Until the British established a protectorate, Uganda was not one country but many: The area consisted of four kingdoms and a number of ethnic groups organized along differing segmentary lines. The centralized kingdoms were in the South, and the people in the south generally belonged to the Bantu-speaking groups, who had little linguistic, ethnic, or cultural affinity with the taller, darker Nilotic groups in the North. Much has been written about this North-South divide in Uganda. It is sometimes exaggerated, but it is always there, and it still poses perhaps the greatest problem for Yoweri Museveni's government today.
The British compounded the difficulties by favoring the kingdoms, and according them special self-governing privileges, in the system of "indirect rule." The central kingdom of Buganda, especially, had a formal agreement with the British granting them semiautonomy and a special status within the protectorate. They remained a state within a state, headed by their Kabaka (king), and at the time of independence would have preferred to break off and form their own nation-state, sloughing off the poorer, less developed areas of Uganda.
This strong political separatism of the Buganda people has always presented a major obstacle to the postindependence governments of Uganda in building up a spirit of national unity. Museveni can approach it in a different way, because for the first time the government is predominantly "southern" in its personnel and its support, but whether Buganda aspiration can be contained within it remains to be seen. Already there have been pleas to restore the Kabakaship and put Prince Ronald Mutebi on the throne. Museveni has allowed him back in the country but has firmly forbidden talk of a restoration of the monarchy.
Royalist sentiments, however, are not to be discounted and can be latched on to other political grievances at any time.
Another troublesome historical legacy is the pattern of military recruitment. The British had the notion that only certain ethnic groups made the best soldiers and recruited for the King's African Rifles almost exclusively from the northerners - Acholi, Langi, and West Nilers, the "martial races" of Uganda. Milton Obote, the first ruler of independent Uganda, was himself a Langi and continued that process. So of course did Idi Amin. Museveni's guerrilla force, which has now taken over, was the first predominantly southern military force in this century. It triumphed, but the result has been a large remnant of disaffected northern soldiers in northern Uganda and southern Sudan who continue to threaten the new regime and reimpose the old order of northern military predominance.
The unequal distribution of economic wealth and development poses another thorny problem for Museveni. When the British introduced cash crops, they found that the highly profitable cotton crop grew best in the southern and eastern regions, and peasant farmers in Buganda and Eastern Province became richer than most people in East Africa. Coffee was even more successful, but again needed the lush climate of the South. The barren, arid regions of the North could not compete, and indeed the colonial government encouraged this economic imbalance, in which the North became merely the labor supply for the South. The result was that the whole process of modernization, involving the spread of a cash economy, the growth of towns, an infrastructure of services,
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