Mutesa and Mirambo: Thoughts on East African Warfare and Diplomacy in the Nineteenth Century

There has been an understandable backlash against what has been called the "great man" approach to history among scholars of Africa's past. The argument seems to be that since the proliferation of African studies during the 1960s, there has been too much of an emphasis on the political systems of Africa, the power of kings and chiefs, the structures and workings of government, and so on-the story, in other words, of the "great men." This has been at the expense of so-called "ordinary" Africans, the lives of the continent's citizens in a broader social, economic, and cultural context being regarded as of secondary importance. Only in the last ten to fifteen years has this imbalance been properly addressed, as more and more studies rightly move away from the "centrist' and purely political approach to focus upon deeper socioeconomic changes and circumstances as they affected those not included in the "ruling elite" category. This is, again, only right, and the author has attempted to do just this in his own work on nineteenth-century Buganda.'