Early 20th Century: (The Invention of Tribal History — Colonial Administrators and Elites Collaborating to Produce Myths of Historical Dominance, the Ganda U…

Early 20th Century: (The Invention of Tribal History — Colonial Administrators and Elites Collaborating to Produce Myths of Historical Dominance, the Ganda Using British Favoritism to Extend Influence Across Uganda, the Nyoro Labeled Backward for Resisting the British, the Lost Counties Resentment, and Lugard’s Attempted Recreation of the Oyo Empire in Southern Nigeria in 1912): Along with enlarged scale and hardened boundaries came the forceful and opportunistic articulation of myths and pasts to justify tribal consciousness. Colonial administrators and tribal elites sometimes collaborated in this process — in Uganda, the British came to view Buganda, with its increasingly Anglicized Christian establishment, as the historically dominant power and preferred vehicle for development. The Ganda used their favored position under British tutelage to extend influence across central and southern Uganda by the 1920s and 1930s, reaching into areas never before under Buganda’s sway, their ruling elite regarding themselves as the vanguard of the civilizing mission. The Ganda had a clear advantage over their historic rivals the Nyoro: where the Ganda had worked with the British, the Nyoro fought them, and there developed the colonial stereotype of the Ganda as intelligent and progressive while the Nyoro were backward and undeveloped. Under the Uganda Agreement of 1900, Buganda had won an extension of pre-colonial territory at the expense of Bunyoro, and the lost counties issue festered as a source of deep resentment throughout the colonial period. In southern Nigeria in 1912, Lugard’s administration attempted to recreate the eighteenth-century Oyo empire, setting up king and court to rule a large area based on a spurious reading of the past — the colonial state was not merely governing Africa but rewriting it.