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The European nations, especially Britain and France, gradually increased their involvement in Africa all during the 18 th and 19th centuries.

They included the humanitarian reaction to the inhuman excesses of slavery and the slave trade the beginnings of a new European territorial expansion into Africa, as well as the extension of previously existing contacts the awakening stimulus within Christianity, which led to an interest in the evangelizing of nonEuropeans. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, several developing currents of European endeavor emerged to fundamentally alter the balance of relationships between Africa and Europe (Axelson 1967 Lewis, 2000). Europeans began to rule parts of Africa long before the hectic years of the scramble for the territorial control of the continent beginning in the 1880s. When Europeans came to Africa, Africans were economically independent and socially stable.

The two states evolved efficiently structured forms of government, with their rulers, the mukama in Bunyoro and the kabaka in Buganda, ultimately presiding over societies which many observers have compared to the feudal systems of Europe (Brett 1873).

45).įor example, the highly centralized polities of Bunyoro and Buganda, located to the north of Lake Victoria, were the result of migrations, beginning in about the sixteenth century, of Lwo-speaking peoples originating in the territories around the banks of the Nile in the southern Sudan. “Most African states were the product of an indigenous evolution” (Brathwite 1988, p. The process of African state formation, of course, was not limited to areas having commercial and other relationships with the Muslim worlds of North Africa and southwestern Asia.

Furthermore, well before this period there certainly were long centuries of intercourse between the peoples inhabiting the northern. First Europeans, Greeks, Romans, and other Mediterranean peoples came to Africa as traders, settlers, and conquerors to intrude their cultural patterns among African mores as early as the last 1,000 years before the beginning of the Christian era.