DEPORTATION AND REACTIONS

The meeting that launched the crisis was choreographed by British officials, after months of tense negotiations. The governor repeated his demand that the Kabaka accept British guidance. When Mutesa refused, the governor reportedly told him ‘I am very sorry. You are no longer considered to be the Kabaka from today.’ Governor Cohen then read aloud the document to end Britain's recognition of Mutesa as ‘Native Ruler of the Province of Buganda’.Footnote ⁶ As he left, the commissioner of police arrested Mutesa and escorted him – surrounded by soldiers from Kenya – to a military plane.

This withdrawal of recognition was political; Governor Cohen sought to remove obstacles to development. The Kabaka, however, was more than a political leader. His praise names described his facets beyond politics: he was Ssabataka, or head of clans and thus head of the country's families from the ancestors to their descendants; he was Ssabasajja, the man of men who stood for masculine power; he was Mawanda, the beautiful one imbued with the power of seduction and persuasion; and, for close subjects and especially for the country's women, he was Omufumbo, husband to his loyal subjects and wives.Footnote ⁷

A quick flight removed Mutesa from Buganda before anyone could mobilize the uprising that British officials feared. Kampala did not erupt in riots. Tactically, the operation was a success. Buganda's prime minister, though, remembered weeping so uncontrollably, ‘overwhelmed by what had taken place and by what had happened to the Kabaka’ that an associate pointed out that he was ‘not behaving like a man’.Footnote ⁸ If the blow of the Kabaka's deportation was enough to make the country's prime minister weep like a bereaved widow, he was only the first, and not the most dramatic of those reacting emotionally to this loss.  Throughout Buganda, the dominant reaction reported was not violence, but grief. Anthropologist Audrey Richards reported that:

Women in Buganda described themselves as wives of the king, both subject to and protected by him.Footnote ¹⁰ Without the Kabaka as an ultimate husband and lord, nothing was clear. A Christian leader of Uganda's Mother's Union argued that ‘as long as the Kabaka remained in exile, the stability of every … marriage would be weakened’.Footnote ¹¹ In perhaps the most dramatic enactment of the country's intensely emotional response, Mutesa's sister Alice Zalwango, the country's most important female officeholder (Nnalinya) and the Kabaka's closest friend, died on hearing the news.Footnote ¹²

These emotional responses were immediate, widespread, and apparently not initially coordinated by any organization or party. They were wholly unexpected by the governor and his staff. These emotional responses that claimed the Kabaka as husband ultimately became key to Ganda efforts to reinstall Mutesa II as Buganda's king. Noting women's ‘violent’ responses to the deportation, a missionary observer emphasized ‘the Kabaka is still a figure of great emotional significance in the lives of almost all the Ganda women and girls … one might almost say that from him all husbandhood derives’.Footnote ¹³ When the governor called on Buganda's prime minister to name those whose opposition to the deportation was dangerous to public order, Buganda's prime minister noted that despite his own public weeping, the British officials seemed to lack understanding of the wound they had dealt everyone. He informed them that they lacked enough jails. It was pointless to distinguish between supporters and opponents because at the head of the list of opponents ‘must be my wife, for even she, though she loved me, was my enemy because of what had happened to the Kabaka while I was Katikkiro’.Footnote ¹⁴

This affective response of pain and grief at a marriage of king and people ripped apart was possible because politics in Buganda worked through metaphors of normative family relationships. During the 1940s, populists had sought to develop a Ganda idea of citizenship, complete with both rights and responsibilities. To do this, they had attacked anglophilic elitists as greedy, abusive, deal-making fathers, and asserted the moral stewardship of grandfathers and inheritance of grandsons within the patrilineal clans, or Bataka, as the true expression of what it meant to be a citizen of Buganda.Footnote ¹⁵ With the 1950s, though, in the crucible of the Kabaka crisis, grief-stricken women and men loudly voiced a different normative family politics, that of the Kabaka as husband to the Baganda, the man of men who provided land and protection that gave people the opportunity to work in security. This was a politics rooted in idealized marital roles that went beyond any simple assumptions about biological sex or even social reproduction. The normative roles of husband and wives in Buganda offer a package of concepts – political, economic, military, emotional, sexual, and social – that, better than any less loaded metaphor or analytic framework, can illuminate the crisis from the initial emotional response of grief to the ongoing intensity of loyalty and sacrifice.

Disrupted marriage was not the only narrative that activists used to shape the Kabaka crisis, but it was powerful, and now offers insights into Ganda solidarity, mobilization, and eventual success in a crisis that can seem incomprehensible through more conventional depictions. To examine this narrative, I reconstruct and analyze the gendered, emotional response of women and some men to the derecognition. I then contextualize these affective performances in a structural analysis of the normative politics of marriage in Buganda. Normative structures of marriage directly paralleled the affective and moral relationship between subject and king. The socially constructed roles of husband and wives, and the marital metaphor invoked by weeping women, illuminate both the loyalties voiced throughout the crisis and subjects’ acceptance of the dramatic difference between their desperate mourning and sacrificial activities to reclaim the king, and Mutesa's own relative inertness.

The Kabaka crisis of 1953–5 was one of the major upheavals in late colonial Buganda. It was documented extensively as it occurred, within both official documents collected by the Colonial Office and less official archives. Activists generated a range of partisan documents ranging from high-level speeches and legal briefs to rudimentary letters to Sir Keith Hancock. Both local and imperial publications described events and actions. Key participants wrote about the crisis retrospectively in both published and unpublished work. The interpretation offered here emerges from a close reading of these archives, contextualized within a broader understanding of how colonial era observers and subsequent scholars described Buganda's social relationships and expectations. Some specifics were contentious at the time, and may remain so even today. The stories that emerge in these materials, however – whether factual or fictitious – can be explored for insight into the basic concepts, values, and tactics of Buganda's struggles with British rule.

During the 1940s, in the context of Bataka mobilization, activists voiced and pursued citizenship. During the Kabaka crisis, though, Ganda women and men developed a politics of wives loyal to something bigger than oneself, whether that be as basic as a husband, or as grand as the kingdom. They acted publicly as wives and subjects. This marital politics was open to both sexes. In the context of the Kabaka crisis, with its destabilization and remaking of Buganda, both women and men offered emotional assertions of loyalty, abandoning the alternative Bataka ideal of a citizenship rooted in collective rights and obligations, or the alien British theory of neutral and rational bureaucratic meritocracy. Instead, they insisted on Mutesa's return as Kabaka, rejected criticism of his behavior, and fought constitutional changes designed to limit the Kabaka's power.

MUTESA II

This dramatic response to derecognition was about the position of the Kabaka as husband in Ganda society. It did not occur because Mutesa himself was especially effective. Indeed, the governor's willingness to move quickly to the major sanction of derecognition was based on the accurate perception of Mutesa as a troublesome young man, useful to neither his own people nor British administrators. He had proven unable or unwilling to act as a source of order in the series of crisis and clashes that Buganda experienced during the 1940s. Instead, his distinctly casual attitude toward responsibility and restraint may even have exacerbated tensions. His friends rioted at Budo.Footnote ¹⁶ His dithering over personnel crises in the Buganda government created vicious enmity from opposition leaders. His marriage to a woman of the Nkima (monkey) clan antagonized traditionalists. And his unrestrained affairs made Christians nervous.Footnote ¹⁷ As late as August 1953, his critics put up posters declaring ‘Mutesa II is a mere dog’ and calling on people to ‘Bury all the White Missionaries and Mutesa for they are stealers of the country’.Footnote ¹⁸ In the early 1950s, his actions appeared experimental, as he reportedly sought divorce, enquired into terms for abdication, and took on an increasingly prominent political role in Buganda's opposition to East African Federation and its ineffectual request for independence.Footnote ¹⁹ He was, in all accounts, a charming, handsome man who was athletic enough to play in soccer games as well as presiding at them as guest of honor. His political enemies were real, though. His personal life was a mess as the brother of one of the country's most prominent politicians named him in a divorce suit; the Archbishop of Canterbury sought to offer marriage counseling during his trip to London for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II; and he was conspicuously without a male heir by his Christian wife Damali (the Nnabagereka).

Mutesa himself, therefore, whether in the fond memory of his friends and associates or the frustrations of his critics, was not an intransigent politician. Far from being a popular leader, he appeared trapped between the demands of the British, the expectations of Ganda politics, and his tendency to rely on consultation, connections, and associations. In his meetings with the governor, the minutes describe him as simply seeking to consult with the Lukiiko (Buganda's parliament) rather than claiming Buganda's rights.Footnote ²⁰ Going into exile, he dithered over what to do with his gun (it stayed in his pocket, and he surrendered it in London) and only negotiated to ensure that his Christian wife did not follow him to London.Footnote ²¹

In exile, his political passivity persisted. It was his subjects who felt the derecognition as a ‘wound’, raised money, formed delegations to Britain, coordinated international press campaigns, recruited British supporters, developed a legal case against the deportation, boycotted alien goods as a protest and emphasized, over and over again, an unprecedented rhetoric of the Kabaka as the foundation of Buganda's identity. Mutesa himself behaved as if on vacation, settling into the Savoy Hotel, partying with supporters in Britain, engaging in affairs that left Colonial Office observers worried that ‘no Baganda woman in this country will be safe so long as he is around’, and going on holidays.Footnote ²²

THE MEANINGS OF MARRIAGE

As Mutesa II was far from being a charismatic celebrity in Uganda, Ganda reactions to his deportation can best be explained by examining not him, but Ganda expectations and normative ideals of marriage. Marriage was a fundamental social institution basic to Ganda adulthood and identity.Footnote ²³ Without it, ‘A woman who is not yet married, even if she is 30 years, is still a girl; she is only a potential wife; but a married woman is somebody's wife. One who is not married can never be counted’.Footnote ²⁴ Conventionally, Ganda marriage certainly involved sex and reproduction – according to Lucy Mair, old women argued that ‘girls should marry … before they have “learnt wantonness”’, since a mature woman could be expected to have sex outside marriage if she was not satisfied by her husband.Footnote ²⁵ But a girl who became pregnant without marriage did not need marriage for her lover's family to take responsibility for the child. Even in the 1930s, ‘There is absolutely no feeling that the lover is under an obligation to marry the girl.’Footnote ²⁶ Reproduction could be facilitated by marriage, but children were born to patrilineal clans (Bataka), not nuclear families. Clans took responsibility throughout a person's life and after, naming children, teaching them manners, finding them land or marriage, and providing a place for their graves. Further, while Christianity was professed widely, its marital ideals had not displaced older understandings of association, sexuality, and reproduction.Footnote ²⁷

Instead of focusing principally on children (though children were valued and important), Ganda marriage was about loyalty, respect, and protection. It was more than an alliance between families or an economic relation marked by bridewealth. Sylvia Nannyonga-Tamukuza's interviewees described how women knelt, demonstrating respect, and asserted that being somebody's wife meant protection.Footnote ²⁸ Mair portrayed the ‘actual native ceremonial of betrothal’ as a family ratification of a woman's transformed loyalties, respect, and identity. Within it, family was important – particularly in distinguishing between acceptable partners and incestuous ones – but the individual man and woman, prospective husband and wife, were chosen by themselves.Footnote ²⁹ The ritual performance included economic components, but was a ritual enactment of a relationship of loyalty and meaning rather than a simple sale; Juliette Kiguli's discussion of marriage practices and beliefs in Buganda suggests that bridewealth was associated with twentieth-century economic changes such as the rise of consumer goods and cash and had been minimal to non-existent in earlier times.Footnote ³⁰

A normative Ganda marriage began with token gifts; a prospective groom offered barkcloth to his potential bride and salt to her parents. If all the presents were accepted, a ceremony introduced the suitor to the girl's parents. The ritual was political, with exact parallels between a wife rebelling against the authority of her birth family and accepting a husband and the actions of a client rejecting the authority of an ineffectual chief in favor of his newly chosen patron.Footnote ³¹ Mair described a version of practices that continue to this day: in ceremonial dialog, the bride's brother accused the suitor of ‘trying to steal the girl’ and his sister of ‘rebelling against him [the brother]’. Speaking for the bride, her ssenga (father's sister) then spoke the key phrase Mair translated as ‘I have found my master’, asserting that the phrase derived from the same verb – ‘kusenga’ – that anyone might use to describe becoming the client of a specific chief or official. Completing the ritual, the bride's father observed: ‘This child has rebelled against us; she has found her master.’Footnote ³² The meeting was closed by the ssenga, who shared beer with the husband and kin, and witnessed receipt of the prenegotiated bridewealth. Mair noted that neither party made promises about future conduct.Footnote ³³ The ritual simply recognized a relationship between husband and wife, patron and client, master and servant, in language that acknowledged the emotional and affective elements of the connection established.

Marriage explicitly connected the political symbolism to an economic base. Economically, marriage enacted patron/client associations basic to Ganda social relationships. A Ganda sociologist asserted, as examples, that a bride was not supposed to accept gifts from a man until he proved suitable (lest a contract be implied) but once her new status was agreed, she was to insist on payment at each stage of the intensifying relationship: payment to enter her husband's house, payment to eat in that house, and payment to have sex.Footnote ³⁴ Etymologically, a contemporary Ganda sociologist noted, for a woman to marry in Buganda was literally to find someone to cook for.Footnote ³⁵ A good woman worked for her husband and his family and expected to be compensated for that work.Footnote ³⁶ Ganda observers noted that with cash-crop cotton, polygyny regained its profitability for men even as the region's economy changed.Footnote ³⁷ What a woman expected from her husband was not support – a hardworking woman was capable of feeding herself, husband and children, constructing a house, and doing most of the physical work of providing for a family. Instead, she expected the use of land and sometimes tools, and a secure context for her work. If a husband failed to provide the necessary land or resources to enable her to work effectively and on her own plot, she might well leave ‘for home’, accusing him of seeking to enslave her.Footnote ³⁸ Within this older framework of political and economic expectations, a sensible woman remained conscious that ‘home’ was her patrilineal clan, not her marital garden. But it was on her husband's land that she took on an adult identity as a valued worker and potentially powerful client rather than a simple child in the home of her clan.

Politically and economically, therefore, marriage in Ganda society worked as a transition from domesticity and childhood as a dependant of the patrilineal clan – a status acquired by birth that provided security, belonging, and acceptance independent of parental presence, absence, or marriages – into public achievement as client, wife, and adult. Married, a wife would receive the raw materials for production from her husband/patron and use them for support and profit, demanding rewards for her successes, and offering tribute in the forms of food, deference, and sex.Footnote ³⁹ The explicit parallels between marriage and key political and economic hierarchical relations extended even further: they were enacted in even very ordinary rituals of deference, such as greetings, where a wife was expected to kneel to her husband just as any subordinate would kneel to a superior, regardless of gender.Footnote ⁴⁰

Such clear normative expectations brought a corollary: if a woman was in a marriage, she must work for her husband and his family, support herself and them, defer, and submit. But any specific marriage was traditionally neither essential nor holy. If a wife found the terms of a marriage unacceptable, whether because her husband lacked sufficient land, suffered impotence, beat her, or otherwise failed her, she could leave. She was valuable, and retained membership in her own clan. Nor was she burdened by dependants: any children would belong to their father's clan. She could renegotiate – ‘rebel’ – and live alone or find someone new to cook for.Footnote ⁴¹ Her abandoned husband might well have difficulty in her absence: according to Holly Hanson, a man married with a verb that translated literally as having acquired someone to peel his bananas.Footnote ⁴² Beyond the sexual metaphor, this image was about the immediate necessities of economic life: raw plantains were unpalatable and a man's land, even if stocked with trees and watered with rain, could not keep him from hunger and a need to beg food from someone else's cook.Footnote ⁴³ A man's need for his wives, and the reality of options for frustrated women, meant that although wives owed their husband deference and worked for him, rather than vice versa, his only sensible action was to provide them with land, tools, and security to make their work productive, and to offer them enough respect (and charm and seduction) to keep them as his own.

To understand how this model of Ganda marriage and politics worked during the Kabaka crisis, though, it is important to consider not simply general marital norms, but elite marriages’ patterns of political achievement. First, both prior to Christian influence and even in the twentieth century, Ganda marriage was always potentially polygynous.Footnote ⁴⁴ Nakanyike Musisi and others have emphasized that in Buganda, polygyny was basic to elite control of political and state structures, not simply a sign of wealth.Footnote ⁴⁵ The roles of ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ were utterly dissimilar. A wife owed loyalty, respect, deference, and obedience to her husband, but not a husband to his wife. A corollary of polygyny as an elite, political, phenomenon was that the more powerful the husband, the more a wife owed loyalty, and the harder it was to walk away. Elite wives – women who held offices, managed resources, and demanded respect from both male and female subordinates – sometimes saw themselves as bound ‘slaves’. They knew too much to be free to leave. Their tight marital loyalty was both an opportunity for advancement, and a price demanded by their high status. There were rewards: a powerful man acquired multiple wives by being able to offer them status, land, slaves, children, or other benefits. But to maintain his status, he balanced each wife off against another, managing his clients. Each wife competed with others in expressions of loyalty and usefulness. This idealized form of marriage in Buganda was intensely political. Beyond her skills as a farmer, builder, beer-brewer, cook, administrator, mother, and lover, a wife achieved status through extremes of deference and loyalty to her husband. Kiguli has emphasized that the Kabaka himself depended on his royal wives’ loyalty as a defense for his absolute power.Footnote ⁴⁶ And Sylvia Nannyonga-Tamusaza has emphasized that the royal marital metaphor was so powerful that even male commoners in the palace were effectively gendered into women as wives of the Kabaka.Footnote ⁴⁷

This reliance on wives’ loyalty meant that, like a peasant husband, an elite husband always had plenty to be nervous about. Women in polygynous marriages, at court, balanced their identities as agents of their clans against loyalty and identification with their husbands. The higher the husband's class, the more he was a target for intrigue and the more, therefore, he had to demand wives’ explicit declarations of loyalty, fearing their autonomy or clan loyalties. Thus the marital loyalty imagined in a polygynous marriage was unbalanced, owed by the wives to the husband, who reciprocated by providing a loyal wife with resources to build her dependant power and wealth. This intensely political relationship was about more than two people. An elite polygynous husband might not need to worry about hunger if a disloyal wife left. But unless loyalty was explicitly performed, it could not be assumed. An abandoned elite husband would have to concern himself with a wife's clan, and whether any children she left behind might plot against him. A wife was presumed to have her own identity, clan, and home that she retained and did not share or surrender. A husband could not expect to control a wife's independent economic resources, or her self.

Unrestrained passionate and emotional expressions of grief and loss, dependency and need, were probably not as personally embarrassing to Ganda women as they might have been to more stoic Britons. Performative affect instead reassured an elite husband, and defended a marriage against structural challenges. Passionate connection to the king was not simply about pleasure or sex, but about power and patriotism, and a wife's ambition to be a part of something larger than her own clan. To be effective, it had to be overt, not subtle. And performing loyalty and identification with the king was both necessary and effective in achieving personal advancement. Choosing to be a wife, or a subject, and to identify with a husband or king put a wife below her lord in the social hierarchy and subsumed her interests to his. As he gained power, wives competed to share loyally in his authority, but in their marital loyalty, risked losing independence or bargaining power toward their husband or lord. Accepting this vulnerability to achieve power was an act of an adult, accepting responsibility and pursuing ambition.

MOBILIZING LOYALTY

In the earliest days after the Kabaka's deportation, men as well as women very publicly wept and organized,Footnote ⁴⁸ but women's reactions were what impressed British observers. The Nnalinya's death provided the occasion for her dramatic funeral, where she ‘was mourned … as a princess “killed” by the white men’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Beyond this funeral, women were both incapacitated and disruptive. A missionary reported that the schoolgirls at Budo lay on their beds ‘screaming and making animal noises’, the Ganda girls at Gayaza school were angry and unwilling to cooperate with school discipline, the nurses at Mengo Hospital sat down and mourned, and the female students at Makerere University gathered at the top of the stairs shouting ‘Every Englishman is a traitor to our King! God save our King!’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Women and girls, even more than Buganda's men, perceived the Kabaka's removal as a ‘wound’ – suffered in their minds and bodies as well as in the community and nation.Footnote ⁵¹ All of these reactions, from death through grief to angry outbursts, were emotional. And they were only the beginning of women's responses. As efforts to resolve the crisis developed early in 1954, the women remained intensely emotional and grew increasingly organized in their responses, making their case for the Kabaka's return.Footnote ⁵²

Damali Kisosonkole, Mutesa's Christian wife (Nnabagereka), somewhat unexpectedly became a key actor in women's mobilization and pleas. Damali's marriage to Mutesa II was not good. Damali was born to the Nkima clan, the only clan in Buganda that was not supposed to offer brides to the king. The marriage thus, from the very beginning, was deemed inappropriate by local standards.Footnote ⁵³ Rejection of a marriage between Nkima and the king went so far that one of the necessary steps to prepare for the marriage was to construct a new genealogy that transformed Damali's clan identity.Footnote ⁵⁴ The marriage went forward despite objections that in choosing an inappropriate woman, the Kabaka was thinking only of himself.Footnote ⁵⁵ Further, despite a Christian wedding, it rapidly became clear that the Kabaka was unwilling to even pretend to monogamy.Footnote ⁵⁶ Damali's sister Sara, the politically well-connected Kate Mulira, and others were publically associated with him.Footnote ⁵⁷ The Kabaka's liaisons were widely known, providing superficial credibility to a covertly circulated official dossier of libelous allegations about Mutesa's personal life. Mutesa's defenders were reduced to rejecting the relevance of personal behavior. However tawdry the allegations (incest, homosexuality, and poor tipping were mentioned), they contended that Mutesa's personal life was not grounds for his disrecognition.Footnote ⁵⁸

Despite the Nnabagereka’s status as a Christian woman wronged, she quickly earned respect as a key advocate for Mutesa's return to Buganda. As one of the educated women of her generation, she networked with others such as Rebecca Mulira and spearheaded an emotive plea for both herself and Buganda, which resonated in the sentimental press of Britain. She and her associates began their press campaign in January of 1954, cabling Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, asking for her intervention to facilitate Mutesa II's return to Buganda. This was not simply an appeal from one queen to another, but a move in a publicity campaign, publicized within Buganda in a local newspaper and circulated beyond Buganda to India, Ghana and the United States. The Nnabagereka’s plea was ‘a very moving communication’ speaking of ‘her misery at the loss of her husband and the grief of the whole country’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Her message offered an empathic understanding of British frustrations with Mutesa as a man, and answered with a declaration of wifely loyalty and hope. In a more private letter to the head of the Church Missionary Society, she did nothing to defend Mutesa himself, but instead asserted, in a message that was implicitly about both her own marriage, and Mutesa's kingship,

With this argument, Damali used her familiarity with evangelical Christian ideas of the possibility of forgiveness and transformation. She simultaneously asserted herself as a loving wife (rather than a dupe) and made clear that Mutesa's problems made the wound of his loss more rather than less, turning upside down any paternalistic colonial assertions of removing him for the good of Buganda.

Love, in Damali's petition, was not contingent on a husband's reform. Instead, love and loyalty by Damali as a wife, and by any loyal to the Kabaka, were actions. This performative love secured Damali's position, and that of the Kabaka's other adherents, and might have eventually called forth his response. Damali made clear the politics of this love and loyalty by noting that the grief of the removal had meant that ‘like one person’ his people all stood behind him. In grief and pain, there was no room for individual ambition, disloyalty, or ‘personal feelings’.

Uganda's new bishop and mission observers were dubious of assertions that Mutesa was reforming in reaction to the trauma of his deportation or the balm in the loving support of his wife and followers, arguing that they would not believe any change short of Mutesa sending for Damali and the two of them settling down to live as ‘Christian man and wife’.Footnote ⁶¹ Nevertheless, pushed by his own wife, Uganda's former Bishop became key to those who sought to make the British hear Ganda emotional outrage. He was bemused that Damali was ‘behaving as if her dearly loved devoted husband had been sent away from her’. Nevertheless, he emphasized that in what he heard, there was no evidence of people settling down and accepting the British intervention. Loyalty to the people he had worked with, he emphasized, was important to him, he could not refuse when the delegation came to him to request help.Footnote ⁶²

The potential positive power of love and loyalty toward the Kabaka were part of the campaign Damali and other women in Buganda waged, but only a part. Beyond reforming and reclaiming their husband and king, Baganda women also sought to defend him. They did not distinguish between Mutesa the man and the structural position of the Kabaka. They were therefore outraged by actions during the deportation that were so sudden that they could be compared with Pearl Harbor and ‘the lack of ordinary courtesy’ in how Damali's husband/their king had been ‘pushed out of that meeting room as though he were a common thief, hustled into a waiting car and bundled into the waiting plane as if he were a sack of chaff’.Footnote ⁶³

When the men of the Lukiiko's delegation to London met with the colonial secretary, and asked for Mutesa's return they too powerfully voiced their love, loyalty, and that of the Baganda.Footnote ⁶⁴ The delegation's spokesmen were fluent in English and among the most eloquent men in Buganda. Beyond their analysis of Buganda's state and treaty relations with Britain, they sought to connect with the secretary's specifically British sense of right behavior, asking how his government could depose a king crowned in a Christian ceremony and backed by Baganda who had laid down their lives in the Second World War, fighting for democracy. The secretary dismissed this eloquence by simply asserting that his government believed the deposition was in the long-term interest of the Baganda, and ‘it was their duty to follow their own judgment and conscience’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Men's loyalty was not a powerful debating point with British officials who at least in the context of the crisis valued conscience and reliability. British officials, indeed, repeatedly found the emotional loyalty of Ganda men to their king to be embarrassing. Men who spoke of the Kabaka as their beloved were simply grist for colonial concerns about his wide-ranging sexual proclivities.

If the Kabaka had to be defended through emotional pleading, Ganda activists therefore found that women's pleas were most affecting. Damali and her coalition of elite women pursued one part of the emotional campaign for the Kabaka's return. But other women also joined in. Two busloads of women, led by Debola Kiwanuka, came to Prime Minister Kavuma to pressure him against acquiescing to British pressure and accepting the Kabaka's loss, cornering him for ‘a lengthy discussion’. A meeting with a group of royals, including prominent princesses, took three hours. And by February of 1954, Ganda men emulated women by performing grief and loyalty and demanding the Kabaka's return, rather than simply petitioning. Despite the governor's objections, the Lukiiko declared two days for a ‘formal demonstration of their displeasure and grief’, regarding the Kabaka's deposition, closing all offices and mobilizing the population to announce a ‘state of mourning’ that was to continue until the Kabaka's return.Footnote ⁶⁶

The Nnabagereka led these public rituals of mourning. She dressed in barkcloth and prayed alongside others, displaying the cloth that, beyond mourning, was also traditionally a gift of a husband to his wife and a symbol of the Kabaka's relationship to the nation. At his coronation, one of the symbols of power and affiliation the Kabaka has historically received is the royal mallet that established him as the provider of barkcloth to his wives, and the one who pounds out the fabric of Buganda from separate fibers into a functional whole. Led by the Nnabegareka in prayers for the Kabaka's return, Ganda emphasized that they were loyal subjects and wives who rejected Britain's efforts toward forcible divorce. They wanted their husband. Wearing or waving the barkcloth that symbolized Ganda unity over any individualism, they emphasized Buganda as a marriage rather than dwelling on alternative praise names that portrayed the Kabaka as conquering lion, owner of the land, or head of the clans.

The effectiveness of these loyal, emotional campaigns is difficult to assess, particularly since principals in the Colonial Office and Sir Keith Hancock's constitutional mediations found them troublesome and had difficulty acknowledging them. Ganda historians have tended to focus on other factors.Footnote ⁶⁷ When officials sought to pressure Mutesa by blocking his income and cutting back on the funding for the Nnabagereka and Nassolo (her daughter), who were still living in Buganda, they looked petty and vindictive despite the governor's statement that

While officials seem to have been able to mount rational, substantive explanations for the deportation in settings ranging from parliament to the Uganda High Court, their inability to respond effectively to women's emotion became so obvious that in the final stages of negotiation for Mutesa's return as Kabaka, the Lukiiko sent his sister, Princess Ndagire, who pressured British negotiators by crying whenever they reached an impasse.Footnote ⁶⁹

The women's campaign, though, went beyond portraying Damali as a wronged wife, or the bereaved barkcloth-wearing women of Buganda as victims. Buganda's women emphasized themselves as loyal wives bereft of their husband, and proclaimed wifely values and rights – Ganda style – in a vigorous popular campaign. Like Damali herself, other women reached out to an international public and to British officials in efforts to shape and resolve the crisis. Ganda had discovered the power of the women's lobby in Britain during the 1940s, as wives of prominent deportees in 1945 had petitioned their British friends through the Mother's Union of the Anglican Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Colonial Office and, of course, the international press.Footnote ⁷⁰ The campaigns in the 1950s were even more organized. They were also pervasive within Buganda. During the first few months of 1954, when people in Buganda heard of the Kabaka's financial difficulties as he refused to formally abdicate, women, under the auspices of the Nnabagareka and the Association of Women, sent letters signed by many prominent women around Buganda asking for contributions to his support. An official complained to the prime minister, objecting to signatures by wives of the regents as actions that suggested the regents opposed the government. Kavuma's remembered response was ‘that it was a matter arranged by the women themselves and if they were aggrieved on account of the Kabaka's deposition they were free to do as they wished’. Pushed on the involvement of his own wife, Kavuma acknowledged that both his wife and his sister were collecting money in the campaign. Kavuma went on to say that he himself had, of course, already made his donation.Footnote ⁷¹

Women's activism played multiple roles. Within the British context, it transformed the clash of Kabaka and governor from a political story of modernization to a sentimental tragedy of bereavement. The Nnabagereka played her role, and the agent the women's association sent to Britain to lobby, Musa Parma-Ntanda, made women's narratives explicit. Funded by and speaking for the women's association, he argued that the Uganda Agreement of 1900 established a special relationship between Britain and Buganda regarding domestic politics. It was, in its way, a marriage. He pointed out, however, that the issues that had brought the controversy to a head – federation, Buganda's representation in Uganda's legislature and Buganda's independence from Uganda and transfer to the Foreign Office – were external issues, extending beyond the house. The expectation and requirement of loyalty within an Agreement (or by implication a marriage) did not extend that far. And thus the Kabaka's government was under no obligation to accept such external directives.Footnote ⁷² Like a loyal wife within a marriage, Buganda did not surrender its own broader identity and interests by proclaiming loyalty.

Parma-Ntanda's indictment of British interference went further, though. He portrayed Mutesa II as an example of peaceful, stoic courage, offering strength to his people, and contrasted that image with the governor's efforts to find ‘a more pliable successor’.Footnote ⁷³ With this as background, he argued that Buganda needed a strong Kabaka. Without one, the king's sister collapsed and died. The Kabaka was not a far away political figure or an abstraction to Buganda's women, but accessible, meeting them on tours and resolving differences. His mediation on matters of tradition and clan precedent was final. ‘[H]is removal disrupts the whole nation.’Footnote ⁷⁴ The Kabaka, Parma-Ntanda and the women argued, anchored the kingdom's institutions, and without him other identities faltered.

Beyond challenging the Colonial Office's version of the crisis as one of difficulties in modernization, the women's campaign also kept people within Buganda focused on identification with Mutesa as the Kabaka – as one person – rather than allowing British initiatives, economic opportunities, or ambitions to divide the country by different interests and affiliations. While not entirely successful (the prime minister and a number of other elite Baganda had private conversations with British officials regarding how they would like to replace Mutesa), the women shaped what could legitimately be said in public. Even the country's most powerful elite men, princes and princesses, office holders, opposition politicians, Muslims, prophets and bishops as well as Catholic and Anglican Churches, found it necessary to back the Kabaka's return in public.Footnote ⁷⁵ According to Governor Cohen, ‘The women are solidly and emotionally against us.’Footnote ⁷⁶ The women's effectiveness in emotionally and passionately uniting a diverse Buganda for the Kabaka's return – and his return as a king, rather than simply a cultural symbol – ultimately blocked the governor's efforts to find progressive allies within Buganda.

By early 1954, Governor Cohen and the Colonial Office increasingly recognized that the problem of Mutesa's deportation would not offer an easy replacement of a recalcitrant king with a pliable one. George Mawanda, Cohen's choice, failed to receive support. As the crisis proceeded, Cohen was reportedly on the verge of a breakdown.Footnote ⁷⁷ Unable to replace Mutesa II with a new Kabaka, the Colonial Office and Governor Cohen, prodded by a British public educated by the Ganda lobbying campaign, selected Sir Keith Hancock to write a new constitution and seek a solution. Hancock's mandate was to recommend changes to Buganda's relationship with Britain. Governor Cohen initially expected Hancock to be his ally. Buganda's representatives saw Hancock's mission as a way to finesse Mutesa's return to Buganda.

Hancock, however, from the beginning of his mission, sought to achieve both the reality and appearance of independence. Cohen, disconcerted, wrote that Lukiiko members were spreading a ‘false’ rumor that Hancock's commission was a fast track to self-government and the return of the Kabaka, insisting that this would be embarrassing because that was a misrepresentation and such rumors were not true.Footnote ⁷⁸ Hancock responded by challenging Cohen, noting that ‘I … fear … a very drastic deflation of their hopes might cause them to lose all confidence’ and went on to point out that ‘Mutesa was bound to be in everybody's mind; he belongs inevitably to the background of our problem … it will be quite impossible for me to exclude Mutesa from private conversations … [and] if I should come to feel … that no constitutional settlement in Buganda … will work unless Mutesa is brought back, I shall give you my opinion’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Hancock was furious at Cohen's decision to declare a state of emergency and shut down two Luganda newspapers before his team's arrival in May.Footnote ⁸⁰

From the beginning of Hancock's mission in Uganda, the women's campaign kept reintroducing Ganda expectations into his work, interfering with his effort to offer a technical constitutional consultation. Women in barkcloth were an easily visible sign of the boycott campaign, and the Nnabagereka and her colleagues claimed the space of the palace and the prerogatives of specific offices even when doing so interfered with the activities of the British-affiliated regents.Footnote ⁸¹ Women also went beyond symbolism and their earlier monetary support for the Kabaka's return and offered their perspectives vocally in delegations and in writing. A letter signed by the Nnabagereka’s mother and other prominent women, for example, asserted

Pumla Kisosonkole and the others who signed this emphatic letter used evocative and emotional language, but also advocated as political stakeholders with a right to be part of any negotiations, asking for the committee that was to work with Hancock to include women.Footnote ⁸³ Damali, as Nnabagereka, wrote ‘I am now pleading, on behalf of all women in Buganda’ to be part of constitutional talks as women had shown ‘indomitable courage’ during the crisis.Footnote ⁸⁴ Buganda's women lobbied relentlessly, even when Hancock sought peace and quiet.Footnote ⁸⁵ At least two groups of princes and princesses pressed for meetings and got them.Footnote ⁸⁶ The women who mourned at the royal graves at Kasubi called for the return of their ‘beloved King Mutesa II’ and threatened that unless he came back, friendship between Britain and Buganda was over and the British would have created a Buganda where people lost culture, customs, and basic sense of appropriate relationships and instead had sex ‘this way or the other’.Footnote ⁸⁷ In some meetings, women pressed their points so aggressively that specific content vanished from Hancock's reports of ‘a terrific do with the Ladies today. Heaven knows what will be in local papers.’Footnote ⁸⁸

Though Hancock may have initially been chosen for his task of constitutional review because of his expertise and calmness, he recognized early in his Uganda inquiry that the crisis involved emotions. In memos, meetings, and publicity he took people's feelings, beliefs and values seriously. Summing his observations up, he concluded

Passion – the powerful attachment between a wife and her chosen husband, people and their king, proved in Buganda to be such a powerful force that even emphatic rationalists found it impressive and unstoppable.

Ideas of a wife's loyalty to her husband, backed up by real women's passionate defense of their Kabaka, shaped the political debate over the Kabaka's return. This combination of ideas and women worked at several levels, from immediate weeping through metropolitan lobbying. And it played an additional role in this particular crisis: women's emotional displays of loyalty allowed them to claim a moral high ground and insist that even the most ambitious Ganda men adhere to the community's demand for the Kabaka's return rather than (as the governor had anticipated) moving immediately to seek prominent positions under his successor.Footnote ⁹⁰

REPERCUSSIONS

Some of the most powerful images of the women's campaign emerge vividly in notes by colonial intelligence officials who were watching themselves lose the contest for Buganda. Their description of the Nnabagereka’s dignified, mournful, barkcloth-clothed presence at processions in the marketplaces of Buganda, her attendance at Protestant, Catholic, and Muslim prayer services for her husband's return, as well as her visit to the tombs at Kasubi, clearly shows how the bereaved wife became an icon for the country as a whole.Footnote ⁹¹ And she acted, holding the palace and becoming a respected fighter as she raised funds for the Kabaka's defense, lobbied British opinion-makers, and worked in unprecedented ways with a heterogeneous collection of Baganda women.

Yet even as women's passionate and loyal insistence on the Kabaka's return succeeded, deploying the imagery of wives who wanted and needed a strong tree at the center of the kingdom, oversimplified women's lives in a modern Buganda, and engrained a political legacy prioritizing the passionate patriotic loyalty of wives and subjects over other sorts of social and political identities.

Describing Buganda in the 1950s, Wrigley summarized his informants’ arguments by asserting that ‘Ganda-ness was sufficiently determined by allegiance to the Kabaka’ and that a Muganda ‘is a Muganda and practically nothing else’ unlike an Englishman who was likely to have overlapping loyalties to village, class, and even football team.Footnote ⁹² Historically, he asserted that what ‘held the kingdom together was the opportunity that its organized unity provided for the despoilment of its neighbors … a formidable machine, the most efficient … in East Africa, for the acquisition of wealth – first in women and cattle and later also in slaves and in the trade goods which slaves and ivory could buy’. He went on to argue that Buganda lacked the structures that shaped an internally stable or balanced society like England's; instead, in Buganda people were ‘extraordinarily mobile’ in terms of both geographical and social status, moving from place to place, up and down the social hierarchy, lacking sharp class distinctions.  Advancement was through ‘individual solicitation of the favour of the powers that be’, specifically the Kabaka. Accurate or not, Wrigley's portrayal of ‘Ganda-ness’ or kiganda as an overwhelmingly powerful identity centered on the Kabaka rather than on clans, land, ancestry, practices, choice, or rights, was based on information gathered during the most intense phase of the Kabaka crisis.Footnote ⁹³ Once inscribed, it tended to block out other ways of thinking about Ganda identity that had been struggled over by Bataka activists and educated men.Footnote ⁹⁴

The rhetoric of loyalty was effective in the short term. But it had long-term costs as it mobilized Baganda to defend the Kabaka rather than encouraging democratic mobilization around popular rights, accountability, or stewardship. Pulled into the campaign, the Bataka movement lost the progressive elements of its 1940s mobilizations for Ganda citizenship and became inarticulate; instead of the complex speeches, songs, and activity of the 1940s, a Bataka activist simply assured the Nnabagareka, that her husband had been deported for love of country, that the ministers were responsible, and that they would be punished by God.Footnote ⁹⁵

For Uganda as a whole, the implications were even more divisive; S. R. Karugire, looking back at Uganda's political history, emphasized that while the Kabaka crisis offered Uganda an opportunity for a new nationally inclusive politics, no such progressive mobilization took place, and Buganda ‘became inward-looking’, chronically opposing initiatives from beyond the kingdom.Footnote ⁹⁶

A. K. Sempa, probably one of Wrigley's most important informants, summarized the new emphasis on the Kabaka, asserting

Women – including Sempa's own wife – who campaigned for the Kabaka's return in passionate, emotional terms, accepting him as the center of Ganda identity and the kingdom of Buganda, were empowered by this rhetoric. They were close to the Kabaka, and part of something bigger than themselves.

But they were also accepting a politics that fit badly with the needs of a modern, changing state. Damali's own experiences illustrate these ironies. As an icon of the loyal, suffering nation, the Nnabagereka Damali was at the center of Buganda's politics in 1954 and uniquely powerful in her ability to act simultaneously as a Christian wife who, for international audiences, sought her husband's redemption, and the senior wife who, for Ganda audiences, held the palace and awaited his return.

Her husband's return, though, did not prove kind. By 1957, relations between Mutesa and Damali included public clashes. As the returned Mutesa oversaw an administration that stripped ‘disloyal’ chiefs of their posts and discussed rewards for the faithful,Footnote ⁹⁸ he explicitly took resources and respect away from Damali: he denied fathering her son, refused her an allowance, and designated Sara's child as his heir.Footnote ⁹⁹ The Kisosonkole family retained its prominence through Sara, accepting Damali's loss of position.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ By the late 1950s, the Kabaka complained that Damali ‘was getting on his nerves’. Bishop Brown described the Kabaka as having a ‘pathological hatred’ of her, even as she continued to live in the palace, as the Kabaka lacked resources to pay her to depart.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Spying on her proved effective, however. She was caught in compromising ‘but not adulterous’ circumstances with Prince Juko. He was arrested, and the Kabaka threatened to exile Damali to the Sesse Islands, where his uncle Suna had been exiled and died. Under torture, which included fifty strokes from a rawhide whip, she was forced to state that her son, the Kiwewa, was not the Kabaka's – a statement she recanted immediately. By 1959, however, she was perceived as too independent to fit into a Buganda voicing loyalty to the Kabaka alone.Footnote ¹⁰²

As Damali's political career illustrated, a wife or subject's loyalty to her husband or Kabaka offered short-term possibilities, but no guarantees. Unlike the reciprocal obligations of men within clans, a wife or subject's loyalty to husband or lord could not force reciprocation, and laid claim to no rights. Wives and subjects gained their place through self-abnegation and incorporation into something or someone else. The agnosticism Damali displayed in the face of her husband's triumphant return to Buganda (and installation of her sister as his favorite wife) was unacceptable.

Damali's sad story foreshadowed the rise of the troublesome politics of Kabaka Yekka, and the Buganda separatism of the 1960s that was to lead to Uganda's war against Buganda in 1966, and a regionalized politics that continued to provoke debate as many Baanda asserted political identities as emotional, passionate, and loyal subjects of the Kabaka. As D. A. Low pointed out, ‘Mutesa and very large numbers of his people saw in the final outcome of the crisis not reconciliation with the British, but his own triumph over them.’Footnote ¹⁰³ Buganda's passionate loyalty had recruited and held some of its most modern and progressive leaders in solidarity with a popular politics grounded not in developmental modernism, statebuilding, or even modern political parties, but in personal, affective, and self-abnegating loyalty to the Kabaka. Buganda's persistent politics can become coherent for historians not as a primordial loyalty, but as a lasting legacy of a historically successful campaign that drew tactically on Ganda expectations of marriage to build Ganda solidarity, attack British rule or the developmentalism of Ugandan or African nationalism, and assert a distinctive Buganda.