At a Glance
Budo, Britain, and the Dual Formation of a Democratic Mind
King's College Budo was, for the generation of Ganda men who passed through it in the 1920s and 1930s, simultaneously an education in British institutional culture and a formation in Ganda identity — a place where the sons of the Ganda ruling class absorbed the English language, the British educational tradition, and the Anglican religious formation while living in a community defined by Ganda social relationships and Ganda cultural norms. The dual formation produced, in its most intellectually serious students, a particular kind of critical perspective: an ability to see both British institutional culture and Ganda traditional culture from a slight distance, to understand what each was and was not, and to think about what kind of political institutions a Uganda that was neither simply British nor simply a continuation of pre-colonial Ganda structures should develop.
Mulira's subsequent time in Britain extended that formation — gave him direct experience of British political institutions, of the Labour Party's politics of democratic reform, of the debates about colonial policy that were developing within British intellectual and political circles in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He returned to Uganda with a clearer sense of what democratic governance actually looked like in practice, and with a conviction that the development of genuine democratic institutions in Uganda was both possible and necessary — that it was not sufficient simply to replace British governors with Ugandan ones, but that the institutions through which power was exercised had to be reformed so that they were genuinely accountable to the people they governed.
The Press as Political Education
Mulira's decision to work as a journalist — and to make Gambuze the vehicle for his political ideas — reflected an understanding that political change required not only electoral organisation but the development of a public capable of engaging with democratic politics as informed citizens rather than as subjects of whatever ruler happened to be in power. The newspaper was a tool of political education as much as of political advocacy — a means of developing in its Luganda-reading audience the kind of informed political consciousness that democratic governance requires.
The content of Gambuze under Mulira's editorship reflected his political priorities: coverage of Buganda's political affairs with a critical democratic perspective, reporting on the colonial administration's policies and their consequences, engagement with the larger question of Uganda's political future and what kind of constitutional arrangements would best serve Ugandan interests. He argued consistently for the development of representative institutions — for an elected Lukiiko that would be genuinely accountable to the Ganda population, for a relationship between Buganda and the colonial state that was based on negotiated constitutional arrangements rather than on the administrative discretion of British officials, and eventually for a Uganda that would govern itself through democratic institutions rather than through the combination of royal authority and colonial oversight that the existing system provided.
The press gave Mulira something that the classroom alone could not: a public platform and a constituency defined by engagement with political ideas rather than by ethnic or religious identity. The readers of Gambuze were the Ganda educated class — the teachers, clerks, small traders, and professionals who were the primary audience for Luganda-language print culture — and they were the social group from which a democratic politics would have to draw its support if it was going to exist at all in the specific conditions of colonial Uganda.
The Progressive Party and the Architecture of Democratic Reform
The founding of the Progressive Party in 1955 was Mulira's translation of his journalistic and educational work into formal political organisation. The PP was built on a specific set of commitments: to democratic governance through constitutional means, to the expansion of political participation to include the whole Ugandan population rather than just the traditional elite, to a gradualist approach to self-government that prioritised building the institutional capacity for democratic governance over the speed of the transition from colonial to self-governing status, and to a politics of principle rather than communal mobilisation.
The PP's political programme was in many respects the most intellectually coherent of the parties operating in Uganda in the late 1950s — it had a clear analysis of what was wrong with the existing political arrangements, a specific vision of what should replace them, and a gradualist strategy for achieving the transition. What it lacked was the emotional resonance of either Ganda royalism or mass nationalism — the ability to mobilise large numbers of people around a simple and compelling identity claim. Democratic reformism is, almost by definition, a politics for people who have moved beyond the politics of identity — who are sufficiently secure in who they are to think about how institutions should be organised rather than simply about whose institutions they should be. In Uganda in the late 1950s, that population existed but was not large enough to sustain a major political party against the mobilising forces of royalism and nationalism.
The 1953 Deportation Crisis and the Test of Democratic Principle
The deportation of Kabaka Mutesa II in October 1953 created a political test for everyone in Ganda public life — a moment when the abstract commitments of political philosophy had to be translated into specific public positions on a concrete crisis. Mulira's response reflected both his democratic commitments and his analytical honesty about the complexity of the situation. He supported the Kabaka's right to resist British policy — the deportation was constitutionally indefensible, an exercise of colonial power that overrode the constitutional arrangements under which Buganda's autonomy was supposed to be protected — while also arguing that the crisis revealed the structural problems of a political system in which the Kabaka's authority rested on British goodwill rather than on genuine constitutional guarantees backed by democratic accountability.
The position was intellectually consistent but politically uncomfortable — it satisfied neither those who wanted unconditional royalist solidarity nor those who wanted to use the crisis as an opportunity to advance a more radical break with the existing constitutional arrangements. It was the position of a man whose primary commitment was to getting the political analysis right rather than to building the widest possible coalition, which is both its strength as political thinking and its weakness as electoral strategy.
Squeezed from Both Sides: The Electoral Politics of 1961–62
The elections of 1961 and 1962 — the pre-independence and independence elections that determined who would govern Uganda at and after independence — were the moment when the political space that Mulira had been trying to build was definitively squeezed. The emergence of Kabaka Yekka as the organised vehicle for Ganda royalist politics, and its alliance with the UPC, meant that the political choices available to Ganda voters in the 1962 election were essentially binary: KY or UPC, Ganda royalism or national nationalism, Mutesa or Obote. The PP's democratic reformism was present as an option but could not compete effectively against the mobilising force of these simpler and more emotionally compelling choices.
The electoral marginalisation of the PP in 1962 was not a verdict on the quality of its political programme — it was a verdict on the conditions of Ugandan political culture at that specific moment, conditions in which the mass mobilisation of communal and royalist identities was more electorally powerful than the appeal to democratic principle. The verdict was temporary in the sense that Uganda's subsequent political history demonstrated, repeatedly, the consequences of allowing communal and royalist mobilisation to substitute for democratic accountability — but it was definitive enough to prevent the PP from achieving the electoral significance that its intellectual coherence might have suggested it deserved.
The Democratic Tradition Maintained Through Disaster
Mulira's survival through the Amin years and the Obote II period was, in retrospect, one of the most significant aspects of his contribution to Ugandan political culture. The decades from 1966 to 1986 were years in which the institutional and organisational vehicles of democratic politics in Uganda were largely destroyed — parties suppressed, newspapers closed, civil society organisations shut down, the political actors who had built the independence-era democratic culture killed, imprisoned, or driven into exile. The tradition survived in part through the people who maintained it in private, who continued to think and write and teach in ways that kept the democratic argument alive even when the public space for making it had been closed.
Mulira was one of those people — a figure who had spent his active political career building the institutions and developing the arguments for democratic governance in Uganda, and who maintained that commitment through the decades of disaster as a form of intellectual and moral continuity across an era of political destruction. When the NRM took power in 1986 and began the process of rebuilding Ugandan political institutions, the traditions that Mulira represented — the commitment to constitutional governance, to democratic accountability, to the rule of law as the foundation of political legitimacy — were available as resources for that rebuilding precisely because people like him had maintained them through the years when the political system had been doing everything possible to destroy them.
The Educator's Legacy
Eridadi Mulira died in 1986, the year that the NRM took power and Uganda began its most recent attempt to construct a stable and legitimate political order. He had been born in 1910, before the First World War, and he died in the same year that the political movement that would govern Uganda for the subsequent decades came to power — a lifespan that encompassed the full arc of Uganda's colonial and post-colonial political history, from the height of the British Protectorate through independence and its destruction to the beginning of the reconstruction.
His legacy is not the legacy of the man who held power — he never did, in any significant sense — but of the man who built the institutional and intellectual foundations for democratic politics in a specific national context: the journalist who used the press to develop political consciousness, the educator who used the classroom to develop political capacity, the party founder who built the organisational vehicle for democratic reform even when the electoral conditions were not favourable. Those contributions are less visible than the achievements of men who held presidencies and commanded armies, but they are not less significant — they are the contributions that make democratic politics possible in the first place, the slow institutional and intellectual work without which the more dramatic acts of political leadership have nothing to build on.