Jonathan Earle and Jay Carney have written an insightful and painstakingly researched book about Uganda's first prime minister and its first chief justice, Benedicto Kiwanuka. Born on 8 May 1922 in the heartland of Ganda Catholicism in south-western Buganda, Kiwanuka rose to prominence in the late 1950s before being murdered in 1972, in circumstances that are still unclear, by Idi Amin's security apparatus (p. 25). Though he has not attracted much scholarly attention to date, Earle and Carney's sympathetic biography provides ample evidence to suggest that he was indeed a very influential political actor in Uganda during its turbulent mid-twentieth century.

In writing Kiwanuka's biography, the authors attempt to dispatch the idea that he was a parochial politician leading a largely sectarian Catholic party. Instead, Earle and Carney argue that Kiwanuka's upbringing and influences were deeply cosmopolitan despite the importance the rigorous and disciplined Buddu Catholic faith had during the early life of the future politician (p. 56). Aside from the Mill Hill missionaries, Kiwanuka had meaningful contacts with the Combonis, served in the Middle East during World War Two, and enrolled in a pre-law Bachelor of Arts course in what is now Lesotho (pp. 41, 56). His Evangelical zeal, however, was in some ways transposed from propagating the Catholic faith to advocating for a liberal democratic state to prevail in the Ugandan postcolony (pp. 54–8). Key to this transposition was the Democratic Party (DP), which was founded in 1954 largely as a political vehicle for Buganda's marginalised Catholics. Yet, while the DP started life as a Catholic party, it was far from the sectarian organisation or ‘Dini Ya Papa’ (Swahili for ‘religion of the pope’) that some contemporary Protestants despairingly referred to it as (p. 52). Instead, while many Catholics did indeed find a place within DP, it also attracted the attention of a number of Protestants.

In charting Kiwanuka's ascent to power, the authors show an impressive attentiveness to the broader political context in which both he and his party, the DP, worked. While Kiwanuka deployed some generalised political strategies, not least in seeking to dispatch the perception that he was a strong advocate of Buganda secession, the authors show just how alive he and the DP were to dealing with different political circumstances (p. 79). In Teso, in eastern Uganda, for example, Catholic activists joined DP in some respects as a means to check the increasing power of the chiefs under the government of the Uganda Peoples’ Congress (UPC) (p. 79). In the western parts of Uganda, in Toro, the DP were similarly associated with critics of royalist political authority (p. 79). Yet, this time, Kiwanuka found common cause with the Rwenzururu patriots as they struggled against monarchic power (p. 196). Indeed, the authors attribute Kiwanuka's relationship with the Rwenzururu as an important factor in his winning of power in March 1961 (pp. 78–80).

The DP's political tenure in Uganda was not to last even eight months, though. It was voted out of office by a large margin by April 1962. Tensions between the DP and the newly influential royalist Kabaka Yekka (KY) party, which the authors argue was aided to a large extent by inter-Catholic competition, led in part to Kiwanuka's political downfall (p. 165). For his part, Kiwanuka attributed his failure to concerted electoral intimidation at the hands of the KY party (p. 175). In the years following the election, in part as a response to their increasing marginalisation from political power, Kiwanuka and the DP ‘embraced a theopolitical discourse of martyrdom’ as they critiqued the increasingly autocratic rule of Milton Obote (p. 169). Kiwanuka's career was briefly rehabilitated under Amin's rule, when he became chief justice in June 1971, but his promise to protect Ugandans against governmental abuses unfortunately led to his murder relatively soon after his appointment by the brutal tyrant (p. 189).

In telling Kiwanuka's tragic story, Contesting Catholics draws on some incredible sources. For example, Earle had unearthed Kiwanuka's private papers during his doctoral research in 2009 in a suburb of Kampala (p. 15). The collection that Kiwanuka's son, Ambassador Maurice Kagimu Kiwanuka, had preserved is a veritable treasure-trove of material containing around 4,900 pieces of textual evidence and some 900 pages of loose-leaf material. Given the volume of this collection, the repertoire of source material is impressive comprising as it does campaign agendas, finance reports, photographs and international letters to name only a few examples. These private papers are without a doubt the muse that has given rise to this monograph. But other important sources include the Uganda Argus, Uganda's national newspaper, institutional archives on three continents, and fieldwork interviews in eastern Africa conducted over two decades (p. 17). Altogether, the sources that Earle and Carney have been able to make use of here take us well beyond the traditional institutional archives used to examine religion and politics, and this is one of the book's main achievements. No collection of archives will tell a whole story, of course, but it is difficult to imagine a more complete biography of Kiwanuka being published.

While the authors make a number of important interventions on the subject of Ugandan colonial and post-colonial politics, one of the book's most important points is valuable to scholars of African political history as a whole. That argument is that there is more to Ugandan politics than people ‘eating’ power or the state (p. 1) in the manner first theorised by Jean-François Bayart (The state in Africa: the politics of the belly, trans. Mary Harper, Christopher Harrison and Elizabeth Harrison, London 1993). Instead, the history of African political thought – not just in Uganda but elsewhere – is far more interesting than simply of the ‘politics of the belly’. As such, this book represents a challenge to historians, first, to look more deeply into the lives of understudied figures and their influence on the formation of independent African states and, secondly, to be alive to the pluralities and contestations surrounding the construction of statehood on the world's second largest continent.