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MAPPING CONFLICT: HETERARCHY AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN THE ANCIENT CAPITAL OF BUGANDA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

HOLLY HANSON
HOLLY HANSON
Affiliation:
Mount Holyoke College
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Abstract

Multiple, overlapping, and competing forms of authority contributed to the highly centralized Buganda kingdom. Their enduring salience, commonly considered characteristic of heterarchy, challenges our understanding of the early history of the kingdom. A map that specifies the location of 292 chiefs and authority figures in the capital reveals not only the critical importance of multiple forms of authority but also the development of those forms over several centuries. The allocation of space in the capital and other historical sources indicate that compromise and co-optation characterized the practice of power in the ancient kingdom: the king was surrounded, literally and figuratively, by others who curbed his authority.

Keywords

Ugandagovernancepre-colonial
Type
Governance and Inheritance in Precolonial Uganda
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , July 2009 , pp. 179 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

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11 British National Archives, Kew (NA) CO536/133 (the Butaka Land Commission), 561–4. This document is now missing from the Entebbe Secretariat Archives in Uganda but is also referred to as Entebbe Secretariat Archives of the Uganda Protectorate, Secretariat Minute Paper, no. 6902.

12 Relying on oral histories recounted by clan elders, Michael Wright disputed the view that clans and kabakas had been in conflict or that Buganda had been despotic: Buganda in the Heroic Age, 2–4, 206. Other non-royalist perspectives were published in Ebifa and Munno by Gomotoka and others; these are explored in M. S. M. Semakula Kiwanuka, A History of Buganda from the Foundation of the Kingdom to 1900 (New York, 1972), 99–100; and Ray, Myth, 96–13. See also Holly Elisabeth Hanson, Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda (Portsmouth, NH, 2003), 212–14.

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15 See, for example, John Hanning Speke, Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (Edinburgh, 1863), 295–7; and Holly Hanson, ‘“A venerable old lady of decidedly masculine mind”: British explorers encounter gendered political power in the Buganda kingdom’, unpublished paper presented at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Storrs, June 2002.

16 Wrigley, Kingship, 225.

17 Wyatt MacGaffey, Custom and Government in the Lower Congo (Berkeley, 1970), 238–48; Randall M. Packard, Chiefship and Cosmology: An Historical Study of Political Competition (Bloomington, 1981), 46–52; Wilks, Forests, 94.

18 John Roscoe, The Baganda: An Account of Their Native Customs and Beliefs (New York, 1911; 2nd edn 1966), xi, 523.

19 John Rowe made an extensive search for Roscoe's papers that encompassed Oxford and Cambridge libraries, the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Roscoe Ethnographic collection, a visit to Roscoe's former parsonage, an effort to trace his heirs, and an interview with his daughter. My queries yielded no memories of Kaggwa's maps. For assistance in a further search for the original maps, I am grateful to Dorcas Kigozi and Annet K. Nuwamanya of Makerere University Library's Africana Collection and to Rachel Hand of the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

20 Miller, ‘History and Africa’, 7, n. 19; Schoenbrun, David Lee, ‘A past whose time has come: historical context and history in the Great Lakes region’, History and Theory, 32:4 (1993), 32–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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23 Apolo Kaggwa, Customs of the Baganda (1907), partially trans. Ernest B. Kalibala and ed. May Mandelbaum, Columbia University Contributions to Anthropology, no. 22. (New York, 1934), 78.

24 Roscoe and Kaggwa, ‘Enquiry’, Tefiro Mulumba Kuruji, 57.

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29 Roscoe, Baganda, 523.

30 The White Fathers' map is reprinted in Gutkind, Royal Capital, facing p. 14, originally published in P. B. Leblond, Le Père Auguste Achte (Algiers, 1912). Baskerville's map is published in John A. Rowe, Lugard at Kampala, Makerere History Paper 3 (Kampala, 1969). Alexis Sebowa's map of the palace is published in Julien Gorju, Entre le Victoria, l'Albert et l'Edouard (Rennes, 1920), 137. I appreciate James Gehrt's help with maps.

31 David Newbury demonstrates this clearly in Kings and Clans: Ijwi Island and the Lake Kivu Rift, 1780–1840 (Madison, 1991), 4.

32 David Schoenbrun posits that severe rainfall fluctuations between 950 and 1100 furthered the transition from mixed farming to intensive banana cultivation, while Christopher Wrigley views that transition as happening around 1500. The profound social transformations that followed intensive banana cultivation make the earlier date more plausible. See Schoenbrun, David L., ‘We are what we eat: ancient agriculture between the Great Lakes’, Journal of African History, 34 (1993), 23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wrigley, Kingship, 235; Hanson, Landed Obligation, 28–30.

33 David Lee Schoenbrun, A Green Place, A Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender, and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th Century (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998), 42, 178.

34 Michael Twaddle, Kakungulu and the Creation of Uganda (London, 1993), 28.

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37 Fallers, King's Men, 78–81; Henri Médard, Le Royaume du Buganda au XIX siècle (Paris, 2007); Hanson, Landed Obligation, 46–8.

38 Kaggwa, Customs, 83.

39 Robert Pickering Ashe, Chronicles of Uganda (first published 1895; 2nd edn, New York, 1971), 102.

40 Alexander M. Mackay, A. M. Mackay: Pioneer Missionary of the Church Missionary Society in Uganda (London, 1890), 149–50, 155–6.

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42 Marcel Mauss, The Gift, trans. Ian Cunnison (New York: Norton, 1967), 10. Cf. Carol Summers, ‘Radical rudeness: Ugandan social critiques in the 1940s’, Journal of Social History, 39 (2006), 741–70.

43 James Augustus Grant, A Walk Across Africa: Or Domestic Scenes from my Nile Journal (Edinburgh, 1864), 231.

44 M. S. M. Semakula Kiwanuka, History, 112–13; Gorju, Entre le Victoria, 136.

45 NA CO536/133, Semei Sebagala Kyadondo, 442.

46 R. J. McIntosh, ‘Clustered cities’, 28.

47 Gorju, Entre le Victoria, 112; Roscoe and Kaggwa, ‘Enquiry’, 55; Ray, Myth, 208.

48 Chrétien, Great Lakes, 113.

49 David L. Schoenbrun ‘The (in)visible roots of Bunyoro-Kitara and Buganda in the Lakes region: AD 800–1300’, in S. K. McIntosh, Beyond Chiefdoms, 136; Schoenbrun, Green Place, 74.

50 Roscoe, Baganda, 327.

51 Wrigley, Kingship, 117–19; Kaggwa, Customs, 9.

52 Kaggwa, Customs, 123.

53 Ray, Myth, 94, 101; Wrigley, Kingship, 28, 83; Kiwanuka, History, 94–5.

54 Wrigley, Kingship, 83–6.

55 Ray, Myth, 91, 92, 94.

56 Roscoe, Baganda, 104–6, 156–7, 253; Roscoe and Kaggwa, ‘Enquiry’, 3, 69, 101.

57 Roscoe, Baganda, 203.

58 Ibid. 237.

59 NA CO536/133, 428.

60 Ham Mukasa, ‘Some notes on the reign of Mutesa’, Uganda Journal 1:2 (1934), 128.

61 John Hanning Speke, Journey of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (Edinburgh, 1863), 294–5.

62 Roscoe, Baganda, 203.

63 Schiller, ‘Royal women’; Kodesh, Neil, ‘Renovating tradition: the discourse of succession in colonial Buganda’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 34 (2001), 517.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

64 Wrigley, Kingship, 176.

65 Martin Southwold has pointed out that this feature – the necessity of finding broad-based support for one woman's son over another's – gives Ganda succession democratic elements and ‘some of the virtues of both a monarchy and a republic’: Martin Southwold, ‘Succession to the throne in Buganda’, in Jack Goody (ed.), Succession to High Office (Cambridge, 1966), 96–7.

66 Gorju, Entre le Victoria, 136.

67 Cf. Médard, Le Royaume, 93–112.

68 Roscoe, Baganda, 290–323; Kaggwa, Customs, 112–17; Roscoe and Kaggwa, ‘Enquiry’, 52.

69 Hanson, Landed Obligation, 72–5.

70 Kiwanuka, History, 114.