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An East African Kingdom Changed T Roosevelt and the Course of American Democracy

57 points by prmph 4y ago

andsoitis 4y ago
Fascinating. Did some extra reading from Buganda wikipedia page. Like most (all?) cultures/civilizations, the circle of empathy excluded humans on the periphery: Before the arrival of Europeans in the region, Buganda was an expanding, "embryonic empire".[12] It built fleets of war canoes from the 1840s to take control of Lake Victoria and the surrounding regions and subjugated several weaker peoples. These subject peoples were then exploited for cheap labor.[12] The first Europeans to enter the Kingdom of Buganda were British explorers John Hanning Speke and Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton while searching for the headwaters of the Nile in 1862. They found a highly organized political system which was marred, however, by the ongoing practice of mass human sacrifice estimated at 800 persons annually.
- gostsamo 4y ago
  So, just like any empire at the time.
  - mc32 4y ago
    Pretty much, except for the frivolous human sacrifice aspect.
    - gostsamo 4y ago
      Yes, the random genocides in the name of progress or capital gain are totally different. I'm sure that the starving irish, native americans, and asians who were caught in the opium wars died with grateful appreciation that there were no priests around to oversight their expeditious sending to the afterlife.
      - irrational 4y ago
        I don’t know why you are being downvoted. Whether it is ritualistic human sacrifice or pushing native Americans onto reservations, it is all versions of trading human lives for our own benefit. This takes many forms from the person who uses another person’s body for their own sexual gratification to wage theft to murdering people in a ritualistic setting to curry a God’s favor. It is all about how can I use others (other’s time, bodies, possessions, lives, etc.) to get gain for myself.
        nhchris 4y ago
        [flagged]
        gostsamo 4y ago
        Think about the GP comment though: "they've had achieved statehood with a complex society, but they were killing people for religious reasons". And the religious reasoning underpinned a major part of the colonial effort.
        kortilla 4y ago
        And colonialism is appropriately panned for it. What’s your point?
        gostsamo 4y ago
        It is like you did not read the first sentence of the comment that you are replying to. I'll repeat it in another form: the gp implied that human sacrifice is sufficient enough to discard any other achievement of the society in question. I argue that the value of human life at the time was rather conditional matter. The rest of the debate is quantity and quality, and people who prefer to draw semi-arbitrary lines in the sand.
        kortilla 4y ago
    - orange8 4y ago
      Look up king Leopold of Belgium if you're looking for a less "frivolous human sacrifice" aspect during that time period. Humans have a strange thirst for blood, whether its for religion or money.
      - rajin444 4y ago
        [flagged]
        notahacker 4y ago
        Ah yes, just as it would be wrong to single out Hitler for capitalising on latent anti-Semitism that already existed, and the real problem with WWII is that Germany wasn't successful enough in its expansion to prevent pogroms... Leopold introduced a policy of paying his (non-native) soldiers based on the number of severed hands produced, FFS. I doubt the kingdoms that existed beforehand were wonderful places that never arbitrarily killed anyone, but you absolutely can blame him for paying bounties for evidence of sufficiently prolific indiscriminate killing/maiming, and generally being one of the most despicable humans to have ever lived.
        orange8 4y ago
        He did introduce it. Rubber was not traded or even heard of in the Congo until the Belgians arrived. > Pygmies are still eaten in the congo today. LOl! There are no Pymies in Congo. Pygmies are from the CONGO BASIN, not CONGO. But I wouldn't expect someone who still believes in old proganda stories from the 1800s to know anything about the continents geography. Do you have any proof of pygmy cannibalism?
  - scythe 4y ago
    China banned human sacrifice in -384 (Duke Xian of Qin). Rome banned it in -97, which was inherited by the Christian and Islamic traditions. The Northern Crusades around +1000 eradicated it in the Scandinavian / Baltic region; the Spaniards banned it in the Americas in the 1500s. Buddhism (ca. -500) and Jainism (ca. -3000 or earlier) prohibited it among their followers, which gradually spread to most of India (ahimsa), though reports of cult sacrifices (Shaktiism) persist until the early colonial period. So I wouldn't say it was particularly common in the 19th century.
    - gostsamo 4y ago
      At the same time, making sure that those with the wrong religion and/or skin tone would die rather easily was still accepted practice of the time. I my other comment I gave a few examples how mass casualty policies were introduced with the more or less implicit understanding that people will die in the millions. This is like the difference between white-collar crimes and those of the poor - the punishment matches how graphic it is, not its overall effect because the causality chain obviously washes out the responsibility.
    - lazyninja987 4y ago
      [dead]
rayiner 4y ago
Man, the condescension in this article was hard to make it through. Wakanda, really?
- adjav 4y ago
  It only mentions it in the first few paragraphs. Not the greatest framing, but it's a pretty interesting article over all.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  Yep. Entirely offensive. "This nation is a copy of a Marvel concept, but predates it" is also a really awkward framing. And calling Roosevelt's speeches "cynical" because they were critical was ridiculous, too. Honestly, the article smacked of someone who didn't know much except pop culture, read about this somewhere else, cribbed a lot of language, and pretended to know something about history.
t344344 4y ago
Most african kingdoms like that were funded by slave trade. They raided and sold their enemies. Reason for highly organized state was army and trade. Not sure about Buganda, but here is a quote from wikipedia: > Subjugating weaker peoples for cheap labor, Buganda grew into a powerful "embryonic empire" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buganda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buganda
- throwaway031123 4y ago
  The abolition of slavery in Africa is interesting to read about. It was mostly European colonial powers who were trying to end the practice of slavery in Africa, and they often faced a lot of resistance from African leaders. Ethiopia is an interesting example - since it wasn't colonized in the 1800's, it didn't have colonial rulers who tried to end the practice, so it was one of, if not the, last polities on the continent to end slavery. The League of Nations kept pressuring it to end the institution, and it kept dragging its feet. Slavery was only abolished after Italy invaded and took over the country (Italy used the existence of slavery in Ethiopia as one of the pretexts for the invasion).
  - prmph 4y ago
    > The kingdom’s state builders had already helped end Indian Ocean slavery, during which three million Africans were enslaved…
    - throwaway031123 4y ago
      Did you look into that claim at all? Michael Twaddle's "The Ending of Slavery in Buganda" seems to be one of the central writings about the end of the slave trade there. It seems that the connection to the Indian Ocean slave trade was through trading with Zanzibar. British colonial administrator Frederick Lugard ended the slave trade with Zanzibar, and freed the slaves there. I've looked at other sources as well, but from everything I can find that seem to be the extent that Buganda "helped end" Indian Ocean Slavery (there British colonial administrator helped end it). If you read historical research on the ending of slavery in Buganda, it's similar to what I said. It was pushed by the British, often against intense local opposition.
vita256 4y ago
Buganda is still organised to this date, more or less a state within a state, a status which every now and then puts them at odds with the central government. As a Ugandan, seeing this on hacker news makes me smile.
cafard 4y ago
How did this change the course of American democracy?
- gostsamo 4y ago
  It did not. Introduced the idea that the "negroes" could be just like the white man in the political discourse through an influential politician, but the effect was short-lived and Woodrow Wilson made sure that the races would be nicely segregated for a few more decades. At least I did not find evidence to the contrary in the article. Nothing about the legacy of Roosevelt.
  - morelisp 4y ago
    Arguably the rift created within the Republican Party allowed the Democrats to win nation-wide elections for the first time since the ACW making the room for Wilson to do this; it's not a very good legacy for a progressive campaigner though. (And the article is weak on it either way.)
    - gostsamo 4y ago
      I don't know the history around those elections, but Wilson is mentioned to win over 400 electoral votes. Here the majority system hides if the republicans were that bad overall or the three way split was always to the benefit of the democrats, but if the latter, I'd tend to agree.
      - Jtsummers 4y ago
        Wikipedia includes a breakdown by state so you can see by what percentage Wilson won in each state at the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1912_United_States_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1912_United_States_presidentia.... He didn't have the majority in most states he won and didn't even have the majority of the popular vote overall. His lowest winning percentage was 32.08% in Idaho. Beating out Taft by a bit over 1%, Taft had 31.02% of the vote. His margin against Taft was not substantial in many of the states where he didn't have the majority, so depending on who Roosevelt took votes from (likely more Taft voters than Wilson voters) the election could have been substantially different.

57 points by prmph 4y ago

Fascinating. Did some extra reading from Buganda wikipedia page. Like most (all?) cultures/civilizations, the circle of empathy excluded humans on the periphery: Before the arrival of Europeans in the region, Buganda was an expanding, "embryonic empire".[12] It built fleets of war canoes from the 1840s to take control of Lake Victoria and the surrounding regions and subjugated several weaker peoples. These subject peoples were then exploited for cheap labor.[12] The first Europeans to enter the Kingdom of Buganda were British explorers John Hanning Speke and Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton while searching for the headwaters of the Nile in 1862. They found a highly organized political system which was marred, however, by the ongoing practice of mass human sacrifice estimated at 800 persons annually.

gostsamo 4y ago
So, just like any empire at the time.
- mc32 4y ago
  Pretty much, except for the frivolous human sacrifice aspect.
  - gostsamo 4y ago
    Yes, the random genocides in the name of progress or capital gain are totally different. I'm sure that the starving irish, native americans, and asians who were caught in the opium wars died with grateful appreciation that there were no priests around to oversight their expeditious sending to the afterlife.
    - irrational 4y ago
      I don’t know why you are being downvoted. Whether it is ritualistic human sacrifice or pushing native Americans onto reservations, it is all versions of trading human lives for our own benefit. This takes many forms from the person who uses another person’s body for their own sexual gratification to wage theft to murdering people in a ritualistic setting to curry a God’s favor. It is all about how can I use others (other’s time, bodies, possessions, lives, etc.) to get gain for myself.
      - nhchris 4y ago
        [flagged]
        gostsamo 4y ago
        Think about the GP comment though: "they've had achieved statehood with a complex society, but they were killing people for religious reasons". And the religious reasoning underpinned a major part of the colonial effort.
        kortilla 4y ago
        And colonialism is appropriately panned for it. What’s your point?
        gostsamo 4y ago
        It is like you did not read the first sentence of the comment that you are replying to. I'll repeat it in another form: the gp implied that human sacrifice is sufficient enough to discard any other achievement of the society in question. I argue that the value of human life at the time was rather conditional matter. The rest of the debate is quantity and quality, and people who prefer to draw semi-arbitrary lines in the sand.
        kortilla 4y ago
  - orange8 4y ago
    Look up king Leopold of Belgium if you're looking for a less "frivolous human sacrifice" aspect during that time period. Humans have a strange thirst for blood, whether its for religion or money.
    - rajin444 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - notahacker 4y ago
        Ah yes, just as it would be wrong to single out Hitler for capitalising on latent anti-Semitism that already existed, and the real problem with WWII is that Germany wasn't successful enough in its expansion to prevent pogroms... Leopold introduced a policy of paying his (non-native) soldiers based on the number of severed hands produced, FFS. I doubt the kingdoms that existed beforehand were wonderful places that never arbitrarily killed anyone, but you absolutely can blame him for paying bounties for evidence of sufficiently prolific indiscriminate killing/maiming, and generally being one of the most despicable humans to have ever lived.
      - orange8 4y ago
        He did introduce it. Rubber was not traded or even heard of in the Congo until the Belgians arrived. > Pygmies are still eaten in the congo today. LOl! There are no Pymies in Congo. Pygmies are from the CONGO BASIN, not CONGO. But I wouldn't expect someone who still believes in old proganda stories from the 1800s to know anything about the continents geography. Do you have any proof of pygmy cannibalism?
- scythe 4y ago
  China banned human sacrifice in -384 (Duke Xian of Qin). Rome banned it in -97, which was inherited by the Christian and Islamic traditions. The Northern Crusades around +1000 eradicated it in the Scandinavian / Baltic region; the Spaniards banned it in the Americas in the 1500s. Buddhism (ca. -500) and Jainism (ca. -3000 or earlier) prohibited it among their followers, which gradually spread to most of India (ahimsa), though reports of cult sacrifices (Shaktiism) persist until the early colonial period. So I wouldn't say it was particularly common in the 19th century.
  - gostsamo 4y ago
    At the same time, making sure that those with the wrong religion and/or skin tone would die rather easily was still accepted practice of the time. I my other comment I gave a few examples how mass casualty policies were introduced with the more or less implicit understanding that people will die in the millions. This is like the difference between white-collar crimes and those of the poor - the punishment matches how graphic it is, not its overall effect because the causality chain obviously washes out the responsibility.
  - lazyninja987 4y ago
    [dead]

rayiner 4y ago

Man, the condescension in this article was hard to make it through. Wakanda, really?

adjav 4y ago
It only mentions it in the first few paragraphs. Not the greatest framing, but it's a pretty interesting article over all.
drewcoo 4y ago
Yep. Entirely offensive. "This nation is a copy of a Marvel concept, but predates it" is also a really awkward framing. And calling Roosevelt's speeches "cynical" because they were critical was ridiculous, too. Honestly, the article smacked of someone who didn't know much except pop culture, read about this somewhere else, cribbed a lot of language, and pretended to know something about history.

t344344 4y ago

Most african kingdoms like that were funded by slave trade. They raided and sold their enemies. Reason for highly organized state was army and trade. Not sure about Buganda, but here is a quote from wikipedia: > Subjugating weaker peoples for cheap labor, Buganda grew into a powerful "embryonic empire" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buganda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buganda

throwaway031123 4y ago
The abolition of slavery in Africa is interesting to read about. It was mostly European colonial powers who were trying to end the practice of slavery in Africa, and they often faced a lot of resistance from African leaders. Ethiopia is an interesting example - since it wasn't colonized in the 1800's, it didn't have colonial rulers who tried to end the practice, so it was one of, if not the, last polities on the continent to end slavery. The League of Nations kept pressuring it to end the institution, and it kept dragging its feet. Slavery was only abolished after Italy invaded and took over the country (Italy used the existence of slavery in Ethiopia as one of the pretexts for the invasion).
- prmph 4y ago
  > The kingdom’s state builders had already helped end Indian Ocean slavery, during which three million Africans were enslaved…
  - throwaway031123 4y ago
    Did you look into that claim at all? Michael Twaddle's "The Ending of Slavery in Buganda" seems to be one of the central writings about the end of the slave trade there. It seems that the connection to the Indian Ocean slave trade was through trading with Zanzibar. British colonial administrator Frederick Lugard ended the slave trade with Zanzibar, and freed the slaves there. I've looked at other sources as well, but from everything I can find that seem to be the extent that Buganda "helped end" Indian Ocean Slavery (there British colonial administrator helped end it). If you read historical research on the ending of slavery in Buganda, it's similar to what I said. It was pushed by the British, often against intense local opposition.

vita256 4y ago

Buganda is still organised to this date, more or less a state within a state, a status which every now and then puts them at odds with the central government. As a Ugandan, seeing this on hacker news makes me smile.

cafard 4y ago

How did this change the course of American democracy?

gostsamo 4y ago
It did not. Introduced the idea that the "negroes" could be just like the white man in the political discourse through an influential politician, but the effect was short-lived and Woodrow Wilson made sure that the races would be nicely segregated for a few more decades. At least I did not find evidence to the contrary in the article. Nothing about the legacy of Roosevelt.
- morelisp 4y ago
  Arguably the rift created within the Republican Party allowed the Democrats to win nation-wide elections for the first time since the ACW making the room for Wilson to do this; it's not a very good legacy for a progressive campaigner though. (And the article is weak on it either way.)
  - gostsamo 4y ago
    I don't know the history around those elections, but Wilson is mentioned to win over 400 electoral votes. Here the majority system hides if the republicans were that bad overall or the three way split was always to the benefit of the democrats, but if the latter, I'd tend to agree.
    - Jtsummers 4y ago
      Wikipedia includes a breakdown by state so you can see by what percentage Wilson won in each state at the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1912_United_States_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1912_United_States_presidentia.... He didn't have the majority in most states he won and didn't even have the majority of the popular vote overall. His lowest winning percentage was 32.08% in Idaho. Beating out Taft by a bit over 1%, Taft had 31.02% of the vote. His margin against Taft was not substantial in many of the states where he didn't have the majority, so depending on who Roosevelt took votes from (likely more Taft voters than Wilson voters) the election could have been substantially different.