An enumerator gathers information from a woman in Lira Municipality during national census on August 27, 2014. PHOTO | BILL OKETCH
Enumerators started knocking on doors of various households yesterday as Uganda commenced only her 11th census. The first official census in the country was conducted by the British colonial state in 1911. It came against the backdrop of the protectorate government undertaking the first civil registration process in 20th Century Uganda at about the same time. The process unfolded gracefully, albeit not chronologically, with careful consideration given to the inevitable demands.
“The requirement that all births and deaths had to be registered at the local sub-county headquarters was first trialled in the kingdom of Buganda, then extended to the rest of southern Uganda in 1911-1912, and subsequently rolled out across the rest of the Protectorate over the following 10 to 15 years,” Shane Doyle writes in a research paper titled “Parish Baptism Registers, Vital Registration and Fixing Identities in Uganda”.
“The recording of vital events was never thought to be entirely comprehensive nor fully accurate during the colonial period. To some degree, omissions and errors reflected the uneven enthusiasm of local bureaucrats for filling in forms, but in addition, the region’s many unmarried mothers, recently-arrived immigrants and people living alone were less likely to have their births and deaths reported than citizens who were more integrated into local social networks,” Doyle adds.
Second World War impact
The 1911 census counted nearly 2,466,325 people, 2,856 of whom were non-African. Decennial censuses were then held by the protectorate government in 1921 (it counted 2,854,608 people) and 1931 (it counted 3,542,281 people). A wartime interruption in 1941 cynically willed into existence disruptions of the 10-year cycle that had hitherto been ritualistically observed. Even with the smouldering embers of the Second World War in 1945, the British colonial state could barely scrape by.
“[T]he ending of the war changed nothing,” Gardner Thompson writes in his treatise on governing Uganda that assumes the same name, quoting Governor John Hathorn Hall admitting that a “shortage of staff and shortage of materials have gravely impeded and circumscribed all departmental activities throughout the current year [i.e. 1945].”
In fact, it was not until 1948 that another census was held. By which time the population in the country had grown to 4,958,520. The non-African population had also swelled up to 40,956.
The last census in the pre-independence period took place in 1959. While one of the data-points from the final dataset showed that the non-African population had doubled to 87,058, the African population—standing at 6,449,558 back then—started to show signs of splitting at the seams just when the anti-colonial struggle should have been gaining traction. A Hutu uprising forced out nearly 350,000 Tutsi, who sought refuge outside their native Rwanda. A great deal of them settled in Uganda, specifically Buganda.
“So many immigrants came into Buganda during the colonial period that the census of 1959 found that they almost outnumbered the indigenous Ganda. The difficulty though of tracking immigrants’ movements meant that their increase between each census was grossly underestimated,” Doyle writes.
He adds: “[The Tutsis] regarded Buganda as a haven from the extreme poverty and oppression of their homeland…But, as migrants began to settle in such numbers that they outnumbered the indigenes in much of Buganda, a division on class lines emerged in Ganda communities. Larger landlords’ readiness to welcome immigrants as rent-paying tenants outraged the Ganda peasantry who found it increasingly difficult to recruit migrant labour on acceptable terms.”
While the Bakopi, as the Ganda peasantry were almost pejoratively known, continued to work just as hard, just as attentively, as the immigrants, the “chiefs’ willingness to allow foreigners to open up wasteland for cultivation” touched an open wound. Doyle adds that the Bakopi interpreted this “as another example of the elite’s greed for rent and clients, especially when the cleared forests and reclaimed swamps proved to be more fertile than the Ganda’s long-established gardens.”
Appetite for information
While such cleavages threaded through Ganda culture with unintended sinister repercussions, censuses were in fact intended to give the protectorate government a snapshot of the area under its control. The protectorate in Uganda was established in 1896 after religio-political wars had been gravely waged between 1888 and 1892. While those years did not pass easily, with Protestants, Catholics, and Muslims hardly passive observers in a classic turf war, religion, Doyle notes, “provided the stimulus, as well as the capacity for keeping accounts.”
He proceeds to add that “political competition, as European influence grew in the late 1880s and 1890s, increasingly required the counting of the members of the several religio-political parties in order to assert the right to an appropriate number of chiefships.”
When the British colonial state took over the reins, the appetite for vital registration remained voracious, if not insatiable. Doyle discloses that the protectorate government “remodelled the hierarchical system of chiefship, creating a pyramidal bureaucracy that lent itself to the collection and transmission of information, and ensuring that administrative competence would be the primary qualification for promotion.”
The protectorate government took great pride in the rigour of its approach during each census. Great effort went into turning up nuggets such as Bunyoro District suffering the highest rates of syphilis in colonial Uganda.
“Only in 1948 was it possible for the colonial state to evaluate the comprehensiveness of vital registration in Buganda,” Doyle writes, adding, “The census of that year for the first time gathered data on fertility and mortality, which showed that in Buganda, the crude birth and death rates were 30 and 24 per 1,000 respectively.”
Put simply, censuses held in 1911, 1921, 1931, 1948, and 1959 helped the protectorate government to plan better for people entrusted to its care. The empirical evidence gleaned would be used to ensure that public health interventions were deployed judiciously. The British colonial state also got a handle on seemingly trivial issues such as naming traditions.
“Analysis of the names registered at baptism in one Catholic parish in the western Ugandan kingdom of Bunyoro, for example, showed that almost 40 percent of names given in the first quarter of the 20th Century referred to death,” Doyle writes, adding, “Over the entire colonial period, one in 12 children were given names which demonstrated awareness of neighbours’ or family members’ concealed antagonism. There is an impressively large repertoire of Nyoro names which refer to hidden enemies, such as Beyeza (the bad pretend to be good). The naming of a child was an opportunity for redressing wrongs publicly while avoiding open confrontation.”
Time for a rethink?
Post-independence Uganda has held censuses in 1969, 1980, 1991, 2002, and 2014. From a population of 9,535,051 in 1969 to 34,856,813 in 2014, Uganda has clearly undergone a sea change. It still is. But even as the present continuous tense is maintained, questions are being asked as to the relevance of a decennial census. The British, who impressed upon us this practice, are toying with the idea of doing away with a census altogether in 2031. Their Office for National Statistics opines that it is more instructive to rely on data sources collected daily than a once-a-decade survey.
“This is the first census we are conducting immediately after a 10-year interval, which is a very good thing,” Mr Fred Muhumuza, a macroeconomist, told NTV Uganda’s flagship political talk show, On the Spot, on census eve night.
Still, there is a school of thought that insists relying on a patchwork of public sector sources of data to produce information about Uganda’s population more often provides better value than a decennial census. With the taxpayer funding 98 percent of the Shs333 billion budget for the 2024 census, citizen activism could play an important role in establishing how to course-correct. For now, though, a tried-and-tested method—whose frequency was only so slightly derailed by the Second World War—will suffice for state actors.
The country’s No.1 reckons this 10-yearly snapshot dating back slightly more than a century is important now more than ever.
“It is important that we plan based on accurate information about our people and our resources. The information from the National Population and Housing Census will support [the] government, the private sector cultural and religious institutions, civil society, and development partners in service delivery,” President Museveni said in a televised message, adding that the census “will also provide the basis for planning, the provision of social services such as educational, health, and transport, among many others.”
ethnic groups
According to Ubos, ethnicity is the state of belonging to a social group with common culture and tradition.
Ubos further adds that Ugandans are classified by ethnic groups as listed in the Constitution.
In 2002, Ubos reported that the most populous ethnic groups from 1948 to 2002 were Baganda, Banyankole, Basoga, Bakiga, Iteso, Langi, Acholi, Bagisu, Lugbara who were more than one million. T
The So (Tepeth), Banyara, Batuku, Chope, Babukusu, Banyabindi, Lendu, Basongora, IK (Teuso), Batwa, Bahehe, Dodoth, Ethur, Mening, Jie, Mvuba, Nyangia, Napore, Vonoma were the least populous groups with less than 25,000 people in Uganda.
In 2014, the Baganda, Banyakole, Basoga, Bakiga, Iteso, Langi, Bagisu, Acholi and Lugbara were listed as the largest tribes accounting for 67.8 percent of the population of 34.6 million.
The Baganda have been the largest tribe since 1948 to 2014 while the Iteso, who were the second largest tribe up to 1959, were fifth in 2002 and the fourth largest tribe in 2014.
The Banyankole, who were the fourth largest tribe in 1948, became second in 2002 and 2014 while the Basoga have maintained the third position since 1948.
Apart from the 60,818 Ugandans whose ethnic groups Ubos did not list in 2014, the groups that were under 50,000 were:
•Aringa: 42,555
•Baamba: 35,117
•Bahehe: 4,023
•Batuku: 6,200
• Mening: 2,879
• So (Tepeth): 23,422
•Vonoma: 2,613
•Reli: 8,357
•Nyangia: 9,634
• Ngikutio:5,729
•Kuku: 46,497
