Paper long abstract:

Recently scholars have begun to predict the “end” of postcolonial theory and suggest the need for new conceptual frameworks that “provincialize” colonial discourse and practice, that foreground other geographies and cultural traditions, and that join theory with empirical research and material history (for one such discussion, see “Editor’s Column: The End of Postcolonial Theory?,” <em>PMLA</em> 2007). Some have called for accounts that place historical actors, simultaneously, on local and global stages (Feierman 1994). Others have offered provocative methods for foregrounding the preconceptual elements that shaped colonial discourse (Young 2000) or have argued that concepts like “polycentricism” offer especially productive models for understanding the contribution of non-European populations to the development of “modernity” (Friedman 2007, 2008).

Responding to such critical work, this essay develops a new reading of Samuel White Baker’s 1864 encounter with the people of Bunyoro-Kitara (a region in the northwest of modern day Uganda) as detailed both in Baker’s exploration narrative, <em>The Albert N’Yanza</em> (1866), and his 1864 diary (currently held by the Royal Geographical Society). Using Baker’s texts as well as recent African historiography and several narratives of recorded Bunyoro oral history, I locate the 1864 encounter within a broader network of local and regional political and cultural developments. These include a secession war staged by Ruyonga, brother of Kamurasi (the King of Bunyoro); Buganda military incursions from the south and south-east; a growing trade with Zanzibari caravans; and the arrival in Bunyoro, via Sudan, of Turkish and Egyptian slave traders.

Baker’s narratives, I argue, outline the simultaneous impact of all these forces on the autonomous kingdom of Bunyoro-Kitara, while also allowing us to track Bunyoro’s reshaping of these forces via such strategies as negotiation/incorporation, resistance, and spatial relocation. As a result, my essay makes a sustained attempt to “decenter” British exploration in nineteenth-century Africa by thinking beyond frameworks like “imperialism,” “colonialism,” and the center-periphery binary, and instead reads Victorian literary production within (and as shaped by) a non-Western narrative of multiplicity and multidirectionality.