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Precolonial Markets in Bunyoro-Kitara

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

G. N. Uzoigwe
G. N. Uzoigwe
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

One of the weaknesses of students of African development studies has been their inability to speak in the idiom of Africans. Anthropologists, despite their often magnificent contributions of earlier times in the field of ethnography must find a new role in the present state of African studies. The tendency to conceive precolonial developments in Africa in terms of primitivity, tribality, and feudality, has conveyed the erroneous impression that Africa is characterized by the static nature of its past. In other words, the dynamics of the growth of African societies has traditionally not been their concern. Unfortunately, the African historian who should have been particularly concerned with this aspect of study has, until recently, proved to be of little help. He has first to win the battle of African history, the mopping up operations of which are still going on. But he, too, must now realize that a history of specifically political developments is an anachronism: precolonial Africa had no clear-cut distinction between the political, the economic, and the social. To be meaningful, history must be conceived in its totality. Finally, the economist seems to speak least in the idiom of theAfrican. It is ‘fashionable’ for him, it has been pointed out, to assume that ‘the African economy’ ought not to work in a basically dissimilar fashion from ‘the Western economy’ and that something is wrong with it if it does. The problem of the African economist, then, is that of relevance, a problem that has to be satisfactorily solved if his readiness to offer his services as the specialist ‘doctor’ of African economic problems is to be taken seriously.

Type
Markets
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , September 1972 , pp. 422 - 455
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1972

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References

* By Africans I do not mean scholars of African origins, few of whom, in any case, speak in the idiom of the Africans.

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2 I wish to thank here all my informants for their readiness to make available to me information at their disposal; my research assistants, William Byaruhanga, Joe Darlington Besisira, and Lewis Belinda for all their help and patience; and the Research and Publications Committee of Makerere University College who partly financed my research.

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7 Kitara Historical Texts (henceforth, K.H.T.), No. 18(a). These texts are in my possession and are unedited.

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45 Ibid., pp. 11, 195.

* It is regretted that informants were unable to supply precise information on this question.

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47 Uzoigwe, op. cit.; idem, ‘Kabalega and the Making of a New Kitara’, Tarikh 3: 2 (1970), 5–22.Google Scholar

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75 K.H.T., No. 107.

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78 Baganda in Kitara markets.

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81 K.H.T., Nos. 21,100.

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