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Even under a bright noon sky, the darkness at the confluence of Nsalo Road, Sir Apollo Kagwa Road and Boundary Road persists like an ineradicable, congenital condition. The high, dense, tropical canopies interlaced by looping monstera vines and luxuriant bougainvillae concealing the inscrutable Perryman Gardens from view keep the air dark. Below, the secretive walls of Madras Gardens pick and give out no light, the rust colours of the mortar-spray walls and deep-set doors that never open do little to leaven the air. Lower down the slope, Delhi Gardens, wider, sunnier, might seem different, but is even more inscrutable; you can live in Kampala all your life and know nothing about it.
Like many old towns nestled inside the bigger industrial-era cities that swallowed them up, Old Kampala’s obsolescence charms with the impractical, ornateness of the marvellously illogical. The old town was built on the crest of the hill. The hill (whose proper name is Kampala Hill; as the city expanded, so it took the name of this hill) can only be thought of as such out of courtesy. It is overshadowed to the west by the hulking bulk of Namirembe hill on which sits a cathedral with a large, polished copper dome. To the east sits the long, sloping Nakasero hill. Between Namirembe and Nakasero, Kampala Hill might be properly thought of as a knoll.
When British imperialist Military Administrator Captain Frederick (John Dealtry) Lugard arrived here in December of 1890, there had been no Nsalo Road, nor the Grand Mosque that now towers over the hill. There was the Nakivubo River marking the lower western boundary of the hill, beyond which lay the big, gently sloping Nakasero hill. The two, Kampala and Nakasero, sloped into the marshy banks of the Nakivubo River, where tall reeds provided cover for wildlife, mostly the antelope impala, from which the hill derived its name. The river no longer exists. The marshes were long drained, and for miles around, the ground is covered in concrete and paving.
As if a second age had come and gone, the town for which the swamp was drained is itself part of an ill-fitting past, as the impala and marshes had been part of another past, living its life now as an obsolescent leftover. This obsolescence, of a bygone era, like ill-fitting machine parts, has left the old town unable to fit into the bigger, faster-paced city all around it.
The four major city roads that feed into the old town – Old Kampala Road, Fort Road, Gaddafi Road and Kyagwe Road – flood intrepid traffic into the old town. Immediately, it’s coiling, looping streets bottleneck and take the pace out of the wheels. This creates a vacuum suction that leaves the old town’s inner streets of Martin Road, Berkley Road and Matia Mulumba Road eerily empty, as though they were in another century. It was not built for motorised transport, and today, cars, as do customers, mostly avoid inner Old Kampala.
Lugard arrived in Kampala Hill, later to become Old Kampala, six years after the General Act of Berlin (what the press and part of the intelligentsia like to call the Scramble for Africa – the Berlin Conference) granted what is today Uganda to Great Britain, as an area of interest, not yet a colony. He came as the head of a motley mercenary army of Nubian Sudanese soldiers, and without waiting for the permission of the Kabaka – Mwanga II – sat on the hill and began building a fortress. In the final year of his stay on the hill, but mostly because of his role in the land as an agent provocateur, a civil war broke out in Buganda between converts of the various new Abrahamic faiths, a conflict timed to end with victory for the British-leaning Protestant/Anglican forces. As recounted by R.P. Ashe in The Two Kings of Uganda, Christian missionaries scattered around present-day Kampala, had to be frequently evacuated to seek shelter at Lugard’s Fort. As with any war zone, supplies were cut, trade routes blocked, the kingdom avoided, a depressive atmosphere, lawless and dangerous.
Many longed for the halcyon days of Kabaka Muteesa I.
The coastal Arab and Asian traders, who had long frequented the royal courts of Buganda, sought shelter at the fortress. They set up stalls, and to this day, Kampala remains the bazaar city whose roots lie in the civil wars that birthed it.
The hill station (to use the operational term of colonial administrative outposts of the time), lived in unease with the kingdom around it. The kingdom could do little about the representative of British power who sat here with a Maxim gun. And yet the kingdom was not weak enough for Lugard’s will to force the kingdom to grant him more land. Following the civil wars, Lugard left, his job done, setting the precedent by which a succession of Commissioners would take over the hill station. Each new Commissioner – and there would be ten of them before a Governor was appointed in 1910 – had seen the settlement grow ever more congested.
The years from 1884 to the signing of the Anglo-Buganda treaty of 1900, the 1900 Agreement, was the long African decade; from the Berlin Conference to effective colonial rule. Brief now in the longue durée of history, the settlements parted out into segregated quarters of “Gardens” left their mark in Ugandan life in the form of Anglo-Indian architecture, in Indian cuisine – Biryani, Tikka Masala and tandoori, and in spices – cumin, black pepper, cinnamon, coriander, ginger and chilli. When my flaneur-esque walks on Kampala streets commenced, the time I spent inside the old houses of old Kampala made me think of the aroma of an age wafted still within the layered paintwork. Much was to pass off into Ugandan menus; the samosas, the chapati (now thought of as native), made their entry via this old town. The town stirs the senses still in the exotic baluster, interior trims, arched doorways that are the charm of Old Kampala.
The ghosts of pasts layered down under new buildings and repurposed public spaces come out only for the knowing visitor, who amidst the din and roar, will see underneath the sheer riot of matatus, the once brilliant colours of buntings at the gymkhana that sat on the ground that became the Kampala New Taxi Park.
At its height, Old Kampala had achieved the rhythm and life of a booming, bourgeoisie civilisation. The many books and letters of the time describe a vibe and strain of culture whose absence has reduced the old town into a collection of the obsolete.
While it lasted, Old Kampala held the promise of something.
When it sprung up in 1890, Kampala was a suburb of Mengo. But by the end of the decade and century, the roles were quickly reversed; Mengo became a Kampala suburb. Writing in the pioneering paper of the East African Institute of Social Research (EAISR), whose name would later change to Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR), Southall and Gutkind note:
“Whereas in 1890 the little fort on Kampala hill and the houses of the missionaries on Namirembe and Rubaga were insignificant by comparison with the great concentration of the King’s capital on Mengo, by 1906 the position was reversed by the rapid development of the British administrative post and the Asian bazaar which sprang up beside it, so that Commissioner George Wilson could write “so strong and wide-spreading has been the influence of Kampala that its name is superseding that of Mengo especially in outlying countries, and it will be simpler…to retain it … as referring to the native Capital as a whole … Its complete ascendancy in importance over all other centres, due to its being a long established Capital of the dominant tribe, is accepted by the natives of the Protectorate without dispute and its affairs are matters of universal interest.”
Below, and overwhelmed by the grand Mosque, sits the O’Kla Club, a building from 1911 that had been open to “persons of European descent”, with the de rigeur sporting, cinema and cocktail halls.
Remembering her time there, an Alice Boase wrote of the life:
“Our social highlight was a monthly dance at the club, which had a newly constructed ballroom with the unique distinction of a wooden floor, which was a lot easier on one’s feet than the usual cement. It also boasted a stage, which was a great asset to local amateur performers among whom I later came to be numbered. In general, the clubs were all male strongholds and women were only grudgingly given access to a veranda referred to as the ‘boat deck’ and to the library.”
As the description of membership has it, in Old Kampala had also been planted the virus that would destroy the budding, imperial idyll.
The “Gardens” were strictly segregated according to race and confession – Delhi Gardens for “Hindus”, Madras Gardens for “Mohammedans”, and Perryman Gardens, for “Europeans”. The fact that the land was taken by force would haunt the colony throughout its life, and eventually, undo it. It was here, in the 1890s, that the Victorian-era theories of racial sanitation, the pre-germ theory fixation on “miasma” as the cause of all disease, of the malaria theory – the pathogenesis that set races in colour bars – came to Kampala. The low, fearful, shut-in walls of Nsalo Road were built on the fears of “bad air” carrying disease from lower to higher races.
Buildings were downsized, like a theme park.
The new century opened to a heightened pace. Kabaka Mwanga, whose reign had restricted British plans, had in 1897, been deposed and on the throne sat his infant son, Kabaka (later Ssekabaka) Daudi Chwa. The treaty of 1900 arrived with the completion of the Uganda Railway in 1900. The three-month caravan trek from the coast to Mengo was reduced to two days by train. Instantly, the volume of trade multiplied. The hill had never been big enough. Now it was choking with commercial life.
As yet, there was no formal, legal cover for the British government to take control. Even the formal declaration of the Protectorate, in 1894, did not hand them the instruments. That awaited the full treaty, whose negotiations dragged on for a decade.
The limitation of space was felt all the more acutely with the big, gently sloping Nakasero hill just across the Nakivubo River. Through the imperial lens, Nakasero Hill was terra nullius, as was all of Africa; free, and unoccupied, the hundreds of African agricultural holdings and settlements, invisible. The British resolved that Nakasero Hill would belong to them.
Social and political realities of Buganda would not allow Mengo, the Buganda seat of power, to cede the land, the many chiefs, their followers, the clans that owned the land, the farmlands, burial and religious sites and Buganda government administration properties, were so woven into the fabric of Buganda polity and politics that expelling them would upend a social order whose roots lay in the heydays of the Bunyoro-Kitara empire. It would also be a spiritual erasure for Buganda society. Not even the collaborationist Buganda government, now under the regency overseen by the overbearing architect of collaboration, Apollo Kagwa, could muster the nerves to agree to British demands over Nakasero.
Since I got to understand its past, I have found it hard to stop thinking of Nsalo Road as a veritable setting for Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, founded as it was at the same time as Conrad was writing his book. There was actually no “Britain” as yet in this period. There was the charter company, Imperial British East African Company, who had sent Captain Lugard to secure a trading foothold in Mengo. As with Heart of Darkness, it was clear the company was not a company, but the imperial power well understood to be behind it, gave the front for deniability, however implausible. It may not in fact be that Captain (Frederick) Lugard (Kapere as he came to be called here, and memorialised in the Luganda song, Kapere yazimba enyumba – Lugard built a fort) was one of many inspirations for Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz, but it is hard to shake the thought off, and Lugard does bear striking resemblances with the fictional character.
Occupying Nakasero would not be painless.
The British bid was to await the completion of the Buganda treaty, which, coming in 1900, granted them leave to make convenient interpretations. This was not simply a treaty, but was, rather, the de facto constitution by which indirect rule was prosecuted in Buganda. British actions after the agreement was signed show they interpreted the tenets liberally. The subterfuge via which Nakasero was grabbed from its African owners happened thus: for years, Buganda’s chief negotiator, Apollo Kagwa, soon ennobled as Sir Apollo Kagwa, had wanted to visit England. The British prevaricated on this request till Kagwa had inked the treaty, perhaps dangling a visit to England as incentive. In any case, a visit by an African Prime Minister (Katikiro) to England would have meant he be received as an equal, which would have been awkward.
The death of Queen Victoria in 1901, and the enthronement of King Edward VII in 1902, provided the pretext. Kagwa visited England. In his absence, the British informed the Buganda parliament, the Lukiiko, that the Katikiro had permitted the colonial administration to take over Nakasero Hill. There is indication – from the recorded shock Kagwa received upon landing in Mombasa back from England when he found a letter awaiting him in Mombasa informing him of the expulsion of Africans from Nakasero – that the British statement to the Lukiiko may not have been truthful. However, given that the British generally tended to cover their tracks, we cannot categorically say that no discussion, however, mooted the subject matter, did not take place between them and Kagwa. The words of Ham Mukasa – Kagwa’s private secretary who writing in Uganda’s Katikiro in England, recorded receipt of the letter in Mombasa – are open to interpretation:
“We heard that the Government were going to turn about a hundred chiefs and peasants out of their estates, which were in the neighbourhood of Kampala, and that a chief called Kikojo was going to be turned out of his estates near Entebbe; and we were very much afraid, because a promise had been made that some of the people should not be turned out. This frightened us very much, as we thought that perhaps other treaties would be in the same way broken”.1
There was more.
To forestall trouble, the Agreement granted the Buganda political class “free” land, under the disastrous Mailo Land system, by which communally and kingdom-owned lands were parcelled out to collaborators – to Apollo Kagwa and his cronies.
***
I never set out to dig this deep into the history of Kampala.
As a northern Ugandan, my knowledge of the city and of Buganda was surface. As with any postcolonial citizen, there were only the ethnic stereotypes of the south for me to go on. Colonial education never taught colonial history. Much has been written about these matters already. But the passing of the neoliberal era, which we are currently witnessing, made the past of its antecedent, the “liberal era”, the more urgent.
The more years I spent studying social and cultural transformations under colonial rule, the more certain elements began to look familiar. Now that the end of the neoliberal era is in sight, certain similarities in how Uganda has been governed since the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of the Bretton Woods Institutions link up with how it was under the less understood liberal era – the effective economic ideology of colonialism – as neoliberalism was to be for neo-colonialism.
They were too provocative. I had to write this piece:
The parallels from Messers Kagwa and (Yoweri) Museveni coming to power militarily under British support, the idea that “Nilotics” were mortal enemies of the “Bantu” – even though centuries of migration and intermarriages had blurred the lines – helped the British use Kagwa to destroy Bunyoro Kitara, and Museveni, Northern Uganda. Neither Kagwa nor Museveni fully understood their own wars. But this was and is, divide and rule in practice. The forcing of freewheeling capitalism on native populations, the use of warfare as a political tool, and use of Kampala as a military force against neighbouring states, all bear the hallmark of a similar, imperial mind frame. The expansion of Kampala city, from Kampala Hill into Nakasero under Kagwa’s watch, and from Kampala city into northern Kampala under Museveni, followed a similar trajectory of land grabbing.
The personal crisis that pushed me to study Kampala began in my budding years as a journalist and writer.
But here you were a Black citizen of Kampala, barely a generation new into what used to be barred to your grandparents, and you were expected to have already fitted into a city not built for your culture. One of the most important clues that they did not want you in this city, was that space existed for European, Arab and Asian religious beliefs but none for African ones. We naturally came to believe only African religions were satanic – because the city planners granted no room for our worship.
At a practical level, the city remained a closed book, the schools were mum about the violence and collaborations, which mealy-mouthed descriptions called and still do, “development”. The crucial records of colonial rule had been evacuated by the British towards the end of colonial rule. We lived in absolute, Naipaulian, ignorance. You tried to write and found the subject matter missing. And so, the decision to walk through every accessible street of Kampala came to me gradually, building up through the decade from 2004 to 2014 when I began to do it in earnest.
It began in the mud, ash and dust-smitten hovels of Katwe-Kisenyi.
I had lamely assumed that Katwe-Kisenyi was just another ordinary slum, odd, as it sat smack in the centre of the city. I did not at the time know that the welders, molders, foundry bellows and milling machine operators I was meeting and making friends with were part of a tradition of Black resilience and survival amidst racially oppressive cities. One of my first acts when I moved to Nairobi was to seek out their counterparts, who I found on River Road, and I was immensely unsurprised to find there the ash, mud and frame of Katwe-Kisenyi.
But something more real in them than in the middle-class crowd I had been a part of drew me closer. It was here, through the 1940s and 1950s that the Black elite who would agitate for political independence had lived and honed their union-leading skills. There are graves of pioneering African liberators in Katwe-Kisenyi, many now slumbering under malls and arcades.
In the years 2014 to 2021, when I got to understand Kampala, I was not the only one scanning for buried pasts. Among the many researchers was Dutch photographer Andrea Stultiens, whose project, History in Progress Uganda, began to unearth and make available publicly hundreds of colonial-era photographs. In tracing these images, their era and their photographers, I thought I had found an important key:
Among the many photo collections of History in Progress was the captivating one from 1927 when Dr A.T. Schofield, medical doctor and missionary, took his camera out for a walk, creating a photo diary. By studying the angle of shadows in the frames, I thought I worked out that he went walking through Kampala just before midday. The more you study the pictures, the more the sense of the past blurs off, and you are effectively back in 1927. Add that to the letters, manuscripts and books and the culture of the era comes alive.
Gradually, the 1920s ceased to be the past for me.
I also discovered that the interwar years were an age of writing by Africans. In Kampala, writing was wielded as a weapon. First, the Anglican-Protestants set out their case of what had transpired. The Baganda Catholics fired back. Then came the Baganda Muslim writers, in what some have described as the sickness of writing. What had happened in 1892 haunted Kampala’s Black scholars of the time, and not just from the deep guilt of having converted, betraying ancestors, about which traditionalists never tired of reminding them. If you can catch the drift, you understand that in Buganda, guilt about 1892 lives on in Kampala to this day (and yes, there was such a thing as Black scholars in 1920s and 1930s Kampala).
Everyone, it seemed, had something to write.
Their papers, like Benin Bronzes, are sadly on another continent. Much has not survived nor been published. But one man among a few, Ham Mukasa, went on to get his magnum opus, Simuda Nyuma, published – at least the first two volumes straddling the reigns of Kabaka Muteesa I and Kabaka Mwanga II. But Ham Mukasa is no ordinary man. He is the maternal great-grandfather of the current Kabaka, Mutebi II, and his donations helped build Namirembe Cathedral and Uganda Christian University, to name a few, saying nothing of the vast lands he granted for the sugar plantations of Kyagwe. In his time, he rose to become the governor of the rich province of Kyagwe. He was a serious intellectual and writer of weight. The amount of scholarship he put into Simuda Nyuma has been commanding, a body of work that historians of Uganda cannot afford to ignore.
The familiar yet estranging images Dr Schofield captured building up in my mind were starting to cohere. It was possible to draw a historiography of Kampala.
I began to understand the city I had come to in the 1980s.
When the chance came to immerse myself in it, I spent many months starting from 2014 “searching” for Kampala. I came to think of the Kampala created by urban planner A.E. Mirams in 1931 as “the egg”, given its shape. Effectively, this “egg” is a zone marked out by the long Jinja Road taking the southerly loop till it enjoins Kampala Road, to become Bombo Road till it hits Wandegeya. Thence, it takes a northeastern turn to sharply end at the Mulago roundabout. It then runs as Yusuf Lule Road, along the Golf Course till it rejoins Jinja Road. This was effectively the city Mirams created, the Nakasero dreams of the 1890s come alive. Like Old Kampala, it is a contouring, concentric plan, centred around Kyagwe Road, the first street of new Kampala, also a military, defensive road providing a clear line of fire between Fort Lugard and Fort Nakasero.
To effectively take ownership of Nakasero Hill, the colonial administration on Kampala Hill built half a dozen bridges across the Nakivubo River. Like a piratical boarding party throwing hooks over a merchant ship, they very quickly invaded Nakasero. At the northern end was built the Kyebambe Road bridge, followed by the bridge of Mpabana Road (Ibis Road), which links the Aga Khan School to Kiseka Market. The Kyagwe Road bridge is the most heavily used, standing as it is, between Nabugabo and Kiseka Market. The Namirembe Road bridge is the other heavily used but is not the last bridging point between the old 19th-century commercial centre and the new, 20th-century one. A series of footwalk bridges link the Mukwano Arcade/Channel Street district into the Nakivubo Park Yard, otherwise also known as the former Owino Market.
I came to understand that in Buganda, rivers marked natural boundaries between polities. To cross a river was an act of aggression. Taking Nakasero was, in effect, classical, settlerist violence which Kenyans, with their Kenya Land and Freedom Army, will recognise. Graveyards, shrines and holy places were desecrated, the chopping down of banana plantations were social and spiritual violations. Those thrown out of Nakasero fell into poverty for generations.
The mental health impact of such violations on African societies writ large lives with us daily. By the 1950s, “psychology” had joined classical anthropology as an academic and clinical discipline examining the impact of colonisation on African societies, and one now forgotten name, Dr. Benjamin H Kagwa, did much work at Mulago Hospital in this area. The city, as I was learning, was a crime scene. My colonial subjective stereotypes died as I understood the pain of Buganda. Divide and rule parted us out into the tribes by which we turn against one another.
Walking across these bridges was draining; it was sickening to see that the streets leading away from them, six decades into independence, still bore the names of the dramatis personae that destroyed thousands of lives in Nakasero, and beyond. You have the missionary Alexander Mackay mocking Kabaka Mwanga yet taking pride of place in Mwanga’s kingdom, a road in Old Kampala, another in Nateete, and a neighbourhood referred to as “Mackay”; the Commissioner from 1894-1899, Ernest James Berkley (the “Bakuli” of the neighbourhood Bakuli); the administrator and high-handed Big Man in Bukedi, Perryman, also of Perryman Gardens, Allen, Johnston (Sir Henry Hamilton Johnston, also colonial Commissioner 1899-1901).
They had been the first-generation street names.
The tropical health authority, Dr. William Simpson, as well-presented by Ugandan scholar Dr. Frederick Omolo-Okalebo, was drafted to advise on developing Nakasero. His theories of “tropical” disease stated that Europeans must not live next to Africans, because they carried communicable diseases. The most devastating verdict by Dr Simpson was that particularly African children must not be allowed to live close to white people. About this, Omolo-Okalebo in his thesis, The Evolution of Town Planning Ideas, Plans and their Implementation in Kampala City 1903-2004, writes:
“To preserve their (colonial settlers’) health and purity, as well as their status and dominance, Dr. Simpson the expert on sanitary affairs in the colonies together with his counterpart Lugard argued that the solution to the peaceful settlement of Europeans in the tropics was through creation of exclusive, endogamous, and defensible enclaves by means of careful planning. He also advocated putting as much distance as possible between the races, he said: “The [European] house should not be surrounded by nor be close to native huts. Native children are seldom not infected with malaria, and hence living in a dwelling house in this position increases the risk of infection from that disease” (Simpson, 1916).”
In 1931, across from Nakasero, sat the impressive Kololo hill, still belonging to Africans. Dr. Simpson advised the construction of a cordon sanitaire, to create sufficient distance between African Kololo from European Nakasero, to keep away mosquitoes that had fed on Black blood from mixing it into white blood. Today, this green zone is the Kampala Golf Course.
Under the plans of A.E. Mirams, the city advanced across Nakasero. New streets were built: Burton, Baxton, William, Colville Street (Sir Henry Edward Colville, Commissioner 1893-1894) Dastur, George (two George streets, the second running up to Parliament named after King George), Salisbury, Rosebery and Ternan Avenue (independence had changed the names of some streets, as Ternan became Nehru Avenue, and Salisbury, Nkrumah Road).
What is today Nkrumah Road was once called Salisbury Road. Next to it, and never used by motor traffic except for trucks collecting garbage and delivering packages to the back of Nkrumah, is Rosebury Lane, a muddy track. The spelling of the street name is intriguing. “Rosebury” returns no searches. But the placing of the streets means they memorialised personalities of the 1890s, not earlier ones, as the downtown area of Kampala memorialised the earlier crop of imperialists. I took Rosebury to mean Rosebery. Seen this way, some intrigue wells up:
The “Uganda Question”, a catch-phrase of the early 1890s British press, became a heated issue in British politics in the period, triggered by the wars between Black converts to Abrahamic faiths, but also on what nature colonial rule would take. The Mengo wars, the use of the chartered company, Imperial British East African Company (IBEA Co), had touched opposing nerves. On the one hand, the jingoistic nationalists were against the use of the chartered company. They wanted direct colonisation. Opposite them, the pro-business wing wanted a laissez-faire approach, to let the businesses do as they pleased in the colonies, a position that was applied in Southern Africa. While the liberals seemed anti-colonial, their attitudes to the darker races was no different to slavery. The devastating impact of such a view is still felt in the Democratic Republic of Congo today, where businesses won concessions of entire parts of the country to run as they pleased.
Rising big power conflict in Europe would lead to direct colonisation as European states took care to secure territory from annexation. But not as yet in 1892. The debate haunted the ruling party of that time, the Liberal Party, splitting it fatally down the middle.
There was the Rosebery wing and the Gladstone wing. Rosebery’s was the liberal, laissez-faire wing. He just happened to be the Foreign Secretary in Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone’s government. Gladstone advocated direct colonial rule. It was Rosebery – Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery – who declared Uganda a British Protectorate in order not to contradict his position; it was as “protectorate”, not “colony”, a wordplay that should have mattered but for the coming force of history.
Rosebery’s ruthlessness was such that he dispatched Sir Gerald Portal to Uganda, to investigate the Mengo wars. With the arrival of the Portal Commission, the era of Commissioners, which would run till 1910, had begun. It was mooted that Rosebery – a kind of Sir Humphrey avant la lettre – had already determined the content of the report of the Portal Commission before it set out. At any rate, when it was eventually delivered, he timed its release with its damning verdict of British government incompetence on the matter, to humiliate Gladstone, who lost his premiership. Rosebery took over the reins of power as prime minister.
After Rosebery, Lord Robert Arthur Salisbury became prime minister. And so they had shared streets sitting next to each other in Kampala, Salisbury and Rosebery Roads, till Salisbury was changed to Nkrumah Road, and Rosebury, Nasser Road. But the devil is tough. The decision to append his name on a lane jutting off Rosebery (Nasser) Road meant that even after the name changes by the Idi Amin government, the lane kept its name, Rosebury Lane, a dirt-smitten backstreet enduring to this day bearing the name of the man who formally colonised Uganda.
Despite the fact that Uganda was declared a protectorate under Gladstone, there was no street in the city I could find in his name. Was this because of the influence of Rosebery and the Rule Britannia jingoists who de-campaigned his premiership on the handling of the Mengo wars? Erasure was not preserved for Black subjects only; freewheeling capitalism has never been skimping in its vengefulness. Kampala lives with the ghosts of its past.
The power of Kagwa is ingrained into how the city lives.
In the Taxi Parks, the touts cry out “Sapollo Sapollo” – in an eerie kind of ancestor worship – for the matatus plying the West Makerere-Bwaise-Kawempe route along the long Sir Apollo Kagwa Road. Such is his standing that a second street, running behind Parliament, is named after him, the only African in this part of Kampala to have a street named in his honour.
Then there’s the name Dewinton, a constant staple on lips, invoked by the newly arrived middle class to stake their claim on upper-class Kampala, or by anyone going to Parliament and National Theatre. I had always known of this street, even been curious as to why an Englishman’s name sounded French. The books delivered the coup de grace to my ignorance: Dewinton had been a captain in the invading army of combined British and Buganda forces that carried out the Bunyoro genocide. My family, from Bunyoro, had nearly been wiped out, save a few relatives who fled into northern Uganda along with (Omukama) Kabalega, King of Bunyoro-Kitara from 1870 to 1899 till he was dethroned by the British and exiled to Seychelles island.
By now, I was hopelessly alienated from Kampala.
***
Old Kampala may be charming, but the old Kampala years, from 1890 to 1911, were years of bloody, colonial atrocities – The Heart of Darkness years. New Kampala was supposed to represent a new, clean and peaceful era. It started with the concealment of the past, entire histories being carefully concealed.
The most violent and deadly episode in Kampala’s history was in 1892, but who knows about it?
In the final battles of that year, Apollo Kagwa led his Protestant forces to a storming raid of the Catholic stronghold, Rubaga. They burnt down the new church and what other buildings were there, putting to death some two hundred Baganda Catholics. The Catholics struck back and killed what Protestants they could find. This, a mere six years after the killing of Christian converts “by heathen” Africans in Namugongo had been celebrated as martyrdom.
In our own time, the forcible creation of liberalism’s grandson, neoliberalism, passed through similar stages. Sir Apollo Kagwa’s wars of colonialism lasted three decades, as did Museveni’s civil wars. The land grabbing under Kagwa was reinstated under Museveni, to be granted freely to “investors’’. But it is in Kampala, the most important economic heartland of the country, that the drama came closest in parallel. By the 1990s, it was becoming clear that the city’s outer limits were too narrow. Kampala needed to be expanded, once more. The parallels once again lined up. Exactly a century since the expansion from Kampala Hill to Nakasero commenced, so the expansion from new Kampala into north Kampala.
In 2004, the ground was broken for the construction of the northern bypass.
There too was a swamp that was drained (in 1904 Nakivubo Valley, in 2004 Lubigi). It is too early to say what is happening in the aftermath of this expansion, driven by the impetus of neoliberalism. As it is, we have been, since 2017, in the middle of 1930s equivalent:
By the early 1930s, it was clear in Buganda that neither the Mengo elite nor the British had any intentions of giving back the stolen lands. So began the anti-colonial agitation. Colonial rule was attacked. So was colonial culture, education and religion. In southern Uganda, anti-colonial tactics were wide-ranging, from violence to civic disobedience to personal/psychological warfare deploying words in tactical battles. The Luganda word for converts was also the word for the educated. “Abasoma” meant both the educated and Christians. Anti-colonialists of the Buganda underclass raised personal barriers against their social betters. Approached by the well-to-do, they responded, “Simanyi, sasoma.” I don’t know. I never went to school.
But did it also not imply “I never converted”?
You still see it today.
To go to the slums, particularly Katwe-Kisenyi, and speak English, the language of the educated, is to feel the burning rejection of “Me don’t know ingirisi”, “Tetwasoma”.
The opposite also happened.
Rather than reject Western religion, another movement pushed its interpretations so far out that it alienated the very missionaries themselves. It felt as though the East African Revival developed a form of Christianity that undermined the Missionary Church and its influence out of the spiritual affairs of Africans. Religious independence came before the political one.
The Movement started in Rwanda, and along the migratory routes the British had created to lure the populations of Belgian colonies into the Uganda labour market, so came the Revival. The tactics were not dissimilar to the Reformation; the call to hew to fundamentalist Christian values, was also a literal reading of the Bible in ways the entrenched Church authorities found galling. The centre of it was confession, in public, of personal sins, and popular confession of adultery, in a way the Church authorities thought bordered on pornography, led the Revival leaders to accuse the Missionary Church of promoting immorality, of importing foreign values to Africa and targeting vulnerable and poor Africans with material inducements.
Something in the socio-political universe had shifted.
The “west” was seen to be disgracing itself, brought several pegs lower and hence, legitimated targets. The gathering weight of anticolonialism moved to the streets. Because he had granted the British land to build Makerere University, the Prime Minister of Buganda, Martin Luther Nsibirwa was gunned down as he stood on the church doorway in September 1945. The riots in Kampala were the turning point in colonial rule. It birthed the trade union movement, out of which sprung the political parties of decolonisation.
The annexation of Makerere and Kololo to expand the boundaries of new Kampala in the 1940s joined a stream of other grievances; Kampala reverberated with riots, assassinations and massacres. Each new affluent neighbourhood may have produced its own slum (Makerere – Makerere West; Old Kampala – Kivulu, et cetera), but it also brought political costs to the authorities in Mengo. As with 1900, the early 1950s brought two important developments. The British signed a new treaty with Buganda, the 1955 Agreement, repudiating the 1900 Agreement.
Kampala also got a new urban plan.
It now sat on Old Kampala, Nakasero, Makerere, Kololo, Naguru and Mbuya. A new set of street names marked the age; Philip Road, Prince Charles Drive, Elizabeth Avenue, McKenzie Vale Road, Sturrock Road and Baskerville Avenue.
The new plan attempted to make amends.
The United Nations now existed and its commissions criticised the living conditions of “natives” in the colonies. In response, the British built housing estates for the urban natives, albeit grudgingly. They had hired a Jewish refugee from the Nazis, Ernst May, whose own racist views of Black people were a surreal reflection of the racism he fled from in Europe. As Okalebo notes, May conceived of Kampala as a “garden city”, but his attempts at creating bigger native quarters met resistance from conservative elements in the administration who “never wanted the colonised to live in similar environments as themselves, and cited the lack of enough public financial resources to cover most of the housing that had been envisaged”.2
African boycott of European and Asian businesses in the runup to independence froze the construction of Kampala, uptil the 2000s when construction on a large scale recommenced. It also slowed the momentum of the colonial economy that independence granted the new African governments and running into the Economic War that President Idi Amin declared, the colonial economy in Uganda was devastated. By the 1940s and 1950s, Africans in the urban ghetto had begun to produce significant cultural identities, all over the continent.
In Kampala, Katwe-Kisenyi, which had grown as a slum for the Black labour pool of Nakasero, was propagating a generation of musicians in the one-man-guitar mode, Kadongo Kamu music. The tailors, a significant presence since a Kenyan named Owino set up shop on the banks of the Nakivubo River, a market that grew to take his name – Owino Market – were producing fashion.
Leaflet printing in this ghetto was a constant staple of the anti-colonial struggle.
The ghetto as an engine of cultural innovation went on undimmed. The inventiveness extends today, and it is the downtown, ghetto, street food chefs who invented the Ugandan Rolex of our time. Inevitably, the expansion of colonial settlement onto Kololo produced a new slum, Kamwokya-Kyebando. As Katwe-Kisenyi sprung up to serve Nakasero, Kamwokya-Kyebando served Kololo. As Katwe-Kisenyi formed the epicentre of anticolonial movements, in our time, Kamwokya-Kyebando turned Museveni’s Uganda upside down.
***
Perhaps history and politics collide less frequently than might seem to be the case.
Over the last fourteen decades, it has not happened too often. But we can safely count the ouster of Apollo Kagwa as once such, the East African Revival another, the Kampala riots and the rise of the anti-colonial movement, among others. Independence looks odd in that category, if this collision is a comeuppance for past sins. But the 1966 Kampala crisis is best remembered for the one dramatic subplot of the ouster of Kabaka Muteesa II from his palace. But many, many factors had gone into creating the crisis, not least Buganda’s refusal to give back the lands of Bunyoro the British granted them as a gift for the destruction of Bunyoro Kitara. It is hard to think of it now, but even in the 1960s, Mengo was under serious siege by Baganda land agitators.
Expanding Kampala in our times would not have happened without a second set of bridges laid down to annex more land for the city: the bridges of Namugongo Road, Kyaliwajjala-Naalya Road, Majwala Road, Mbogo Road 1, Ntinda-Kisaasi Road, Bukoto-Kisaasi Road, Kyebando Ring Road, Kisingiri Street, Gayaza-Kampala Road, Kampala-Masindi Road, Koala Road, Hoima Road and Sentema Road, are the concrete sutures that grafted the countryside north of the city, into its urban orbit.
I did not fully understand it when I took my bicycle out to continue with my research in the lockdown curfew and started listening to stories of Kamwokya-Kyebando. The city was drained of humans, the eerie apocalyptic image of the times. Then, out of the old colonial zone, I was in Kamwokya. There, the lockdown barely registered, life grinding on. The paved roads disappear as you descend from the rich hills. Through effluent-darkened mud, it churned its life.
The space between food and waste did not exist; the grilled meat aroma of Kamwokya street food fighting for nose registration with the stench of open sewers. At the butcher’s, the choice meats are parcelled for those that can afford real meat. For the poorest of the poor, the street food chefs go for offcuts; offals, lungs, pancreas and tongue of ox, hooves and tails.
If the factors of rural poverty, broken families, migration to the city, exploitation and disillusionment had bodily form, they would look like Kamwokya. The place earns its name, meaning ‘‘it burnt him’’ in Luganda. The typhoid and malaria I picked up from there in the course of the study was par for the course; it burnt me (as another street there has it, Kanjokya).
Among the many I interviewed, I will never forget Annita Nakimuli (not their real name). In 1995, Nakimuli picked worse than typhoid. She got Aids. It was the second life-altering affliction in less than ten years. In 1990, giving birth at sixteen had given her fistula. Her village disowned her. She came to the city. The city took away her illusions of society. From waitress to housemaid, marriage seemed the answer. AIDS collapsed her marriage. And yet Nakimuli’s is no sob story. As she told me, catching HIV/AIDS was the best thing that ever happened to her. She pulled herself together, attending HIV/AIDS workshops where she learnt that she could live with it. HIV/AIDS took her into networks where she learnt tailoring, urban farming, design, finance and accounting. Neither the government nor her family had taken her to school. HIV/AIDs did.
She kept fighting, her head down, for twenty years. One day she looked back and found it hard to believe. She, a reject, had sent three sons to university. She had also started a savings society in the slums of Kampala and counted seventy members by the time I met her.
In our time, Kamwokya-Kyebando is the new Katwe-Kisenyi.
In 2004, the construction of the Kampala northern bypass displaced thousands of families. The livelihoods built around vegetable farming, poultry-rearing, potted plant business, tailoring, water-collecting and myriad other informal businesses, disappeared when the twenty-two-kilometre highway was built. The majority were without the claims to attract compensation. The population of slums like Kamwokya exploded. Petty traders began invading the streets of Kampala. Then the rise of Bobi Wine created the wave of anti-Museveni era land-grabbing and ethnic segregation. Look closely and you see Bobi Wine is no Kizza Besigye; not an opposition leader in the tired sense. Bobi Wine grew up in Kamwokya.
In his rise, a series of political and historical collisions that had not ended in justice combined, making it the relitigation of 1900, a repudiation of the politics of Kagwa, a riposte to the riots of the 1940s, and even the anticolonisation movement. More than that, it is perhaps the first time in its history that a commoner from Buganda has risen (in political terms) to greater prominence than the Kabaka. In the history of postcolonial Uganda, it is the first time a Muganda has risen to lead a political movement nationwide; those crowds from Kampala to Kapchorwa, Arua to Byushenyi, were not pretending their love for him; they knew him. Perhaps, through its betrayal of 1900, the Mengo elite were creating the movement that would upend the very socio-political order they stood upon.
It may take decades, centuries even, but it has started.
The massacres of November 2020 was the ghost of Kagwa and 1892 returning, as it did in 1945, 1949, 1966, the 1970s and 1980s, reclaiming the city’s soul.
The final parallel is also the most telling.
The new genre of sexual moralising by Kampala’s political elite converted to neoliberalism, has taken root. Like the cronies of Kagwa’s age of free-market liberal capitalism, Museveni’s free-market neoliberal elite cannot attack the economic ideology that has enriched them. But the pressure on them by ‘‘Western’’ powers is unbearable. As with the Christian converts of the 1930s, they have found a way to drive a wedge into the “Western” hegemony. Unlike their Francophone counterparts who have challenged the French militarily, they cannot challenge the more powerful Britain or the United States. They have picked the weapon of “homosexuals”.
1 Mukasa, Ham, Uganda’s Katikiro in England, Hutchison & Co, London 1904, pp 252.
2 Omolo-Okalebo, Ibid, pp 93.
