Book Review: Uganda’s Katikiro in England

Abstract

In 1902, Sir Apolo Kagawa, chief minister (or Katikiro) and regent of the kingdom of Buganda, and his secretary, Ham Mukasa, arrived in Britain for the coronation of King Edward VII. Uganda’s Katikiro in England is an account of their visit, first published by Hutchinson of London in 1904 with Mukasa as the named author, which has now been reprinted by Manchester University Press, with an introduction by Simon Gikandi. When first published, Uganda’s Katikiro was regarded as a charming curiosity; in his contemporary introduction Sir H.H. Johnston (the British Special Commissioner for Uganda 1899–1902) remarked that while ‘we are constantly publishing the impressions made on our own pioneers . . . by the exotic subjects of the Empire’, ‘much less numerous are the recorded impressions which we make on the minds of those visitors to our shores’ (p. 42). As Gikandi points out, such curiosities now seem much more significant as rare surviving examples of cultural translation written by colonial subjects. The text is saturated with a sense of wonderment at the spectacle of Britain and the achievements of its people. On arrival in London: ‘We then went out to see the wonders of England . . . and first went out in our carriages to see the wonderful railways that go through the town underground. The English truly are marvellous people! . . . The roads there are very fine and wonderful; they have electric lamps, which shine and act as suns’ (p. 84). The reader is also informed of the ‘cleverness of the English’ (p. 71), and of Mukasa’s verdict ‘that the English are the kindest nation on earth’, particularly when compared with the perfidious Germans, who abuse him and the Katikiro on the return voyage to Africa (p. 197). For Gikandi, Mukasa’s narrative is a measured attempt by a colonized subject and his mentor to position themselves ‘within the cultural and political economy of Englishness, and to turn their colonisation into a source of moral, cultural and political authority’ (p. 5). He points to the mediating and ambiguous position of colonial elites, occupying a distinctive space in the culture of colonialism. In general Britain is not seen as an exotic other, but as the ultimate model for Bugandan civilization. In Gikandi’s reading of the text, Mukasa’s major claim is that the path to a modern Africa was to be found in overcoming the differences between Britain and Buganda. The re-publication of Uganda’s Katikiro in England is to be welcomed, and I hope that other examples of ‘reverse’ imperial travel writing will be published in the series. However, this cannot be seen as a simple exercise of recovering unheard or under-heard voices from the age of imperialism. Uganda’s Katikiro in England points to the complexity of imperial and colonial discourses, and particularly to the difficulties of ascribing authorship and interpreting positionality. In his introduction, Gikandi treats the text as the joint creation of Ham Mukasa and the Katikiro, and suggests that because it was written in the Luganda language its principle intended audience consisted of other elite Baganda. Gikandi finds it ‘amazing’ that the text was never published in Luganda, and ‘equally amazing’ that the translation by Reverend Ernest Millar of the Christian Book reviews 237