11 - Buganda: Religious Competition for the Kingdom

Summary

The East African kingdom of Buganda offers another variation on islamization, beginning in the precolonial period and extending to the regime established at the end of the nineteenth century by the British – who made Buganda the core of their larger colonial territory Uganda. Muslims had not been present in this state, set on the northern shores of Lake Victoria, neither as merchants, as we have seen in Asante, nor as part of the ruling in class, as we saw in Hausaland or Mali. The young Muslims we encounter in Buganda in the late nineteenth century were first-generation practitioners. They were interested in trade to be sure, but especially in power. In their heady, rapidly changing society it was possible to imagine going from no Islamic identity to a Muslim state in one generation.

These local Muslims had considerable encouragement in their ambition: the Swahili and Omani merchants operating out of Zanzibar (see Chapter 3) in the late nineteenth century. These traders, unlike those of the Suwarian tradition we saw in Asante, were often active missionaries for the faith, not unlike the European Christian missionaries who were spreading throughout Africa in the same period. Indeed, the Zanzibaris often saw themselves in religious as well as commercial competition with the Europeans. Momentum was increasingly in the hands of Western entrepreneurs and governments, and Africa was on the verge of falling under European control.