The Counties That Voted: A Story for Two Tables
On Alberta's referendum day, a Ugandan in Edmonton tells one story to two tables: a kingdom that fought to stay its own master, a 1964 referendum in two disputed counties, the sale of a third of a country by deed, and what a 64-year-old republic knows about votes.
A reflection, not a recommendation. Today is referendum day in Alberta. I don’t have a vote, and I won’t tell anyone how to use theirs, or whether to. This is a story, told to two tables at once.
Monday, two tables
It is the morning of October 19, and I am sitting at two tables, a feat of seating arrangements I would not recommend at a wedding.
The first is in Alberta, where ten ballots, each its own colour, are being handed out today. I wrote about that table over the Thanksgiving weekend, from a chair with no vote attached, which is rather like being asked to review a meal you are only allowed to smell.
The second table is further away, and rather older. I come from Uganda, which turned 64 on October 9. Sixty-four is a respectable age for a country: old enough to have firm opinions, young enough to still argue about the furniture.
So this story is for both. For my neighbours here, it is a story from a place where independence was something people fought for with armies, not paperwork. For the elders back home, the ones who were children when the flag first went up, it is a story about referendums, on which I suspect they hold a degree of hard-won expertise.
One thing, plainly, before anyone sharpens a pencil. I am not comparing Alberta to Bunyoro. Bunyoro was invaded. Alberta is having a lawful, loud, largely paper-based conversation inside a federation. The comparison I’m after is smaller and, I think, more useful. It is about how a people decides who decides, and what the morning after looks like.
There is one more thing the two tables share, which I only noticed while writing: both sit on maps drawn by people who were not at the table. Hold that thought. The story keeps coming back to it.
A kingdom with an army
Bunyoro-Kitara was one of the kingdoms of the interior, and its king, Omukama Kabalega, is remembered as the man who would not simply hand it over. As the Kabalega Foundation tells it, he built a standing army, the Abarusura, and held colonial advances off for years. When the British rejected his overtures for peace in 1894, he turned to guerrilla tactics. He was captured in 1899 and exiled to the Seychelles, where the Foundation says he spent 24 years.
The British did not do this alone. They leaned on an alliance with Buganda. In 1893 and 1894 a British colonel, Henry Colvile, invaded Bunyoro and promised Buganda all the land south of the River Kafu in return for its help. Two of Bunyoro’s counties, Buyaga and Bugangaizi, were handed over, and the 1900 Buganda Agreement recognised the transfer.
Colonial map-making has always had a certain dinner-party quality. Someone promises someone else a piece of a third person’s table, and everyone agrees to call it a settlement. The table, naturally, is not consulted.
Alberta’s table has its own version of this, and it is older than the province.
In 1670 a royal charter gave the Hudson’s Bay Company exclusive rights over all the lands draining into Hudson Bay. The Canadian Encyclopedia puts Rupert’s Land, as it was called, at about 3.9 million square kilometres, a third of what is now Canada, named for the company’s first governor, Prince Rupert. Of that charter it says: “Almost no thought was given to the sovereignty of the many Indigenous peoples that had lived there for centuries.” In 1869 the company agreed to sell the territory to Canada for £300,000, or $1.5 million, and the transfer took effect on 15 July 1870. A third of a country changed hands by deed.
Canada then negotiated treaties with the Indigenous nations of the territory, “acquiring their consent to the Crown’s sovereignty”, in the Encyclopedia’s words. In what is now Alberta those were Treaty 6 in 1876, Treaty 7 in 1877 and Treaty 8 in 1899.
Back in the interior of Africa, Bunyoro did not agree either. It appealed, again and again, for the counties to come back. Independence arrived in 1962 and the question was still sitting there, unanswered, like the last samosa on a communal plate: everyone had an opinion about it, and no one would be the first to reach.
November 4, 1964
The answer, when it came, was a referendum, and a rather particular one. The British Colonial Secretary set the terms: a vote in those two counties only. The ballot offered three options: stay in Buganda, return to Bunyoro, or become a separate district, across 72 polling stations.
Only people registered in the counties in 1962 could vote. The Daily Monitor reports that close to 4,000 Baganda ex-servicemen settled there under a resettlement scheme were left out. By the Monitor’s count, 11,602 voted to return to Bunyoro, 3,542 to stay in Buganda, and 112 for a separate district. (Other sources differ slightly on the percentages by county, which is a sentence I have come to expect whenever numbers are involved.)
Then came the morning after, which turned out to be much longer than the day.
Buganda’s government challenged the referendum in court and lost, in the High Court and then at the Privy Council. The Kabaka refused to sign the Bill, so the Prime Minister, Milton Obote, signed it into law. There were riots. Within days, Buganda’s cabinet resigned, its statement saying only that it “has realised the seriousness of the matter and has decided to resign.” And the kingdom maintained, even so, that the counties remained part of Buganda, since it did not recognise the Act under which the vote was held.
I take three things from this, and none of them is advice.
A vote can answer a question and still not close an argument. This one was lawful, was upheld by the courts, and was followed by a resignation. If referendums were sold as closure, the label would carry a warning.
A ballot is only as wide as the room it is handed out in. Who counted as “in the room” was settled before a single ballot paper was printed. Whether the line was drawn in the right place is a debate for Ugandan historians, who are better qualified than I am. I note only that it was a decision, and that it was made first.
The Red River settlement in 1869 is the reverse case: no ballot at all. The Canadian Encyclopedia’s phrase for how Rupert’s Land was handed over is blunt: “The transfer of Rupert’s Land was negotiated as if no one was there.” The people who were there, mostly Métis, blocked the incoming lieutenant-governor and formed a provisional government, with the aim of forcing Ottawa to negotiate the terms of joining Confederation. The Manitoba Act of 12 May 1870 was the result. Different century, different continent, and the same old question about who is in the room when a map is redrawn.
And the count ends on a night. The living-together goes on after.
What a 64-year-old knows about referendums
Now imagine a man born in the first year of Uganda’s independence. I am inventing him, and I’d like that understood. He is, in effect, the uncle at every wedding who has seen this film before. He was a toddler when the counties voted.
He was in his late thirties in June 2000, when Ugandans were asked, “Which political system do you wish to adopt, Movement or Multiparty?” About 90.7 per cent chose the Movement system, on a turnout of about 51 per cent.
He was in his early forties in July 2005, when Ugandans were asked whether to “open up the political space to allow those who wish to join different organisations/ parties to do so to compete for political power”. This time 92.44 per cent said yes, on a turnout of 47.33 per cent, with the Forum for Democratic Change among those boycotting, arguing that it would legitimise 19 years of rule by an effective one-party state.
Two enormous majorities, five years apart, pointing in opposite directions. A man who has lived through that has learned something no headline ever teaches. A landslide is a photograph of one dinner, from one angle, on one night. It tells you who turned up and what they were asked. It does not promise that the next landslide will point the same way.
Alberta knows something of this rhythm, and I say so gently, because it is a fair thing to say of any place. Some of what is on today’s ballots has been asked before, in other forms. On October 18, 2021, five years and a day before today, Albertans were asked whether Section 36(2) of the Constitution Act, 1982, the commitment to equalization payments, should be removed from the Constitution. About 61.7 per cent said yes, on a turnout of about 38.7 per cent. By the same account, that result had no immediate legal effect, because Alberta cannot amend the Constitution alone, and equalization stayed in place. Albertans also elected Senate nominees that day. So when Questions 6 to 9 ask about the Senate, the courts, opt-outs and the weight of provincial law, they are not arriving from nowhere. They are in a long line of questions about where Alberta sits inside the federation.
That is not a criticism. A question that has been asked and answered does not always stay answered, in any country. Uganda has taught its people that. It may be teaching Albertans a little of it now.
Back to our man.
And what does he see now? In April, a Ugandan government minister for labour presented figures showing that more than 73 per cent of the population is under 30, and that 42.6 per cent of young people aged 15 to 24 are not in employment, education or training. The same report says about 88 per cent of the workforce operates outside formal employment.
You can see the difficulty. The old arguments, about which kingdom held which county, or which political system was the right one, are not wrong. They may simply be answering questions that a twenty-three-year-old with no job is no longer asking. He may not care who owned Buyaga in 1894. His rent is due in 2026.
If the old positions feel as though they’ve stopped serving the people who now make up most of a country, a referendum is the tool people reach for. It is how a country asks itself whether the furniture is still in the right room. In Alberta, that furniture is described differently: in services and costs, in who decides how many chairs the table holds, in how the province sits inside a federation. And both tables, I notice, are living inside lines drawn before any living resident was born.
Back to the Alberta table
I’m not claiming the strains are the same. Nor am I claiming a referendum is the right tool in either place. I’m only noting that the instrument is familiar to anyone who has watched a country ask itself what it still agrees on, usually at a volume that suggests it doesn’t.
Alberta’s own lines were drawn in stages. In 1882 the federal government split the land acquired in 1870 into four districts, one of them called Alberta. On 1 September 1905 an Act of Parliament created Alberta and Saskatchewan as the eighth and ninth provinces. That Act also kept control of Alberta’s natural resources and public lands with the federal government, until 1930. I include that last detail only because it belongs to the story of who held the pen, and I leave it for each reader to weigh. The map that holds ten ballots today came out of a document, as maps tend to.
Now look at what Alberta’s table has, set beside the Bunyoro story.
Question 10 is the grace. It is counted first, by hand, and it asks about the table itself: remain in Canada, or begin the legal process towards a binding vote on separation. It is also, by Elections Alberta’s own labelling, non-binding, as are Questions 1 to 5. That is a quieter instrument than 1964, when the result was fought in the courts and ended with a cabinet leaving the room. What follows from Alberta’s ballots will follow at a different pace and in a different register.
Questions 1 to 5, the turkey, are the ones that reach my chair: how many seats, who qualifies for which plate, what the cover charge is. They are also the ones that rely on words not yet defined, which is why I spent the whole of the Thanksgiving weekend reading them like a man reading a lease on a flat he has already moved into.
And here the 1964 story offers me one small, uncomfortable echo. I am, tonight, someone whose life is touched by a question and who is not in the room where it is asked. I’m not going to claim that makes the room wrong. I notice only that, in 1964 and in 2026, the edges were drawn before the ballots were printed, and that the people just outside them still have to live in the morning after.
What I’d say to each table
To my neighbours in Alberta: the story I’ve told you is half about a kingdom far from here and half about the ground under your own table, which also changed hands by deed long before any of us arrived. It is about a people who once fought to stay their own masters, a Métis community that insisted on being at the table when terms were set, and a vote that settled an old wrong, and how even then the morning after took longer than the vote. If it is useful at all, it is as a reminder, to me at least, to read the wording, to notice who is in the room, and to make allowance for a long tomorrow.
To my elders in Uganda: you taught us that a landslide describes a day and not a century, and that a country asks itself the same question in different clothes whenever its young people stop finding themselves in the old answers. Alberta is asking some version of that today, in its own accent. I’m watching it the way you taught me to watch such things: with interest, and with a long view.
Tonight, two tables will count their votes. One, here, will count in ten colours of paper, the first by hand, so that someone, somewhere, will be very tired by Tuesday. The other has been counting in memory, slowly, for sixty-four years.
Both, I notice, will wake up tomorrow at the same table, inside lines drawn long before either of us arrived. Leftovers, as any host will tell you, are where the real conversation begins.
Brian Ssennoga writes, from Edmonton, Alberta on family and newcomer life in Canada.
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