Introduction^{Footnote 1}

The articles in this special issue explore the possibilities and limits of researching institutional life in colonial and postcolonial Africa. They also identify new opportunities and challenges that concern the use of institutional archives and their digitization. This special issue grew out of a workshop on emerging approaches in Uganda Studies in early 2017 at University College London, which was organized to rethink the multiple trajectories, spaces, and temporalities existent in the field.

For reasons that are outlined in this introductory article, the study of institutions in Africa has a long history. The supposed function and absence of institutions across the continent was quickly incorporated into much larger historical and political debates surrounding the legitimization and fraught expansions of colonial empires into the interior of Africa from the early nineteenth century onward. More recently, as noted in the annual theme of the African Studies Association’s 60^th Annual Meeting, “Institutions: Creativity and Resilience in Africa,” scholars continue to “consider how various institutions have been constructed, how they function, and how they relate to Africa and African Studies.”^{Footnote 2} The call for proposals continued:

The articles in this collection, though, wish to interrogate the category of institution itself, the etymology of which derived from the Old French gloss institucion, a term that circulated increasingly from the twelfth century onward during a moment of extensive political debate surrounding the expansion of French institutions in England. African vernacular reflections on the question and creation of colonial institutions developed alongside much older and far-reaching debates about reciprocity, patriotism, and public justice. This introductory article, then, begins by outlining the contested practices of institutional life in late colonial Africa. It next turns to the place of institutions in Uganda’s historiography, where it will introduce the articles in this volume. We then briefly outline developments in Uganda’s archival landscapes before, in a final section, critically assessing the possibilities and limits that surround these recent transitions. In doing so, we recast existing frameworks for the study of institutional life in Africa.

Institutional Life in African Studies

The history and practice of institutional life in Africa has long attracted the attention of activists and scholars. As luminaries looked toward Independence by the late 1950s, questions concerning local and regional institutions throughout the Continent propelled international discourse. Dissenting activists and parliamentary administrators in British colonies engaged in debates about the production of commodities and the importance of regulating economic institutions. When Nigeria’s future president, Nnamdi Azikiwe, addressed a rally in Trafalgar Square on 4 December 1949, following the massacre of twenty-one Nigerian coalminers at the Iva Valley Mine in Enugu, he scathingly noted that “[w]hat interested some of the Members of [the British] Parliament was the effect of the disturbances on the shipment of groundnuts to Britain.”^{Footnote 3} As the editor-in-chief of Nigeria’s leading nationalist press, the West African Pilot, Azikiwe’s remarks were not only a response to obtuse rhetoric in the parliamentary halls of Lagos and Westminster. Three days prior to delivering his remarks in Britain’s imperial capital, the London Times had highlighted the local “riots” – not government massacre – at the Enugu colliery.^{Footnote 4} The article argued that political and economic institutions in Britain’s African colonies “must go together step by step.”^{Footnote 5} During his speech at Trafalgar, in turn, it was not without reason that Azikiwe went to such lengths to emphasize the international support that Nigeria’s massacred miners had attracted. He was especially keen to note the backing of Soviet states, including “[t]hree million Czech trade unionists,” who “registered protests against this evidence of man’s inhumanity to man.”^{Footnote 6} In an international climate that was increasingly, ostensibly divided into a First, Second, and Third World,^{Footnote 7} the claims made by Azikiwe to “discard the yoke of oppression” demonstrated the extent to which the region’s institutions raised questions about international allegiances, local solidarities, and development throughout the Cold War.

The relationship between formal administrative strategy and local activism was equally complex in Francophone Africa. The policy of “assimilation” during the Third Republic extended the possibility of full citizenship to France’s African colonies. As Kenneth Robinson noted, the colonies’ “economic relationship with France and with other French colonies, their constitutional position and their administrative organization were to be identical with any part of France itself.”^{Footnote 8} On the ground, however, assimilation was extended only to the Quatre Communes of Senegal. The overwhelming majority were subjects of an empire whose architects, even into the late 1940s, saw administrative development as a possibility only within the context of the French imperial system.^{Footnote 9} Following the Second World War, the call for the liberalization of African institutions within France was limited. When forty-four French colonial administrators and unionists convened in 1944 at Brazzaville, without an African delegation, the Recommendations maintained the supremacy of French language and culture.^{Footnote 10} Indeed, at one level, de Gaulle’s role in the convening of Brazzaville signified the solidifications of power that surrounded the emergence of a new, Fourth Republic. As Ruth Morgenthau argued, the colonial administration in French West Africa had remained loyal to Philippe Pétain and the Vichy government until late 1942, following the Allied landing in northern Africa.^{Footnote 11} But as Elizabeth Schmidt and Frederick Cooper, respectively,^{Footnote 12} have persuasively argued, provisions set out in the Constitution of 1946 were sufficiently adequate for communities to assert claims of citizenship within colonial institutions that had been largely absent prior to the Second World War. “The citizenship that French West Africans were claiming in the postwar years was not that of a nation-state,” notes Cooper,

In ways that were not present in British colonies, debates regarding institutional life in French Equatorial and West Africa were shaped by concerns about the possibilities and limits of European citizenship for colonial subjects.

Public contestations regarding unions, rights, and citizenship, however, not only preoccupied writers and activists during the postwar period. The relationship between public order and the necessity of colonial chiefs was the subject of numerous ethnographies and travelogues throughout the nineteenth century.^{Footnote 14} The role of local agency and the limits of colonial authority have continued to propel contemporary scholarship, especially in western Africa’s historiography.^{Footnote 15} In southern Africa, by contrast, discussions surrounding nineteenth-century chiefs and state-builders were not used to inform the policies of indirect rule; they were used to legitimize the invention of settler policies and the eventual formation of Bantustans. Throughout the 1900s, as Julian Cobbing argued in 1988,^{Footnote 16} academic descriptions of violent chieftaincies and pasts, supposedly characterized by “black on black destruction,” developed during a period when European historians and settlers were engineering political and legal institutions that sought to systematically disenfranchise local communities from settler societies. Historical claims, reflected in accounts written by Eric Walker in 1928 and John Omer-Cooper in 1966, infused apartheid policy with a particular historical logic.^{Footnote 17}

Throughout colonial Africa, however, the institutional authority of chiefs could only be pressed so far.^{Footnote 18} In no place was this clearer than in the creation of native and colonial courts. Alan Booth has shown in his work on court life in colonial Swaziland, for instance, how colonial courts offered young Swazi women recourse to elude the authority of chiefs, who sought to legislate women’s movements.^{Footnote 19} More broadly, religious courts, too, constituted spaces within which women challenged male authority. As Derek Peterson has shown in his work on the East African Revival in colonial Kenya, “[l]oud-mouthed Revivalists broke church laws, refusing elders’ authority and publicizing marital wrongs best kept private. Church elders condemned wordy converts for the sexual and political delinquency.”^{Footnote 20} Women used institutional courts to contest the moral boundaries within which communities were obliged to operate.

Institutions and Uganda’s Historiography

As was the case across much of colonial Africa, European rule brought with it considerable changes to Uganda’s institutional landscapes. From courts to churches, imported institutions assumed key roles in shaping the nature of the colonial encounter, as well as the contours of the postcolonial state. In the last decade or so, institutions have become more prominent within Ugandan historiography. As new archival sources become available, historians are reconsidering the types of institutions – official and otherwise – that have shaped Uganda’s state and society. Whereas earlier scholarship had a regional or local focus, producing rich studies of specific communities, more recent works have examined how institutions impacted the imaginaries and experiences of Ugandans across time and space. Whether writing about universities, militaries, healthcare facilities, or government bureaucracies, this newer scholarship considers how institutions inform constellations of identity and authority, and the ways that Ugandans have actively informed and contested institutional life.^{Footnote 21} Richard Reid’s recent monograph, A History of Modern Uganda, is one of the most productive interventions in this field. Reid traces the significance of a wide range of institutions – including kingship, the military, churches, universities, economic networks, and museums – in shaping conceptions of Uganda as a nation.^{Footnote 22}

The articles in this collection illuminate the ways in which Ugandans – or more specifically political leaders in the early colonial period, Acholi intellectuals and Jonam ethnic patriots in the 1950s, and prison officers working under Idi Amin’s regime – engaged with a variety of institutions. Despite the diversity of time periods, actors, and institutions studied, these articles find common ground in a number of ways. First, they all anchor their inquiries around a particular set of sources, whether material, vernacular, ethnographic, or archival. By placing these sources – their provenance, circulation, and insertion into historical debates – at the heart of the analysis, the articles speak to central methodological questions that are arising amidst the shifting evidentiary terrain available to historians of Uganda.

Beyond the focus on sources, these articles share two other points of overlap. All of them explore institutions from the vantage point of social and intellectual history, tracing particular personalities and relationships to illuminate the affective dimensions of institutional interaction and the circulation of local and colonial knowledge. Early colonial diplomacy appears in Alison Bennett’s article as more than a set of transactions; it is instead presented as a gift economy in which elite Ugandan actors sought to position themselves as gatekeepers of a particular vision of authority and history. Adrian Browne’s article unpacks the intensely personal dimensions of ethnographic research, as well as illuminating a dissenting politics in which members of the Jonam community challenged the dismissal of their identity within academic and official circles. Patrick Otim’s article provides insight into the nexus of relationships that shaped the views and writings of Lacito Okech, an intermediary figure whose roles included La or Pa Rwot or royal messenger in Acholiland, colonial clerk, Christian convert, and historian. Finally, Katherine Bruce-Lockhart’s article discusses the everyday experiences of prison officers, examining how the quotidian aspects of their work were shaped by wider debates about national identity as well as more intimate and interpersonal concerns.

Despite writing about institutions entangled with colonialism – including physical spaces such as prisons and museums, as well as disciplinary, diplomatic, political, and religious spheres – each author foregrounds Ugandan perspectives and self-representations. By underscoring how Ugandans make claims and position their identities, these articles challenge longstanding narratives drawn from external perspectives. Bennett’s article situates early colonial diplomacy beyond the narrow confines of the European “official mind,” looking instead at the strategies and negotiations of political leaders from a variety of regions. Both Browne and Otim draw on the perspectives of ethnic patriots. Tracing the contest between anthropologist Aidan Southall and the Jonam community, Browne unpacks Southall’s valorization of the Alur ethnonym through processes of ethnographic knowledge production, as well as the rejection of this identity amongst the Jonam. Otim explores the life and career of Okech, focusing in particular on his book Tekwaro ki Ker Lobo Acholi, or “History and Chieftainship of Acholiland.” As the first written account of Acholi history, this book represented a “landmark in the production of historical knowledge” for the region.^{Footnote 23} Last, Bruce-Lockhart’s article brings to light the social worlds of prison officers, illuminating the range of relationships, identities, and communities that shaped their professional experiences, as well as how they used paperwork to present their personhood within wider bureaucratic structures.

Along with these shared themes, the articles also reflect a number of emerging research agendas, both within Ugandan historiography and the field of African history more broadly. First, historians are increasingly interested in institutions as arenas of contested historical representation and competing historical imaginations, as Jonathon Earle shows in his recent book on intellectual life in colonial Buganda.^{Footnote 24} This is most evident in the study of public memory, museums, and heritage industries, in which discussions of Uganda are increasingly prominent.^{Footnote 25} Bennett’s article examines how museum collections past and present have been crucial sites for negotiating the colonial encounter and memories of this period, while Browne and Bruce-Lockhart both examine the place of the archive – in the form of both official and personal collections – in shaping particular historical narratives. Otim, like Earle, shows the extent to which colonial Acholiland constituted an arena of historical debate about the past; and the ways in which Acholi intellectuals, like their southern counterparts in Buganda, were part of a regional movement to create useful political historiographies. Second, there is a growing emphasis on the impact of colonial institutions following independence. As Frederick Cooper reminds us, Uganda and its colonial counterparts elsewhere were “successor states,” whose physical, ideological, and institutional infrastructure was in a large part inherited from imperial rule.^{Footnote 26} Whether through the study of psychiatrists, lawyers, or police officers, scholars still have much to unpack when it comes to understanding the role of institutions in the postcolonial landscape.^{Footnote 27} In Uganda, such inquiries are particularly urgent in a political climate of increasing privatization and decentralization. While Bruce-Lockhart’s article tackles these themes most explicitly, both Browne and Bennett consider the legacies of colonial institutions in terms of the ongoing struggles over questions of identity and sites of memory in the postcolonial period, while Otim provides a glimpse of the impact of Okech’s work in resolving local political disputes after independence.

Finally, these articles touch on broader discussions about the decolonization of knowledge production, a pressing concern in the Africanist academy and also a focus of contemporary social movements on the continent and elsewhere. Browne’s article considers how particular configurations of disciplinary practice produced, silenced or impacted the ongoing creation of categories of belonging in Uganda. Bennett’s article touches on the politics of the repatriation of objects of material culture; while Bruce-Lockhart broadly considers how newly accessible archives complicate depictions of the postcolonial state in Uganda as a site of disorder. Otim’s research asserts the importance of treating vernacular sources as sites of knowledge production, while also bringing to the foreground a part of Acholiland’s history that is often overlooked at the expense of more recent events.

This increasing emphasis on institutions opens up a number of analytical possibilities. By putting these institutions at the centre of our analysis, we can ground our inquiries into various aspects of colonial power and its aftereffects. Examining how Ugandans imagined, helped create, interacted with, and contested institutional practices and forms speaks to many wider themes that have animated Africanist historical inquiries, from debates about modernity to discussions of respectability, state-building, and national identity. Whether in the colonial or postcolonial period, institutions were a place where Ugandan populations worked, came into contact with the state, and created new relational moorings. Furthermore, this institutional focus helps to de-center Ugandan historiography from its longstanding southern bias. The articles here examine a variety of regions, underscoring the increasing diversity of the field. Browne and Otim’s articles, which move us into northern Uganda, draw on themes that are of wide interest to Ugandanists, particularly their emphasis on the processes that surrounded local knowledge creation and contestation. In a different vein, Bennett demonstrates how a variety of political leaders – including those in Busoga, Acholiland, Ankole, and Buganda – used gift giving as a strategic tool in shaping their interactions with Europeans. While this shared practice did not necessarily bring these communities together, it demonstrates the ways in which elites from of a variety of regions deployed some similar strategies when navigating the European encounter. Finally, Bruce-Lockhart’s work is grounded on a national institution, where professional, regional, and ethnic identities intersected in a variety of ways to produce new configurations of belonging.

Uganda’s Changing Research Landscape

Along with examining the histories of institutions, this special issue considers the types of sources that render such histories legible. Uganda’s research landscape has changed considerably in the last decade or so.^{Footnote 28} Successive years of relative political stability have made it easier to conduct research in the country, although Yoweri Museveni’s renunciation of the humanities has created significant barriers for scholars based in Uganda. Rather than relying on sources held outside Uganda, historians are increasingly utilizing a range of source materials within the country. As Bruce-Lockhart maps out in her article, this has been in part due a range of archival reconstruction projects led by Derek Peterson and the University of Michigan. These initiatives, carried out by both foreign and local researchers, have resulted in a number of crucial government archives being organized and catalogued.^{Footnote 29} Ugandan scholars, archivists, and university students studying records and archives management have been integral to these projects. While there are certainly ongoing challenges for historians conducting archival research, they do not face many of the obstacles encountered by scholars writing in this journal less than two decades ago.^{Footnote 30}

In the past few years, Ugandan sources have been the focus of a number of new and exciting digital humanities initiatives, making archival sources much more widely accessible as well as helping to ensure their preservation. One of the largest projects has centered on the archives of the Church of Uganda, held at Uganda Christian University (UCU) in Mukono. UCU, the Yale University Divinity School Library, and Brill/IDC publishers have collaborated to digitize nearly five thousand archival files, which date from the 1880s to the 1980s.^{Footnote 31} A similarly large-scale digitization project emerged out of a partnership between the Centre for African Development Studies at Mountains of the Moon University in Western Uganda, the Cooperative Africana Materials Project (CAMP), and the University of Michigan.^{Footnote 32} Through this project, over four hundred thousand pages of archival material from Tooro Kingdom, Kabarole District, Hoima District, and the Kabarole Forestry Office have been digitized, providing unprecedented insight into the politics of this region.^{Footnote 33}

Other new digital collections have focused on intellectual histories. Jonathon L. Earle and the staff of the African Studies Centre at the University of Cambridge have worked together to digitize the papers of Eridadi M.K. Mulira, a Protestant intellectual in Uganda who helped co-author the country’s first postcolonial constitution. In total, 4,471 images have been digitized, providing researchers with intimate insight into the region’s late colonial and religious politics.^{Footnote 34} In a similar vein, Samantha Stevens-Hall is currently creating an “open access digital archive of primary sources and supplementary materials” based on the writings of prominent Ugandan intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.^{Footnote 35} Along with digitizing these sources, Stevens-Hall is also reflecting more broadly on the ethical implications of such digital humanities projects and their entanglement in wider debates about the decolonization of colonial knowledge – questions that will become increasingly pressing as more digitization efforts emerge.

All of the articles in this collection benefit from and engage with this new research landscape, utilizing a wide range of source materials. Bennett argues persuasively for more “object-based histories” in the study of Uganda’s past, articulating their role as “vehicles for navigating cultural memory, local and colonial power, civic debates and ideals, and identity politics.”^{Footnote 36} Bruce-Lockhart’s work draws on a range of newly catalogued district archive collections and the disparate archival files of the Uganda Prisons Service, putting these into conversation with memoirs, newspapers, and oral histories. Along with providing a detailed examination of famed anthropologist Aidan Southall’s private papers and published works, Browne too draws on a wide range of archival materials based in Uganda, as well as media sources, older ethnographic scholarship on communities in Uganda’s Northern Albertine region, and more familiar archival collections housed in the United Kingdom. Otim’s work employs a vernacular source base long overlooked by historians, reminding us of the rich intellectual terrain that can be accessed through texts written in local languages. Finally, each article considers the political afterlives of these sources, assessing their position within wider debates on knowledge production from the early colonial period to the present day. These include issues regarding the movement and ownership of material objects, the role of ethnographic knowledge in suppressing and cementing particular identities, the interaction between local and colonial sources of knowledge, and how official archives can complicate dominant images of the postcolonial state as site of chaos and brutality.

The Limits of Researching Institutional Life and Institutional Sources

But if these articles highlight the possibility of rethinking institutional histories in modern Africa, they also underscore the limits of institutional gazing. As Neil Kodesh has argued in his work on precolonial public healing, institutions of power, including institutional sources, can only say so much.^{Footnote 37} Institutions and institutional sources – like all subjects and sources – have their limits. Museums, ethnographies, Christian histories published in colonial capitals, and prison records all underscore the intimate and contested processes that surrounded the standardization of colonial and local knowledge, and institutional legitimacy. In this respect, the articles in this special collection begin to identify the challenges that surround both the framing of institutional histories – and moving beyond them – and the fetishization of archives and their digitization. If the preservation and digitization of institutional archives is a cause for celebration, it is also a moment for pause.

Alison Bennett’s article raises important questions about gift-giving cultures, or cultures of reciprocity, in early colonial eastern Africa. It asks why certain material objects were considered museum-worthy in the creation of European repositories. At one level, “gifts reinforced the image of dynastic and ritual authority of the Southern Ugandan Kingdoms and their masculine material culture,” while they also raised important insights into the relationship between shifting conceptions and practices of gender and ritual regalia.^{Footnote 38}

Correlations between the past and the present of Uganda studies and the parallels between the creation of colonial museum registries and searchable digital records are similar. Who precisely is defining what sources are “worthy” of digitization? To what extent do these sources and their geographies reinforce the ostensible legitimacy of the country’s southern and western regions – and the scholarship that focuses on the past of these places? Digital records and searchable databases are useful, but for whom and for how long? How many institutions in Africa can actually afford Brill’s searchable database of the Church of Uganda archives? To what extent does digitization undermine the types of social reciprocity that Bennett explores and the sustainability of local repositories, universities, and other institutions of local knowledge? In what ways does a preoccupation with institutional spaces and archives call into question the importance of language acquisition, as Otim’s article highlights, and long-term fieldwork? And who are the rightful owners of these collections? Surely, to some extent, copyright and intellectual property laws reinforce the political and economic hegemonies and research agendas of the global north.

In ways that echo the earlier sentiments of the history philosopher Edward Carr – that students of the past ought to “re-enact what goes on in the mind of the historian” or “[s]tudy the historian before you begin to study the facts” – Browne’s article challenges us to rethink the impact that communities in northern Uganda had on the biography and scholarship of one of Uganda’s influential late colonial writers, Aidan Southall. ^{Footnote 39} In doing so, he asks us to provincialize the directionality of colonial knowledge and the development of the Ugandan academy. As the British anthropologist Aidan Southall reworked the ethnic classifications of Jonam and Alur, he was in fact adapting the political agenda of the Alur patriot Peter Ringe, who, as an African member of the protectorate’s Legislative Council, sought to imagine a distinctive, unified Alur polity to contest the political claims of southern kingdoms following the Second World War. Southall and Ringe spent considerable amounts of time together conducting fieldwork and relaxing. Over time, Southall’s changing understanding of the Northern Albertine past was significantly impacted by Ringe’s historical vision. By innovatively underscoring this intellectual constellation, Browne reorients the study and inspirations that propelled colonial scholarship, offering new possibilities for understanding the impact of African knowledge on the formation of the European academy.

Similarly, Bruce-Lockhart’s article challenges conventional understandings of Africa’s postcolonial carceral spaces, particularly during Idi Amin’s Uganda, which, following accounts of “grisly murders and grim conditions,” have often been viewed as sites of institutional corruption and state violence.^{Footnote 40} But as Bruce-Lockhart argues, 1970s Uganda was also a period within which prison officers used literacy and institutional and recreational spaces to assert and rework older forms of social obligation and family life. Prison workers, she maintains, “socialized in a variety of common and residential spaces, played on sports teams or in musical groups together, went to church services, and fell in love.”^{Footnote 41} To uncover an institutional world that has been largely overlooked in Africanist historiography, her article draws extensively from personnel files. By using service applications, performance reviews, disciplinary records, petitions to avoid dismissal, and transfer requests, Bruce-Lockhart is able to move us beyond the bureaucratic machinery of the state and into the interiority of everyday life and aspiration, in all its ambiguity and clarity.

Otim’s article shows how the academic and colonial preoccupation with the institutions of kingship in southern and western Uganda has precluded scholarship on the social, political, and intellectual histories of colonial Acholiland. The institutionalization of southern historiography and the presence of British and Baganda missionaries in northern Uganda bolstered a particular royalist perspective – seen in the writings of Apolo Kaggwa, for instance – that writers such as Lacito Okech were obliged to contest. The claims of southern kingships upon a colonial state governed by an imperial monarchy challenged activists in Uganda’s republican arenas to both adapt and rewrite royalist rhetoric and honorifics.

What is at stake in these articles is a fundamental rereading of institutions and practices that have long interested scholars: museums, the academy, religious literacy, and postcolonial penal spaces. Viewing the British Museum through the managerial collection and distribution strategies of the early colonial historian and prime minister of Buganda, Apolo Kaggwa; assessing the far-reaching impact of local relationships and historical arguments on the biography and research methodology of one of Uganda’s premier late colonial anthropologists; considering the processes of history-making in colonial Acholiland; and inspecting the inner social world of Uganda’s prison workers during Amin’s Uganda. Colonial and postcolonial institutions were not merely the public presence of the state in everyday life in modern Uganda. Interpreted from within the social and intellectual worlds in which they were inhabited, we can begin to see that colonial and postcolonial institutions embodied much larger and longer contested pasts and practices, and the possibilities of alternative futures.