Kingdoms of East Africa - Great Lakes States

Much of Africa's pre-history involves a great deal of uncertainty in which small windows of opportunity to view events can be gained through archaeology. The various stages of the African Palaeolithic are covered, as is the African Neolithic and African Iron Age.

It was out of these latter two phases that the earliest stages of state-formation emerged in the Great Lakes region of East Africa. This is dominated by the largest tropical lake in the world, Lake Victoria which is surrounded by highly fertile land. This region has been cultivated for centuries and perhaps may have provided a home to at least some elements of the very earliest human species.

Such fertile soil and the rich fishing stocks of Lake Victoria have been fought over time and again in the region's history, even by peoples and states which now exist as little more than legends. The process of Saharan desiccation (see feature link) may partially have been responsible for a more concentrated settlement effort around the lakes.

Bantu-speaking groups arrived from the west in the first millennium AD to enter the Great Lakes area. This same area was also subject to settlement by Nilotic-speakers from the north. The region's complex topography and rainfall patterns gave rise to wide variations in the local ecology which resulted in the interspersal of pastoralism and agriculture.

These two farming systems together with the use of iron and also fishing along the lake shores would provide the basis for increasing social complexity. Over centuries the people of the region gradually generated tribes and early forms of states which would later be encountered by Europeans.

Kongo was the westernmost kingdom in an arc of Bantu-speaking states which emerged along the southern fringes of the Central African rainforest. That arc also stretched over to the Great Lakes of East Africa to incorporate modern Uganda, as well as Rwanda and Burundi. The early modern kingdom of Buganda was one of the few great African kingdoms to have given its name to an existing nation of which it remains part.

The region's history extends deep into the past. A centralised state probably began to take shape from about AD 1600 but its roots can be traced to social and economic developments which unfolded across many centuries before that, most notably in the firm of the nebulous empire of Kitara.

The North Nyanza branch of Bantu-speakers was the ancestral common speech of the Ganda and their Soga neighbours across the Nile to their east. Oral history recorded their stories until a young British soldier by the name of John Hanning Speke in 1862 claimed that after six years of searching he had discovered one of the holy grails of nineteenth century explorers: the source of the River Nile.

Speke's explorations also brought him into direct contact with both of the main Ugandan kingdoms of the time. There is a complete absence of written records prior to his arrival. This was in contrast with the Sudanic zone of West Africa, where accounts by Arab geographers and travellers date back to the ninth century.

African Kingdoms

East Africa & North Africa

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