This article explores the intellectual history of dreaming practices in the eastern African kingdom of Buganda. Whereas Muslim dissenters used their dreams to challenge colonial authority following the kingdom's late nineteenth-century religious wars, political historians such as Apolo Kaggwa removed the political practice of dreaming from Buganda's official histories to deplete the visionary archives from which dissenters continued to draw. Kaggwa's strategy, though, could only be pressed so far. Recently unearthed vernacular sources show that Christian activists, such as Erieza Bwete and Eridadi Mulira, continued to marshal their dreams and literacy to imagine competing visions of Buganda's colonial monarchy. Earlier scholars had argued that modernity and literacy would displace the political function of dreams. This article, by contrast, proposes that sleeping visions took on new, more complicated meanings throughout the twentieth century. Literacy offered new technologies to expound upon the political implications of dreams and a vast repository of symbols to enrich interpretative performances.

When Britain withdrew recognition from Kabaka Mutesa II in 1953, considering him disloyal for failure to advocate for the new governor's progressive initiatives, Buganda's response was distinctive and successful: mourning. Ganda wept publicly, and portrayed themselves as wives forcibly divorced from their king/husband. With the removal of Mutesa, they argued, Britain even violated its own alliance, or marriage, with Buganda. Metaphors of marriage and declarations of loyal wives proved successful in destabilizing imperial efforts to reshape power in Buganda to fit into a unified Uganda. Drawing on specific associations of love and politics associated with Ganda marriage, Ganda fought, successfully, to achieve Mutesa II's return and to ensure Buganda's distinctive political identity. In the process, though, they declared and institutionalized an identity as subjects of the Kabaka, abandoning ideas of citizenship through Bataka (clans) voiced by earlier activists and enacting troublesome precedents for proponents of Ugandan nationalism.

Over the course of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–70), many people in the secessionist Republic of Biafra resorted to forgery, confidence scams, and other forms of fraud to survive the dire conditions created by Nigeria's blockade. Forgery of passes and other documents, fraudulent commercial transactions, and elaborate schemes involving impersonation and racketeering became common in Biafra, intensifying as the Biafran government's ability to enforce the law diminished. Using long-neglected legal records from Biafra's courts and tribunals, this study traces the process by which deception emerged as a practice of survival in wartime Biafra – a process with important implications for the growth of fraud (known as ‘419’ after the relevant section of the Nigerian criminal code) in reintegrated postwar Nigeria.