Casualties and Connections: Observations from the Archives of Late Colonial Uganda

In the National Archives of Uganda, some of the most striking documents from the last years of British rule foreground the physical proximity, even intimacy, of individual Ugandans with the British empire. Among these are records of casualties, both injured and killed. The routine correspondence of the second world war, for example, included regular reports on war dead that specified their service number, name, place and cause of death, stated home location, next of kin and, significantly, whether or not their kin should receive a royal message of sympathy or, in the case of suicides, deserters, and others, not. And even after the war, whether in investigations into specific political clashes such as 1949, when policemen without shoes found themselves overmatched by protesters, or smaller scale unrest at schools or prisons, physical details, sometimes recorded in graphic photographs of bodily injury, remind us that the violence of even late colonial rule was more than simply structural or rhetorical.
In Uganda, though, such records of casualties fail to pit imperial power or a White elite against an African mass. Instead, they emphasized the closeness and constant assessment of individuals that was part of colonial institutions, even between Britons and Africans. The broader historical context, though, also demonstrates that while soldiers, military recruiters, chiefs, Native Government officials, and other Ugandans might expect that closeness to produce a solidarity, British officials and institutions resisted any idea that bodily sacrifice should evoke substantive reciprocal obligation or citizenship. A close reading of casualties thus points to the careful limits of late colonial concepts of friendship, commonwealth and non-racialism.