate the source of the Nile into the Equatoria Province of the Egyptian Empire were thwarted by Mutesa and the Bunyoro King Kabalega, who defeated armies and Egyptian agents such as Samuel Banker. The Buganda and the Bunyoro had long been rivals for supremacy, but found themselves as partners in the effort to resist colonialism.

The final blow to the Egyptian scheme was eventually to be delivered by the Mahdist revolt in the Sudan (included in the Egyptian empire since the 1820 s), which effectively blocked Egyptian advances into Uganda. But by this stage Islam had started to take root. Indeed, Kabaka Mutesa had half-heartedly welcomed this faith although he had resisted actual conversion. There ensued conflict between the Muslims and Mutesa in 1867, leading to the burning of many Arabs. These were the first of many Ugandan martyrs.

When Henry Morton Stanley a Welsh (but pretending to be American) explorer reached Buganda in 1875, Mutesa asked him to arrange for Christian missionaries to come to Buganda. It is highly unlikely that Mutesa knew exactly what he was doing. His principal aim was probably that the Christians would bring guns with them which he could use to ward off the Egyptians. Stanley wrote a letter to Britain appealing for Christian missionaries to be sent to Buganda. This received an immediate response, with generous financial donations pouring into the coffers of the Anglican missionaries of the Church Missionary Society who arrived in Uganda in 1877 as the first group of Christian missionaries. Two years later they were followed by the Catholic White Fathers lead by Father Lourdes who was called by the Baganda maker.

But the separate Protestant and Catholic missionary efforts sadly set the stage for some of the religious conflicts to come. Mutesa and his courtiers were bewildered by the two sets of white men each claiming to represent a brand of Christianity more valid than the other. When Kabaka Mutesa died in 1884, his son Mwanga was a volatile head-strong teenager who took the throne just as the complex religious rivalries in Buganda were building to a climax. Things were getting out of control. The Muslims, Catholics and Protestants had turned themselves into incipient political parties and were competing for political influences around the royal family and the court noblemen. The Muslims took advantage of their longer stay in the country and argued to Mwanga that the actual intentions of the Christians were not religious but to colonize Buganda and take the land.

Mwanga therefore decided to stop any Christians entering Buganda. When he heard that Bishop Hannington was about to arrive in Buganda, Mwanga ordered that Hannigton be killed before he reached Buganda. He also tried to prevent the Buganda people from attending the missionaries classes, but many of them resisted his efforts. In February 1886 he had a few of them burned to death at Namugongo, followed by a mass burning of Christian converts in June that year, many of them roasted on a spit. This move misfired badly, since instead of turning away from Christianity the Buganda sought to be baptised in growing numbers. Mwanga was increasingly disturbed by the religious activities in Buganda and planned to chase away from his kingdom all foreign religious groups.

But he failed, and in fact his plot to chase them away provoked open rebellion against him by the two Christian groups and the Muslims. In 1888 Mwanga was overthrown. But as soon as Mwanga had left the scene, the Christian-Muslim alliance broke up The Muslims staged their coup by installing a Muslim- Kalema - as the Kabaka. Hostilities ensued between the Muslims and the Christians, with the Christians forcing the Muslims to flee from Kampala, the capital of Buganda. The Christians groups then rallied behind their former persecutor Mwanga and finally managed to overthrow the Muslim regime in 1889.

Mwanga was reinstated but real power had actually passed to the Christian leaders who had a huge influence over the people. The British take over. The above events were happening against the background of an increasing scramble for Africa by the major European powers. The Congress of Berlin had decided in 1885 that the whole of Eastern Africa was to be a German and British sphere of influence.

Trading companies were therefore formed to claim areas of East Africa on behalf of their respective countries. The Germans moved fast and made several treaties around Mount Kilimanjaro and within areas on the Tanzanian coast. The British also plunged into the race but fearing that the Germans might get ahead of them they pressed for an Anglo- German agreement which was signed in 1886. This agreement practically gave Kenya to Britain and Tanganyika to Germany. Neither the British nor the Germans asked the local people for their views. The 1886 agreement left the question of who was to take over Uganda unsettled, and, conflict soon arose with the German agent, Carl Peters concluding a treaty of protection with Mwanga.

Peters achieved this with the support of the French Catholic missionaries who had helped to put Mwanga back on the throne. The British worried that the German government might make Peters protectorate official, and so engaged in some frantic diplomacy leading to an Anglo-German agreement in 1890. Under this agreement, the British gave the Germans - at that stage dreaming of building up their naval power - an island called Heligoland in the North South (only about three miles around, a barren rock covered with seagull droppings), in exchange for the Germans giving up any claim to Uganda, or Zanzibar or Equatoria (about 100. 000 square miles of Africa in all), which would become British protectorates. Captain Lugard of the Imperial British East African Company (IBEA Co) was the pivotal figure in the establishment of real British rule. He arrived in 1890 and started to work out a way of colonizing the whole of Uganda. Immediately, when he arrived he concluded a treaty of protection with Mwanga.

The Bunyoro remained a significant obstacle. From 1869 Kabalega, the ruler of Bunyoro, had re-organised his forces and embarked on the reconquest of lost territories that had once belonged to him. By 1890 Kabalega ha already chased away Kasagama of the Kingdom of Toro, who fled to Buganda. Lugard moved on to Toro to restore Kasagama, and then he turned his attention to Anyone.

He returned to Buganda in 1892 only to find that the Protestants and Catholics - with the Muslims now defeated -had fallen out. Lugard intervened on the side of the Protestants giving them the guns to ensure their victory. Thereafter Buganda was carved up along religious lines. The Catholics were given Buddy, the Muslims retired to But ambala and Gamma and the Protestants took the counties near to and surrounding the town of Kampala. Unfortunately, these religious divisions were to be replicated elsewhere in Uganda as British influence spread. By 1982, the IBEA Co.

was already in financial difficulties. The company threatened to pull out of Buganda unless the British government built a railway to link from Uganda to the coast. The debate in Britain was whether to retain Uganda or not. In 1892, Sir Gerald Portal was sent to Uganda to assess the countrys potential, to see if Uganda was worth colonizing. The key point was that African countries like Uganda were primarily seen in terms of their economic potential for the imperial power. There was indeed some reluctance in Britain to occupy Uganda because at first there did not seem to be an obvious material advantage in doing so.

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Research essay sample on British Rule African Countries

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