The Politics of Intrigue in Ankole: 1905

Extract

The death of a colonial official in the early days of colonial rule in Africa was always a matter of grave concern to the imperial powers. Trained manpower was scarce and the sense of isolation and vulnerability must have been intense when the entire white establishment numbered a few dozen men. When that death was not from disease or accident, but was the result of an act of violence by an African subject, the concern felt by the colonial authorities was comparable to that caused by a local rebellion or armed insurrection. Such was clearly the case when a senior officer was murdered in the Ankole District of Uganda in 1905, only six years after the first British officer took up a post in the district. The result of the murder was a political crisis and a far reaching probe into the crime and its circumstances which serves to lay bare the political intrigues, divisions and motives of the entire collaborating elite of the Ankole Kingdom.

Like a rebellion, the crime of assassination offers us not only a story of intrigue and drama, but an avenue into the workings of the colonial regime and the African political systems which it encompassed. The complicated new structures of factional competition which were uncovered in the course of the murder investigation were fundamentally the same political structures that persisted during the entire colonial era in Ankole. It is for this reason that the murder of a single colonial officer deserves careful scrutiny.