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Connexions between ‘Primary Resistance’ Movements and Modern Mass Nationalism In East and Central Africa. Part I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Extract

A recent authoritative review of developments in African historiography pointed to one 'kind of synthesis which has always seemed worthwhile undertaking’, the attempt to trace ‘an historic connexion between the last-ditch resisters, the earliest organisers of armed risings, the messianic prophets and preachers, the first strike-leaders, the promoters of the first cautious and respectful associations of the intelligentsia, and the modern political parties which (initially at least) have been the inheritors of European power’.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1968

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References

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9 These themes and others in this paper are treated at greater length in Ranger, T. O., ‘African reaction to the imposition of colonial rule in East and Central Africa’, in History and Politics of Modern Imperialism in Africa, ed. Gann, L. H. and Duignan, P. (Stanford, forthcoming). Although the two papers are distinct in theme, some parts of the argument are necessarily the same, and there is some repetition in this paper of passages also included in the Stanford chapter.Google Scholar

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27 Report by Captain Phillips, J. E. T., A.D.C., Kigezi, 31 07 1919, National Archives, Dar es Salaam,Google Scholar Secretariat 0910. See also Bessell, M. J., ‘Nyabingi’, Uganda Journal, 6, no. 2 (10 1938);Google ScholarBaxter, P. W. T., ‘The Kiga, in East African Chiefs, ed. Richards, A. (London, 1959);Google ScholarEdel, M. M., The Chiga of Western Uganda (Oxford 1957), Since this article was written I have been able to read a detailed appraisal of the political implications of the Nyabingi cult by Mr F. S. Brazier of Makerere University College, ‘The Nyabingi cult: religion and political scale in Kigezi, 1900–1930’. Mr Brazier finds that in Kigezi Nyabingi was, indeed, ‘a cult of resistance’ and suggests that ‘it attained its near-monopoly status among the cults which had a Kiga following just because it answered best to the political needs of the time—a rallying point against the incursions of the Ruanda and Twa’, and later of the British and their Ganda agents. He notes that Nyabingi priests were involved in a series of incidents of resistance widely scattered in time and place. But he also remarks that at any single time the Nyabingi priesthood was not able to bring about widespread and co-ordinated resistance. The cult was an important focus of resistance and covered a wide area but was itself too individualistic and loosely structured to succeed in any very extensive enlargement of scale.Google Scholar

28 For specific examples of religious leaders urging wider unity see Ranger, ‘African reaction to the imposition of colonial rule’, loc. cit.

29 Iliffe, op. cit.

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