Great Kingdoms of Africa by John Parker

Author:John Parker
Format: epub

Kabaka Mutesa receives the British explorers Speke and Grant in 1862, from John Hanning Speke, Journey of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (Edinburgh, 1863).

‘Isolation’ may well be in the eye of the beholder, but Buganda’s belated encounter with agents of the outside world certainly impacted on the study of its past in one crucial respect: a complete absence of written records before 1862. In contrast with the Sudanic zone of West Africa, where accounts of Arab geographers and travellers date back to the ninth century and the Timbuktu Chronicle tradition to the seventeenth century, historians of this region are more dependent upon alternative sources of evidence: archaeology, comparative ethnography, oral traditions and historical linguistics. Unfortunately, archaeological evidence too is limited, having been degraded by the humid environment of the lakeshore. As in the Bantu-speaking region of equatorial Central Africa to the west, however, linguistic evidence has proven to be fruitful in efforts to understand the deep past. The methodology is complex and contested, but, in short, the chronology of language change can be estimated by comparing the range of different words used for the same things or concepts in the various branches of the Bantu language family. Let us take as an example the point about cattle and bananas. ‘Cattle had been part of the legacy of Great Lakes food systems from very early on’, David Schoenbrun explains, ‘and the span of time between the development of a breeding taxonomy and a color taxonomy is fully two millennia’. Following its arrival from Southeast Asia, in contrast, the vocabulary associated with the banana developed much faster, ‘with no more than 600 years separating the innovation of the first varietals from the development of generics and plantation terms’.⁶ Yet these different rates of language change harmonized around the years 1000 to 1200 CE, with the sudden explosion of different words to describe the colour of cows and for the varieties, cultivation and preparation of bananas. The ‘language archive’ indicates that specialized pastoralism and intensive banana farming were taking shape. Rhiannon Stephens has recently applied this methodology to explore the history of motherhood among speakers of the North Nyanza branch of Bantu, the ancestral speech community of the Ganda and their Soga neighbours across the Nile to the east. Ideologies of motherhood and other forms of gender identity, like the growing of bananas, would have an important impact on the history of Buganda.⁷

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