In the flurry of scholarly literature over the last twenty years or so on nineteenth-century British imperial history, it is remarkable how seldom the peoples who were actually on the receiving end of empire make much more than a fleeting appearance. The inability, or perhaps reluctance, of historians to ‘do both’ – that is, empire and its subjects – is a cause of some regret, for it has meant that the two worlds of Africanist and British imperial history remain oddly segregated. The two books under review here are exceptional in this regard and indeed in several other respects. The appearance of Low's book on the creation of Uganda is especially welcome, coming as it does at the end of a distinguished career spent examining empire, its local impact, and its dismantling in both East Africa and South Asia. It has also been a career of remarkable longevity: it is several decades since Low first went into print on the relationship between Buganda and the British, and his work has been core reading for students concerned with the history of both Uganda and the wider region for close to fifty years. Price, by contrast, is a relative newcomer to African history, following many years' work on various aspects of British history, including, increasingly, imperial culture. Taken together, Low and Price tell the story of how empire and imperial culture were created in those frontier zones of expanding British hegemony, in eastern and southern African history respectively.
The peoples at the heart of these studies are the Ganda and the Xhosa – both with histories of intense interaction with the British, culminating in British rule, but experiencing very different outcomes. The stories of both peoples reveal much about the ‘making’ or the ‘fabricating’, as the two titles have it, of empire at its edges. The Ganda and the Xhosa each fundamentally shaped the British empire at those edges. The Ganda were particularly ‘successful’: their political and cultural systems impressed the British and lent themselves to the achievement of British aims across the region. The Xhosa, in contrast, got in the way, failed to meet expectations and to adapt, and ultimately frustrated missionary and official endeavours to ‘improve’ them. Something similar, of course, can be said of Bunyoro, Buganda's long-term neighbour and competitor. The outcome was two very different stations for the two peoples in the new colonial order and, in a sense, two very different empires, or perhaps, more appropriately, two aspects of a bewilderingly complex beast. While there could be no doubting British technological power, the Ganda might espy a somewhat more benevolent empire than could the Xhosa, who experienced, in the end, a brutally hegemonic system willing to dispense with legal and political niceties in its pursuit of conquest.
Price's early focus is on Christian missionary culture with respect to the Xhosa frontier; he explores how missionary work was implemented among the Xhosa themselves, describes the utopian ideals and struggles with the realities of the frontier, and discusses the attempts by missionaries to ‘get to know’ the peoples thus earmarked for spiritual progress. What missionaries actually encountered – as colonial officials would later on – was a rather more ambiguous relationship than their training had prepared them for. The Xhosa were often interested in Christianity, but their refusal to behave as expected, and their dogged adherence to unpalatable practices and views, led to missionary frustration – and, in time, to the emergence of a hard line among many evangelists on the frontier. Price uses the example of William Shrewsbury, who ‘moved fairly rapidly along a spectrum from cultural relativist to racial essentialist’ (p. 85). The need for violence against the Xhosa was deeply disappointing to the British, whose ‘knowledge’ of these people had failed them, another of Price's core themes; and thus a new system of knowledge, a new approach, was required. The ‘savagery’ of the Xhosa led to the collapse of the optimistic missionary worldview; to some extent, this was related to mid-century shifts in racial thought, but, Price argues, it actually pre-dated these. Price uses the emergent British discourse around the Xhosa, the growing number of contemporary studies of them, to demonstrate the move from evangelical humanitarianism to racial essentialism – a shift that will be familiar to students of Afro-European interactions in West Africa in much the same period. The new system of ‘knowledge’ that emerged thereafter ultimately placed rather more emphasis on distance from, rather than engagement with, the Xhosa.
Likewise, in political terms, the war of 1850–53 was regarded by British officials as rooted in Xhosa resistance to British civilisation. Tensions swiftly emerged between colonial officials and chiefs, the latter increasingly understood as tyrants blocking progress, the former viewing themselves as the harbingers of liberation and progress. Sir George Grey, the energetic and interventionist governor of Cape Colony, sought the legal and political moderation of what he saw as excessive chiefly power; thus once again did British ‘knowledge’ fail them. In the wake of the catastrophic cattle-killing of the mid 1850s, the British sought to identify a chiefly conspiracy, and did so with the express aims of both crushing the chiefs' authority and, paradoxically, rendering them useful to the advance of British civilisation. The combination of the cattle-killing and imperial intervention ultimately spelled disaster for the Xhosa chiefs, as the British sought to erode the power of the chiefs and render them ‘reliable pipelines for the transmission of imperial authority and culture’ (p. 296). And so it was that the full (il)legal force of the putative liberal empire was brought to bear on the Xhosa chiefs, whose power was destroyed through a series of carefully managed prosecutions.
Many of these themes emerge in Low's examination of late nineteenth-century ‘Uganda’. Low is the master of this particular story: the arrival of competing Christian denominations, as well as Islam, in Buganda; the resultant civil war; the arrival of the Imperial British East Africa Company. The events of the ‘vortex’ thus created – a useful concept deployed by Low throughout – led to the largely piecemeal British intervention at Buganda's centre. Lugard's handling of the various warring factions – in particular, his utilisation of the military phenomenon of ‘new model warbands’ proliferating across the region, though originating in Bunyoro – leads ultimately to the emergence of the new oligarchy that was ‘to give the colonial era its formative indigenous ballast’ (p. 149). With the situation thus simmering in Buganda, the British succeeded in establishing a ‘raw hegemony’ over Toro and the chieftaincies of Busoga, imposing themselves on extant ‘paramountcies’ to create – as the British did elsewhere in Africa, with varying degrees of success – some sense of ‘traditional legitimacy’ (p. 183). The ‘determining vortexes’ of these regions are explored in rich and compelling detail, as are the stories of the resistances of Mwanga, Kabalega, and the Sudanese, whose narrative arcs have some resonance with that of the Xhosa. Britain's advantages, unsurprisingly, lay in having some powerful local allies and a wealth of resources, ultimately, on which to draw in removing the obstacles to hegemony. In remarkably quick time, colonial settlements were arrived at, with rulers installed, and internal territories defined. The Uganda Agreement of 1900 was the product both of imperial creativity and of Ganda dexterity; other settlements flowed from it, and were based upon it.
Low is much less concerned than is Price with the notions of liberty and humanitarianism supposedly at the heart of the nineteenth-century British empire, or with their dilution; the Ugandan story, rather, is one of intricate local pragmatisms, deft political machinations, and a slender but ultimately robust web of alliances. At the very local level, it seems, the British system of knowledge in Buganda and beyond was rather better than it was in Kaffraria – or perhaps they were just lucky. And the respective regional contexts – the fact that racial hegemony was much more important in Cape Colony and its edges than it was in the Uganda Protectorate – doubtless played their part. But one is struck by the differences in the British approach, and in their dealings with African political elites, in the two regions; ‘knowledge’, inevitably, was influenced by local exigency and local agency, but also by the spiral of response and counter-response between British and Africans, and it was in this flux that empire was ultimately formed.
Price is surely not entirely correct to suggest that the Xhosa were the first African people under direct British control: several groups on the West African coast, notably on the Gold Coast and in Sierra Leone, can claim that debatable honour. Price's otherwise excellent account of the Anglo-African frontier pays but scant attention to European settlers – Boers or British – save for a brief survey of ‘settler discourse’ (pp. 163–9); their inclusion might have further enriched the story. One advantage, however, that Price's book has over Low's lies in the handling of the ever-fascinating sub-theme of perception – European of African, if not vice versa. Price is deeply interested in British perceptions, ‘knowledge’, and resultant discourse about the Xhosa, and sees these – correctly, surely – as essential to understanding how official policy and attitude, as well as missionary strategies, were framed. Low foregoes such a discussion, which is a pity, as it greatly enriches Price's account and would undoubtedly have added much to Low's minutely detailed descriptions of Anglo-Ugandan interactions. There is much wonderful material on which to draw for the 1850s–1900s period, containing imagery and ‘knowledge’ that ultimately provided the cultural and intellectual framework within which the Anglo-Ugandan encounter took place. Incidentally, however, Low does conclude with a description of the visit of Ham Mukasa and Apolo Kagwa to England in 1902, and of their understandable ‘awe’ at what they beheld there; the contrast with the defeated Xhosa chiefs, dispatched to Robben Island, is a poignant one indeed.
In an age in which studies of imperialism ossify with the onset of postmodernist theory, these two authors – to put it bluntly – each tell a bloody good story. They are important reminders from two senior scholars of what can be achieved by – dare it be said – old-fashioned, meticulous empiricism. And both books are certainly exemplary in terms of research, with an exhaustive range of sources used in each. It might be suggested that neither story is especially original; each has been told before – in the case of southern Africa, in Noel Mostert's panoramic account of the Xhosa story; and, in the case of Uganda, by Low himself, among others. But they are masterful, and contribute significantly to our understanding of the building of empire and imperial culture at its edges, and of the histories of the peoples inexorably caught up in the process. These two studies ultimately demonstrate that the different empires thus created were, in a variety of ways, as African as they were British.
