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Missionary Discourse and the Problem of Slavery in Histories of the African Great Lakes

Dr. Philip Gooding
IOWC, º«¹úÂãÎè

This paper takes a comparative approach to missionary documents that refer to slavery in Buganda (northern Lake Victoria) and Ujiji (northern Lake Tanganyika). Protestant missionaries of the Church and London Missionary Societies founded missions in these two locales in respectively 1877 and 1878. They arrived with divergent preconceptions: of Buganda as having no internal structures of slavery, and of Ujiji as being the centre of a regional slave trade network dominated by ‘Arabs.’ However, their impressions became increasingly intertwined over time. Initially, they minimized the extent of slavery in both locales, perhaps partly to emphasize the feasibility of their missions. Thereafter, though, as they struggled to accomplish their goals, such as in making their stations self-sufficient (Buganda) and in facilitating conversions (Ujiji), they developed a common discourse in blaming the existence of slavery for their shortcomings. This led them to both contradict earlier statements about labour and social relations and to overstate and oversimplify the role of slavery in both locales. The paper concludes by reflecting on this archival heritage and its implications for the growing historiographies of slavery in eastern Africa and bondage in the wider Indian Ocean World.