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Uganda HISTORICAL LEGACIES AND SOCIAL DIVISIONS
As Uganda's first prime minister, Obote displayed a
talent
for acting as a broker for groups divided from each other
by
distance, language, cultural tradition, historical
enmities, and
rivalries in the form of competing religions--Islam, Roman
Catholicism, and Protestantism.
Observers with a powerfully developed sense of
hindsight
could point to a series of divisions within Ugandan
society that
contributed to its eventual national disintegration.
First, the
language gulf between the Nilotic-speaking people of the
north
and the Bantu-speaking peoples of the south was as wide as
that
between speakers of Slavic and of Romance languages in
Europe.
Second, there was an economic divide between the
pastoralists,
who occupied the drier rangelands of the west and north,
and the
agriculturists, who cultivated the better-watered highland
or
lakeside regions. Third, there was a long-standing
division
between the centralized and sometimes despotic rule of the
ancient African kingdoms and the kinship-based politics of
recent
times, which were characterized by a greater sense of
equality
and participation. Furthermore, there was a historical
political
division among the kingdoms themselves. They were often at
odds--
as in the case of Buganda and Bunyoro and between other
precolonial polities that disputed control of particular
lands.
There also were the historical complaints of particular
religious
groups that had lost ground to rivals in the past: for
example,
the eclipse of the Muslims at the end of the nineteenth
century
by Christians allied to British colonialism created an
enduring
grievance. In addition, Bunyoro's nineteenth-century
losses of
territory to an expanding Buganda kingdom, allied to
British
imperialism, gave rise to a problem that would emerge
after
independence as the "lost counties" issue. Another
divisive
factor was the uneven development in the colonial period,
whereby
the south secured railroad transport, cash crops, mission
education, and the seat of government, seemingly at the
expense
of other regions which were still trying to catch up after
independence. Another factor was conflicting local
nationalism
(often misleadingly termed "tribalism"), the most
conspicuous
example of which was Buganda, whose population of over one
million, extensive territory in the favored south of
Uganda, and
self-proclaimed superiority created a serious backlash
among
other peoples. Nubians had been brought in from Sudan to
serve as
a colonial coercive force to suppress local tax revolts.
This
community shared little sense of identification with
Uganda. The
presence of an alien community of professional military
people
clustered around military encampments added fuel to the
fire. And
there was another alien community that dominated
commercial life
in the cities and towns--Asians who had arrived with
British
colonial rule. Finally, the closely related peoples of
nearby
Zaire and Sudan soon became embroiled in their own civil
wars
during the colonial period, drawing in ethnically related
Ugandans.
This formidable list of obstacles to national
integration,
coupled with the absence of nationalist sentiment, left
the newly
independent Uganda vulnerable to political instability in
the
1960s. It was by no means inevitable that the government
by
consensus and compromise characterizing the early 1960s
would
devolve into the military near-anarchy of the 1970s. The
conditions contributing to such a debacle, however, were
already
present at independence.
Data as of December 1990
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