The Mind Of Buganda

In the scramble for Africa, Britain took a lion’s share of the continent. It occupied and controlled vast territories, including the Uganda Protectorate – which it ruled for 68 years. Early administrators in the region encountered the progressive kingdom of Buganda, which they incorporated into the British Empire. Under the guise of protection, indirect rule and patronage, Britain overran, plundered and disempowered the kingdom’s traditional institutions. On liquidation of the Empire, Buganda was coaxed into a problematic political order largely dictated from London. Today, 56 years after independence, the kingdom struggles to rediscover itself within Uganda’s fragile politics. Based on newly de-classified records, this book reconstructs a history of the machinations underpinning British imperial interests in (B)Uganda and the personalities who embodied colonial rule. It addresses Anglo-Uganda relations, demonstrating how Uganda’s politics reflects its colonial past, and the forces shaping its future. It is a far-reaching examination of British rule in (B)uganda, questioning whether it was designed for protection, for patronage or for plunder.

This book offers an intellectual history of colonial Buganda, using previously unseen archival material to recast the end of empire in East Africa. It will be ideal for researchers, upper-level undergraduate and graduate students interested in the cultural, intellectual, religious and political history of modern East Africa.

Historically, studies of the church in Africa have tended to focus on church history or church-state relations, but in this publication David Zac Niringiye presents a study of the Church of Uganda focused on its ecclesiology. Niringiye examines several formative periods for the Church of Uganda during concurrent chronological political eras characterized by varying degrees of socio-political turbulence, highlighting how the social context impacted the church’s self-expression. The author’s methodology and insight sets this work apart as an excellent reflection on the Ugandan church and brings scholarly attention to previously ignored topics that hold great value to society, the church, and the academic community globally.

Decolonization of knowledge has become a major issue in African Studies in recent years, brought to the fore by social movements such as #RhodesMustFall and #BlackLivesMatter. This timely book explores the politics and disputed character of knowledge production in colonial and postcolonial Uganda, where efforts to generate forms of knowledge and solidarity that transcend colonial epistemologies draw on long histories of resistance and refusal. Bringing together scholars from Africa, Europe and North America, the contributors in this volume analyse how knowledge has been created, mobilized, and contested across a wide range of Ugandan contexts. In so doing, they reveal how Ugandans have built, disputed, and reimagined institutions of authority and knowledge production in ways that disrupt the colonial frames that continue to shape scholarly analyses and state structures. From the politics of language and gender in Bakiga naming practices to ways of knowing among the Acholi, the hampering of critical scholarship by militarism and authoritarianism, and debates over the names of streets, lakes, mountains, and other public spaces, this book shows how scholars and a wide range of Ugandan activists are reimagining the politics of knowledge in Ugandan public life.p by militarism and authoritarianism, and debates over the names of streets, lakes, mountains, and other public spaces, this book shows how scholars and a wide range of Ugandan activists are reimagining the politics of knowledge in Ugandan public life.p by militarism and authoritarianism, and debates over the names of streets, lakes, mountains, and other public spaces, this book shows how scholars and a wide range of Ugandan activists are reimagining the politics of knowledge in Ugandan public life.p by militarism and authoritarianism, and debates over the names of streets, lakes, mountains, and other public spaces, this book shows how scholars and a wide range of Ugandan activists are reimagining the politics of knowledge in Ugandan public life.

Buganda was the most prominent of the four traditional Bantu kingdoms of Uganda, which ceased to exist when the country was declared a Republic in 1967. The Kabakaship (kingship), the central institution of Buganda, was saturated with rituals and mythic images. Based on fieldwork and using extensive Luganda-language source material, this book describes and interprets the myths, rituals, shrines, and sacred regalia of the kingship within the changing contexts of the precolonial, colonial, and post-independence eras. Interpreting the Kabakaship as the symbolic center of the precolonial kingdom, this book examines James G. Frazer's theory of divine kingship, Buganda's creation myth, traditions about the origins of the kingship, regicide, royal ancestor shrines, and theories about the connection between Buganda and Ancient Egypt.

In The Social Origins of Violence in Uganda A.B.K. Kasozi examines the origins of the appallingly high levels of violence in Uganda since independence. This is the first scholarly compilation and comparison of patterns and forms of violence under successive Ugandan regimes, and the first to offer a systematic analysis of violence under the second Obote regime.