--He caused untold misery in Bunyoro-Kitara hence a villain
By Ford Mirima
On may 21 Sunday Vision magazine carried the story of Florence Baker, the wife of explorer Sir Samuel Baker. She deserves credit for her courage to undertake risky travels in Africa under difficult conditions. But this story gives undue credit. In Britain Samuel Baker was praised for his explorations, which earned him knighthood by Queen Victoria and numerous gold medals by the Royal Geographic Society and Paris Geographical Society.

But Baker’s role as a colonialist is not worth the praise in Britain and in Bunyoro-Kitara. Oral history as told by King Kabaleega during his exile (1900-23) in the Seychelles as told to his son, the late King Tito Winyi Gafabusa, who passed it on to other Banyoro historians, shows that Baker acted criminally and was arrogant and abusive to King Kamurasi and King Kabaleega. His criminal behaviour irrevocably, unnecessarily provoked and antagonised the two kings resulting in bad relations and incessant quarrels and armed confrontation.

Baker went beyond his assignment when he sent false dispatches to Britain and Europe depicting the two kings as barbaric and anti-civilisation. His biased opinion poisoned British and European public opinion. This made future British and European travellers to fight and depose Kabaleega.

The nine year-war was launched in 1890 by Cpt. Frederick Lugard in which over two million Banyoro were killed, not to mention the destruction of the kingdom’s economy was a consequence of Baker’s false dispatches. Samuel Baker’s actions led to the 1900 Buganda Agreement, which gave birth to the persistent problem of lost counties.

Samuel Baker’s ill intentions were very evident from the first day he visited King Kamurasi in 1861. On this occasion and in his second visit in 1871 he came with unruly Nubian soldiers who went grabbing peasants’ food and raping Banyoro women. Earlier, Baker had arrogantly hoisted the Egyptian flag as an indication that he had concluded the colonisation of Bunyoro in favour of Egypt. Kabaleega could not accept this. He forced him to pull it down. Eventually bad blood developed into a full military confrontation in the battle of “Baligota Isansa” that saw Baker fleeing the country in shame, never to return.

The Sunday Vision article depicted Baker as a hero. It even described his reaching Lake Mwitanzige (Lake Albert) as a discovery. The use of the term “discovery” is an abuse to Banyoro and Africans in general. You may cross-check with the Ministry of Education where it is banned. It was banned as early as 1962 at the time Uganda gained independence. It was banned because of its abusive connotations.

Indeed the article is contrary to the Ministry of Education policy. The paper might be accused of being anti-patriotic. That lake existed from time immemorial under its Kinyoro name Mwitanzinge. Many of us prefer to refer to the lake by this name.

Shane Doyle in her book, “Crisis and Decline in Bunyoro” says, “The Banyoro have been repeatedly accused of being uninterested in modernisation and economic development, and inherently incapable of benefiting from, for example, western medical care or sanitary reforms. This distorted but persistent representation of the Banyoro as a people fundamentally at odds with the forces of civilisation and development originated in the 1860’s with Samuel Baker.”

The reason why Baker wrote so damningly of the Banyoro was to cover up his own mistakes and misdeeds. A succession of proto-imperialists who followed Baker to Bunyoro did the same thing. Hence, Baker may be a hero in Britain and Europe but a villain in Bunyoro-Kitara.
Ends