Correcting Uganda’s distorted history
One of the reasons Uganda is engulfed in a political economy crisis is partly the result of colonial distortion of Uganda’s history and attributes between Bantu people on the one hand and Nilotic people on the other hand. Because of race theories that dominated Europe at the time of Africa’s colonization that put whites at the top and blacks at the bottom of the racial pyramid, it was assumed that black people including Bantu of eastern, central and southern Africa had no civilization and lived in darkness which is not a subject of history hence the teaching of European history in African schools.
The first European explorers, colonial and missionary officers to Africa came from the aristocratic class imbued with racial prejudices. “Britain had access to the cream of the Oxbridge [Oxford and Cambridge Universities] crop… targets were those energetic young men of aristocratic demeanor worthy of the colonial calling…”(D. Rothchild and N. Chazan 1988). ”The European colonists of the 19th and early 20th century described Africa as ‘the Dark Continent’. According to them it was without civilization and without history, its life ‘blank, uninteresting, brutal barbarism’… So strong were their prejudices that the geologist Carl Mauch, one of the first Europeans to visit the site of the 12th century city of Great Zimbabwe, was convinced it could not be of local origin, but must have been built by some non-black people… The Tory historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote in 1965, ‘There is only the history of the European in Africa. The rest is largely darkness” (C. Harman 1999).