List of Great Lakes kingdoms

The African Great Lakes kingdoms refers to the numerous historic kingdoms in the African Great Lakes region. These polities existed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and had similar and yet sometimes distinct cultures, values and traditions. The Great Lakes kingdoms were found in Southeast Africa and some parts of Central Africa, in what is present-day northwest Tanzania, south Uganda, some parts of Rwanda, and Eastern Congo.

Karagwe, Nkore, and Buhaya formed small neighboring states to the major kingdoms of Bunyoro and Buganda in the Great Lakes region. Karagwe and Nkore were individual polities, while Buhaya refers to an area along the western side of Lake Victoria in which seven small states were recognized: Kiamutwara, Kiziba, Ihangiro, Kihanja, Bugabo, Maruku, and Missenye.

Although this entry only deals with the period up to the end of the eighteenth century, it is essential to recognize that the earlier histories of these polities and the detail with which they have been recorded are a direct product of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history and the circumstances which befell them. Nkore (Ankole in colonial times) found itself within the British Protectorate of Uganda and became a cornerstone of Protectorate policy, being one of the four main kingdoms and enjoying a considerably enlarged territorial status under the Protectorate than it had done in precolonial times. It was also served well by various missionaries, ethnographers, anthropologists, and historians. Buhaya was moderately well served, partly through expedient politics in the early colonial era and the siting of the regional colonial administrative center in Bukoba. By contrast, Karagwe fell from being one of the most powerful of the nineteenth century states in the Great Lakes, a position it had largely attained through its domination of early Indian Ocean-Great Lakes trade routes, to total collapse and obscurity by 1916. Writers on Karagwe have been sporadic and have failed to provide the rich array of texts that are available for Nkore, its northern neighbor. In independent Tanzania, under Nyerere, there was little place for such overtly unequal, precolonial political formations.

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