In 1945, actions which have been understood as strikes against wartime inflation occurred across colonized Africa: this essay identifies a deeper motivation in the events which happened in the Uganda Protectorate in early 1945. An understanding that people had a moral responsibility to act, and leaders had a moral responsibility to see them, to listen, and to respond led from a mobilization of workers on town streets, to efforts to see wrongful deaths acknowledged, to gatherings in the courtyard of the Buganda king in which he was almost overthrown. In each of the three stages of the protest, Ugandans of different ethnicities asserted an ethic of mutual obligation which acknowledged no boundary between the political and the economic, spoke to authority with an expectation that they would be heard, and drew on enduring knowledge of politics as well as a range of new ideas to solve the problems they confronted.

We have the capacity to act together in shared intentional and shared cooperative ways. This lecture argues that our capacity for the plan-based, mind-supported cross-temporal organization of our individual activities, together with certain further elements, suffices for our capacity for the mind-supported, small-scale social organization characteristic of acting together. These two fundamental forms of human practical organization––diachronic and small-scale social––are for us grounded in a common core: our capacity for planning agency.