Just as modern Zionists claim to be indigenous to Palestine, 19th-century British colonialists in Africa claimed that white people had lived in Africa since ancient times.
When Cecil Rhodes sent in his agents to rob and steal in Zimbabwe, they and other Europeans marvelled at the surviving ruins of the Zimbabwe culture, and automatically assumed that it had been built by white people.
-How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Walter Rodney), Chapter 2.2g, p. 105
Actually, Europeans were so impressed with what they saw in the interlacustrine zone [in Uganda] that they invented the thesis that those political states could not possibly have been the work of Africans and must have been built at an earlier date by white ‘Hamites’ from Ethiopia. This myth seemed to get some support from the fact that the Bachwezi were said to have been light-skinned. However, in the first place, had the Bachwezi come from Ethiopia they would have been black or brown Africans