‘I DO NOT KNOW THE CAUSE OF THIS SUDDEN REVOLUTION,’ PRIME Minister Lord Salisbury complained to a British audience in 1891, ‘but there it is’. The chief commercial nations of Europe had coiled themselves into a frantic spring for colonies in Africa, and the only thing that seemed to count was who should get there first The noble prime minister and other elder statesmen in Britain and continental western Europe strongly disapproved. They believed that African colonies were bound to prove an expensive nuisance. But the public, or at any rate the public that politically mattered, thought otherwise. By 1891 this public had thought otherwise for a long time, and had regularly had its way. However mysterious the reasons might appear to Salisbury and his like, the fate of Africa had taken a new turn.

Yet the crisis of modern Africa did not open with this new imperialism. If colonial invasion afterwards piled turmoil on confusion, the colonial invaders were absent from the opening scenes of the drama. Towards 1850 the ancestral charters were beginning to break down, although not everywhere or at the same speed. The fact was often blurred by their breadth of development. Within them lay long centuries of growth and the rise of many-sided cultures. Civilisations of no small technological ingenuity, of fine artistic achievement, and, perhaps above all, of genial and persistent resolving of the conflict of individual and community, had flowered in systems of proverbial wisdom and belief. Offering hope and consolation in all the great things of life and death, these could seem in their venerable power to stand outside the ravages of time.

Yet even before 1850 these systems had come severely under strain. Though the old ways could still satisfy and easily enclose those peoples who, like the Karimojong or Lugbara, still lived beyond the margins of a world in change, there were others who found themselves, like their contemporaries in western Europe, caught in a 'sudden revolution’ whose causes must have seemed no less mysterious.

Much remains to be explained about this initial period of transition or adjustment to an accelerating process of change. Its root cause seems to have lain in a disturbed ecological balance. For these societies were now the victims of their own success.