Late 19th–Early 20th Century: (Colonialism and the Production of Historical Knowledge — Speke’s Hamitic Myth for Buganda, Apolo Kagwa’s Kings of Buganda as a…

Late 19th–Early 20th Century: (Colonialism and the Production of Historical Knowledge — Speke’s Hamitic Myth for Buganda, Apolo Kagwa’s Kings of Buganda as a Biblical-Form Text Written to Consolidate Power, Samuel Johnson’s History of the Yorubas Creating a National Identity That Had Scarcely Existed, and Knowledge Like Cash Crops Supplied According to the Needs of the New Political Market): The dramatic intensification of relations that colonialism represented also involved the more systematic accumulation of knowledge about Africa. In the early 1860s, Speke drew up the first king-list for Buganda as part of what he called the legendary history — describing how the kingdom was formed by an invasion of lighter-skinned peoples from the north, the Hamitic myth that statehood in the area had its origins outside Africa. Crucially, African elites had enormous control over this process. In the 1890s, orality gave way to literacy as chiefs committed to writing their preferred versions of the past. Apolo Kagwa, chief minister of Buganda and Christian convert, wrote his Kings of Buganda in the early 1900s in a form resembling the Bible — with a Genesis-style opening and genealogical format reading like Old Testament scripture. He knew he had rivals and used the text to write them out of the political scene. Samuel Johnson’s History of the Yorubas similarly attempted to place in moral and historical focus the evolution of a people that had scarcely existed as such before the mid-nineteenth century. Language and literacy had led to new forms of knowledge about identity, loyalty, and belonging. The Ganda used the creation and manipulation of historical knowledge to consolidate their position within the Uganda Protectorate, persuading the British to award Buganda a dominant position at the expense of entities like Bunyoro. Knowledge, like cash crops, was supplied according to the needs of the new political market.