Opening ParagraphThis is a study of Teso District, eastern Uganda, during a period of colonial administration from 1896 to 1927. A group of appointed chiefs was brought into being and maintained within a local political environment in which neither traditional rulers nor a principle of hereditary succession to political office were recognised. The growth of the bureaucratic and authoritarian aspects of client chiefship is traced, along with changes in the relations of the chiefs with the colonial regime and with the people they ruled. In time, their increasing powers of coercion and their accumulative control of patronage led to the emergence of a class interest among them. This became crystallised in the mid-1920s when, as a body, they maintained a conservative stance within a colonial administration geared to change.