The king on the road

Look first at the man in the middle.

He wears a turban, a draped garment, and shoes that are difficult to distinguish in this old photograph. On either side of him stand uniformed men with rifles. The handwriting beneath the image gives him an abrupt new title: “Ex-King of Uganda.” The place is Mumias; the year, 1899. Kabaka Mwanga II is being taken toward the coast and, ultimately, exile in the Seychelles.

The label is almost as arresting as the photograph. A king has become an ex-king, and someone else has written the description. How did that happen? To answer it, we have to go backward through the images and papers left behind: a royal portrait, correspondence with Europeans, a company’s ambitions, a quarrel reported in London, and another photograph crowded with armed men.

This is not simply a story of Britain arriving and Buganda falling. The kingdom already had its own political institutions, rivalries, and religious debates. Its leaders made choices, formed alliances, changed sides, and fought over the future. The colonial state took shape amid those struggles—and then left an enormous paper trail telling us how to remember them.

Eight years earlier, a very different portrait

In a photograph dated January 14, 1891, Mwanga sits at the center of a group of chiefs. The arrangement draws the eye toward him: this is a court, and the Kabaka still matters as its political center. The Cambridge catalogue, however, calls the picture “M’Wanga Uganda Chief.” It also tentatively identifies a man partly cut off at the edge as Apolo Kaggwa.¹

A small caption can make a large difference. To the people in this court, Mwanga was Kabaka. In the catalogue of a British collection, he becomes a “chief.” This is not proof that a photographer toppled a monarchy with a word. It is a reminder that photographs reach us already interpreted—collected, captioned, dated, and arranged by institutions with their own histories.

When I put the Mengo portrait beside the image from Mumias, I cannot help noticing the shift. In one, Mwanga is surrounded by his court. In the other, he is surrounded by armed escorts. The two pictures do not explain every event in between. But together they ask a question that runs through this archive: who gets to decide what counts as legitimate African authority?

The letters show a kingdom still arguing for its future

Before Mwanga became a prisoner of empire, he was a political actor speaking to the wider world. The manuscript collection associated with Frederick Lugard contains correspondence involving Mwanga, chiefs, missionaries, and the men advancing British commercial power into the region. Some pages preserve letters in Swahili; others carry English copies or translations.²

Mwanga’s letter, dated June 18, 1889, recounts his displacement, his Christian commitments, and his efforts to return. It is a striking document because it refuses to leave him frozen as the villain of a missionary story. Here is a ruler attempting to explain his own predicament to potential European allies. Yet even this apparent first-person account survives in an English-language copy rather than an unmediated original.

A year later, Kaggwa’s letter offers a very different vantage point. Addressed to the British consul-general in Zanzibar, it describes the division between Catholic and Protestant Baganda. It reports the Protestant party’s willingness to place itself under English protection if Britain would help. The letter reminds us how much initiative lay with African political leaders: they were not waiting passively for a British decision. They were pursuing protection, advantage, and survival in a shifting political landscape.

That does not mean both men had equal power over what came next. Their letters survive in a collection organized around the British officers who would help decide the kingdom’s fate. A political appeal could become, in another set of hands, proof of consent or evidence of instability. The voices are African; the filing system is not necessarily theirs.

A company drew up the rules of government

The language of conquest is not always dramatic. Sometimes it looks like corporate paperwork.

In April 1888, the men forming the Imperial British East Africa Company set out the powers they wanted the business to hold. The agreement describes acquiring concessions and land, administering territory, raising taxes, creating courts, building roads, and even establishing banks and issuing money. These were not merely the ambitions of merchants hoping to buy and sell goods. They were claims to functions usually associated with a government.³

The distinction in dates matters. This 1888 agreement belongs to the company’s formation; the formal British protectorate over Uganda was declared later, in 1894. The company was not the same institution as the Crown administration that followed. But the papers show how an imperial presence could begin with private contracts and claims to authority, long before its government became a familiar item on a map.

If the portrait of Mwanga shows sovereignty gathered around a person, this document imagines sovereignty broken into powers that can be granted, exercised, transferred, and managed. The distance between the court and the company’s memorandum is part of the story.

When faith also meant taking sides

It is tempting to tell Buganda’s religious conflicts as a straightforward clash of beliefs. The surviving record makes that impossible. Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim communities did disagree over faith. They also struggled for political influence, court positions, allies, and arms. British Protestant networks and French Catholic missions brought their own rivalries into those contests.

An unsigned article in The Times of July 15, 1892, shows how those events appeared to readers in London. Under the title “The Other Side at Uganda,” it endorses Lugard’s version of the fighting against a competing account circulated by Catholic missionaries. The article says the Catholics were defeated and casts them as the aggressors. It speaks of Lugard’s Maxim gun and of the king’s flight. What looks like a news account is also an attempt to settle a dispute over blame.⁴

One sentence in particular reveals how the writer understood the stakes:

“Whoever has the King will have the country in the end.”

The Times, 15 July 1892

Mwanga could be challenged, exiled, recalled, and constrained, but rival parties still needed the legitimacy of kingship. He was not incidental to the struggle. He was its prize and, for that reason, a continuing threat.

Near the end, the article concedes that “the faith and the flag invariably go together.” It is an unusually candid observation: missionaries and imperial states were not identical, but religious affiliation could become inseparable from foreign political power. The rhetoric of protection traveled alongside armed intervention.⁵

There is another history behind the words “religious violence”: the Baganda converts executed during Mwanga’s reign in 1885–87, remembered as the Uganda Martyrs. Their deaths were real, and the religious memory of them matters. But a history told only through martyrdom can make Mwanga visible chiefly as a persecutor while leaving less space for the political crisis surrounding a royal court whose subjects were entering new, internationally connected allegiances. Both histories must remain in view.⁶

The gun was already in the picture

This photograph is not of Mwanga’s final capture. It is catalogued as January 1891, years before his eventual overthrow and deportation. That is what makes it revealing. The armed infrastructure of imperial intervention was visible before the later protectorate order had fully taken shape. British officers appear with African soldiers; a Maxim gun occupies the middle of the camp.⁷

The picture offers a corrective to two easy stories. The first says colonialism was only a paperwork exercise: it was not. The second imagines European officers acting alone: they did not. African soldiers, allies, porters, and intermediaries were already in the ranks and throughout the supply networks.

That presence should not be reduced to a single story of “collaboration.” People joined armed forces for different reasons and under unequal conditions. But it does show that empire relied on mobilizing people who were themselves subject to its rule. That pattern becomes even clearer in the last photograph of Mwanga.

One African statesman found a place in the world’s pages

Who could exercise influence as Mwanga’s own position weakened? Apolo Kaggwa is unavoidable here. A leading Protestant chief, Katikiro, diplomat, and writer, he helped negotiate Buganda’s political future and became a regent during the minority of Daudi Chwa II. To call him only a British collaborator misses his skill and political ambition. To describe him only as a modernizing hero misses who lost authority as his position grew.

In 1915, Kaggwa appeared in Frank Lincoln Mather’s Who’s Who of the Colored Race, a biographical directory of people of African descent. It described him as prime minister, regent, negotiator, author, knight, and a “loyal friend to England.” Here was a Muganda politician placed alongside prominent figures from a much wider Black world.⁸

This recognition opens a fascinating question about Black international visibility. What made an African leader appear worthy of global notice? In Kaggwa’s entry, the answers include literacy, authorship, Protestant respectability, diplomacy, and honors bestowed within the British imperial system. The directory is not evidence that everyone in the Black world agreed with his politics. It is evidence that he had become legible far beyond Buganda—and that the language of his success was closely tied to England.

Meanwhile, Mwanga’s young son Daudi Chwa was installed as Kabaka under regents. Buganda retained a monarchy, but its authority now operated within British supervision and the politics of an increasingly powerful chiefly elite. The throne survived; the conditions of kingship had changed.

And then empire sent soldiers from another colony

Return to Mumias in 1899. The uniformed escorts around Mwanga appear to be South Asian soldiers, although their precise identities and regiment cannot be established from this photograph alone. Their presence fits a documented military history: after the 1897 mutiny of Sudanese troops in British service, Indian troops were brought to East Africa, with five companies in Uganda by February 1898.⁹

British India was not merely a faraway possession in this story. It furnished an imperial military system that could move people and force across oceans. African troops had already served in the colonial ranks; Indian units joined a complex, unequal military landscape that included European commanders, African troops and auxiliaries, and soldiers recruited from elsewhere in the empire.

The photograph exposes the inadequacy of imagining colonial rule as a simple white-versus-Black encounter. Indian soldiers were themselves governed by the British empire and could nevertheless be ordered to enforce its authority over an African ruler. That asymmetry mattered more than any single visual guess about the men’s ethnic backgrounds. Empire assigned different duties, privileges, and constraints to the people it mobilized.

And its reach ran in both directions: it could bring soldiers into Uganda and send Mwanga out.

Who is missing from the story?

Photographs and paper records have a way of making the powerful look like the only people who lived through history. Lugard wrote reports. Kaggwa published histories. European missionaries kept correspondence. Colonial collections preserved images of rulers, officers, and armed men. Yet the archive is thinner when it comes to women, non-Christian communities, ordinary cultivators, lower-ranking soldiers, and those whose political memory did not pass through a European office.

The historian John Rowe points toward an alternative. Early Baganda writers, including Ham Mukasa and Bartolomayo Zimbe, recorded memoirs, clan histories, and accounts of the religious wars. Rowe also notes the unequal survival of those sources: Protestant and Catholic narratives were more plentiful than Muslim ones, while many people outside literate mission circles were left with little written representation.¹⁰

This is where the work of Achille Mbembe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o becomes useful without having to turn the story into theory alone. Mbembe asks us to see an archive as something built through power: records survive because someone collected and authorized them. Ngũgĩ asks us to take language seriously: who tells a people’s story, and in what words? Both questions arise immediately when a letter survives only as an English translation or a Kabaka appears in a catalogue as a “chief.”¹¹

There is a later echo in the fate of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo: a political figure removed while the question of who truly controlled African independence remained fiercely contested. The circumstances of Mwanga and Lumumba were very different; the comparison is not an equation. It is a reminder that the battle over African sovereignty has repeatedly been followed by a battle over the documents, photographs, and stories in which that sovereignty is remembered.¹²

The last word should not belong to a caption

In the first photograph, a king looks out from his court. In the last, he looks out from a road toward exile. Between those images lie a company’s proposed powers, competing missionary claims, weapons, political letters, the rise of a regency, and soldiers drawn from across an empire.

None of these objects can tell us the whole story of Buganda. Together they show how a kingdom could retain a throne while losing control over the meaning and exercise of its sovereignty. They also show that Baganda were not silent spectators: some resisted, some negotiated, some fought, some wrote, and some helped build the new order.

The colonial archive gave Mwanga an “ex” before his title. Reading beyond that word means restoring the disagreements, ambitions, lives, and institutions that the caption cannot hold. What happened in Buganda was not simply a transfer of government. It was a struggle over who could speak for a country—and who would get to tell its story afterward.

Explore the archive

The principal objects reproduced in this illustrated story. Dates follow the documents and supplied catalogue descriptions; uncertainties are identified rather than filled in.

01 / The royal portrait, 1891

Ernest Gedge, “M’Wanga Uganda Chief,” January 14, 1891. Cambridge University Library, Royal Commonwealth Society Library, Y30468K(LS)/1:31.

02 / Mwanga’s letter, 1889

English-language copy of a letter attributed to Kabaka Mwanga, June 18, 1889; in the Lugard-associated correspondence reproduced by the author. Full collection call number unverified.

03 / Kaggwa’s appeal, 1890

Copy of the English translation of a letter by Apolo Kaggwa, April 25, 1890, addressed to the British consul-general at Zanzibar; same correspondence collection.

04 / Company agreement, 1888

Imperial British East Africa Company, agreement dated April 18, 1888, including proposed concessions, administration, courts, and taxation; archival reproduction supplied by the author.

05 / Newspaper argument, 1892

“The Other Side at Uganda,” The Times (London), July 15, 1892; article reproduced from the author’s clipping.

06 / The armed camp, 1891

Ernest Gedge, photograph of Lugard and others at Kampala/Mengo, January 1891. Royal Geographical Society / Getty Images, image 1085330064.

07 / Mwanga under escort, 1899

Photograph captioned “Mwanga, Ex-King of Uganda en route to Coast—Mumias 1899”; reproduction provided by the author. Holding institution and escort personnel not confirmed.

08 / Kaggwa in the wider Black world, 1915

“Kagwa, Sir Apolo,” in Frank Lincoln Mather, ed., Who’s Who of the Colored Race, vol. 1 (Chicago, 1915), 166. Cover and entry reproduced.