In the last chapter, we showed how Benedicto Kiwanuka developed a political philosophy – a ‘gospel’ of democracy – that was consistent with international Catholic democratisation movements that emerged following the Second World War. In theory, Kiwanuka envisioned a non-sectarian political world characterised by pan-ethnic nation-building. Part of the appeal of DP throughout the 1950s and 1960s was its attempt to argue that democratisation entailed the accommodation of regional polities and interests. Rather than simply offer defensive, oppositional politics, DP provided creative, integrative approaches to imagining a postcolonial state. On the ground, though, it proved very difficult to move beyond regional, sectarian interests. Benedicto Kiwanuka struggled to navigate Uganda's peripheral cosmopolitanisms, whose competing political traditions were difficult to unify into a coherent national project. For Kiwanuka and his UPC rivals, Tesoland in eastern Uganda, and the Rwenzururu-Toro question in western Uganda, constituted two of the more contentious arenas of political competition on the eve of independence. By securing the electoral control of these regions, activists in DP saw themselves as both stimulating and regulating Uganda's nationalist pulse. Kiwanuka saw these areas as ‘curtain raisers’ for what was to come. The DP publicity secretary, Paul Ssemogerere, maintained that electoral victory in Uganda's far eastern and western districts was ‘indicative of the firm allegiance which his party enjoyed in different parts of the country’.

In this chapter, we show how DP activists in eastern and western Uganda sought to rework many of the lofty ideals that Kiwanuka had developed internationally and in Buganda, especially his commitment to republicanism and the political priorities of rural bakopi. In Uganda's Eastern Province, party activists in Tesoland, whose republican societies were largely decentralised, confronted a political world that was increasingly consolidated from the early 1900s onward. Political centralisation compelled communities to think about family authority, colonial chiefs, and the ordering of public space in ways that complemented and challenged older notions of republicanism.