[3] Meanwhile, by the fourth century BCE, the Bantu-speaking metallurgists were perfecting iron smelting to produce medium grade carbon steel in pre-heated forced-draft furnaces.
[3] Although most of these developments were taking place southwest of modern Ugandan boundaries, iron was mined and smelted in many parts of the country not long afterward.
[3] This kinship-organized system was useful for coordinating work projects, settling internal disputes, and carrying out religious observances to clan deities, but it could effectively govern only a limited number of people.
[3] In the meeting of cultures, they may have acquired the ideas and symbols of political chiefship from the Bantu speakers, to whom they could offer military protection,[7] and with whose elites they sometimes joined and intermarried.
[citation needed] It is theorized a system of patron-client relationships developed, whereby a pastoral elite emerged, entrusting the care of cattle to subjects who used the manure to improve the fertility of their increasingly overworked gardens and fields.
[8] In some regions, pastoral elites were of partly Nilotic descent, while in others they may have derived mainly from the Bantu population (so theorized by the linguist David L. Schoenbrun from certain of those relatives of wealthy banana cultivators who were not eligible for inheritance).
[8] Legends depicted the Chwezi as supernatural beings, but their material remains at the archaeological sites of Bigo and Mubende have shown that they were human and perhaps among the ancestors of the modern Hima and Tutsi pastoralists of Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi.
[8] The Hima rulers lost their Nilotic language and became Bantu speakers, but they preserved an ideology of superiority in political and social life and attempted to monopolise high status and wealth.
[8] Although some of these ambitions might be fulfilled by the Bunyoro omukama (ruler) granting his kin offices as governors of districts, there was always the danger of a coup d'état or secession by overambitious relatives.
[9] There, as in the nearby Haya kingdom of west Tanzania, the wealth of the ruling class continued to depend more on banana lands and groves than cattle, and no sharp caste-like distinction between farmers and herders formed.
[10] Buganda's armies and the royal tax collectors traveled swiftly to all parts of the kingdom along specially constructed roads which crossed streams and swamps by bridges and viaducts.
[10] Stanley counted 125,000 troops marching off on a single campaign to the east, where a fleet of 230 war canoes waited to act as auxiliary naval support.
[12] The central African lake region was a world in miniature, with an internal trade system, a great power rivalry between Buganda and Bunyoro, and its own inland seas.
[14] But growing world demand in the 19th century, together with the provision of increasingly efficient firearms to hunters, created a moving "ivory frontier" as elephant herds near the coast were nearly exterminated.
[14] Bunyoro also found itself threatened from the north by Egyptian-sponsored agents who sought ivory and slaves but who, unlike the Arab traders from Zanzibar, were also promoting foreign conquest.
[14] Baker regarded the resistance as an act of treachery, and he denounced the Banyoro in a book (Ismailia – A Narrative Of The Expedition To Central Africa For The Suppression Of Slave Trade, Organised By Ismail, Khadive Of Egypt (1874)) that was widely read in Britain.
[17] Two years after the CMS established a mission, French Catholic White Fathers also arrived at the king's court, and the stage was set for a fierce religious and nationalist rivalry in which Zanzibar-based Muslim traders also participated.
[citation needed] The victorious Protestant and Catholic converts then divided the Buganda kingdom, which they ruled through a figurehead kabaka dependent on their guns and goodwill.
[19] The resultant scandal was settled in Europe when the British government paid compensation to the French mission and agreed with the Germans who gave up Peters' claim to Uganda in the Anglo-German Agreement of 1890.
[19] With Buganda secured by Lugard, and the Germans no longer contending for control, the British began to enlarge their claim to the "headwaters of the Nile" as they called the land north of Lake Victoria.
[19] Allying with the Protestant Baganda chiefs, the British set about conquering the rest of the country, aided by Nubian mercenary troops who had formerly served the khedive of Egypt.
[19] After five years of bloody conflict, the British occupied Bunyoro and conquered Acholi and the northern region, and the rough outlines of the Uganda Protectorate came into being.
[19] Other African polities, such as the Ankole kingdom to the southwest, signed treaties with the British, as did the chiefdoms of Busoga, but the kinship-based peoples of eastern and northeastern Uganda had to be overcome by military force.
[19] A mutiny by Nubian mercenary troops in 1897 was only barely suppressed after two years of fighting, during which Baganda Christian allies of the British once again demonstrated their support for the colonial power.