UNIVERSITY OF LONDON INSTITUTE OF COMMONWEALTH STUDIES COMMONWEALTH PAPERS Party and Locality in Northern Uganda, 1945-1962 Cherry Gertzel JS 7649.9 .A37G47 UNIVERSITY OF LONDON THE ATHLONE PRESS NUNC COCNOSCO EX PARTE THOMAS J. BATA LIBRARY TRENT UNIVERSITY University of London Institute of Commonwealth Studies COMMONWEALTH PAPERS General Editor Professor W. H. Morris-Jones 16 Party and Locality in Northern Uganda, 1945-1962 COMMONWEALTH PAPERS x. The Vocabulary of Commonwealth Relations. S. A. de Smith, 1954 2. Imperial Federation: A Study of New Zealand Policy and Opinion, 1880-1914. Keith Sinclair, 1955 3. Richard Jebh and the Problem of Empire. J. D. B. Miller, 1956 4. The Investigation of National Income in British Tropical Dependencies. A. R. Prest, 1957 5. The Inter Se Doctrine of Commonwealth Relations. J. E. S. Fawcett, 1958 6. The Commonwealth and Regional Defence. W. C. B. Tunstall, 1959 7. The Nyasaland Elections of 1961. Lucy Mair, 1962 8. Political Parties in Uganda, 1949-62. D. A. Low, 1962 9. Population Characteristics of the Commonwealth Countries of Tropical Africa. T. E. Smith andj. G. C. Blacker, 1963 10. Problems of Smaller Territories. Edited by Burton Benedict, 1967 11. Canadian-West Indian Union: A Forty-Year Minuet. Robin W. Winks, 1968 12. Louis Botha or John X. Merriman: The Choice of South Africa’s First Prime Minister. N. G. Garson, 1969 13. Nigerian Politics and Military Rule: Prelude to the Civil War. Edited by S. K. Panter-Brick, 1970 14. Political Attitudes of Indian Industry: A Case Study of the Baroda Business Elite. Howard L. Erdman, 1971 15. Whitehall and the Colonial Service: An Administrative Memoir, 1939-1956. Charles Jeffries, 1972 16. Party and Locality in Northern Uganda, 1945-1962. Cherry Gertzel, 1974 Guide to Resources for Commonwealth Studies in London, Oxford and Cambridge, with bibliographical and other information. A. R. Hewitt, 1957 Union List of Commonwealth Newspapers in London, Oxford and Cambridge. A. R. Hewitt, i960 Party and Locality in Northern Uganda, 1945-1962 by CHERRY GERTZEL Professor of Political Science University of Zambia UNIVERSITY OF LONDON Published for the Institute of Commonwealth Studies THE ATHLONE PRESS 1974 Published by THE ATHLONE PRESS UNIVERSITY OF LONDON at 4 Gower Street, London wci Distributed by Tiptree Book Services Ltd Tip tree, Essex U.S.A. and Canada Humanities Press Inc New York © University of London 1974 ISBN O 485 17616 5 Printed in Great Britain by WESTERN PRINTING SERVICES LTD BRISTOL PREFACE This essay considers political developments in the two Northern Uganda districts of Acholi and Lango between 1945 and 1962. It is concerned primarily with the growth of political parties in these rural areas and the popular response at district level to the men who sought to develop those parties as a base from which to challenge the colonial government. Thus it seeks to add to our knowledge of African nationalism. For a long time the study of African politics was characterized by a preoccupation with the national macropolitical level and the develop¬ ment of national institutions. This was largely true of most studies of political parties, which to a considerable extent ignored party leadership, recruitment, and ideas at the local level. More recently however there has been an increasing awareness of the importance of the political process at the local level for an understanding of the political process as a whole.1 This emphasis upon micropolitics has led, among other developments, to a fresh enquiry into the growth of African nationalism and of political parties, with a change of focus from the political elite at the national level to the ‘ordinary Africans’ from whom the leaders had to obtain support.2 Such an emphasis on the local level is of great importance for any understanding of Uganda politics, which in the pre-independence period was dominated by the locality rather than the centre. There are some excellent studies of pre-independence politics, but these emphasized the national level, for a period when politics was largely decentralized and essentially rwra/-based. The district as a level of political activity was thus neglected. There are of course notable exceptions, particularly Southall’s Alur Society,3 Fallers’ Bantu Bureau¬ cracy',4 and more recently Colin Leys’ Politicians and Policies.5 Generally, however, the district level received little attention until recently. Moreover, the emphasis was upon Buganda.6 The reasons for that emphasis lay, of course, in the dominant position of that kingdom in Uganda, and the extent to which Ganda politics dictated national developments in the 1950s. The result was nevertheless that our know¬ ledge of the growth of nationalism and of political parties at the grass roots level was very uneven. While a great deal is known about the '> 46519 VI PREFACE reactions of the ordinary Ganda to the events of the fifties, much less is known about the role of the rural masses in other parts of the country in the same period. This essay attempts to redress the balance. This is important because it was the overwhelming response of those rural masses outside Buganda to the appeal of the political parties in the 1961 and 1962 national elections that provided the non-Ganda leadership with sufficient bargaining strength to persuade Buganda to negotiate a settlement with them. Colin Leys has argued that the Uganda government’s economic dependence on the mass of peasants as farmers underlay and reinforced its political dependence upon them as voters during the immediate post-independence period. The political dependence was crucial. It is important therefore to consider the growth of the national movement from the perspective of the rural voter and this requires us to examine the nationalist phenomenon at the local and rural as well as at the national level. Anyone who lived in Kampala in the early 1960s could not moreover fail to be aware of the constant movement of party leaders between district and centre or of the frequency with which men from the districts visited the capital. Everything suggested a considerable interchange of influence between the two levels, a situation graphically illustrated by the crisis within both major parties, the Uganda People’s Congress and the Democratic Party, at the time of the election of a Uganda President in 1963. At that time district leaders descended upon Kampala to press their views; behind the public debate in parliament and the private debate in the parliamentary groups of the parties there was a good deal of negotiation between the national leadership and local representatives. The influence of the district on national politics was further sug¬ gested by the extent to which the government in the early years after independence coopted local elements in order to stabilize political rule. The alliance of the UPC with the Ganda movement Kabaka Yekka and the election of the Kabaka as President in 1963 were perhaps the most obvious, but there were numerous other indications of cooption, not only of Buganda but of other localities. District leaders figured prominently, for example, in the membership of the Regional Services Commission set up in 1962 to deal with appoint¬ ments to the local government civil service. Political developments in Uganda after 1962 furthermore saw ‘the North’ emerge as an increasingly significant factor in a country hitherto dominated by Buganda. Allegations of‘Northern dominance’ had by 1966 replaced earlier charges against Buganda; the contest between the former Prime Minister, Milton Obote, and the former President, Kabaka Mutesa II, which reached its climax in 1966, was PREFACE vii seen by many as a conflict between ‘North’ and ‘South’. It is my own view that the lines of conflict were in fact by no means so sharply cut between the two regions. Nevertheless one must ask what was the basis of the increased prominence of the Northern districts. Part of it was clearly the former Prime Minister’s UPC support in those districts, yet we know little about how it was built up. This essay seeks to increase our knowledge of a part of the Northern scene in the years before independence, when the foundations of that support were laid. In doing so it is hoped that something more will be added to our understanding of the growth of nationalism in one small part of Africa. The bulk of the research on which this essay is based was carried out between 1962 and 1964, when I was a member of the staff of what was then Makerere University College and later of Nairobi University College. I am grateful to both institutions and also to the University of Manchester, who financed my secondment to Nairobi, for their assistance. During that period I made regular visits to Northern Uganda, in the course of which I collected a good deal of material in interviews with a wide range of people including the party founders, party supporters, chiefs, councillors, and local authority officials, Members of Parliament, civil servants, and church officials. I am grateful for the generous assistance they gave me in understanding the political history of the area between the end of the Second World War and independence. In addition to this oral evidence, I was also able to draw considerably upon documentary sources at district level which had hitherto scarcely been tapped by researchers. These are the district records of both the provincial administration and the African local governments, which in the case of Lango and Acholi Districts provided a rich, if uneven, store of archival material previously neglected. My first task was, in fact, to sort out and tidy up those records, which had lain untouched in district stores for some time. I am grateful to the Gov¬ ernment of Uganda for permission to use those archives. Documentary and oral sources at district level were augmented by material in the central government archives related to developments in local government institutions over the period under review. I am also grateful for permission to use those archives and for the unfailing assistance given me by those in charge of the records at Entebbe. I am also grateful for permission to use certain selected files in the then Ministry of Regional Administration.7 In 1962 I served as a member of an Archives Committee set up by the then Prime Minister to ascertain the position regarding district archives. While that position gave me no special access to records, it did viii PREFACE enable me to see—as indeed the work of the committee established— that Uganda’s district archives at that time were a rich source of study material. Unfortunately difficulties of staff and storage made it im¬ possible to move the records to a central repository, and political events in Uganda during subsequent years have further impeded a solution to the problem of preservation. I sincerely hope, however, that even now it will be possible to save those records, which offer a store of information about Uganda’s more recent past. In the course of the years, and particularly in the period when I was actively engaged in research in Northern Uganda, I have incurred deep debts to very many people for their assistance and friendship. While it is impossible to name them all, I must thank especially the former President of Uganda, Dr Milton Obote, who gave me my first introduction to Lango; Mr Eric Lakidi, Mr Peter Oola, Mr Alex Ojera, Mr Alex Latim, and Mr Obonyo, who respectively helped me to under¬ stand Acholi’s political parties; and Miss Mildred Brown, of Boroboro Mission, Lira, who over the years gave me much hospitality and assisted me with interpreters. Central government officials and political leaders from other regions were also generous in the time they gave to discussing with me the whole issue of central-local relations, thus enabling me to see Northern Uganda more properly in the per¬ spective of the whole country. Professor A. Southall, then of Makerere University College, introduced me to West Nile, and Professor Colin Leys, then also of Makerere, more than once read drafts of the manu¬ script. Professor B. Webster, Professor of History at Makerere University Kampala, helped me to eliminate some of my early mis¬ takes on Acholi traditional history. I am also grateful to Professor Colin Leys and the East African Publishing House for permission to re¬ produce the map on page xii. finally, I must thank the Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, Professor W. H. Morris-Jones, for the facilities given me when I was a visiting fellow in 1969, during which time this study was finally written. Without that period ol quiet in his Institute, this monograph would never have been completed. I alone, of course, remain responsible for the final conclusions reached. My one regret is that those who helped me with their ideas, information, and opinions have had to wait so long for this manu¬ script, which has been delayed by numerous other responsibilities. I can only hope that they will accept it even at this late date and that it may contribute something to our understanding of the political development of Uganda and the events of the last decade. Lusaka C.G.