Marriage cases discussed by Catholic missionaries in Uganda at the turn of the twentieth century showcase considerable diversity in relationships between women and men. While these cases reflect the turbulence of the late nineteenth century, the history of marriage and divorce in the region since around 700 CE demonstrates that diversity in marital arrangements was a long-standing phenomenon. This article sets out the history of aspects of marriage and divorce in Buganda, Bugwere, Busoga, and Bushana, and their ancestral communities to show how women and men conceptualized their domestic relationships and adapted them as they dealt with political and social change.

The ecological fecundity of the northern shore of Lake Victoria was vital to Buganda’s dominance of the interlacustrine region during the pre-colonial period. Despite this, protein-energy malnutrition was notoriously common throughout the twentieth century. This paper charts changes in nutritional illness in a relatively wealthy, food-secure area of Africa during a time of vast social, economic and medical change. In Buganda at least, it appears that both the causation and epidemiology of malnutrition moved away from the endemic societal causes described by early colonial doctors and became instead more defined by individual position within a rapidly modernising economy.