Political Activism and Other Life Forms in Colonial Buganda

Abstract

Abstract:This article uses recently unearthed private papers and ethnographic fieldwork to explore the intersection of political practice and environmental ideation in colonial Buganda. In the early to mid-1900s, colonial administrators sought to draw Ganda interlocutors into abstract conversations about a natural world that was devoid of political power. Through Witchcraft Ordinances, imperial administrators sought to distance spirits, rocks, trees, snakes, and other life forms from the concrete world of social movement and dissent. But in late colonial Uganda, the trade unionist Erieza Bwete and the influential spirit prophet Kibuuka Kigaanira navigated environmental spaces that were imbued with political significance. Uganda’s economic and national histories, informed by methodologies that privileged philosophical materialism, overlooked how interactions with multispecies animated anticolonial politics and larger debates about authority. To challenge these earlier assumptions, this article shows how colonial literati and a late colonial prophet interacted with a natural world that was deeply political to conceptualize independence and challenge colonial power.

Objects of Catholic Conversion in Colonial Buganda: A Study of the Miraculous Medal

“…By the mid-twentieth century the snake had also become pivotal to the visual and rhetorical approach of particular anticolonial and anti-Catholic activists in Buganda such as Kigaanira Ssewannyana Kibuuka. Kibuuka was a self-styled prophet who rebelled against his strict Roman Catholic upbringing in 1930s Buddu, and declared war against the colonial state (Earle 2018). Kigaanira declared himself 'compelled to find a political ally among Buganda's pythons' and wore a python around his neck in reference to the precolonial version of the Bemba tale, and as a call to return to the moral order of the precolonial period.…”