 I'm Paul Webley, I'm the director of SCIAS, I'd like to welcome all of you in the audience tonight, particularly all of those who've travelled a long way to be here and to Professor Richard Reeds, friends and colleagues. We've got guests from all over the place tonight, some people have travelled a long way to be here and we're very grateful to you all. SCIAS in Orgles are rather special and I say that having been at other universities where Orgles seem to me to get less and less special with the years. It's kind of downgraded and important, optional and so on and so forth. It seems to me that SCIAS in Orgles have a real sense of occasion, there is celebration, there are each passage for the speaker. Richard assures me that he has no nerves at all and an enjoyable intellectual event for the whole SCIAS community. It's also a great pleasure to welcome Richard's mother, wife and brother. I don't know where they are in the audience but I'm told they're here somewhere. No, welcome. Richard told me that his mother has never heard him give a lecture. This will be great. I can assure you it will be a wonderful occasion. Now just to make sure it's a wonderful occasion, can I just do a bit of simple housekeeping. First thing is do turn off your mobile phones. Sorry, mobile phones first. Turn off your stupid mobile phone. Good. I think people who've seen me do these in Orgles frequently think I'm extremely stupid because it takes me a long time to know my mobile phone. The other thing is if there's a fire alarm it means there's a fire. Don't panic, note where the fire exits are. I'm very pleased to preside over this inaugural lecture. It's the second one of the 2013-14 inaugural lecture series. I think it's particularly appropriate that Richard is giving his inaugural this term. It coincides with the brilliant exhibition on David Livingstone for which he was the lead academic. If you've not seen it, please make sure you go in and look at it. It is really excellent. You might have to make an effort because it's not immediately obvious when you go through the Zoriastriad exhibition that there is actually a brilliant Livingstone exhibition to see as well. If you haven't seen it, please go. It's really, really good. Professor Reid will be introduced by Professor Justin Willis. He's a professor in the Department of History at Durham University. His work has largely been concerned with identity, authority and social change in eastern Africa over the last 200 years. He's conducted extensive archival and oral historical research in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Sudan. He's also held research awards from the ESRC, AHRC, Leverhoom Trust. It's all very impressive. Professor Will's current research particularly rates the history of elections in eastern Africa since the 1950s. From 2006-2009 he was seconded from Durham to serve as director of the British Institute in eastern Africa in Nairobi. The vote of thanks will be delivered by Dr John Parker of the Department of History here at SOAS. So he really needs no introduction but you'll get a couple of sentences. John's a senior lecturer in the history of Africa here. He's the author of Making the Town, Garstate and Society in an Ecolonia Acra, Tongnab, The History of West African God and African History, a very short introduction which I've read so I know it's very good. He's recently researched a book on the history of death and burial in Ghana. He's edited the Oxford Handbook of Modern African History with Richard. We're very grateful to both of you for being part of today's event and I'll pass over to Professor Willis in a moment. At the end notice that you'll also be invited upstairs to the Brunei Suite for some wine and food. So over to you Professor Willis. Good evening everyone. I can't remember when I first met Richard Reid which is quite surprising to me because he has come to loom quite large in my life subsequently. But my first memory relating to Richard is sitting on the top deck of a number 29 bus reading a seminar paper by him I think in 1995. At a time when I was a temporary lecturer here trying not very adequately to fill the shoes of Andrew Roberts who had been my own supervisor and was Richard's at this time. And although I don't remember meeting Richard I do remember reading his seminar paper and I do remember being impressed at the time by his determination to study pre-colonial African history at a time when so many including myself were being tempted to study the more recent past by the relative ease and convenience of doing so. I then lost touch with Richard for some years. I was in East Africa. Richard also was but in a different part he went off to Eritrea to enjoy what in retrospect we can see as the all to brief Eritrean political and intellectual spring of the mid to late 1990s. And I think it's probably fair to say, Richard can correct me if I'm wrong, that it was at this time that Richard really developed some of the characteristics of his subsequent work. And I think it's fair to say that his work has really been marked both by an extraordinarily broad regional sweep of interests but also by a real interest in a chronological depth. But yet again also in a willingness to think about the very recent past and understanding contemporary Africa in terms of that deep past. And I think Richard's experience in Eritrea helped him to think about all of these things in a very profound and sometimes quite intense way. Richard reappeared in my life in quite a major way in 2002 I think it was when he came to join me at Durham as a lecturer in African history. I really hadn't been keeping in contact with his work or with him over the years and so I had no idea what to expect when he appeared. And I have to say it was an extraordinarily pleasant surprise and from the day of his arrival I was delighted that he had come to join me at Durham. That was partly of course because Richard is quite simply immensely good company. He's a very sociable person. He's very entertaining to be with. It took him a little while to adjust to the hard drinking culture of the northeast. But after the first couple of minutes he seemed to get the hang of it. And thereafter he was it's safe to say the life of the party for myself and for other colleagues and also often for our postgraduate students. And he played a tremendous role socially which should never be underestimated in any institution. But he was also an extraordinarily hard worker at a time when we faced extremely heavy workloads in Durham. He was thoroughly committed to teaching. And we are if I can blow the Durham trumpet for a moment a department which prides itself on its teaching of undergraduates. We have a very distinctive competitive and demanding group of undergraduates. And Richard rose to the task of teaching those students with extraordinary calm and a plumb and also sometimes with vigor and energy. And he was great to work with. Really an excellent colleague. And last but not least Richard was marvellous to work with because of the candour and clarity which he brought to any intellectual discussion. He was really a good person to talk about work with not only because he was sympathetic and entertaining and clever but also because he was willing to say things which sometimes people weren't always willing to hear or willing to think about. This quality I think his candour and his directness has consistently marked Richard's published work. A not altogether friendly reviewer remarked of his Frontiers of Warfare book in a review on the unusual if contentious approach of the book and on Richard's eriodite and provocative style. Now I don't think that Richard would quibble with any of those adjectives although he may well have found reason to disagree with much of the rest of the content of that particular review. As John Rowe noted in his sleeve notes on Richard's first book, Political Power in Precolonial Burganda, Richard takes no prisoners in his academic writing. It is of course a very apposite metaphor since from the outset Richard has been concerned in his study with the theme of violence and particularly the relationship of violence to state power in eastern Africa and across Africa more widely. The choice of topic in itself is revealing of Richard's great virtue of directness and robustness. Many Africanist historians, I think it's safe to say, have shied away from the topic of violence and warfare in African history, partly because we're a liberal lefty sort of lot and we hate bloodshed, but also of course because the shadow of Hugh Trevor Roper has always lain heavy upon our profession and the thought that by raising the topic of precolonial warfare in particular, one might be accused of presenting Africa's past as one of endless mindless violence, is one I think that has dissuaded many historians from approaching this topic. Characteristically, Richard took this head on and in his work consistently time and again he has shown that African warfare has not been primitive, that it has not been meaningless either and also that it has not been simply driven by external demands for ivory and slaves as some would like to argue. Richard has, as a reviewer put it in writing of his book on precolonial warfare in eastern Africa, made war meaningful if not rational in African history. I think actually Richard might actually dispute the second part of that in that I think he would argue that warfare often is very rational, has been rational in the African past, because while he is sought to explain it in terms of culture and explain its meanings culturally, he has also argued that for state actors warfare has been a very rational and constructive approach to the pursuit of certain tasks, although of course he has also shown how patterns of violence can repeat themselves destructively along historically enduring lines of conflict. Richard left Durham in 2007 while my back was turned, lured south possibly by the attractions of working at Urt-Sawas, possibly by other reasons who can say, we were extremely sorry to see him go, although I should say that if we were sorry the owner of Fabio's bar was absolutely desolate, the move has however suited Richard in all kinds of ways. I think all his friends and colleagues will know that he has thrived here in a number of ways and we have been pleased to see him thrive and pleased to see his family thrive, but also of course his scholarship has gone from strength to strength. Richard's written output has continued to be both prodigious and extremely readable. His publications and his engagement with a policy audience have confirmed his reputation as a scholar who is willing to pursue an unfashionable line of inquiry and make a difficult argument in a very clear and comprehensible way. For me editing Richard's recent and now already much cited piece on pre-colonial history in the Journal of African History was a rare pleasure. It is not usual to come across a historian writing about African historiography who can make one laugh out loud with the sheer boisterousness of their prose and it was quite a pleasure to edit that piece. So Richard has continued to show himself not only willing, but actively determined to think across a long span of African history in explaining the African present, whether to undergraduate students or to diplomats or to other policy makers. Richard's performance as a lecturer on the Rift Valley Institute's Horn of Africa course is an absolute masterclass in how to make history relevant to a wider audience of policy makers and also in how to switch between the grand regional overview and the very local insight and make the two cohere together in a single presentation. Richard is in short a scholar whose research insights, whose gift for effective communication make him richly deserving of the recognition bestowed on him by the chair. And it is my very great pleasure to introduce my unusual, contentious, eriodite and provocative colleague and friend Richard Reid. I chose well. Thank you very much Justin. Some of that is even believable. Just a quick couple of thanks to various family members and there's quite a few of them. I feel a little like George Bernard Shaw tonight. All relatives, no friends. I'm exaggerating slightly. There are a number of people I've managed to rustle up who I'm not related to tonight. So thank you for coming. And a couple of particular thank yous to my mum and brother who have come rather further than most today. Now you might get an idea of what I actually do and then you can judge for yourselves whether it's a sensible use of public funds. And a special quick thanks to my wife Anna, who I've lost there she is, who deposited tonight our three-year-olds in the care of a total stranger to be here tonight. Let's hope that works out. Anna's support particularly in recent months has been absolutely invaluable and I feel in some ways that the two of us are giving this inaugural lecture tonight although she may want to distance herself from that when she hears me after tonight. Justin talked quite a lot about my work on violence and I've decided to demilitarise. I'm not going to talk about war tonight although there is some political violence in this but rather I want to use this occasion to talk about a current project which is essentially an exploration of historical culture and consciousness. It's a new project. It's been running around a year now. It's funded by the Leverhulme Trust very generously and the idea here is to explore the uses of the past, what history has meant in the making of modern African society and politics using the case study of Uganda. I did begin my career in Uganda many years ago, well 20 years ago, before moving up to the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia, Eritrea and I've since returned to Uganda largely because I can no longer get into Eritrea. Uganda, as I hope I will demonstrate, is a good place to test some ideas about the uses of the past and the importance of history. This project, which is in some ways quite simple and yet in other ways terribly complicated, is essentially about the role of the pre-colonial in the making of a modern African nation state. It has a long gestation period. It is, as Justin pointed out, I was a student here at SOAS at 20 years since I first showed up here to study under Professor Andrew Roberts who I'm very pleased to say is here tonight. I was very surprised to discover that I was the only student in my cohort who was doing pre-colonial history. I had naively thought when studying as an undergraduate at Sterling under Professor Robin Law, who's also here, that pre-colonial history was African history. I didn't understand these people who did the 20th century which seemed to me to be basically politics. I've been thinking about this for quite a long time and in the sense it's developed over the last two decades, the way in which the past, the African past has been increasingly foreshortened and as Justin pointed out in his very generous introduction, there has been a trend towards looking at the colonial period and increasingly in fact the post-colonial period. Anything before around 1900 is increasingly regarded as largely irrelevant. This is not to say it's completely dead in the water, it isn't. There's a number of people working on the pre-colonial past, particularly in North America, but it is still minority sport. Then there was my own experiences teaching, for example, in Eritrea for a number of years. It came to my attention just how fragile was the study of history, the teaching of history in a young country like Eritrea. I was privileged to be part of the first BA degree programme there. This was before the war with Ethiopia. Things were looking good and then it quickly became clear, of course, that history was quite dangerous and very contentious. So my project is very broadly concerned with the way that history has been mobilised in Uganda over a number of decades, often cynically mobilised, and to explore the paradox that sat at the heart of the new nations of the 1960s, in which you had a period where African history, of course, is born as a professional discipline and so us is very much at the forefront of that. Yet history becomes dangerous to those new nations, particularly the case in Uganda, in various ways, as I hope to demonstrate. History and writing and talking about the past became a profoundly problematic intellectual and political exercise. I don't want to keep you too long tonight. There's an excellent reception waiting for us, so let me skip on. A further moment of inspiration, I have to say, in the Ugandan context came in 2010 when I was there doing exploratory work for this project. I was very struck by the story of the Ugandan Museum, this very uninspiring looking building which lies on the outskirts of the city centre in Kampala. Essentially the story went that the government was determined to close the Ugandan Museum. This particular building dates to the 1950s. It was originally held at Macari University itself, which we'll come to later. The government decided that this museum was a waste of space. It occupies prime real estate on a hill as you head north out of the city. It was going to close the museum, mothball the contents, and in its place it was going to build an East African trade centre. 30 stories high or something. This struck me as remarkable because in many ways it speaks to a very current concern, certainly of mine and one or two others in modern African history and politics, which is a hostility to the past or aspects of the past. In the Ugandan context I believe increasingly that things like history are frankly irrelevant. What matters is economic development, GDP growth rates. The past however we choose to identify it and there will be various forms of history as I will show over the next half hour or so. History was associated with sectarianism, with tribalism, and in fact was inimical to national development. I think the current government under the national resistance movement, the NRM, have very much inherited this idea from earlier regimes, including Milton Abote, Idi Amin in particular. This was also a moment of inspiration. I have to say that the museum survives still. There was an enormous outcry about this and the government apparently has shelved its plans for the moment to close this uninspiring but incredibly important building. So we wait to see what happens. I should say a word or two about the Ugandan context itself for those of you who are uninitiated into the complexities of Uganda. Two pictures here. The one on my right is a rather simpler view of Uganda with some of the key kingdoms, Buganda, Toro, Kohle, Banyoro and the later addition of Basoga there to the east. The reality looks much more like the other one on my left. Uganda is small but incredibly complex with large numbers of ethnic cultural linguistic groups pressed in within quite a small area. Uganda is small but incredibly complex. My point being here that within this enclosed space there's been enormous competition over the past, enormous competition over what history means and what it might mean crucially, of course, for the future. I should say something also about Buganda, Uganda. I've tried to elaborate on this to several cohorts of students over the years. Buganda is not Uganda and vice versa. Uganda is named after the kingdom that sits there in the south centre of the modern state. The British basically misspelled it, as many others did, and the whole territory becomes known as Uganda, in fact it is named after that original kingdom. Buganda, as really an accident of historical geography, looms large in our story. Buganda has one of the loudest voices in Uganda historically. It has an extraordinarily rich, literal and oral output. Buganda tends to overshadow all these other bits. My talk is very ganda-centric, but that's largely because the project is in its early stages. If an academic wants to get out claws, we always say it's work in progress, don't criticise me yet, but we are still looking at the various bits and pieces around Buganda. Much of what I have to say this evening is concerned with Buganda and we have to understand Buganda's hugely problematic, dominant role in Uganda's 20th century. Much of what I'm dealing with in this project is concerned with the politics of the past, but I want to begin with something slightly different. An important aspect of this project is to examine the representation of the pre-colonial past, for example in Ugandan writing, Ugandan literature. I myself, virgin territory very much. Uganda, even by contrast with neighbouring Kenya for example, does not have a very big footprint in literary collections, for example. But there are a number of important authors that the project is looking at. For example, this chap, Okot Betech, who is described by some Ugandans problematically as Ugandan's Chinua Echebi. And Okot belongs to a particular generation. He wrote his early work in the 1950s at the same time as Echebi, and for example, Kamara Le was writing in French Guinea, pioneers of African writing. And these are probably his most famous works on the left here, Song of Luino, Song of Achol. These are traditional formats. They are presented in song form. And it's basically, you have to read them sequentially. Luino is a wronged woman presented in this work as a traditional woman full of pre-colonial virtue. And Achol is her fancy husband who has adopted Western ways and taken up with a westernised woman. And they basically sing insults at one another. It's a wonderful kind of breakdown of a marriage and in fact a culture in literature. And White Teeth. Not, of course, I was delighted to discover that Zedith Smith has obviously ripped off a title of an Acholi novel that was originally written in 1953 but was only translated in the late 1980s. And White Teeth again, if you want to read something uplifting and about the resilience of the human spirit, do not read White Teeth. It makes Irish misery literature look positively like Monty Python-esque. Everything that can go wrong goes wrong. It's absolutely one misery after another and it's basically the story of a young man who travels to Campala from the rural north, tries to make a living, fails miserably, and returns having been robbed of his last possessions on the bus home. And that's where the novel ends. You're kind of turning the page waiting for something nice to happen. Nothing happens. It's all crap. So he ends up going home. And, of course, the whole story is basically as lots of Chebys' work was and Camarole in French Guinea was all about the breakages of supposedly pre-colonial culture under the wit of colonial modernity. But it's not simply fictional writing. I also am quite keen to look at the burgeoning realm of memoir in Ugandan writing. And I couldn't let go of the opportunity to present Princess Elizabeth of Toro who was quite prolific in her way. But her most famous book, of course, inevitably entitled African Princess. And she was famous in the 1970s for all sorts of reasons, some good, some not so good. She was, for a time, Minister and came from royalty in the west of the country and ended up writing this memoir. And it's a very good example of the packaging of a particular type, a vision of traditional society. Again, the project will be looking at this kind of thing. And indeed, the president of Ugandan himself, Museveni, has also gone into print. This is unusual. He doesn't normally look this grumpy. Normally, he's quite a smiley chap, although less so of late. But Museveni has also written. He's become a very didactic president. He likes to instruct and he likes to instruct in print. And his own book, his original book, Sewing the Mustard Seed, was very keen to kind of reach back to a past that's full of virtuous peasants doing the right thing. So the project, in a sense, is not only about overt politics. I'm also very keen to look at this kind of literary output. But let me turn back a little bit to the early colonial period. And there are a number of experts in this audience. All I can do tonight is skip through particular episodes and give glimpses at the kinds of things the project is aiming to look at. And we begin with the era of the scramble for Africa, which I define as a period between the 1870s and the 1920s. This is a period where thinking about history and historical production or cultural production of a historical nature becomes incredibly intense. A new political marketplace has opened up a result of the African-European engagement. European imperialism provokes new ways of thinking about the past. Now I've tried for quite a long time to argue that we should not be obsessed with the colonial period and then in fact that in some places the colonial moment is largely irrelevant. But there's no question that the coming together of European and African thinkers provokes new types of writing and thinking about the past. Again, Buganda which is represented in this picture, the young king is over there on the left between the great pillars of British society in the early Ugandan protectorate. Buganda understood very well the advantages not simply of political engagement but of intellectual engagement. Of putting their point of view forward of producing histories that were meaningful and would create space for themselves, cultural and political space within which to operate. Historical writing was above all an imperial activity. So you get lots of stories which are essentially of course written in the style of the Old Testament. This was of course the first texts that many baptized Christian Gandah had read. So they tended to write history in the style of the Old Testament. And lots of begatting and smiting and indicating of course that particular peoples were worthy of dominating over others and so on. This was very much an Afro-European exercise. European writers were also complicit in the production of Gandah-centric visions of the region's past. This picture is of what remains of course one of the possibly still the finest public school in Uganda, King's College Budo which was opened in 1906 and here's the grid and the good gathered including as I said the young king in 1906. And their output was very important in forging a new kind of African history and one of the earliest texts to come out of Budo school was a book by the Reverend Weatherhead and Samson Buzongeri which was called an introduction to the history of the entire world. Three quarters of which dealt with Buganda. So very much in the style of British world history writing where England of course is smack in the middle of much of the narrative. So this was a period of history in the making and the particular characters that were involved in this will be familiar to many people who know about Uganda. This I think is a particularly delightful picture. This is Apollo Cagwa and Ham Mokasa outside Westminster Abbey on the occasion of Edward VII's coronation in 1902. Cagwa is the one without the hat. Like myself. And his secretary sorry other way around. Cagwa is wearing the hat and his secretary is on his right Ham Mokasa. Now these were political heavyweights. They're literary endeavours. The writing of history cemented their authority. They seized Cagwa in particular dominated a generation of historical writing in Uganda. And of course collaborated very famously with a church missionary society missionary called John Rosco. They worked off one another. Occasionally they disagreed over particular interpretations. But they were very much in sync. Cagwa was a very problematic figure. You had a later generation that basically grew up trying to kind of deconstruct everything that Cagwa had ever written. But in the 1900s particularly with his Bassa Kabaka King's of Buganda which is basically a kind of chronicle. His Burgon customs of Buganda the clans of Buganda extraordinarily prolific all churned out on his own little printing press. So this was a period in which historical writing proliferates. Clan histories get written. The missionary societies themselves and I should add something here about the religious tensions because of course this was a particular colonial territory that was split between Protestants and Catholics. The Protestants got there first they thought they had a virgin land in the 1870s and a couple of years later the Catholics arrived, they were French which made it even worse. Some of the letters from missionaries are absolutely wonderful ranting about here we are in the centre of Africa we've got a population ready for conversion and along come these French Catholics and move just a mile down the road unbelievable. They both made converts and both churned out particular views of the past and sponsored particular newspapers Ibiza Mubaganda for example Ibiza was the CMS sponsored newsletter from 1907 Muno was produced means your friend was the rival Catholic paper from 1911 and certainly by the 1920s you're getting the appearance of vernacular newspapers often concerned with contemporary events but very often with a great deal of historical content, historical debates the origins of particular kings and cultures and so on. In other words Ganda like to see themselves in print it was very important, it was politically important to get yourself into print and history mattered the pre-colonial past mattered because this was the best way that you could make your point about the future the present and the future of Uganda. Buganda again particular has a flourishing local publishing scene and writings take various forms in this period lots of moral instruction what to do, what not to do marriage for example, war memoirs biographies all of historical bent and one of the tensions by the 1930s was the arrival of western ways in many ways this anxiety continues in fact in Uganda today and in some ways for various reasons that some of you may be aware of it's actually being reinvigorated to some extent and political heavywits weighed in on this including the new Kabaka, Kabaka simply means king of Buganda Daodichwa he was the small boy in the picture of the public school earlier and Daodichwa weighs in on this and produces in the 1930s pamphlets and statements on the pre-colonial past including quite a famous one published in 1935 education, civilisation and foreignisation in Buganda in which he basically talks about the beautiful pristine nature of pre-colonial custom and behaviour he says there was no adultery in pre-colonial Buganda only Europeans introduced sexual messing around no human sacrifice in fact of course there was not much human sacrifice under the British either as far as we're aware but he felt keen to make the point that we didn't sacrifice one another and then they deserved it lots of personal respect, personal kindness in other words Daodichwa the king looked out from Mengo which is the royal palace and saw all these all these young dudes walking about dressed like the Europeans and began to despair that the pre-colonial past was being forgotten and so history becomes a matter of morality and a reflection of generational conflict there is, of course I'm told a time in everybody's life when you begin to grumble about young people obviously I haven't reached that stage yet and I can't quite understand how this happens but in Uganda you begin to get this by the 1930s Hamukasa who we noted earlier on as Kagwa's secretary comes into his own in the 1930s he appears to do the same thing produce enormous tomes these are men who are now reaching their 50s their 60s and believe that they're being forgotten they need to remind these young bucks who've been born since the British came what they achieved in the late 19th century and Hamukasa in particular produces his monumental Sumudanuma which means don't turn back it was a three volume history of the 19th century in the triumph of religious truth Hamukasa was a good Protestant others weighed in at the same time others talked about and some of this stuff's quite bizarre in its make up kind of fusion of ganda culture with Roman Catholic morality for example but all of them deplored the new ways of drinking and marital infidelity and so on we focused as historical works on the turbulence of the late 19th century the 1880s, 1890s when this particular generation Hamukasa and others had come to the fore and kind of rescued Uganda from darkness there are real comparisons to be made with other with European examples of similar kind of generational shifts I couldn't give an academic lecture without showing you the front cover of a journal this is about as exciting as it gets for academics well this journal is actually quite exciting this is the Uganda Journal and this is another major outlet for historical debate this is volume one number one January 1934 cost you a lot of money on eBay and this is a kind of fledging academy the Uganda Journal is set up in 1934 this is one thing that British did very well they promoted this in most of their territory certainly in our region as far as I am aware in Tanganyika and Sudan and so on and these were journals if you can see the top there the organ of the Ugandan Literary and Scientific Society and they were full of they were kind of random notes about the making of canoes or how to roast your bananas properly to keep your man happy but they also had historical pieces and this is this particular issue is no different the fourth one down there is a piece on Mutasa of Uganda who was a big late 19th century Kabaka so you are beginning to get lots of outlets both for Europeans and African writers now much of this concerns Uganda and of course one of the simple lessons that we are told about history is that it's usually written by the winners there are lots of losers in Uganda we don't have time to go on into all of them tonight but much of the outputs down to this point relates to Uganda that was the favourite partner of the British they were the centre of Uganda and colonial life in many respects they regarded themselves and this is important as being undefeated and this is still true today that Uganda do not believe that they were conquered by the British they invited the British in which is actually kind of true but others didn't come out of it so well including this glum looking chap this is Mukama or King Kabalega of Banyoro made the decision to resist the British violently and was brutally crushed and history writing and historical recollection in Banyoro takes a very different form much more concerns with nostalgia and something lost irreparably lost unlike Uganda where history is very much alive and in the present and things to be debated over Banyoro this was not true he's also glum of course cos he's just had his arm amputated I should also say that so these cultures of defeat nostalgia one of the things we want to explore in the project is to look at places like Banyoro and examine the ways in which that kind of history also got written the chap on the right is Tito Winy King of Banyoro here he is signing an agreement with the British Governor Andrew Cohen in 1955 but Winy was very important in pushing a particular historical agenda in Banyoro including trying to get back territory that the so-called lost counties that Banyoro had lost to Uganda in 1900 and in fact under a pseudonym KW this guy actually wrote a number of very important pieces for the Uganda Journal in the mid 1930s and he wasn't the first Neuro historian to go into print but he was one of the most important and articulate and then I'm afraid this is my worst par point of the evening very hard to get a good snap of this chap but John Neacatura finally comes through in 1947 with his major work which is basically trying to match Buganda's earlier historical output and his book was Abakama by Banyoro the Kings of Banyoro where he tried to kind of re-put Banyoro back into the picture but through much of the colonial period it's important to note that the British regarded Banyoro as a kind of lost cause very fatalistic wrote a number of colonial administrators and Banyoro's prime minister told John Beatty who was a prominent anthropologist in the early 1950s our spirit is dead and many others find the same thing in the 50s simply something that we tell around the fire the fire at night but we've been separated from former glories there are many other losers which we don't have time to go into tonight Ugandan Muslims are a very important area to go into Ugandan Muslims of course had fewer education little advantages from the 1900s they were lit beginners but even among the Muslim community by the 30s and 40s you're beginning to get a Ugandan Muslim historiography so history becomes ever more politicised and politics becomes ever more historicised during the colonisation and again nowhere was this history politics vortex if you like more turbulent again than in Uganda and in many ways the debates, the arguments what becomes a crisis is between these two men on the right in his robes the New Kabaka in 1939 becomes King of Uganda Edward Matesa Cambridge educated and on the left Milton Abote a langi from the north and they represented very diverse traditions, cultures Edward Matesa of course the King of one of the most hierarchical states anywhere in Africa Abote a socialist from the north which at that time at least lacked the same kind of monarchical tendencies and they clashed fundamentally over their visions of Uganda's past and therefore its future there's lots more that can be said about the decolonisation period but it's worth noting of course one development which is the emergence of Kabaka Yka which means the king alone which became for Uganda a kind of ethno nationalist movement and one of their arguments was in fact secession from Uganda their argument was let Uganda go hang, we are a precolonial kingdom of incredible strength and cogency we can simply move on and here's Edward Matesa addressing all his his key figures and this was often regarded as neo-traditionalism and the clash between northern very broadly speaking northern and southern historical visions was stark in this period so this was the monarchical view that believed in the king and the king's things the king was at the centre of everything was at the centre but it wasn't the only vision probably the most famous figure of course in this picture is the one in the middle Jomo Kenyata but we're concerned with the one to his right Ben Chowanaka who was in fact Uganda's first prime minister long forgotten in many ways under internal self-government and Chowanaka was also a ganda but he very much rejected the royalist monarchical movement and believed that Uganda had been strongest when it was open and more egalitarian, more democratic and so on so there were these alternative visions of the past decolonisation results in a brutal historical revisionism which is how I've chosen to interpret the abolition of the kingdoms eventually Milton Abote does ask the abolish the kingdoms after working with for a short few years in the early 1960s they brought Uganda to independence in 62 but by 1966 the kingdoms were abolished and in many ways all political and cultural systems in which authority and identity were rooted in the precolonial past were deemed troublesome divisive anachronistic this was not the new Uganda that we wanted and this is a rather grainy picture is poor old Edward Matesa arriving having walked hundreds of miles to get to Burundi where he sought asylum if you notice he always has a packet of cigarettes with him wherever he goes Edward Matesa has always got a packet of ffags in his hand heavy smoker and by all kinds a heavy drinker as well and of course he later died London in 1969 under some say mysterious circumstances so historical revisionism was very powerful in the political arena in the late 1960s and this was continued in many ways by Idi Amin himself who had a particular take on historical revisionism and I particularly like this picture of him being carried around by some poor mozungus some poor white guys who had chosen to remain in Uganda and of course had to take an oath of allegiance to him he's a very big man he must have weighed a bloody ton but there he is being carried around if I was Idi Amin I would have done exactly the same thing quite frankly but Idi Amin has a particular view of a revisionist approach of course one of his titles self awarded was Conquer of the British Empire and of course most people have their own little mean stories he also of course laid claim to the supposedly empty throne of Scotland he offered to marry that poor girl Princess Anne he offered to take her off the queen's hands and my particular favourite is that he offered to send Ugandan peacekeepers to the troubled streets of Belfast that would certainly have made my childhood a little more colourful than I remember it to be so history was becoming dangerous I'll shoot through this and yet ironically alongside these turbulent historical or anti-historical dynamics in many ways in the political arena there is something of an historical revolution taking place in the professional academy this fine building is McCarrary University and McCarrary University in Kampala was very much at the forefront of the new African history that was being born in the 1950s 1960s here soas of course comes into the story because at least according to his own account my illustrious predecessor as professor of African history here at Soas Roland Oliver was approached and asked if he would go and save McCarrary and rebuild an African history department he declined but he certainly trained lots of the people who ended up going there the history of Uganda project that was launched in the 1960s did amazing work and regarded themselves as part of a nation building project even though the history department at McCarrary remained largely white and male until really the early 1960s but very much historical revolution just at the moment when political forces are kind of moving against the past but to be a historian was a risky business as those who worked under Idi Amin again in areas on the one side sort of looking like us with his robes of course he was the chancellor of McCarrary for a time and on the left with all those medals awarded himself and the expansion of the historical academy was largely brought to an end by the late Abote regime and then of course by Amin in the early 1970s and Amin moved against McCarrary in sort of subtle ways in many respects and his own view of history was idiosyncratic in around 1974 he complained bitterly to the powers that be at McCarrary that he heard that lots of students were doing their dissertations on the 19th century Arab slave trade and he was very annoyed about this because he said this will simply insult our Arab neighbours he was getting very close to Gaddafi at that point and he instructed them to stop these students talking about the Arab slave trade this slave trade was nothing to do with the Arabs and much more problematically in 1976 he laid claim to the western half of Kenya which was problematic and instructed historians to find evidence in support of this and they promptly left the country so in many ways this is a sort of historical crux a critical moment Samora Michelle the president of Mozambique had it of course in his oft decided declaration for the nation to live the tribe must die and increasingly the view in Uganda certainly was that the past was tribal the future was national and although these two gentlemen Edward Matesa and Milton Abote worked together for a number of years it clearly was not sustainable in terms of nation building project historical academy itself historians never quite overcame the ambiguity of the task before it finally we move into the modern periods and this is the current president standing in the middle there you worry Moseveni and in many ways the nation is certainly Moseveni's views that nation has been reborn under the NRM they have restored order they place emphasis on this to a great degree the longer they've been there they've been there of course since 1986 and the emphasis now very much is on how they have reconstructed Uganda but they have inherited in many respects the morbid fear of the sectarianism of the past of previous regimes and in many ways the best illustration of this problematic relationship with the past is the government's relationship with Uganda in 1966-67 the kingdoms are abolished as I noted earlier in 1993 they are restored but under the condition that they are not political kings are not supposed to speak about political matters these are purely cultural artifacts but of course kingdoms are not cultural artifacts kingdoms are deeply rooted in all kinds of political history and until recently at least the relationship between state house, the president and the new king, Ronald Matheby who used to sell double glazing in Kilburn by the way until the kingdom was restored has been very frosty and in fact the two of them have recently come to an agreement but for a long time there were no relations between them you can understand that this is hugely problematic you've got a kingdom sitting squat in the middle of the nation and yet the government can't actually talk to it in any meaningful way and Uganda has been a problem and I put it in inverted commas of course because for the ganda themselves it's the government that's the problem but in 2009 for instance Mosevony's attempt to restrict the role of the Kabaka produced riots which were very devastating and then in 2010 something very awful indeed happened these are Kasubi tombs where several of the former kings are buried at a UNESCO heritage site and it went on fire in March 2010 it's been largely destroyed and the ganda themselves believed that the government might have been behind it tensions really reached a low at that point so these struggles go on history very much matters these are battles over the very heart of what Uganda means and in many respects Ugandans of course view their kings with some skepticism but they view central government with even greater skepticism so the NRM the Mosevony's government and Buganda sort of wades their political wars terminator style wrestling back into the past over things that they think affect the future Mosevony for example is very keen to go around championing the causes of smaller groups that he says were incorporated into Buganda in the late 19th century and encouraging them to become independent clearly enraging the ganda this is clearly an attempt to undermine Buganda's reach these are history wars when Mosevony was a student himself at Dar es Salaam in the 1960s he was a very keen student of history but he's come not to see it in quite those terms the postcolonial state has become under him at least extremely disinterested in and in fact hostile towards the past he has made speeches where he's instructed parents not to let your children go and study useless subjects like history lecturers themselves at McCarrary which has recovered to some extent but lecturers themselves bemoan the fact that students often don't want to study history there's no money in it this is true they see it as a relevance you can't make money they study business, developments in fact there are cases where they have toyed with renaming themselves the department of development studies or politics and history very small politics and history and in fact across the city you get the enormous growth in these new universities such as this they all kind of look like this they've all got this kind of blue shiny glass front this is Victoria University which is in fact just on the road up to the museum and they don't they don't teach history there are many of these new universities but they all do business studies, management studies that kind of thing they might do some politics but always with a kind of an emphasis on political economy universities Mussefany has announced are only of value in what they contribute to Uganda PLC history doesn't contribute anything what we need are economists and so on and if all this sounds familiar in this country that's because it is hence the picture of the hapolis Andrew Mitchell when of course he was development secretary out there this in fact is him and Mussefany on a visit to Victoria University a few years ago and again the UK government is very much encouraged this idea you're right, history is largely meaningless get your students studying economics and development and so on well I don't want to end with a picture of Andrew Mitchell sorry so here's a monkey but a very important monkey because this of course is the kind of thing that most people go to Uganda to see I have never seen a Uganda gorilla I am very proud of this fact I don't quite understand why many people go to Africa to look at animals it's beyond me so here we have an income generating gorilla and Mussefany is interested in income generation not in the past what I hope I've demonstrated tonight or surveyed at least in the most superficial of terms the troubled history of history in Uganda the vitality of the pre-colonial past versus the perils of actually studying it or seeking to root identity in it we might consider of course that there are indeed more important things in contemporary African society medicine food employment infrastructure in Western Europe after all professional historians are an outcrop of relatively affluent society in the late 19th century and yet ideas about the deep past have long been central to how Ugandan's thought in political terms the government might think that people in their histories get in the way of construction and growth but this kind of developmentalism has been very narrowly defined and increasingly so and this increasingly ominous authoritarianism I think is altogether more dangerous potentially destructive than the histories from which Ugandan's apparently need to be protected thank you very much thank you very much Richard and thank you everybody Richard a gorilla is an ape not a monkey but let's move on it remains for me as Richard's colleague, friend and collaborator here in the African history section of the department of history at SOAS to bring the formal parts of this evening's proceedings to the close first of all I'd like to thank Richard for contributing to making this inaugural lecture such a memorable occasion Payal Gaglani Bhatt who has organised the event Paul for his customary graciousness as our host and Justin for coming down from Durham and giving us such an engaging introduction thank you all Richard it gives me huge personal pleasure to congratulate you on your professorship and to thank you for giving us such a vivid insight into your work I'm aware that the customary way of undertaking a vote of thanks is pithily to encapsulate the essence of the inaugural lecture somehow recapitulating its salient points and broad intellectual thrust something along the lines of a discussant at an academic conference when a lecturer or a paper has been presented in such a way as to make large sways of it incomprehensible to its audience this is surely a useful and laudable exercise when however as I think we've experienced tonight a talk is characterised by a fine balance between erudition and accessibility then I think restating its key ideas seems somewhat redundant I therefore have no intention of doing so what I wish to do instead is very briefly to reflect upon where this display of scholarship that we've just witnessed and I can't really think of a better way of putting this comes from I do not mean individual genius although of course this plays a role in the process of any intellectual production rather I mean something that at least on the surface appears somewhat more prosaic and that's training the notion of training intellectual training the process by which a disciplinary craft is learnt and you've touched on this in your lecture leads us moreover I think to the matter of intellectual genealogy and it strikes me that genealogy is what the ceremony of the inaugural lecture is at least in part about that is by celebrating achievement with the conferring of a professorship it marks the passing of the scholarly baton from an older to a younger generation a chair in the history of Africa here at SOAS has itself considerable historical resonance and that's a point worth thinking about as the school approaches its centenary in 2016-2017 as we've heard from Richard and has touched on by Justin Richard came to SOAS to do his PhD on the history of Burganda under the supervision of Professor Andrew Roberts in the early 1990s I was already here writing my own PhD thesis as was Justin hence the rather matching suits we're wearing tonight my supervisor was Professor Richard Rathbone who would succeed Andrew Roberts as the head of the African History section on the latter's retirement in 1998 Roberts and Rathbone along with Michael Brett who's also joined us tonight were key members of a cohort of historians recruited in the 1960s and 1970s by someone Richard mentioned towards the end of his talk Roland Oliver a dwoeun of the modern field of African history in this country and I used the word dwoeun with no exaggeration the lectureship in African History at SOAS to which Oliver was appointed in 1947 was the first such position in a university in the UK or as far as I know anywhere else now on the way down here tonight I ran into Ian Brown our dear colleague who's busy writing history of the school for at St Henry and he reminded me that in 1947 Roland Oliver's position was called a lecturer in the pre-colonial tribal history of Africa and that I think tells us a lot in the context of what Richard's given us as to how things have changed and what has been achieved in those passing generations quite simply African history as a recognised part of the broader discipline simply did not exist before this time in terms of our genealogy just two generations back in 1960 Oliver co-founded the Journal of African History which remains the leading periodical in our field and which Richard now edits Oliver's subsequent professorship in 1963 50 years ago on the nail was therefore not simply a personal honour but a recognition on the part of SOAS despite ongoing resistance from some quarters Justin noted huge Trevor Roper in passing that the study of the African past from an indigenous African rather than a colonial perspective was a legitimate and viable scholarly endeavour Neither was this project one that remained within these walls as Richard's shown us Oliver and his colleagues also trained many of the first generation of African historians who after retaining their PhDs returned to newly independent nations to found history departments universities such as Leigong in Ghana, Ibadan in Nigeria Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and Macarrion University in Uganda where Richard is now affiliated as we've heard for his ongoing project Indeed Richard's own role in helping to establish the teaching of history in the University of Asmara South Sudan came long a few years ago Africa's last nation state to achieve independence but from an indigenous imperialism rather than a European one can be seen as a late flowering of such scholarly collaboration SOAS then was a real pioneer in our field and Richard's predecessors as professors of African history were its pioneering frontiers men and frontiers women These remain names to reckon with they might be usefully likened to what in the savanna kingdoms of south central Africa are remembered as culture heroes valiant and virile figures possessed of mysterious new technologies who crossed rivers from the east to defeat unjust drunken and often incestuous rulers to marry their sisters and thereby carve culture from barbaric nature an analogy at least in some of its elements withstand some scrutiny Now like all epics of origin such accounts comprise a mixture of historical truth and self-serving mythology With regard to my own theme of genealogy my sketches immediately complicated by the fact that were as my supervisor Richard Rathbone was trained by Roland Oliver Andrew Roberts was trained by an equally ua figure Professor Jan Van Siena at the University of Wisconsin at Madison where North America's pioneering programme in African history was established in the wake of that here at SOAS As we're delighted to welcome Andrew back with us tonight I'll leave further elaboration on these matters should he so see fit Now my point is neither to air the edible anxieties of the history department nor to suggest that our newly appointed professor of African history need carry this heavy burden on his young but reasonably well-formed shoulders It's simply to remind us that what he has achieved and what we as a school continue to represent is part of a longer story and I think one we can be very collectively proud of Richard many congratulations for delivering to us this evening a wonderful lecture thank you all for coming and before we repair upstairs for the reception can I ask you to join with me once more in applauding Richard's wonderful achievement thank you very much