During the 1940s and 1950s, as British power in Uganda waned, Ignatius Musazi, Eridadi Mulira, Abubakar Mayanja, and Benedicto Kiwanuka questioned, researched, and considered what the future should look like.

In Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire: Political Thought and Historical Imagination in Africa, Jonathon Earle deploys methods such as library analysis and textual genealogies to re-center Ganda history away from structural interpretations of cultural, political, and social power. Instead, he emphasizes the readings and applications of diverse ideas of these four key individuals. Material factors and specific event history are peripheral. Each of these activists is described as some sort of nationalist. But in this analysis, Uganda’s history is not a collective project of culture, nation, or class. Instead, Earle’s examination focuses on the understandings (and libraries) of individual intellectuals. This is not a new great man theory of the era, as the men in question were thinkers, not successful powerbrokers. Far from celebrating power, this work celebrates the efforts of thinkers to remake their world through imagination and ideas.

Whether convinced by Earle’s vision of how history works or not, any reader can appreciate his biographical analysis. Each biography here offers lessons in the methods of intellectual history. In examining the ideas of Ignatius Musazi, Earle reinterprets the 1949 insurrection through Musazi’s library and the marginalia of his books. These materials allow him to see the insurrection not as a mass social confrontation, but rather as the outcome of Musazi’s evolving understanding of kingship. Earle examines Musazi’s English Bible (64–6) and other closely marked-up books. Short marginal scribbles, of the sort often ignored by historians focused on events, support Earle’s argument that Musazi’s reading—not some general cultural past—facilitated his vision of development. Earle argues that Musazi’s insight allowed him to broker appeals from cotton-growers to the Kabaka that were no simple cultural cover for economic unrest; instead they called the king to do his duty to make progress as an authoritative statebuilder (53). The implications of the unrest were thus, in this interpretation, not conservative efforts to fight imperial economic exploitation. Instead, the protest’s meaning was grounded in Musazi’s readings of Biblical ideas of the role of prophetic truth in preventing the corruption of kings’ power. Musazi’s activists, here, sought not to topple their king, but to speak prophetically and facilitate monarchical righteous rule as the most powerful way to save the people (or at least ensure decent cotton prices).

Earle goes further into the genealogy of ideas in examining the intellectual development of Eridadi Mulira. He emphasizes that while Musazi sought reform of the Ganda kingship in order to achieve progress, Mulira went beyond ethnicity to a Christian “cosmopolitanism.” Earle worked with the Mulira family to collect Eridadi Mulira’s archive, and with these diverse materials grounds his analysis in Mulira’s Luganda writing. A play on a marriage gone wrong (but saved through Christian understanding by the final act) and a novel on the power of virtuous farming are unusual sources, but they effectively emphasize Mulira’s 1940s-era vision of an inclusive Buganda as under construction, rather than inherited. By the 1950s, Earle argues, Mulira’s fiction put foward the same goals as his constitutional activism: a vision of all-encompassing Christian community and solidarity, as opposed to class struggle or authoritarian leadership.

The story of Abu Mayanja, in contrast, depicts Mayanja as the Muslim community’s brilliant avatar, sponsored for education and governance by Muslim leaders who were alienated and aggrieved by the history of how the rise of a Protestant oligarchy had effectively derailed Islam’s influential introduction in nineteenth-century Buganda. In this interpretation, Mayanja’s career trajectory—first as a popular democratic activist, and then as a conservative loyalist of the king—is less a contradiction than an expression of loyalty to the Muslim community’s need for inclusion.

Earle’s final biography depicts Benedicto Kiwanuka, who read widely as he struggled with ideas of political kingship, social contracts, and how to connect Buganda’s past with a godly future. Instead of appearing as a political operator and the Democratic Party’s leader, Kiwanuka emerges in this analysis as a thinker who drew on the prophet Samuel to portray Buganda as “a state governed by stubborn royalists and monarchs who through disobedience to God destroyed local communities” (204).

Overall, Earle’s work in elaborating the intellectual journeys of these individuals is vivid and methodologically innovative. It reclaims fragmentary sources and interprets intellectual leaps to emphasize a contingent and creative literary culture connecting diverse narratives of Uganda’s history, religious ideas, and secular visions of progress, development, and (sometimes) democracy. This, though, is a work that focuses on interpreters, not events. Links between ideas and actions are sparse. Questions remain, for example, about how Musazi’s ideas of kingship shaped the organizations of 1949, or how Kiwanuka’s careful reading of manuals of constitutional development were understood by ordinary DP activists. In reconstructing these individuals’ ideas, though, Earle’s work joins an expanding literature on the vitality and intellectual creativity of Ugandans at the end of empire.