Knowledge in High Places: Labor and the Scientific Industry in Western Uganda, 1860-1970

Abstract

By the 19th century, the question of the source of the White Nile was one of the driving concerns of imperial expeditions of expansion and research to the riparian kingdoms of East-Central Africa. The mountains known by many names including Lwa-Nzururu (place of the snows) and Rwenjura (place of the rains), among others, came to occupy not only an important place in western imaginations, but also became home to an emergent scientific industry based in the mountains whose leaders sought to understand the relationship between the mountains’ snows, rivers, and lakes to Nile hydrology. This dissertation examines the history of the scientific industry that took root in western Uganda in the late 19th century, starting from the mountains—Lwa-Nzururu (the Rwenzori Mountains)—and gradually expanding the scale and temporality of inquiry from the mountains’ peaks and valleys to the colonial Toro District and Tooro Kingdom, the first post-Independence government, and finally to Makerere University. To speak of a scientific industry rooted in Lwa-Nzururu, is not to think of science as an import, a foreign imposition, or a “transfer,” although these things did happen. It is instead to understand how the functioning and operation of this industry that emerged in the late 19th century was dependent on pre-existing infrastructures in the form of ancient roads, markets, footpaths; labor systems, such as slavery, debt peonage, and porterage; networks, such as of cwezi kubandwa and Nyabingi spirit mediums and clans; hierarchies, organized along gendered, aged, occupational, physical, and ethno-linguistic lines; and of course people and their embodied, ancestral, spiritual, and ecological knowledge. In focusing on the mechanics of scientific knowledge production across time, in addition to exploring the industry from multiple perspectives, a range of actors come into view including porters, guides, spirit mediums, forced laborers, alpinists, Tooro Kingdom authorities, colonial administrators, post-independence government employees, science students, and researchers, among others. This view allows for a broadening of the scope of actors that made the emergence of this industry possible, and which was and remains critical to the functioning of the colonial and current economy. Scientific “discoveries” and advancements in the form of hydrological, geological, zoological findings, among others, applied on the ground in western Uganda challenged, interrupted, transformed, and suppressed people’s livelihoods, exacerbated a range of social, cultural, and economic inequalities, some of which have been deeply naturalized—such as the “uninhabited” higher reaches of the Rwenzori mountains)—and others whose stark visibility such as the segregated Township of Kilembe captured national attention at Independence. The deep strain of conservatism in Uganda’s scientific industry, which this dissertation argues to be a product of its ties to the colonial state and economy, meant that investigators into racial segregation and discrimination at Kilembe Mines after Independence nonetheless refused to research and report findings that would challenge commercial interests in copper deposits in the Rwenzori Mountains. Faced with a scientific industry that had long framed applied science as the primary goal of science and science education in East Africa, in which roles for Africans were largely circumscribed to porter-guide-research assistant, or at best, “technician,” young student scientists at Makerere sought to challenge the structure, aims, and priorities of Uganda’s scientific industry at Independence. This dissertation brings together historical and anthropological literature on science and technology, African environmental histories, and spirit mediumship in the Great Lakes.