At a time of renewed interest in the Britain’s colonial past, Casualty of Empire tells how Bunyoro’s famous fighting king, Kabalega, put up a determined resistance to the incoming British.

Bunyoro’s reward, after the inevitable conquest, was decades of discrimination the effects of which are still felt.

Idi Amin is one of the characters who found themselves Ugandan because of the ethnic mixing that the British conquest set in motion.

Author Cedric Pulford, a veteran journalist with more than 25 years’ experience of Anglophone Africa, has drawn widely on contemporary and modern sources. He provides a compact but complete account of the colonial experiences of Bunyoro and its great rival, Buganda.

Bunyoro may have little chance of seeing its billions, but the case has highlighted one of the greatest failures in the whole empire experience.

Casualty of Empire is for readers who enjoy fast-paced history - and for anyone who wants to understand the emergence of modern Uganda.

REVIEW OF CASUALTY OF EMPIRE
Casualty of Empire: Britain’s Unpaid Debt to an African Kingdom is a well and clearly written account of a generally almost unknown corner of the British Empire. The book becomes quite gripping as one enters more deeply in.

Bunyoro is now part of Uganda. The story extends from J.H. Speke’s expedition in the 1860s to mistakes of the British in the twentieth century: confirmation of wrongly drawn boundaries; mismanaged opportunities for development.

The ongoing claims for compensation in 2004 on behalf of the kingdom of Bunyoro – now a cultural but not political entity (a partial restoration by President Museveni in 1993) – are touched on.

Attempts by some enlightened British colonial officials to engage fully with the territory and its peoples and to build trust and prosperity are reviewed. Casualty of Empire succeeds in avoiding the charge of “purely white history” as it incorporates a range of written sources, both direct and in the form of recorded recollections, of Africans.

The descriptions of the court culture of Bunyoro are particularly fascinating, touching on the purification theme, the movement of capitals, rituals and social behaviour, and so on.
RODERICK THOMSON

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