The Hierarchies and Exclusions of Changing Regional and Global Orders: The Rwenzururu Movement and its (In)Visibility at the United Nations

How do regional and global orders shape and constrain the recognition of minority rights within postcolonial Africa? In my PhD research on ‘African Activism at the UN,’ I examine this question by examining the case of the Rwenzururu movement as a key instance of a secessionist group that strongly presented its cause as a struggle for minority rights at the United Nations (UN), specifically emphasising their discrimination as ethnic minorities in Uganda. The movement’s roots can be traced to the colonial period, when the British administration in the twentieth century decreed the Bakonzo and Baamba ethnic groups to be ruled by the dominant Batooro group in the Toro Kingdom. The two groups were subject to different layers of discrimination by the British and Batooro rulers alike in the realms of education, political representation, and access to healthcare. Discriminatory practices endured in postcolonial Uganda, incentivising Bakonzo schoolteacher Isaya Mukirania and Yeremiah Kawamara and Petero Mupalya, from the Baamba, to cofound the Rwenzururu movement in 1962 – a name that has its origins in the Rwenzori mountains. Numerous variations of the name Rwenzori originate from the colonial period. It is a distortion of the name ‘Rwenzururu,’ which translates to ‘place of snow.’ The collective soon fragmented over disagreements on what form of autonomy to pursue, and my research focuses specifically on Mukirania’s more radical faction that sought a complete rupture from the Ugandan government.

The decolonisation process in Uganda involved a peaceful shift of authority from British colonial administration to nationalist leaders, reaching its peak with Uganda’s independence on October 9, 1962. However, the Rwenzururu people felt they were not part of this liberation as they suffered from what they referred to as ‘internal colonialism.’ Enduring features of internal colonial rule of the Bakonzo and Baamba by the Ugandan state included forced cultural assimilation and economic exploitation. The movement was active between 1962 and 1982 to redress these grievances through various channels, including international diplomacy, domestic negotiations with the successive authoritarian regimes of Milton Obote in the 1960s and Idi Amin in the 1970s, and the waging of guerrilla warfare.

Despite a split in the movement soon after its establishment, the movement still presented a cohesive challenge to the Ugandan authorities in this period, yet their stories and struggles are often overlooked in African and international historiographies. To illustrate, their secessionist efforts coincided with the extensively internationalised Katangese and Biafran secessionist struggles, during which Cold War superpowers had stakes in the outcomes of these conflicts due to geopolitical significance and resource control. In contrast, Rwenzururian protestors, although important locally, had no effect on Cold War power relations or possessed natural resources that could be of interest to foreign powerbrokers, resulting in minimal international engagement.

Minority Rights in Postcolonial Uganda

My longstanding interest in the Rwenzururu movement is twofold. First, its twenty-year journey toward achieving self-determination significantly shaped the course of Ugandan history and cultural memory, if not of the African Great Lakes region. This sheds light on the fight for minority rights, local self-governance, and the plurality of ethnic identities within Uganda’s national context, echoing wider regional and global discourses on minority rights, such as those held at the United Nations.

Second, the people of the Rwenzururu Kingdom continue to face persecution from the Ugandan government, with a massacre occurring as recently as 2016. This reveals the tensions, both historically and presently, between the Ugandan state’s assertion that the Rwenzururu people are mere ‘terrorists’ with no actual influence on the landlocked East African country’s political ongoings and the dichotomous ways in which the movement instils fear in the Ugandan government.

By discrediting the movement as ‘terrorists’ threatening national security, the government seeks to undermine the movement’s impact while justifying violent actions against the Rwenzururu people, as demonstrated by the 2016 attacks, where the Yoweri Museveni government killed, tortured, and detained hundreds of Rwenzururian civilians. The massacre garnered minimal media attention, and even the human rights organisations in East Africa that I at the time was working with dared not pick up on the humanitarian crisis out of fear for repercussions by the Ugandan state. My humanitarian and scholarly interest in the movement was thus sparked by the paradoxical Ugandan state’s incessant framing of Rwenzururu people as ‘terrorists’ with no legitimacy nor influence while at the same time repressing them militarily over a prolonged period. If the movement never posed a real threat to Uganda’s territorial integrity, why respond to them with such brute force to this day?

Self-determination and the United Nations

An intensive surge of minority rights and self-determination movements characterised the early 1960s, redefining world politics, especially at the United Nations. A flurry of liberation movements, nationalist actors, and grassroots activists across the African continent lobbied regional and international institutions to further their agenda and to pursue independence for themselves as well as other colonised territories. Decolonisation claims altered the focus of the UN as Security Council and General Assembly, with its Special Political and Decolonisation Committee, as these organs provided vital platforms for those situated in the so-called Global South to voice their aspirations for self-rule and simultaneously express their grievances.

In 1960, the UN adopted the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, stating the incompatibility of colonialism with universal human rights, thereby supporting self-determination for seemingly all oppressed communities. This sparked an increase in minority rights claims of peoples who pushed boundaries of human rights norms to align with their respective self-determination claims under international law. They also urged the UN to look beyond its typical scope of solving conflicts between states to incorporate the decolonisation and protection of minority groups as key elements of international peace and security. In doing so, this emerging consciousness on a global scale set the foundation for contemporary human rights movements and reshaped visions of (postcolonial) sovereignty to include the right to self-rule for all groups.

Recognising the UN’s crucial role in promoting decolonisation throughout Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, the Rwenzururu movement sought to integrate itself into this period of decolonial transformations, and it actively lobbied the world body for protection from the Ugandan government’s violent attacks as well as to be granted self-determination. The Rwenzururians issued a constant stream of petitions to the UN offices in New York calling for the Rwenzururu Kingdom to be recognised as an independent African nation, free from internal colonialism by the Ugandan government. The activism of the Rwenzururu operated at various levels beyond the local scope, reaching out to the regional and global stage with a strong focus on human rights and minority protection, and an advocation for self-determination to ensure the survival and preservation of their culture. They strongly believed their culture to be distinct from wider Ugandan cultures in terms of languages, habits, customs, heritage, and folklore.

The Rwenzururu activists also tried to leverage Pan-African ideals to garner solidarity as they contextualised their struggles within a broader framework of continent-wide liberation. In some petitions, they went as far as comparing their oppression to that of Black Africans under White minority rule in Rhodesia, and Rwenzururu leader Mukirania likened his leadership to that of Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah. Ironically, Pan-African leaders such as Nkrumah were vehemently opposed to secession across the continent, and it was therefore unsurprising that the Rwenzururian strategy was ultimately mostly unsuccessful. Numerous African states either were unaware of the Rwenzururian persecution, sided with Uganda, or were concerned that aiding the Rwenzururu Kingdom would establish a pattern of fragmentation where postcolonial African states would become divided along ethnic lines. The UN, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), and African leaders, like the Nkrumah’s and Nyerere’s of that time, prioritised protecting Uganda’s stringent territorial integrity over the potential of Pan-African solidarity.

The Colonial Structures within Ugandan and United Nations Archives

In early 2021, I laid the groundwork for my research on the Rwenzururu movement in Uganda and prepared all the documents I needed to submit to the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology (UNCST) to be granted a research permit. The UNCST is the first point of reference for foreign scholars wishing to conduct research in Uganda. However, the institution regarded both my research and identity with scepticism, leading them to create layers of bureaucratic hurdles that I was unable to overcome. This was done with the intention to delay my entry into the National Records Centre and Archives (NRCA), as a denial of my request would have to be substantiated in writing. After sending countless emails and knocking on many doors, I was told that as a Somali researcher I had no business investigating sensitive domestic affairs. Moreover, I was tasked with proving that I was not attempting to liaise between the Somali terrorist organisation Al-Shabaab and the few Rwenzururians still seeking self-determination. How does one prove that they are not affiliated with a terrorist group simply due to their identity and research interest?

Three years later, and I continue to be in bureaucratic limbo, as I was never granted or outright refused entry to the NRCA, limiting my research into the movement to university archives in Uganda. The Mountains of the Moon University (MMU) in Fort Portal was especially fruitful as they housed materials and petitions from the movement. Although conducting research at MMU came with its own set of peculiarities, it further reinforced my notion of the movement’s influence on Uganda’s sociopolitical framework and the need for scholarly engagement with the Rwenzururu people. At the same time, Western scholars, albeit in few numbers, were previously issued research permits to investigate various elements of the movement. This highlights the colonial legacy of the Ugandan state’s regulation of knowledge production that favours Western perspectives over African narratives, and it is especially relevant when the research topic endangers the existing political order.

Moving onto the United Nations archives in New York, they hold significant power as repositories of international events, groundbreaking multilateral treaties, and collective responses to crises, enabling us to instrumentalise institutional memory to gain insights from history. These archives dictate what aspects of history societies decide to remember or erase, and they are not impartial, as they mirror the prejudices of those cataloguing them. There are silences in the UN archives that echo the stories of both the marginalised and the forgotten, including the people of the Rwenzururu Kingdom. This provides additional insight into how the UN’s documentation procedures prioritise narratives that are centred on individual states while mostly obscuring the viewpoints of secessionist movements.

Consequently, Rwenzururu pleas for self-determination as an ethnic group distinct from the larger Ugandan administration are not readily found in the UN archives, possibly due to being omitted to preserve Uganda’s state-centric history or sheer neglect by the UN not to intervene in what was dubbed an internal affair. Also, a gap persists between how the Rwenzururu movement perceived the UN as an integral part of their eventual liberation and the UN’s indifference towards Rwenzururian woes, which illuminates the tension between the hopeful institutional advocacy oppressed groups engage in vis-à-vis the institutional apathy of large international organisations.

While conducting research at the UN archives in October 2024, I uncovered a misfiled document by Ugandan diplomat Apollo Kironde, who, following the Ugandan government’s instructions, submitted a letter to the UN Secretary-General, U Thant, in February 1963. In the letter, Kironde cited a ‘state of emergency’ in the counties where Rwenzururians resided and stressed to the UN that this was solely an ‘internal issue’ with no relevance to the UN.

Kironde tactfully skirted around mentioning the Rwenzururu people or directly referencing the protest movement, yet it was evident from the geographical location and timeframe, which I verified with Ugandan archival documents from that day, that he was alluding to the Rwenzururu movement. In a different misfiled folder, I discovered a letter from the Under-Secretary, Ralph J. Bunche, acknowledging the letter on behalf of the Secretary-General, yet the UN did not investigate the situation further. Bunche’s inaction adds an ironic twist, given his role as a prominent advocate for civil rights in the United States and human rights more globally, and his belief in the necessity of granting self-determination to oppressed populations in order to achieve global peace. Thus, a UN figure who usually promoted human rights perpetuated a system that rendered the Rwenzururu movement invisible.

A Double Erasure

It must be noted that, although the Rwenzururu movement submitted a series of petitions to the UN between 1962 and 1976 seeking protection and recognition, my research focuses on assessing the extent to which these petitions reached their intended audiences in New York and how effectively they were heard and acted upon by UN bodies and member states. After a decade of silence on the UN’s part, Rwenzururu petitioners, such as Charles Wesley Mumbere, the son of Isaya Mukirania, questioned if the petitions had ever crossed Uganda’s borders, as they speculated that the Ugandan government was intercepting their petitions from the early 1970s onwards. This seems likely as Uganda was in the throes of dictatorial rule in the 1970s under Idi Amin’s rule, who was staunchly opposed to the movement’s existence and quest for independence. Additionally, Rwenzururian campaigners were actively stopped and arrested when they tried to cross the Ugandan borders to make their way to the UN in New York or the OAU in Addis Ababa, thereby restricting their access to an international platform to plead their case.

There were several reasons for why the Ugandan authorities sought to block the circulation of Rwenzururu petitions to the UN. Primarily, the Ugandan state feared that internationalising Rwenzururu claims would pose a direct threat to its recently gained sovereignty. To prevent this, it was more prudent to present the Rwenzururu question as a matter of purely internal concern, similar to the stance taken by many other Afro-Asian states post-independence. For instance, this coheres with the minority rights claims of the Naga people in India, highlighting the continued significance of decolonisation efforts within the global framework and making connections to various sovereignty movements and minority rights in the international order.

Second, the successive governments of Milton Obote and Idi Amin shared concerns that global awareness of the Rwenzururu movement’s lack of access to human rights such as self-determination could garner sympathy from all corners of the world, especially from Western states, thereby setting the scene for international intervention that would sustain the movement’s cause. This concern occurred in the backdrop of the Cold War, and although Obote’s involvement in the ideological warfare was more muted than Amin’s, who aligned himself with the Soviet Union, Rwenzururu cofounder Yeremiya Kawamara attempted to insert the movement’s secessionist claims into the struggle between the great powers.

In a letter to Prime Minister Obote in 1964, Kawamara sceptically received Obote’s version/ of non-alignment and suggested the Ugandan state be open to ‘pluralistic ideologies’ and respect the rule of law as directed by the UN. A copy of this letter was forwarded to the American and Soviet embassies in Kampala to demonstrate that the Rwenzururu Kingdom, as a young nation in the heart of Africa, was open to aligning itself with either power bloc, yet the movement failed to play Uganda against American and Soviet actors. Nevertheless, the movement was malleable to the change occurring in its heyday and accepting of the fact that if it wanted to achieve its nationalist objectives, it had to be more connected to the makers and breakers of the global order. The heightened challenge the Cold War presented to multilateral organisations was thus exploited by Kawamara as his letter to Obote exposed a willingness to align oneself with any international state, regional bloc, or individual necessary if the UN continued to be unavailing in Rwenzururu troubles.

Third, the Ugandan state intentionally controlled the narrative surrounding Rwenzururian secession by framing it as a ‘terrorist’ entity in domestic media, minimising its exposure in international media, and solidifying its influence at the UN. During Obote’s leadership, Uganda, as a UN member state, played a crucial role in shaping the African Group’s unified stance on matters of economic sovereignty, decolonisation, and Apartheid. This focus on global solidarity and diplomacy frequently shifted attention away from internal matters, and Uganda’s international reputation took precedence over the prevalence of ethnic strife in Uganda. Overall, this strategy reinforced the state’s territorial integrity, reduced the chances of neocolonial intervention, ensured the diplomatic isolation of the Rwenzururians, and effectively made the movement more invisible.

Given these efforts, it is not unlikely UN officials neither received nor reviewed most of the movement’s petitions, as I could find not a single reference to the Rwenzururians in any UN proceedings, including the Security Council, the General Assembly, and the Fourth Committee. To the UN, it appeared as if the Rwenzururians simply did not exist. At the same time, I do not discount the possibility that some petitions may have reached the UN but were subsequently filed or lost in its vast archives – a clear indication of how marginalised their case remained within the global order as a whole. Additionally, the Rwenzururu activists launched a wide-ranging diplomatic effort, which involved petitioning not just the UN but also the OAU, the East African Community, the World Council of Churches, NGOs, and a vast range of humanitarian groups, many of which had ties to the UN. Alternative strategies to achieve statehood included invoking a distinct ethnic identity, forming regional alliances, albeit in a restricted manner, and continuing to flag the human rights abuses incurred by the Ugandan government. After the movement’s demands fell on deaf ears, they resorted to armed resistance and created local governance systems to bolster their legitimacy, ultimately achieving formal recognition (yet lacking self-determination) in 1982, when the administration of Milton Obote formally acknowledged the cultural autonomy of the Rwenzururians. This accord allowed a degree of cultural autonomy in Uganda but did not provide complete political independence.

The Silencing of Minority Rights

The silencing of minority rights claims in the postcolonial world order, including that of the Rwenzururu movement, was indicative of a wider trend at the UN in the 1960s whereby the world body ensured that the territorial integrity of newly liberated states took precedence over the right to self-rule by smaller ethnic minority groups. It is therefore unsurprising that the minority rights claims of the Bakonzo and Baamba peoples were actively sidelined by the shapers of the international order, in the process protecting the central government of Uganda for the sake of maintaining regional stability.

Moreover, the international order, with its state-centric focus, regularly marginalises minority groups seeking protection and self-determination – for instance, think of the Palestinian people and their quest for statehood, or the case of the West Papuans. This hierarchy emphasises an essential feature of the regional and global orders, making it progressively difficult for minority groups to obtain international backing for their cause. The case of the Rwenzururu movement as such highlights when, under what conditions, and how minority rights claims are silenced or dismissed altogether as an internal issue warranting merely a domestic response. The UN’s (absence of) action thus illustrates how marginalised communities are often made invisible, as the principles of the international order favour state integrity over upholding minority rights, which greatly limited the Rwenzururu people’s capacity to claim their rights in the international arena. More broadly, it forces us to consider the conditions and rationales under which certain minority groups are deemed to have sufficient legal personality to be granted regional or global recognition, while others are not, and how we can explain these divergences more historically.

Nonetheless, it must be mentioned that, as part of the INVISIHIST collective, I research so-called invisible histories at the UN, but I do not personally subscribe to the invisibility of African actors and movements at the UN or elsewhere. Rather, I interpret the term ‘invisible’ to signify the underrepresentation and marginalisation by prevailing narratives – not that they are non-existent. In this sense, the political and cultural struggles of the Rwenzururu movement are still entangled in discourses surrounding regional ordering. It is the structural biases and power imbalances inherent in the UN and the Ugandan state, however, that render Rwenzururu narratives less visible in conventional historical records. Yet, their visibility continues to endure in hard-to-access archives, oral histories, and cultural practices, awaiting both recognition and recovery.

The views and opinions expressed in the CGO blog posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the programme and its partners.