regional dynamics, particularly those animated by the powerful, expansionist states that had emerged in the recent past. The rise of four interlacustrine kingdoms—Buganda, Urundi, Rwanda, and Bunyoro—shaped and was shaped by wider regional changes, particularly as new connections with the Indian Ocean coast commenced in the mid-nineteenth century. Understanding the nature of those new influences and forces in the wider region requires us to pivot away from the fertile littorals, highlands, and grasslands of the lakes region and look eastward to the Indian Ocean coast as well.
Newly prominent kingdoms like Buganda, Urundi, Rwanda, and Bunyoro were aggressively expansionist in their orientation, consolidating power in a territorial core and co-opting or subduing their unruly peripheries into tributary roles.73 Two key factors enabled their territorial expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.74 Political centralization, undergirded by familial and clan ties as well as generational social groups, created stronger states. Entrepreneurial economic activities underwrote and facilitated territorial expansion. Political authorities in these kingdoms also successfully utilized the political and material resources provided by historic chiefship and clanship, alongside innovations in infrastructure, military organization, food production, and trade.75 Growing cohesion and power at the centers of state—the capitals that grew up around royal palace complexes—were achieved by the accumulation of labor and of trade goods, as well as through the growth of bureaucratic institutions and infrastructure that expanded the reach of the state.76 Long-standing trade around and between the lakes had connected communities that produced valuable goods such as iron hoes or copper and the products of agricultural labor, fishing work, and local craftspeople. Increasingly robust connectivity and the demands of expansionist kingdoms moved goods overland and via canoes across and around the lakes, linking people directly to markets in the kingdoms’ distant urbanizing centers and to new hubs along paths of transit as well.77 These powerful states existed alongside many, many smaller domains and, across the nineteenth century, forced these smaller polities into subordinate, tributary relationships of alliance or defense as they expanded—this was the case with the Ssese Islands and Kiziba and Buganda, less so with people in the southern Imbo and Urundi. Wars driven by expansion generated displacement and insecurity for the populations in their path. Violence disrupted food production and raids produced captives, dependents, and slaves.78 New mobilities catalyzed by war and trade also meant that many interlacustrine populations experienced hunger, insecurity, and epidemic disease in new ways.79
In the early nineteenth century, wider regional flows and influences became more important as interactions between the interlacustrine kingdoms and peoples of the savannas and coast began to define a larger territorial—and indeed subcontinental—arena of exchange and engagement. Shifting political and economic trends in the western Indian Ocean interacted with entrepreneurial political ideologies further inland to produce new interventions into the politics and economies of eastern African populations.80 By 1800, port cities dotting the Indian Ocean coast from Mogadishu (in modern Somalia) to Sofala (in modern Mozambique) had seen Arab, Indian, and African influences blend into a distinctive Swahili coastal culture over several centuries. Europeans, too, came and went, attracted by thriving trade in everything from precious metals to exotic spices and driven by competition for geopolitical primacy. Independent Swahili city-states had used their strategic position—good harbors, gateways to rich hinterland regions—to great advantage, while astutely engaging with new powers in the Indian Ocean world to try to preserve their autonomy.81 Centrally important in the increasing connectivity between the coast and the Great Lakes region, and to new possibilities for insecurity and prosperity for interlacustrine populations, were two parallel developments in the 1820s and 1830s: Omani migrants established a sultanate in Zanzibar and claimed suzerainty in Swahili coastal ports; and large, organized caravans began to travel between the coast and lakes. The presence of coastal newcomers—read as “Arab” or Swahili by local populations—would only increase in the hinterlands by midcentury, as would African involvement in moving goods and people to the coast.82 After 1840, Zanzibar became the hub of a transcontinental, Afro-Arabian state; Omani plantation agriculture, especially clove production, soon exhausted supplies of free labor and generated demand for unfree labor in the form of slaves from the mainland.83 Concurrently, historic demand from the Indian subcontinent for East African ivory was joined with growing desire for ivory luxury and status items in Europe and the United States. The recently established caravan routes connecting various coastal cities to the Great Lakes became conduits for the movement of slaves and ivory out of the African hinterland, and of printed cloth, weapons, beads, and other manufactured goods into internal markets.84 The caravan trade brought cultural change to the Great Lakes region as well, as coastal goods (such as printed cloth) came to connote prestige and worldliness and Islamicized, Arab-Swahili identities also traveled.85
This new slave-ivory nexus catalyzed significant, if uneven, changes in the politics and economies of the interlacustrine kingdoms between the 1840s and 1880s. Expansionist states, through wars and raiding, had long generated captives; such captives had historically been integrated into internal production as slaves, but now also became valuable commodities for labor markets further afield.86 Arab and Swahili traders concentrated in entrepôts on and near the lakes and in proximity to caravan routes: Mwanza and Kampala at Lake Victoria, Ujiji and Uvira at Lake Tanganyika, Tabora on the central plains, and Kasongo in the Congo River basin.87 The most vigorous, direct engagement between traders and the major interlacustrine states happened in Buganda, where an entrepreneurial, aggressive regional imperialism made it an active partner in generating and moving slaves and ivory within the wider region.88 The many smaller kingdoms and polities connected with the caravan trade were affected by the movement of slaves, ivory, and other commodities in the region, some as targets of raids for slaves, some through pressure to generate ivory for chiefs to trade, and some as sources of caravan porters. By contrast, the highland kingdoms of Urundi and Rwanda saw less direct engagement until the later nineteenth century, by virtue of their relative isolation from major caravan routes.89
Coastal populations in East Africa had had contact with European traders, particularly the Portuguese, in prior centuries. But with the expansion of northern European empires and increasing agitation against the slave trade in the nineteenth century, European interest in influencing both coastal and hinterland African lives grew more assertive. European travelers followed caravan routes to explore the geography of the interior, “discovering” the sources of the Nile and the chain of vast inland lakes in the 1850s and 1860s on expeditions facilitated by Arab and African translators and guides.90 Christian missionaries were often at the leading edge of European engagement with African populations and both Catholic and Protestant missionaries moved inland to the lakes from coastal footholds after mid-century. Continental partition by European powers at the Berlin Conference in 1884 established the Belgian sphere of influence in the Congo Free State as extending to the western shores of Lakes Tanganyika and Kivu. Jockeying for control of the interlacustrine region, conceived as a “second shore” for German power in eastern Africa, fit into wider imperial calculations regarding the balance of power in Europe. Border negotiations ultimately established the British to the north of Lake Victoria along 1 degree southern latitude, and the Germans to its south.91 But while Buganda, the Victoria hinterlands, and the central caravan route via Tabora to Ujiji had become the focus of European energies, it was not until the 1890s that the hinterlands of Lake Tanganyika were traversed and surveyed by colonial officials.92 Thereafter, first through exploratory expeditions aimed at mapping the region and then through military campaigns aimed at securing German colonial power, Urundi and also Rwanda were integrated into the German colonial state; similarly, the eastern regions of the Congo Free State at Lake Tanganyika were drawn more tightly into the Belgian colonial regime.93 Ultimately, the British claimed modern Uganda, Kenya, and Zanzibar, the Germans claimed modern mainland Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi, and King Leopold II of Belgium, the modern Democratic Republic of Congo.
As European colonial incursion both accelerated and broadened, the 1890s were a time of increasing stresses on health, peace, and prosperity, generating significant upheaval in nearly all aspects of African life. Waves of disruption
