The first foreigners to arrive in Uganda were Arab traders in 1845. In 1862, John Hannington Speke arrived in Buganda followed by Grant in 1865, and by Henry Morton Stanley in 1865.PHOTO BY WORTHPOINT 


The first Arab traders to Uganda carried along guns and ivory, setting the scene for commercial exchanges with indigenous people, especially Buganda.

These Europeans were referred to as ‘explorers’ – exploring territory for British expansion. Stanley helped Buganda raid the Islands of Buvuma and extracted a letter of invitation from Kabaka Mutesa I, inviting the white men to come to his kingdom.

Mutesa felt threatened by the spread of Egyptian imperialism and the old rivalry from the Kingdom of Bunyoro. He wanted guns to defend his kingdom and invited the whites thinking that they would help him in this task.

In his letter of March 24 1876, inviting missionaries, Kabaka Mutesa explained that he wanted to be “a friend to the white man”.This letter was published in London in the Daily Telegraph.

After the publication of the letter, a follow up article was published a week later in the same paper enjoining missionaries who might respond to Mutesa’s invitation to “teach the natives to wear clothes” and design such clothing to be “slightly longer than the normal” with the assertion that “if the Africans increase their clothing by even two inches longer than the normal that would keep the Lancaster Mills in operation for a full year.”

The two extra inches on African clothes showed how colonialism was the battering ram for the expansion of European economic interests in the search for markets.
The colonization of Africa took different forms and different methods were used in different places. These included the use of anthropology, the Bible and the gun.
The gun, assisted by the Bible and the Koran were the most effective means through which Uganda was colonized.