Roosevelt was drawn to Buganda’s culture of political procession, royal decorum and military ceremony. Upon his arrival that December, the former president watched as chiefs and royals — donning locally-crafted barkcloth and flowing robes imported from the Indian Ocean World — moved in and out of the capital, negotiating labor, power and state resources. It was a kingdom with wide roads interlocking government posts, military frontiers, markets, banana groves, farms, mines, smelting sites and estates.

Roosevelt met with military leaders of the kingdom, who managed a powerful navy and army. Buganda’s army of 10,000 warriors had successfully expanded the kingdom’s interests throughout the nineteenth century. The army’s size and power ensured that the British Empire did not openly conquer Buganda (or Uganda more broadly). And Buganda’s naval interests reached throughout the region’s lakes and rivers, giving birth to a vibrant culture of wartime canoes. During the 1890s alone, over 30,000 trees were harvested to produce 10,000 vessels. While these canoes varied in size, the most prominent class was around 25 feet long and 5 feet wide, designed to carry around half a ton. Roosevelt, a former assistant secretary of the Navy, was shocked by what he saw.

Roosevelt’s avowed interest in other cultures, however, had yet to dim his sense of white supremacy. He agreed with notions that Filipinos, whose country was then under the control of the United States, were too backward to participate fully in their own governance. He helped arrange exhibitions that treated indigenous peoples from other countries almost like caged animals. And he was an apologist for European colonialism.

But what he saw in Buganda that Christmas changed him. Roosevelt’s political language and approach to Black politics began veering in a new direction. Here in the heart of Africa was a highly functioning political state with a level of order exceeding that in many European countries or anything he had encountered during his extensive travels. The reality of Buganda’s political sophistication commanded not only his respect. Buganda compelled Roosevelt to rethink his fundamental assumptions regarding Black progress and civilization. As he would note in one speech shortly after his visit, Baganda stood “far above most … in their capacity for progress towards civilization.”

That observation was to alter not only his own views on Africans, but on African Americans. And his changed attitude toward race would reverberate through the country he had led and would seek to lead again.