SCRAMBLING FOR THE PAST: HISTORICAL WRITING, NATIONALISM, AND NOSTALGIA TO THE 1950S

Historical reflection took on new vitality during the era of European “high imperialism” between the 1870s and the 1920s. This must be understood not only in the context of the new, competitive political marketplace that had opened up as a result of the “scramble” for Africa, but also as it came at the end of a turbulent, often violent, and certainly transformative nineteenth century. Africa's nineteenth century had been an era of intense stress and change, and also of avid Historical interest and continual historicization. Societies sought new ways to investigate, resurrect, and contextualize the past. This was certainly true in what became known as “Uganda” between the 1880s and 1900s. In an era of turmoil and crisis, it had never been more critical to retrieve certain aspects of the past, and to consider their significance. The late nineteenth century, moreover, was a period of disorder and fierce political competition, as Buganda and its neighbors, notably the kingdom of Bunyoro, clashed along increasingly volatile borders. Buganda underwent a civil war in the late 1880s, with the factions ostensibly coalesced around newly imported faiths (Protestantism, Catholicism, and Islam) that had been growing in both spiritual and political significance since the 1870s. Then a small group of British army officers arrived in the area intent on capturing the Nile's headwaters, heralding the encroachment of the imperial frontier: “Uganda,” based on a mispronunciation of “Buganda,” became a British protectorate in 1894. This unfolding crisis stirred both Ugandan and European interests in the deep past.

Between the 1870s and the 1900s, Europeans were deeply interested in Africa's history, and the continent's past became severed from its supposedly stunted present only with the consolidation of colonial rule in the 1910s and 1920s, and the increasing supremacy of developmental agendas. The intensified search for the past was part of a wider and well-documented phenomenon in evidence from the early 1800s onward, namely the desire to measure, chart, and map—to plunder knowledge and impose epistemological order on the world's “primitive” cultures.Footnote ¹⁰

Often there was a concern to develop a model by which certain peoples could be understood, in some limited way, to have dragged themselves from the primordial swamp toward a civilization of sorts. In Uganda, the explorer John Hanning Speke offered such a model in the early 1860s, famously ascribing state-formation in the area to the arrival from the north, at some point in the distant past, of lighter-skinned and therefore more intelligent and culturally advanced invaders.Footnote ¹¹ This became known as the “Hamitic myth” and it would distort understandings of the region's past for decades. This was not History as scholars in the Hegelian or Whiggish traditions would recognize it, of course. There was no triumph of liberal values or institutions in the face of over-mighty monarchy, nor were energetic individuals forging any discernible path toward social progress and economic well being, even if unwittingly, until, that is, the arrival of Europeans and the onset of colonial rule.Footnote ¹² But it was History that purported to identify and explain the key dynamics in Africa's deeper past.

Above all, European Historical writing was facilitated by a multitude of African informants. The information they supplied was, naturally, interpreted according to the racial and cultural norms of the time. One prominent theme was the cyclical violence between (and generated by) omnipotent and brutal overlords, who were themselves the products of savage political cultures. But it is clear enough that data was being supplied by Africans who were active participants in the opening up of the “historical space,” and African informants entered that space with marked vigor. In the Ugandan context, these frequently shadowy figures often remained scarcely mentioned in the text.Footnote ¹³ Yet, in their turn, African historians themselves would enter this dynamic epistemological vortex, and make increasingly vital contributions to “Ugandan” Historical culture. During this period, Africans created or revised Histories at least partly in response to new political markets and the demand for “historical knowledge.” In time, states and societies that had been competitors in the nineteenth century transferred their rivalries to these new markets.

The GandaFootnote ¹⁴ exemplified this process, not only by allying themselves with the British in physical terms—their military contribution to the subjugation of surrounding peoples and the creation of the Uganda Protectorate was crucial—but also by recognizing early on the political advantages of intellectual engagement. Early Ganda writers sought to describe great statehood, cultural and political dominance, and military prowess. The Histories that proliferated from the 1890s onward stressed both rightful hegemony and the idea of the Ganda as an enlightened people (with occasional lapses), who were worthy—and the British certainly agreed—of privileged status within the protectorate. In many ways, early Ganda historiography sought to imbue the past with a sense of permanence, and frequently understood History as “tradition” and immutable custom. But in whatever form it came, local writing on the deep past was not regarded simply as an enormously important political activity, although it certainly was that;Footnote ¹⁵ it reflected an entrenched sense in Uganda that control of the past, in its various manifestations, was at the very heart of political and cultural contestation, and that History was in many respects the ultimate form of political argument. Loss of Historical debate could have dire and very practical consequences. Holly Hanson and Neil Kodesh, in particular, have analyzed the high stakes involved in terms of control of the spiritual realm as well as of land.Footnote ¹⁶ Bunyoro would come to understand this all too well, as we shall see.

In the early colonial period, Historical writing was above all an imperial activity, with stories of conquest used to emphasize the natural position of the Ganda at the apex (as they saw it) of British colonial rule. Right of conquest was stressed by depicting surrounding peoples as benighted and backward, and thus in need of Ganda leadership. Many aspects of this are found in the story of Kakungulu, the maverick Ganda chief employed by the British to extend Ganda authority in the east and northeast of the protectorate in the 1900s and 1910s.Footnote ¹⁷ Such Ganda-centric, imperial History was not only the preserve of the Ganda themselves: from the 1900s onward, European writers were complicit in the production of Ganda-centric visions of the region's past, often writing in partnership with African authors and what we might broadly call “Historical activists.” Above all, it is apparent that Historical work was not simply the outcome of political power, but was causal in its expansion and consolidation.

The seminal figure in Buganda's early historiography was Apolo Kagwa, Protestant convert associate of the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS), and, as katikiro or chief minister of Buganda between 1889 and 1925, a close ally of the British administration for much of his career. A political giant who dominated Ganda politics for a generation, his literary endeavors cemented his authority, and indeed were an extension of it. His prominence was indicated as much by the hostile revisionism that his writings inspired as by the successive generations of admirers who believed that his accounts were something close to definitive. Kagwa collaborated closely with the CMS missionary and ethnographer John Roscoe, and their respective publications need to be understood in the context of their partnership.Footnote ¹⁸ They shared informants—in this sense Kagwa was clearly Roscoe's guide through particular cultural and historical landscapes—and although they wrote differently on certain topics, there is clear overlap and even replication in their Historical interpretations and narratives.

Kagwa's early works include the exhaustive and scriptural Basekabaka be Buganda—“The kings of Buganda”—the first version of which appeared in 1901, and which was clearly influenced in tone and layout by its author's reading of the Old Testament.Footnote ¹⁹ This was followed, in 1907, by Empisa za Baganda, which deals with the “customs” of the kingdom and offers a range of insights into the deep past. It bears comparison with Roscoe's The Baganda—there is some overlap between the two—but it also occasionally deviates from Roscoe's text.Footnote ²⁰ Kagwa's Ebika bya Baganda (1912) is a detailed survey of the clans of Buganda and contains much long-term narrative and an assortment of data of variable usability.Footnote ²¹ Kagwa's writings must be understood as a cornerstone of Ugandan historiography and modern intellectual culture, with all the political maneuverings that have come to be associated with that culture.

In the early 1900s, as the new protectorate of Uganda stabilized somewhat in the wake of a generation of turmoil, the “History industry” grew vibrant. Clan Histories were produced, as particular lineages sought to lay claim to rich and royal heritages. Mission printing presses facilitated much of the published output. In 1907, the CMS founded a monthly journal, Ebifa mu Buganda (“Events in Buganda”), which ran articles on a variety of subjects, some of which were historical, including clan and royal Histories, personal recollections, and descriptions of past military campaigns. Soon after, in 1911, the French Catholic order the White Fathers established a rival organ, Munno (“Your friend”), which contained similar kinds of Historical material, and was edited until the early 1920s by Father Julien Gorju, who produced his own book on regional history and culture.Footnote ²²

From the 1920s onward, Historical writing became ever more urgent in the ways in which it addressed ongoing political debates over culture and identity. This was set against the backdrop of a colonial dispensation of power which privileged some—specifically the Protestant Ganda—and excluded many others. In particular, there was growing hostility toward what was identified as “the established order,” namely the politically-influential land-owning Protestant chiefs, exemplified by Apolo Kagwa, who were seen to be close to the British and who had received the lion's share of the private estates distributed under the terms of a 1900 agreement with them.Footnote ²³ The main opponents of the new political order were the Bataka, the clan heads, who had lost both land and political clout due to the agreement. There was also an emerging generational conflict, as a younger, educated cohort of Ganda chiefs grew impatient with the ongoing dominance of the Kagwa generation. These struggles were often played out in print, and Buganda's deep past was a key battleground.

A notable instance of this is the debate over the origins of Kintu (literally, “the thing” or “the issue”), the mythical founding father of the kingdom.Footnote ²⁴ In essence, the question was whether Kintu had come to Buganda from outside, as a “foreigner,” or whether he was a native Muganda.Footnote ²⁵ The official, or “royalist” position was that Kintu had come as a stranger—either from the sky, or simply from beyond the future kingdom's borders—and was the first kabaka, or king, an interpretation that had apparently been in place since at least the mid-nineteenth century. Kagwa's writings endorsed this position, lending it further authority. It was most important in that it meant no single clan could claim a monopoly on the kingship. However, Bataka authors, representing the now-marginalized clans, soon sought to undermine the royalist case by arguing that there had been several kings in Buganda before Kintu, that Kintu himself was an indigenous Muganda, and that therefore, by extension, the kingship was a clan innovation, for the clan had been, in Buganda's deep past, the basic political and social unit of organization. Kagwa, they argued, had ignored all of this.Footnote ²⁶ In other words, Kintu, who was indisputably the kingdom's founder, had to have belonged to a clan. But which one? The Mmamba clan history from 1916 laid claim to him, and in the 1920s the Mutima and Ngabi clans did likewise. No such claims were recognized by the royal court or the historians associated with it.

As Ray has pointed out, these Historical battles were not without precedent, at least according to Kagwa's account: in the early seventeenth century the Leopard clan was ruthlessly ostracized after it laid claim to royal provenance.Footnote ²⁷ Now, however, they took on a particular significance as the Bataka sought, unsuccessfully, to wrest control of both the kingdom's deep past and the kingship itself from the current oligarchy, which was headed, symbolically at least, by the great keeper of Historical “truth,” Apolo Kagwa.

These History wars were waged primarily in the pages of Ebifa and Munno, which in turn came to represent, respectively, Protestant and Catholic views of the past based on the respective camps’ rivalries in the 1880s and 1890s. The 1920s and 1930s, though, brought a thriving local publishing scene as printing presses proliferated and a plethora of journals and newspapers, some short-lived, provided outlets for Historical analysis with a contemporary agenda. This jostling over the past was a continuation of competitive precolonial Ganda political culture, now set against the backdrop of colonial rule, which itself spurred further competition over the political and cultural space. The editorial stance of newspapers such as Njubebirese (“The dawn”) was both anti-colonial and anti-Kagwa; Bulungi Bwa Buganda (“Buganda's welfare”) and Dobozi Lya Buganda (“The voice of Buganda”) were fiercely nationalist, and drew on visions of the kingdom's immaculate past to critique the colonial order. More specifically, Munyonyozi (“The explainer”), founded in 1922, existed mainly to articulate Bataka land claims, again often with reference to arrangements that had supposedly existed in the deep past.Footnote ²⁸

Increasingly common, too, were political tracts that used Historical interpretation to critique contemporary trends. In 1931, Prince Gomotoka, who was the head of the royal princes of Buganda and had been a major contributor to the Kintu debate in the 1920s, produced Magezi Ntakke—“The wisdom of the termites,” an entomological reference that conjured up the image of collective effort. Gomotoka espoused Roman Catholic morality, and lauded “traditional” Ganda manners and the personal cleanliness of the Ganda in the precolonial past, an attribute he portrayed as fast disappearing. Samusoni Mazinga's Buganda Egenda Wa? (“Whither Buganda?”) was likewise a misty-eyed survey of customs of old, which condemned such modern habits as drinking and marital infidelity.Footnote ²⁹ The kabaka himself, Daudi Chwa, stood out in this regard. His 1935 pamphlet Education, Civilisation and Foreignisation in Buganda was an exercise in Ganda patriotism, outlining the pristine nature of precolonial custom and behavior, which it starkly juxtaposed with the ever more wayward and disrespectful conduct of the youth as they sought to emulate “European ways.”Footnote ³⁰ As the kabaka surveyed the kingdom's deep past, he asserted that there had been no adultery, no human sacrifice, and much higher levels of respect and personal kindness. The presence of foreigners, both Asian and European, had begun to corrode those values.

The sense of something having been “lost” after 1900, and a fear that “Westernization” was pushing younger Ganda to abandon old values as they sought to become like Europeans, was common in the Historical writings of an older generation in the 1930s and 1940s. Many notable writers in this period had been young and active in the 1880s and 1890s, when they had fought in Buganda's civil wars and advanced the righteous cause of Christianity, with which they fused a powerful sense of nationalist identity.Footnote ³¹ Thus a number of war memoirs recall late nineteenth-century Christian glories in the face of Muslim and pagan forces. One example is Albert Lugolobi's Ekitabo Mbulire (“Let me tell”), written in 1933, which is full of moral reproach aimed at the unruly young and describes the turbulence of the civil wars from the perspective of the triumph of religious truth. Another is the Rev. Bartolomayo Zimbe's Buganda ne Kabaka (“Buganda and the king”) of 1939, a detailed military history of the 1880s and 1890s that also reminds readers of the magnificent achievements of the author's generation.Footnote ³² James Miti's grand, three-volume “History of Buganda” (ca. 1938), likewise an account of the second half of the nineteenth century, incorporates the struggles of early Christians against the capricious tyranny of monarchy.Footnote ³³ Miti, it should be noted, was also a leading publisher of Bataka tracts.

Perhaps the most famous of such authors was Ham Mukasa, formerly Apolo Kagwa's secretary and a prolific diarist and writer in his own right.Footnote ³⁴ His tellingly titled Simuda Nyuma (“Don't turn back”) is a highly moralizing study of the late nineteenth century, with three volumes that deal, respectively, with the reign of Mutesa (ca. 1857–1884), that of his son Mwanga (1884–1888, 1889–1897), and the civil wars.Footnote ³⁵ No doubt much of this Historical work was also a direct riposte to the Young Baganda Association, which had emerged in the 1920s claiming to represent opposition to the ageing and incompetent generation that had been in power, and in league with the British, for too long.

In 1934, the Uganda Journal was launched as the organ of the Uganda Society, a learned and multi-disciplinary organization whose purpose was to explore various facets of Ugandan life, culture, science, and of course, history. Both the great and the good, and both Europeans and Ugandans, published articles in the journal on everything from the reigns of particular kings, to the development of material culture, to the origins of place names, and they used it to pursue the deep past, subjectively and otherwise. The journal was arguably the most significant channel for serious, public Historical research in Uganda until the 1960s and 1970s, when it grew steadily weaker due to a lack of local funds and the undermining of the academy within Uganda, which I will discuss presently.

Buganda dominated the pages of the Uganda Journal, and more broadly it is apparent that here, in Kintu's ancient kingdom, History writing and struggles over the past were symptomatic of a vibrant and competitive culture, whose members believed themselves worthy of a voice. The same could not be said of those within and outside of Buganda who had been on the “losing side” in the late nineteenth-century imperial encounter, and were subsequently marginalized within the colonial order. Here we have some striking examples of the mobilization of History on virtual or actual peripheries as a means of combating the hegemony of the center. In the neighboring Bunyoro kingdom, for example, the contrast with Buganda was striking. The Nyoro were old rivals of the Ganda who were brutally subdued by an Anglo-Ganda force during the 1890s, culminating in the capture and exile of their king, Kabalega. The History they produced in the early decades of the twentieth century differed in tone and form from that of Ganda writers, being much more a product of nostalgia and fatalism. History writing in Bunyoro sought less to engage with a relevant past than to recall past glories and compete with the narratives emerging in Buganda.

No Nyoro author was published until 1927, when a senior political figure, Petero Bikunya, “prime minister” of Bunyoro under the British administration, produced Abakama ba Bunyoro.Footnote ³⁶ His account closely resembles, and perhaps even drew upon, the missionary Ruth Fisher's historical outline of a few years earlier.Footnote ³⁷ More broadly, between the 1910s and the 1940s the Nyoro king-list was being lengthened and details were steadily accumulated.Footnote ³⁸ The anthropologist John Beattie, working in Bunyoro in the 1950s, suggested that the elongation of the king-list over this period “may have indicated a desire to keep up with neighboring kingdoms, but it also undoubtedly reflects increasing interest in the study of Nyoro myth and tradition.”Footnote ³⁹ Bunyoro was determined to compete with Buganda, which Nyoro historians regarded as a mere offshoot of their ancient kingdom. The Ganda, in other words, were mere children; as Beattie observed, “A longer genealogy implies greater antiquity and so a claim to greater veneration.”Footnote ⁴⁰

The period between the 1920s and the 1950s, then, has been characterized as the era of “nostalgia politics” in Bunyoro.Footnote ⁴¹ The kingdom had been crushed by conquest and marginalized by the colonial state. Of many festering grievances, perhaps the most painful was that relating to the “Lost Counties.” This referred to Nyoro territory, including the counties of Buyaga and Bugangaizi, which the British had removed from Bunyoro's administration and given to Buganda in the 1900s. Nyoro leaders, from 1924 under a new king, Sir Tito Winyi, frequently won the moral argument, but the British were loath to annoy Buganda by reversing the decision. In the meantime, the Nyoro court used every opportunity to stress Bunyoro's former greatness and its role as the progenitor of state formation in the region. There was a paradox in the portrayals of Kabalega, however, for while many saw him as having brought catastrophe to the kingdom through his wrongheaded decision to wage prolonged war on the British, others, including some British officials, thought that his reign had been characterized by a dynamic spirit and an energy that were now sadly absent.Footnote ⁴² Such were the dilemmas that faced Nyoro scholars and political leaders alike.

The addition of historical flesh to the bones of tradition needs to be understood in this context. Following Bikunya's 1927 account, the mid-1930s saw the appearance of a series of articles in the Uganda Journal written by “K.W.” This was a pseudonym derived from “Kabalega” and “Winyi” and used by the reigning king, Kabalega's son Winyi, who apparently wished to indicate joint authorship. Winyi had spent his youth with his father in exile, and had transcribed what Kabalega knew of the reigns of particular kings. The three articles that Winyi wrote between 1935 and 1937 were an early attempt to retrieve Bunyoro's deep past and reignite a Nyoro nationalism rooted in past glory.Footnote ⁴³

But it was another decade before anyone achieved for Bunyoro what Apolo Kagwa had for Buganda; in 1947, John Nyakatura, a senior Nyoro public official who had spent years collecting historical data of various kinds, produced his major work, Abakama ba Bunyoro-Kitara.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the preface he stated that his aim was to enlighten a younger generation that was no longer given the opportunity to explore the deep past, because “people nowadays are more interested in their jobs.… This has resulted in young people being ignorant of the past of their country.”Footnote ⁴⁵ But Nyakatura was also concerned, like “K.W.” before him, to emphasize Bunyoro's former magnitude, restore “national pride,” and critique British colonial policy and condemn the long-term marginalization of the kingdom.

Nonetheless, after 1945 official British thinking about the kingdom was once again deeply pessimistic, due largely to Mukama (King) Winyi himself. In the 1920s and 1930s he had been viewed as a dynamic and even progressive figure, but he was now seen as an obstacle to development, not least because of powers the British had given him under the terms of a 1933 agreement. The 1940s and early 1950s saw an escalating struggle: on one side were the traditionalists surrounding the mukama, on the other Bunyoro's young and educated “modernizers” who argued the mukama had accumulated too much power and that they were the true “defenders of Bunyoro's ancient institutions.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The modernizers could draw succor from Bikunya's 1927 text, which underscored that the king, while embodying supreme political authority, only ruled conditional upon popular support, and said that he could in fact be called upon to relinquish power.Footnote ⁴⁷ In these battles about the present the weapons wielded were Historical arguments and interpretations of well-thumbed texts. The modernizers won a partial victory in a 1955 agreement that, on paper, reduced some of the mukama’s powers.

Meanwhile, the campaign for the restoration of the “Lost Counties” continued. It now involved British lawyers who the mukama had hired and instructed to marshal the results of extensive historical research.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the 1950s the dispute escalated into violence against Ganda chiefs in the contested territories. Not until 1964, in newly independent Uganda, were the disputed counties returned by the government of Milton Obote, who, as we shall see, had his own grievances against Buganda.

What apparently exasperated the British above all, however, was the sense of apathy, fatalism, and natural inferiority that characterized the Nyoro. Again, Beattie's contemporary fieldwork is invaluable. The Nyoro seemed to act like a conquered people, in stark contrast with the belligerent but energetic Ganda. Bunyoro's katikiro told Beattie in the early 1950s, “Our spirit is dead.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Indeed, the resurgence in Historical interest in Bunyoro from the 1930s onward seemed to contribute to the people's self-image of being in terminal decline. Observers could only wonder at tales of precolonial glories when beholding the lethargic and dispirited people before them now. As Ingrams wrote in 1960, “The Banyoro do all they can to impress their past on their visitors.… This ‘backward-looking’ nationalism is not peculiar to Bunyoro, but there is no denying its futility.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Beattie found Nyoro informants were gripped by a powerful nostalgia for a magnificent past they would never recover: “Tribal myths and traditions which glorify the past may assume special importance when a people think of themselves as being in decline. … many Banyoro thought of themselves as a dying race; they looked back nostalgically to their glorious (if mythical) past, rather than forward towards the future….” This was the reason the Nyoro king-lists had grown, seemingly in envious emulation of those of the Ganda.Footnote ⁵¹

A similar scenario is evident for Ganda Muslims, whose public reflections on the past were slower to develop than those of their Christian compatriots. Muslim historiography was held back by illiteracy and relatively limited educational opportunities, and a culture of defeatist isolationism resulting from their marginalization at the hands of an Anglo-Ganda Christian (and largely Protestant) oligarchy in the 1890s and 1900s. Only in the 1930s and 1940s did Muslim accounts begin to appear, driven in no small way by the flurry of interest in the civil wars of the late nineteenth century. Here was an opportunity for literate Muslims to state their case, and Sheikh Sekimwanyi did so in his Short History of the Introduction of Islam in Buganda, which placed emphasis on the martyring of early Muslim converts in the 1870s. The suggestion was that these had been forgotten in the rush to commemorate the Christians killed by Kabaka Mwanga in the mid-1880s. Bakale Mukasa bin Mayanja's History of the Wars of the Three Kabakas detailed the Muslim military campaigns of the civil wars, while Sheikh Nyanzi's History of the Wars of Religion also dealt with the violent upheavals of the late nineteenth century and sternly refuted Christian allegations of Muslim atrocities during that period.Footnote ⁵²

In the kingdom of Ankole in western Uganda, where “formal” historiography had begun even more slowly than elsewhere in the Uganda Protectorate, plans for a grand history of the realm dated to perhaps the 1920s, when the first chief minister of Ankole under British rule, Mbaguta, apparently began to consider such a project. According to the historian Samwiri Karugire, Mbaguta “originated the idea of writing a book on [Ankole] similar to Kagwa's on Buganda,” but he died in 1944 before he could organize the material he had amassed.Footnote ⁵³ That material was left to his son-in-law, a civil servant named Lazaro Kamugungunu, who worked with a colleague, A. G. Katate, to produce the first major account of Ankole history, Abagabe b'Ankole (“The kings of Ankole”), in 1955.Footnote ⁵⁴ The context is important, because the period from the late 1940s into the early 1950s was one of particularly intense hostility between Ankole's two main cultural and linguistic groups, the Hima and Iru.Footnote ⁵⁵ The authors strove to avoid inflammatory interpretations, and in fact Katate was Mwiru and Kamugungunu was Muhima. They were also colonial civil servants, and they needed to avoid controversy or subversion in order to have the text passed for publication. But they did glorify Ankole's past, and performed a fair amount of revisionism in terms of claiming military victory in battles that had obviously been lost.Footnote ⁵⁶ This has to be understood against the backdrop of the intense political marketplace that was Uganda in this period of escalating nationalism and decolonization.

The emergence of this sort of Historical writing between the 1930s and the 1950s was an indication that the dominance of the Ganda Christian printing presses, which were themselves hardly unified in terms of output, would increasingly be challenged by others who felt they had been written out of the story of the making of Uganda. Yet the degree to which History mattered would only become clear when overtly nationalist movements emerged in the 1940s and 1950s, and as decolonization unfolded. The way in which this would take place was ominous for the future of Uganda's plurality, inclusivity, and intellectual culture.

HISTORY AND POLITICAL ACTION: BUGANDA AND DECOLONIZATION

History became ever more politicized, and politics historicized, in the 1940s and 1950s. “Most people in Uganda,” wrote Harold Ingrams in 1960, “now regard their history as vitally important for propaganda purposes.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The crises that eventually resulted were profoundly detrimental to the study of the past, as well as to the celebration, and also political use, of Historical culture more broadly. Here we are concerned more with political action than with literary output, and nowhere was the “History-Politics” vortex more turbulent than in Buganda.

We have already seen the ways in which literary endeavor had long been much used for political purposes. The crises surrounding Buganda in the 1950s and 1960s demonstrated how Historical consciousness might dramatically transcend text and become manifest in overtly political action. In many respects the roots of “modern” Ganda nationalism, in the sense of it being expressed through formalized political organizations, can be traced to the self-consciously styled “Sons of Kintu,” founded in 1938 to represent the grievances of farmers and merchants. The organization was hostile to the government of Chief Minister Martin Nsibirwa, who many Ganda saw to be autocratic, in the Kagwa mould, and as too close to the British.Footnote ⁵⁸ There was also a powerful Bataka presence in the movement, and in fact the Bataka Party emerged out of the Sons of Kintu to more effectively channel popular Ganda nationalism and opposition to the chiefly oligarchy. That opposition was also rooted in generational conflict between a radicalized youth and “old chiefs,” who were perceived as obstacles to progress.Footnote ⁵⁹

Founded in 1946, the Bataka Party drew on a particular form of historical imagery. Its slogan, “Every Muganda is a Mutaka,” played on the idea that the clan was paramount, and that clanship and citizenship were indelibly linked, but that the precolonial authority of clans had been eroded by an over-mighty chiefly class backed by the British. At this stage the organization was just as hostile to the kabaka himself, Mutesa II, who had come to the throne in 1939 and was seen as a stooge of the British authorities. Some saw the Bataka as “atavistic” in that their political grievances, at least, were rooted in some re-imagined segment of the deep past.Footnote ⁶⁰ But they nonetheless tapped effectively into the rural unrest that was rising over access to land and economic opportunity, and evidently envisaged a more prominent role for themselves in a future Buganda. Such unrest was manifest in riots in 1945, and again in 1949.

The role of the kabaka in the Ganda historical imagination was reinvigorated in the mid-1950s following a constitutional crisis that unfolded around the role of Buganda in a future Uganda. It was at this stage that the perils of mobilizing the past became all too clear. Buganda had long enjoyed a privileged status in the British protectorate; and now, as independence approached, most Ganda found unpalatable the idea of the kingdom becoming more fully integrated into Uganda. The kabaka became a martyr to the cause when, having virulently and publicly opposed British proposals—to the surprise of some who had long seen him as aloof and disinterested—he was exiled to Britain in 1953. His return two years later was facilitated by a compromise agreement in which significant constitutional change was put on hold. But there now developed around the kingship a neo-traditionalist movement that sought to defend “the things of Buganda,” including the kabakaship itself, against outside interference.

At the same time, neo-traditionalists undermined, and ultimately caused a split within the first Ugandan nationalist party, the Uganda National Congress (UNC), founded in 1952. Although the UNC was predominantly Ganda-led, it had originally pursued a pan-Ugandan vision, but by the mid-1950s it was being undercut within Buganda by a more aggressive and separatist Ganda nationalist movement.Footnote ⁶¹ This culminated in the formation in 1961 of the Kabaka Yekka movement, meaning “the king alone.” The political details of the period have been well documented elsewhere.Footnote ⁶² Key for our purposes are the remarkable entrenchment of a particular vision of the past, and what it meant for the future of Ugandan politics. Much of the unfolding political crisis was attended by a veritable flood of Historical literature in Buganda, as an assortment of authors sought to make sense of the kabaka’s deportation, or wrote extended treatises on the evolution of the kingdom's hard-won sovereignty. A particularly resilient line of argument dealt with the role of Buganda in the making of Uganda, and how the Ganda had in fact invited the British into the country in the 1890s.Footnote ⁶³

Kabaka Yekka was by no means the only movement claiming to represent certain core features of Buganda's past.Footnote ⁶⁴ The Democratic Party was heavily populated by Catholic Ganda who feared exclusion in a Protestant-dominated future, an anxiety that dated to the 1890s. In a sense, as D. A. Low argued, the two movements represented distinctive strands of thought on the kingdom's history: for Kabaka Yekka, it was about the integrity of the kingdom and the kingship that was integral to it; for the Democratic Party, the kingdom had only ever been prosperous and dynamic when it was open and inclusive, and the kingship should not dominate the body politic in the way that it had been allowed to.Footnote ⁶⁵ During the 1961 elections, which Kabaka Yekka boycotted, the Democratic Party under Benedicto Kiwanuka swept the board and formed an interim government in the countdown to independence. Alarmed, Kabaka Yekka entered into an alliance with the Uganda People's Congress (UPC), a movement with its main support in the emphatically non-monarchical north of the country, and under the leadership of Milton Obote from the northern province of Lango.

This unstable and strained marriage of inconvenience took Uganda to independence in 1962, but it was ill-fated. Under the arrangement, the kabaka represented executive authority, and Prime Minister Obote the legislature, but in 1966 deep-seated tensions returned to the surface, and Obote moved against Buganda, removed the kabaka, and eventually declared himself president. The next year, Buganda and the other kingdoms (including Bunyoro, Toro, and Ankole) were abolished as functioning political units. All political and cultural systems in which authority and identity had been rooted in the precolonial past were now deemed troublesome and divisive, especially Buganda. The kabaka fled to London, where he died in 1969.

These developments were greeted with at least implied approval in certain quarters. Low observed that Obote, in attacking Buganda, was addressing religious division, particularly between Protestants and Catholics, and “was expressing the deep-seated hostility of the traditionally acephalous peoples of his own northern region against the hierarchical values which the Buganda model had displayed.” And, a little later: “The attack upon the Kabaka of Buganda's palace represented … not just an attack upon the structural features of the Buganda model, or upon its religious accompaniments. It was an attack as well upon the hierarchical, elitist values which were so closely associated with them.”Footnote ⁶⁶

It is perhaps debatable whether this was a matter of Obote (and later Amin) re-imagining “Northern Ugandan” political culture as the model for postcolonial Uganda, but there can be little question that much of their hostility toward a “Southern Ugandan” political culture flowed from their having come from historically disadvantaged parts of the country.Footnote ⁶⁷ The “new” Ugandan politics was embodied by the Democratic Party and, notwithstanding a cynical alliance with Kabaka Yekka, the Uganda People's Congress. It was ostensibly an attempt to move away from the supposedly atavistic monarchical politics of Kabaka Yekka, and ultimately to escape from particular visions of the past that many Ganda, especially, had sought to mobilize in order to shape “modern” Uganda.Footnote ⁶⁸

The irony is that each of these political parties, no less than Kabaka Yekka itself, represented historical fault lines dating back to the late nineteenth century and in some cases even earlier. Ultimately, local dynamics had prevailed over the supposed British pax.Footnote ⁶⁹ Yet self-consciously “nationalist” politicians, coalescing around the northern-based regimes of Obote and subsequently Idi Amin, were to reveal a deep animosity toward key aspects of the past. History was now dangerous. Shortly before fleeing into exile, the kabaka had written to the Secretary-General of the United Nations to assert that the Ugandan nation could only be realized in the near term by upholding “traditional institutions, upon which the new and foreign national institutions must be built.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Over time this became a less fashionable and more marginal viewpoint, even while there was renewed interest in exactly these institutions within the increasingly professionalized Historical academy.

EDUCATION AND THE PROFESSIONAL ACADEMY

Alongside the processes just discussed, and indelibly if sometimes indefinably linked to them, the country was witnessing the emergence of a professional scholarly elite, and the foundation of institutions dedicated to research on Uganda's past. Prior to the 1950s, if History was taught at all, it was British, European, or American. This only began to change with the “Africanization” of the curriculum in the 1960s, though even that was a slow process. Nonetheless, the seeds of a professional and Africanized academy were being sown at Makerere University College (later Makerere University).Footnote ⁷¹ European history had been briefly taught at Makerere in the mid-1940s, but when the undergraduate Milton Obote arrived there in 1947 he was disappointed to discover that History was no longer offered, although the campus Historical Society continued to thrive.Footnote ⁷²

However, in 1949–1950, with Makerere University College newly affiliated to Senate House, the authorities at Makerere were seeking guidance on how to re-launch History and place it at the center of the institution's intellectual life. They turned to the School of Oriental and African Studies, or more precisely to the Africanist Roland Oliver, who was asked to consider becoming head of the new History Department with responsibility for “a whole new conception of African history.”Footnote ⁷³ Oliver declined, but he recommended the appointment of African academic staff and the systematic collection and study of Uganda's oral traditions. In fact the department remained largely white (and male) until the early 1960s, and its leading figures, including D. A. Low, cited earlier, remained skeptical about oral History and resolutely documentary in their approach to the past. Historians such as Low, and even Oliver, pioneering Africanist though he was, were as interested in the era of the partition and the personalities and the interactions during the age of high imperialism, as they were in African History.Footnote ⁷⁴

Yet, over the course of the 1950s, Makerere students, Ugandan academics, and foreign scholars all became more interested in using oral history to study the deep past. Mid-twentieth-century developments must be understood as part of a wider phenomenon, namely the birth of African History as an academic discipline in Europe and North America as well as in Africa itself, often associated with ideas about intellectual and cultural liberation, and with politics. The years on either side of Ugandan independence in 1962 constituted a vibrant, perhaps “golden” age of interest in precolonial History. As the professional academy blossomed, historians, anthropologists, and political scientists drew on and were keenly interested in deep History as a matter of course, even when, as was often the case, their primary focus was the recent past.

Among the new generation of foreign scholars, many of them based at the East African Institute of Social Research (later the Makerere Institute of Social Research), anthropologists Martin Southwold, Audrey Richards, Lloyd Fallers, John Beattie, and Peter Gutkind, as well as the political scientist David Apter, extended the boundaries of knowledge about Buganda and Bunyoro. In many ways, they could trace a direct line of descent from Lucy Mair in the 1930s, who also worked among the Ganda, and from the missionary John Roscoe discussed earlier. As to foreign historians, Tony Low, Kenneth Ingham, R. W. Beachey, Christopher Wrigley, and John Rowe were among the pioneers of the new Ugandan historiography, again with an almost exclusive concentration on the kingdom of Buganda, and a thematic focus on the evolution of political authority, particularly kingship.

During the 1960s, Makerere's History Department became more and more Africanized, and two of its new scholars had done research on oral tradition while based at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies supervised by Roland Oliver: Semakula Kiwanuka worked on precolonial Buganda, and Samwiri Karugire studied Ankole. Among their new colleagues at Makerere were Phares Mutibwa, and the Nigerian Godfrey Uzoigwe, who worked on Bunyoro. The Kenyan Bethwell Ogot, who had studied the history of the Luo of western Kenya (again under Oliver at SOAS), was another early appointment, but he left in 1964 to take up a post at the University of Nairobi. Each of these historians represented the “new” African historiography, which was explicitly revisionist in its concern to retrieve the precolonial past, anti-racialist, and broadly “nationalist” in seeking the African achievement in Uganda's deep past. Under the leadership of J. B. Webster, the department at Makerere developed the “History of Uganda” project, which pursued the collection of African source materials (often by undergraduate students) and emphasized the precolonial past.Footnote ⁷⁵

Ironically, the History Program expanded against the backdrop of Obote's formal abolition of the southern kingdoms in 1967, and the coup d'etat that brought Idi Amin to power in 1971 also abruptly ended the great History renaissance. The History of Uganda project was abandoned in the early 1970s, due as much to a lack of external funds as to political interference. Amin, like Obote a northerner with a profound mistrust of southern culture and politics, moved to destroy the Makerere “sanctum,” which prompted a dramatic exodus from the country of intellectuals, including historians. History could be a perilous line of business to be in under the capricious Amin, who around 1974 apparently condemned a History Department documentary about the nineteenth-century Arab slave trade as part of an “imperialist” plot “intended to insult Uganda's Arab friends and Muslims everywhere.”Footnote ⁷⁶ In 1976, when Amin laid claim to a swathe of western Kenya, Semakula Kiwanuka, who had soldiered on in Makerere's History Department, was ordered to produce documentary evidence to support the claim. While the Uganda Protectorate had until 1902 extended as far as the western Rift Valley, the claim was otherwise specious, and Kiwanuka managed to dodge Amin's attentions for several weeks before fleeing the country.Footnote ⁷⁷

One must address the elitist nature of the new History that was pioneered at Makerere, and thus its restricted circulation. This brings to mind debates well established in European historiography, in which “modernists” argue that nations are “mass phenomena” that only came into being with the arrival of mass participation and education in the late nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁸ The first half of the twentieth century in Uganda, and especially in Buganda, broadly bears out Benedict Anderson's observations concerning the union of printing and capitalism. There, the proliferation of pamphlets, newspapers, and books culminated in the (re)creation of a professional African Historical academy in the 1950s and 1960s, and facilitated an ever-more-popular “imagining” of the historic nation.Footnote ⁷⁹ The middle decades of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a frustrated nationalist intelligentsia, comparable to that the Enlightenment produced in Europe, which continually pushed to establish a more populist base and in so doing “forge the political nation in which the intellectuals would have an assured leadership role.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Unlike in parts of Europe, however, Ugandan intellectuals would soon be disappointed.

It is no straightforward matter to establish a connection between the rise of especially strident Ganda nationalism (or Nyoro activism) in the 1950s and the surge in professional Historical interest in the kingdom during the same period. After all, foreign observers had always been interested in Buganda. Yet there is no doubt that much of the academic research undertaken at Makerere and the East African Institute of Social Research during the 1950s was encouraged by the Colonial Office with a view to understanding Uganda's troubled maturation in political and social terms. For example, Harold Ingrams's 1960 study, quoted earlier, was published as part of the Corona Library, “a series of illustrated volumes under the sponsorship of the Colonial Office dealing with the United Kingdom's dependent territories, the ways their peoples live, and how they are governed,” and included a foreword by Winston Churchill.Footnote ⁸¹ An earlier study of chiefly authority supervised by Audrey Richards across British East Africa, including Uganda, had involved intensive interactions between anthropologists and colonial administrators.Footnote ⁸²

Moreover, we can with reasonable certainty suggest that the Ganda royalist leadership drew ineffable succor from the foreign scholarly interest in the kingdom for the same reason—the power of antiquity and of historical majesty—that it benefited from the attentions of colonial officials in the late nineteenth century. The kingdom received a disproportionate amount of scholarly attention, as is generally true of “traditional kingdoms” that somehow survive into and even flourish in the “modern age.” In the 1950s, in the midst of the internal struggle over what a future Uganda might look like, an array of scholars found something compelling about Buganda: its sense of self, its institutions, its historical trajectory. Yet in the 1960s, these counted against Buganda. The sustained backlash against the past that unfolded under Obote and later Idi Amin (and has continued under the present regime) was in some ways an assault on Buganda and what it represented, driven by envy of and exasperation over the prominent role the Ganda had awarded themselves and been awarded by others.

At the moment when the significance of History was clearest, it was regarded, and condemned, as unacceptably “tribal” by its very nature. In the 1950s and 1960s, “tribalism” was rendered a highly problematic phenomenon because it was an obstacle to the building of “nations.” As Samora Machel, president of Mozambique, put it in his oft-cited declaration: “For the nation to live, the tribe must die.”Footnote ⁸³ Tribes were atavistic, denoting primordial stasis and primitive sectarianism; they had no place in the brave new world of nation-states. True to his word, Machel sought to destroy all vestiges of precolonial—that is to say, “tribal”—authority and practice in his pursuit of national modernity, much as Milton Obote would do in Uganda. The past, in other words, was demonized: the past was tribal, the future was national.

In that sense, the burgeoning of Historical consciousness, rich and vigorous though it was, came to be associated with a simmering atavism, or at best “neo-traditionalism,” that drew on mores and cultures that were at once irrelevant and deeply dangerous. To be overly concerned with the past in Uganda indicated an unhealthy adherence to premodern identities, “tribal” allegiances that were surely at odds with the larger national project now underway. For this reason, precolonial History came to be tainted with some very negative connotations in the political arena. All of this took place within the larger context of a more general decline of precolonial history in Africa and beyond. Since the 1980s, historians have turned increasingly to the modern period, and in particular to the colonial “moment.” Work on the precolonial has become a minority sport in the mainstream academy, something mirrored in a shift in donor research funds from historical to contemporary issues.

The Historical academy of this era never quite overcame the ambiguity of the task before it. On one hand, work on the precolonial period, which predominated until the shift toward the twentieth century in the 1970s and 1980s, celebrated the “premodern,” the “tribal” achievement. On the other, this research was often squeezed into the clothes of modern nationhood, and represented an attempt to give the new political structures of African independence the gravity of antiquity. In neighboring Tanzania, Julius Nyerere might have lent his support to the great History projects underway during the 1960s,Footnote ⁸⁴ but historians were often seeking to celebrate a past with which political elites in the new nation-states were less than comfortable. This would prove to be the case in Uganda. The deep past served Ugandan nation-builders poorly in the headlong rush toward occidentalist modernity. Needless to say, much of this avowed antipathy was disingenuous, since, for example, the violence of the nineteenth century weighed heavily on the new leaders of the 1960s, whether they realized it or not, and in any case the agendas (and often the vendettas) they pursued were almost invariably rooted in the deeper past.

THE TYRANNY OF ECONOMY AND THE CRISIS OF THE PAST

The brutality of Amin's reign is well known. Many Ugandans initially welcomed his putsch due to their hatred of Obote. The early support Buganda granted Amin flowed from his having permitted the body of the late kabaka to be brought back to Uganda and interred with full honors.Footnote ⁸⁵ But support for him faded away through the 1970s as his bloody persecutions of a variety of putative ethnic and political enemies gathered pace. In 1979 a joint force of Tanzanian troops and Ugandan exiles invaded and ousted Amin, but the violence continued. A series of short-term administrations from 1979–1980 was followed by the return of Milton Obote, who created a regime known popularly as “Obote II.”

Under Obote, state-sanctioned murder and the uncontrolled army predations continued through the first half of the 1980s. His second and final exile in 1985 was followed by several prolonged attempts at stabilization, but only with the arrival in Kampala of Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army in January 1986 was a degree of order restored and a process of reconstruction initiated.Footnote ⁸⁶ It is important to keep this violently unstable context in view; the understanding of History through much of the postcolonial era was shaped by a morbid fear of “sectarianism,” which was perceived to have initiated Uganda's descent into violent chaos. Uganda's successive governing classes have good reason to see History in these terms given the crises and instability of the 1950s and 1960s, and the shocking violence of the 1970s and 1980s, which resulted from the early failure of the postcolonial state to accommodate all of its constituent groups. History is seen largely as actively undermining the independent state, the new nation under construction, because it was written and conceived in terms of “tribe,” ethnicity, region, and religion. From this perspective, History promotes only the constituent parts of the nation, not the nation itself.

An illustration of this is the deeply problematic and deteriorating relationship between the National Resistance Movement (NRM) and Buganda. Soon after seizing power, Museveni opened negotiations for the restoration of the kingdoms, abolished by Obote in 1967. These were restored in 1993, and a key factor behind the decision was Museveni's need of Ganda support.Footnote ⁸⁷ The newly restored kings, however, were to be purely “cultural” figures, with no political authority. This represented an attempt by the NRM to segregate “cultural” from “political” issues. The policy has proven unsuccessful, and there has been considerable blowback for Museveni because it has resulted in a politicization of the “cultural.” It was, in effect, an effort to quarantine or neutralize the past, in a more nuanced manner than that employed by Obote, but the NRM has been unable to manage the resultant reemergence of Ganda nationalism, centered as it was in the 1950s on the person of the kabaka, currently Ronald Mutebi. Buganda has been unsuccessful in its bid for federal status, and resentment has continued to simmer. Popular Ganda anger at Museveni's attempts to restrict the role of the kabaka led to riots in 2009.Footnote ⁸⁸ In March 2010, a fire destroyed much of the Kasubi Tombs complex, a royal burial ground for Ganda rulers and a UNESCO heritage site, further escalating tensions between the kingdom and the government. Many Ganda believed the government itself was behind the fire.Footnote ⁸⁹

In Bunyoro, too, there has been anger at the restrictions Museveni has placed on the powers of “traditional” rulers. People view state and kingdom in markedly different terms. As a Nyoro loyalist put it in 2010, “If the king says plant a tree, everyone will plant one; but if the president asks, everyone will say, ‘Where's the seed money?’”Footnote ⁹⁰ Of course, many Ugandans view their monarchs, and especially their monarchs’ advisors, with some skepticism. But the larger point here is that kings have deep, historically rooted obligations toward their subjects, particularly in terms of social welfare and promotion of culture; yet this does not sit well with the NRM's authoritarian ethos, and represents precisely the kind of historical network of power and reciprocity which Museveni purportedly despises, though his own policies have reinvented such practices. Museveni has drawn from the deep past in seeking to undermine Buganda by courting and promoting smaller ethnic groups—notably the Baruli and the Banyala—who were, supposedly, forcibly incorporated into Buganda in the nineteenth century, and championing their separation from the Ganda kingdom.Footnote ⁹¹ In this sense Buganda and the NRM appear as antagonistic time-travelers, Terminator-style, their enmity played out on historic battlegrounds in an attempt to shape the future. This is, of course, profoundly destabilizing. The one kingdom that the NRM has not restored is Ankole—Museveni's home district. The president's reluctance to reinstall a monarch in his own backyard is understandable, though the question of royal restoration in Ankole is deeply divisive there, far more than in Buganda or Bunyoro.

In general, then, the postcolonial state has been disinterested in History in terms of what it might contribute to the new nation, and its hostility toward it has grown. This political shift coincided with, and was in many ways connected to, developmental agendas concerned with political stabilization through economic growth. These effectively meant disjuncture from the deep past, and left little room for Historical debate in confronting a growing array of challenges. The roots of developmentalism lie, to some extent, in the colonial era, for while something in the nature of late nineteenth-century imperial expansion awarded significance to the past, this quickly receded. History was of rather greater interest to political and military strategists than to the economic policy-makers who later took control of the colonial project. The deep past was too horrendous either to behold or to properly examine, and in any case it was inimical to Africa's future progress to dwell on it. After about 1920, a more condescending and dismissive view of the “native past” appeared, as colonial planners turned their attentions to cash crops and commerce.Footnote ⁹² Postcolonial elites inherited their agenda and embraced the interpretation of History underpinning it.

In terms of the academy, the destruction of the Makerere's History Department continued through the 1970s and 1980s as facilities and infrastructure deteriorated and qualified staff departed. Their replacements were intellectually (and often literally) malnourished younger colleagues who held Masters degrees at most and were otherwise ill equipped and demoralized. The recovery achieved in the 1990s and 2000s was only relative. The result was a crisis of professional scholarship in Uganda, and the effective destruction of professional Historical work during these years. This has had a profound impact on Ugandan state and society, with implications not just for intellectual culture but also for democracy and plurality more broadly. The work of foreign scholars was, likewise, virtually non-existent until the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In recent years, History lecturers have bemoaned the declining importance of their subject both in terms of government agendas and among students themselves.Footnote ⁹³ Students who study History have often not chosen it as their subject, but instead have been “conscripted” to it. They do not see History as a worthwhile subject largely because, in the words of those who teach it, “You can't make money from it.” “Precolonial” History is regarded as particularly irrelevant and, dispiritingly, “boring.” The History staff at Kyambogo University point out that if anything arouses undergraduates from their resentful slumbers it is the colonial past and late twentieth-century history masquerading as “development studies.” The latter are also favored by the few research-active staff members. History lecturers have become primarily suppliers of basic narratives to large numbers of Education students, most of whom will become secondary school teachers.

The academic sector thus lacks a research culture. In schools, the History that gets taught is simplified and distorted, and informants assert that many topics remain closed to scrutiny because they are seen as too hazardous.Footnote ⁹⁴ There are many vested interests involved here, and the past opens up unwanted fissures in society and polity. Most obviously, again, the violent instability from the 1960s through the 1980s left many extremely nervous about digging around in the past or dwelling on regional or ethnic identity. Discussions about “origins” and migration make many people uncomfortable, particularly those from Rwanda, Burundi, and Congo who migrated to Buganda in the 1940s and 1950s and whose families now firmly identify themselves as “Ganda” and “Ugandan.” Picking through these threads would be considered difficult and dangerous, at least if undertaken by a Ugandan academic, because this is an issue that leads to the very heart of citizenship and ideas about legitimacy. Questions of identity are potentially perilous, and History, therefore, can be profoundly destabilizing.

Historical work is further undermined by the fact that government has other agendas concerned primarily with generating business and revenue. In early 2011, the government announced its decision to close down the country's only national museum, the Uganda Museum, and mothball its contents. In its place, the government proposed to build a multi-story business complex, the “East African Trade Centre,” which would showcase Uganda's arrival as a regional commercial hub. To date, officials have dismissed the resulting outcryFootnote ⁹⁵ and have made explicit their conviction that the museum is a luxury that brings in no revenue and does little of tangible value, but which occupies prime “real estate” on the outskirts of Kampala.

We do not know how the story will end, but it is salutary. As a student, Yoweri Museveni had a fierce interest in History and from time to time he displays a continuing interest in the subject; he was, after all, a product of the radicalism associated with the University of Dar es Salaam, where he was a Political Science student between 1967 and 1970.Footnote ⁹⁶ Recalling his A-level history in the early 1960s, he described his enthusiasm for “the formation of states in Europe—particularly in Italy and Germany during the nineteenth century.… I was also fascinated by the French Revolution, and bourgeois opposition to the taxes imposed by the feudal order because it interfered with trade.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Lessons that Museveni appears to have taken from his forays into the past include the ways in which new political order might be created out of disunity and conflict, and the transformative power of the market. His counterpart today is more likely to study business, perhaps with a minor in Development Studies. Museveni now publicly bashes History as a professional discipline, and he has been known to tell parents not to send their children to study it lest they join the growing ranks of the unemployed and unemployable.Footnote ⁹⁸ The current emphasis is on practical skills, with History seen as irrelevant. Makerere lecturers look back misty-eyed to the 1960s and the era of Kiwanuka and Karugire, in part because the current generation of academics continues to view History as central to what was once widely—and in Uganda still is—referred to as “nation-building.”Footnote ⁹⁹

“STEM” subjects—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—are currently favored, while Museveni's own stress on the importance of education is absolutely rooted in ideas about economic development rather than scholarly expositions: “Lack of education,’ he declared in the mid-1990s, “means lack of entrepreneurship and, therefore, lack of savings.” In Uganda and across Africa, people are “deficient in enterprise, deficient in savings, possess no special skills and [have] nothing to exchange.” Increase the tax base and monetize the whole economy, and a killer blow will have been dealt against sectarianism and tribalism.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Attending university in Uganda is expensive, and many drop out because they cannot pay their school fees. Therefore, many students who do accept the financial risk are inexorably drawn to “business”-type degree programs, or at least those that have a clear “material improvement” element; such programs are particularly common in the private universities proliferating across Uganda. This kind of student behavior is a symptom of hard economic times and difficult financial choices, and of a wider culture of fiercely competitive zero-sum economics fostered by two decades of NRM rule.

On several levels History remains popular, as witnessed by the interactive phone-ins on (not coincidentally) Buganda radio that involve local intellectuals and historians, some of whom have held administrative positions or are respected elders and religious leaders. A visit to the Aristoc Bookshop in central Kampala reveals a thriving local publishing industry: self-help and spiritual literature dominates the market, but there is also a healthy Historical output, much of it facilitated by Fountain Publishers, which has in the past collaborated with the prominent UK Africanist publisher James Currey. One senses a proliferation of biography and personal memoir, and a shift away from the collective and toward the individual, perhaps as part of our neoliberal epoch. Yet more generally, the drive for modernity and development precludes Historical analysis, which is seen as a waste of resources.

Finally, and just as significant, the self-conscious modernity of the “popular liberation front”—exemplified by the NRM—expresses a deep-seated ambivalence that “revolutionary” guerrillas have about the past. As one informant recently suggested, “It is as though before 1986 [when Museveni came to power] there was only darkness, and now the NRM had brought light.… Museveni was the savior, and nothing that came before mattered.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Certainly, the rhetoric of “revolution” was not well served by retrievals of the deep past, though naturally certain elements could serve political purposes, again in terms of knocking down straw sectarians. Museveni promotes “patriotism,” and schools around the country have “patriotic clubs.” Selected aspects of Uganda's “patriotic” History—simplified versions of the anti-colonial struggle and the overthrows of the Amin and Obote tyrannies—are taught at the NRM's “political education” center for party cadres at Kyankwanzi, even if the party does not promote History teaching in schools more broadly. In general terms, it is no coincidence that governments that are the direct products of prolonged violence or political upheaval eschew Historical reflection in favor of authoritarian, and often highly militarized, developmentalism.