The 1890s saw the inauguration of Western colonial rule in several parts of East Africa – the large area stretching inland from the Indian Ocean coastline north and south of Zanzibar to the northern end of Lake Nyasa in the south and the headwaters of the White Nile in the north. In 1890, following a number of other possibilities, this whole area was partitioned by Britain and Germany away in Western Europe, into a German sphere in the south and a British one in the north. Subsequently, the latter was divided by British colonial diktat into a larger territory immediately inland from the coast – the future Kenya – and a smaller one – Uganda – in the further interior. There, amid a series of variously canvassed alternatives, its node came to lie in the kingdom of Buganda.

From 1890 onwards, tiny numbers of British army officers accompanied by scarcely larger cadres of civilians led supportive companies of mercenary troops, mostly from the Sudan, into this region, with a view to establishing their colonial dominance over it. Their task was crucially conditioned by the fact that, during the 1890s, the ‘Uganda’ region was all but exclusively composed of the northern half of the array of long-nurtured traditional rulerships which stood within the northern arc of East Africa's great inland lakes.

Despite the protracted history of British imperial rule – not least over traditional rulerships elsewhere – there was, however, nothing as yet determined as to the course which this might take.