Flagging heightened interest in our homeland from various external groups!

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OPINION

By Kenneth David Mafabi

Congratulations, once again, to the Mwangaza learners and Compatriots, who we recently passed out in Kyankwanzi! Kazi kwenyu! Today, though, we flag heightened interest in our homeland from various external groups. Our December 30, 2021, article on Fashoda provides critical background to that conversation.

“… we have made repeated mention of a template against which our wider geopolitical setting in the Great Lakes Region must be appreciated. Without an appreciation of that template, we shall not be able to accurately discern where precisely we are - and what must be done under the circumstances. Let us outline some of the parameters of the template in question.

First … there is a thread of continuity which runs through the history of the last 600 years, which reflects the consistent marginalisation and impoverishment of the African people. We must repeat that that thread is the unequal world division of work and market, weighted against the African people and their vital interests.

It is the story of the enslavement of the African people during the era of the slave trade and slavery, the story of Africa becoming a source of raw materials and a market for manufacturers, the story of the colonial and neo-colonial conquest and subjugation of Africa, and the story of Africa becoming a source of cheap labour.

It is the story of the production and reproduction of a debilitating poverty, of cyclical conflict and crisis. It is the story of the appearance of our enclave economy of today.

Second, the year 1600 signalled a massive irruption of European armies into Africa, America and Asia, which irruption brought into its wake genocide of indigenous peoples, the slave trade, colonial conquest and occupation … Later, and separately, we shall discuss why this was possible. More importantly for our immediate purposes, it is important to point out that the subsequent 300 years witnessed the journey from the era of merchant capital and empire building to the age of classical imperialism.

V.I. Lenin, in his seminal work ‘Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism’ (1917), described the function of financial capital in generating profits from imperial colonialism as the final stage of capitalist development to ensure greater profits.

Lenin’s socio-political analysis of empire as the ultimate stage of capitalism derived from ‘Imperialism: A Study’ (1902), by John A. Hobson, an English economist, and ‘Finance Capital’ (Das Finanz Kapital, 1910), by Rudolf Hilferding, an Austrian Marxist, which synthesis he applied to the new geopolitical circumstances of the First World War (1914-1918), wherein capitalist imperial competition had provoked global war among the German Empire, the British Empire, the French Empire, the Tsarist Russian Empire, and their respective allies.

The ‘scramble for Africa’, reflected in the Berlin Conference of 1885, was a precursor to the First World War. Contending post-Cold War ‘imperial’ interests in new forms, are very much with us today.

Third, our Motherland, Uganda, was not colonised mainly because of value attached by the British to King Mwanga’s Kingdom. It was colonised mainly because we are the equatorial source of the White Nile. A dictum in English colonial circles at the turn of the 19th Century went something like this: ‘Whoever musters the Nile is master of Egypt. The master of Egypt would be the master of the Suez Canal and the Arabian Peninsula.’

Uganda is the other source of the Nile; the White Nile pours out of Nalubale. The White Nile meets the Blue Nile, which comes down from the Ethiopian highlands, just outside Khartoum, which means ‘where the river divides’ in the Dinka language.

The Nile is the lifeline of Egypt.

The ‘dictum’ remained relevant with: the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1920s and the spread of political Islam in the Horn of Africa, North Africa and the Middle East; the discovery of oil in the Arabian Peninsula in the 1930s; creation of the State of Israel in 1948; Etc.

In all this, therefore, Egypt and/or its control has been of great strategic importance to the forces that rule the world, division of work and market, and have done so over the last 600 years. Modern Uganda, largely by way of unintended consequences, has been continuously bedevilled by its geo-strategic placement in the Nile Valley.

A footnote to this placement has been the question of the use of the waters of the Nile, which has been in contention for a very long time. Here, we need to acquaint ourselves with the contents of the unilateral and unequal colonial Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1929, regarding the Nile and its waters, which excluded the people of the other riparian lands of the Nile.

Similarly, we must acquaint ourselves with the provisions of the Egypto-Sudanese Treaty of 1959, which retained virtually unchanged the unequal content of the 1929 Treaty.

Our physical, political and economic placement in the Nile Valley is a given. We ignore it to our detriment.

Several episodes in our history dramatically bring out in bold relief the three parameters we have isolated above, and their interplay.

We speak here, for example, of the Fashoda Incident of 1898, as a small French force led by Captain (later, General) Jean-Baptiste Marchand - faced off with a much larger Anglo-Egyptian force led by Sir (later, Field Marshal) Herbert Kitchener, at Fashoda on the White Nile.

This is near present-day Kodok in Shilluk country in South Sudan. Fashoda was the meeting point of the imaginary line of French interests from Dakar on the Atlantic Coast, to French Djibouti on the Red Sea on the one hand, and the imaginary red line of British interests from the Cape to Cairo on the other!

In 1896, Belgian King Leopold sent a column of 5,000 Congolese troops to advance to the White Nile, backed with artillery. It took them 5 months to get to Lake Albert, 800km South of Fashoda. They were too late.

Two other French expeditionary forces advanced on Fashoda from the East, but were stopped by the Ethiopians. The Italians attempted to do the same from the Port of Massawa on the Eritrean Coast.

Intending to move through Ethiopia, they were decisively defeated by Emperor Menelik in the battle of Adowa in 1896.”

The writer is a Senior Presidential Advisor/Political Affairs (Special Duties) State House