Thread by @JonathonLEarle

On #Uganda, #Russia & African Diplomacy. This thread follows @burke_jason's recent article @GuardianAfrica on African responses to #RussiaUkraineWar. It shows how the Muganda diplomat Semakulu Mulumba & I.K. Musazi utilized Soviet networks to advocate for Buganda land rights.

Throughout the 1940s & 1950s, Ugandan writers & diplomats thought deeply about Cold War propaganda. Okot p’Bitek used Wer pa Lawino to complicate Catholic claims that the UPC was merely a communist puppet party. In her lament, Lawino asserted,

‘His brother will bring Communism [so we are told]! [But] I do not know/What this animal is!’ Debates re: Soviet alliances were pronounced in the Catholic press, especially following Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Divini Redemptoris, a lengthy critique on ‘atheistic communism’ (1937).

Catholics in Buganda critiqued communism in print as early as 1940. They argued that communism would adversely impact 35 million Catholics living in central Europe (‘Ensonga Ennungi Ey’abangereza N’abafransa mu Lutalo Luno’, Munno, 1 March 1940, p. 30).

Throughout the 1950s, Munno was filled with lengthy articles on Soviet foreign policy & discourses about communism. Indeed, during this very month, 68 years ago, Munno began a 2-month series, ‘Communism N’akabi K’esomba’. Copies are provided below.

Catholic missionaries worried that the likes of Ben Kiwanuka would become co-opted by communists during his legal studies in London. As @jamesjaycarney and I show in Contesting Catholics, leaders at St Thomas Seminary in Katigondo censored Kiwanuka’s

letters back to UG in order to silence Kiwanuka’s anti-colonialism. In response, Kiwanuka penned a blistering letter in 1953 to Bishop Kiwanuka & Archbishop Cabana, asking if Catholics missionaries had ‘come to Africa to preach the Gospel of the Lord—the Brotherhood of Man?—

or [as] political agent[s] to suppress nationalism’? But it was Semakula Mulumba who best used Soviet networks to critique colonial land policies in eastern Africa. The opening photograph shows ‘Mulumba speaking in Trafalgar Square at a demonstration

against the collective punishment and indiscriminate killing of Africans by white settlers in Kenya’ in 1953. Earlier, in 1947, Mulumba petitioned the UN through the Soviet delegate Andrei Gromyko. Reflecting on his decision to work with Gromyko, Mulumba recalled,

‘I decided to petition the UN through AG, a Soviet delegate, and had become aware that this Russian delegate was very forceful in the UN and I realized that this man was a fighter in the political field where he condemned colonialism. I felt that the Russians were

not racists and were fighting against colonialism. I felt too that the Soviet delegate would petition the UN on behalf of the Bataka [hereditary landowners and clan heads], for the East African independence and would also oppose the East African Federation

[which would undermine Buganda’s and Uganda’s autonomy]’. Following Mulumba, Ignatius Musazi (the co-founder of Uganda first political party) visited the Soviet Union on several occasions, where he learned about co-operatives.

As seen in these images, Musazi saw himself as a revolutionary reformer following Leninist ideology. Until he passed away in 1990, Musazi read English translations of Soviet political literature. Ugandans have long complicated Cold War boundaries.