Mutesa, The Missionaries, and Christian Conversion in Buganda

Abstract

The closing decades of the nineteenth century were eventful ones for the kingdom of Buganda. Under the dynamic leadership of Kabaka Suna II (d. 1856), the kingdom had achieved unprecedented size and influence among the many kingdoms to the north and west of Lake Victoria at just the time when new, and troubling, forces began to impinge on the lake region. By the mid-1840s trade routes from the east coast had been extended beyond Karagwe around and across Lake Victoria to Buganda by Muslim traders from Zanzibar. The guns, cloth, and other trade goods that the traders exchanged for ivory and, later, slaves introduced a new and potentially destabilizing element into local and regional politics, threatening both the position of central rulers if subsidiary chiefs were able to acquire arms independently and the security of states unable to acquire arms. In Suna moved quickly to bring the traders to the capital, to settle them in their own quarter under his control, and to impose a royal monopoly on trade. His successor, Kabaka Mutesa (1856-1884), initially excluded the traders while he consolidated his own power, but then reintroduced the royal monopoly and sought to prohibit the traders from reaching his arch enemy, Bunyoro. To further augment his own forces, he continually tried to entice the soldiers accompanying Swahili, and later European, caravans to desert to his own forces, and he repeatedly requested arms and support from Speke, Stanley, and the missionaries who followed them. The two kabakas were largely successful in these policies, but increasing dependence on trade required extensive expansion of state control to procure ever-diminishing quantities of ivory as well as to acquire slaves.1 Mutesa was also faced from the early years of his reign with a threat from Egyptian forces to the north. Throughout the 1860s and early 1870s the Egyptian seemed to be alternately arrayed with or against Buganda's enemy *The following article is based on an honors thesis, Mutesa, Missionaries, and Misconceptions: A Fresh Look at the Christianization of Buganda, written by Jean Brierley at La Trobe University in 1976. Jean was struck by cancer shortly after finishing the thesis, and was thus unfortunately unable to revise it for publication herself. The original was considerably longer, was limited somewhat by the paucity of sources available in Australia, and was written prior to the extensive literature on health and healing now available. Nevertheless, Brierley still has something valuable to add to the discussion of conversion in Buganda. In revising it for publication, I have had to reduce it considerably and to reorganize the argument extensively, but I have sought to do so without altering or updating its content or diluting Jean's forceful argument and feisty style. She would not have approved otherwise. Jean's original acknowledgements were to Jenni Gliddon, Janine Free, Helen Ferguson, and myself for friendship, support and advice. I, in turn, would like to thank Jim Brierley for his help and kind permission to revise and publish Jean's work, Bill Darrow and John Rowe for their helpful comments on my drafts, and most of all, Jean, for the restless energy, acerbic wit, and perceptive insights she brought to her work and to all who worked with her. (TTS)

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