Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-vpsfw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-18T06:00:35.222Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Some Implications of Literacy in Uganda

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

Michael Twaddle*
Affiliation:
Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London University

Extract

During the last fifty years, several debates have waxed and waned regarding the implications of literacy for African history. Among social scientists in general and social anthropologists in particular, Jack Goody and Ian Watt's survey of “The Consequences of Literacy” (1963) for hitherto preliterate or partially literate and now modernizing societies, drew attention to one suggested transformation: “The importance of writing lies in its creating a new medium of communication. (…) Its essential service is to objectify speech, to provide language with a material correlative, a set of visible signs. In this material form speech can be transmitted over space and preserved over time; what people say and think can be rescued from the transitoriness of oral communication.” The consequences, in Goody and Watt's view, were immensely important: “In oral societies the cultural tradition is transmitted almost entirely by face-to-face communication; and changes in its content are accompanied by the homeostatic process of forgetting or transforming those parts of the tradition that cease to be either necessary or relevant. Literate societies, on the other hand, cannot discard, absorb or transmute the past in the same way. Instead, their members are faced with permanently recorded versions of the past and its beliefs; and because the past is thus set apart from the present, historical enquiry becomes possible. This in turn encourages scepticism; and scepticism, not only about the legendary past, but about received ideas about the universe as a whole.”

Type
Literacy, Feedback, and the Imagination of History
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bernt Hansen, Holger, Mission, Church and State in a Colonial Setting: Uganda 1890-1925 (London, 1984).Google Scholar
Cohen, David W., The Historical Tradition of Busoga (Oxford, 1972).Google Scholar
Cohen, David W., The Combing of History (Chicago, 1994).Google Scholar
Ehrlich, Cyril, “The Uganda Economy 1903-1945,” in: Harlow, Vincent, Chilver, E.M., and Smith, Alison (eds.), History of East Africa Volume Two (Oxford, 1965), 395475.Google Scholar
Faupel, J.F., African Holocaust (London, 1962).Google Scholar
Furley, Oliver, and Watson, Tom, A History of Education in East Africa (New York, 1978).Google Scholar
Goody, Jack (ed.), Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, 1968).Google Scholar
Goody, Jack, and Watt, Ian, “The Consequences of Literacy,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 5 (1963), 304–45.Google Scholar
Graff, Harvey J., “The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Society and Culture,” in: de Castell, Suzanne, Luke, Allan, and Egan, Kieran (eds.), Literacy, Society and Schooling (Cambridge, 1986), 6186.Google Scholar
Gough, Kathleen, “Implications of Literacy in Traditional China and India,” in: Goody, Jack (ed.), Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, 1968), 6984.Google Scholar
Henige, David, Oral Historiography (London, 1982).Google Scholar
Henige, David, “Oral Tradition as a Means of Reconstructing the Past,” in: Philips, John E. (ed.), Writing African History (Rochester NY, 2005), 169–90.Google Scholar
Iliffe, John, Honour in African History (Cambridge, 2005).Google Scholar
Karugire, Samwiri, A History of the Kingdom of Nkore in Western Uganda to 1896 (Oxford, 1971).Google Scholar
Kasozi, Abdu, The Spread of Islam in Uganda (Nairobi, 1985).Google Scholar
Kasozi, Abdu, “Policy Statements and the Failure to Develop a National Language in Uganda: A Historical Survey,” in: Perry, Kate (ed.), Language and Literacy (Kampala, 2000), 2329.Google Scholar
Kiwanuka, M.Semakula, M., The Kings of Buganda (Nairobi, 1971).Google Scholar
Lamphear, John, The Traditional History of the Jie of Uganda (Oxford, 1976).Google Scholar
MacBean, Alasdair I., and Balasubramanyam, Vudayagiri N., Meeting the Third World Challenge (London, 1978).Google Scholar
Mbaabu, Ireeri, Language Policy in East Africa (Nairobi, 1996).Google Scholar
Medard, Henri, and Doyle, Shane (eds.), Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa (Oxford/Kampala/Nairobi/Athens OH, 2007).Google Scholar
Miller, Joseph C., Ways of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade 1730-1830 (Madison, 1988).Google Scholar
Mukama, Ruth, “Recent Developments in the Language Situation and Plans for the Future,” in: Hansen, Holger Bernt, and Twaddle, Michael (eds.), Changing Uganda (Kampala/London, 1991), 334–50.Google Scholar
Nsibambi, Apolo, “Language and Literacy in Uganda: a View from the Ministry of Education and Sports,” in: Perry, Kate (ed.), Language and Literacy in Uganda (Kampala, 2000), 25.Google Scholar
Oded, Arye, Islam in Uganda (New York, 1974).Google Scholar
Ogot, Bethwell A., History of the Southern Luo: Migration and Settlement 1500-1900 (Nairobi, 1967).Google Scholar
Ogot, Bethwell A., “Africa: the Agenda of Historical Research and Writing,” in: Ogot, Bethwell A. (ed.), Building on the Indigenous: Selected Essays 1981-1998 (Kisumu, 1999), 205–21.Google Scholar
Peires, Jeffrey, “The Lovedale Press: Literature for the Bantu Revisited,” History in Africa 6 (1979), 155–75.Google Scholar
Pirouet, Louise, Black Evangelists: The spread of Christianity in Uganda 1891-1914 (London, 1978).Google Scholar
Richards, Audrey I. (ed.), Economic Development and Tribal Change (Cambridge, 1954).Google Scholar
Rowe, John A., “Revolution in Buganda 1856-1884,” PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin (1967).Google Scholar
Rowe, John A., “Myth, Memoir and Moral Admonition: Luganda Historical Writing 1893-1969,” Uganda Journal 31 (1969), 17–40, 217–19.Google Scholar
Street, Brian V., Literacy in Theory and Practice (Cambridge, 1984).Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles, “Nationality and Modernity,” in: Taylor, Charles (ed.), Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays (Cambridge MA, 2011), 81104.Google Scholar
Taylor, John V., The Growth of the Church in Buganda (London, 1958).Google Scholar
Tosh, John, Clan Leaders and Colonial Chiefs in Lango (Oxford, 1978).Google Scholar
Twaddle, Michael, “Politics in Bukedi, 1900-1939,” PhD thesis, SOAS, University of London (1967).Google Scholar
Twaddle, Michael, “‘Tribalism’ in Eastern Uganda,” in: Gulliver, Philip H. (ed.), Tradition and Transition in East Africa: Studies of the Tribal Element in the Modern Era (London, 1969), 193208.Google Scholar
Twaddle, Michael, “On Ganda Historiography,” History in Africa 1 (1974), 85100.Google Scholar
Twaddle, Michael, book review, Bulletin of SOAS 37 (1974), 519–20.Google Scholar
Twaddle, Michael, “The Nine Lives of Semei Kakungulu,” History in Africa 12 (1985), 325–33.Google Scholar
Twaddle, Michael, “The Ending of Slavery in Buganda,” in: Miers, Suzanne, and Roberts, Richard (eds.), The End of Slavery in Africa (Madison, 1988), 119–49.Google Scholar
Twaddle, Michael, “Slaves and Peasants in Buganda,” in: Archer, Léonie (ed.), Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour (London, 1988), 118–29.Google Scholar
Twaddle, Michael, “The Emergence of Politico-Religious Groupings in Late Nineteenth Century Buganda,” Journal of African History 29 (1988), 8192.Google Scholar
Twaddle, Michael, “The Bible, the Quran and Political Competition in Uganda,” in: Kastfeit, Niels (ed.), Scriptural Politics: the Bible and the Koran as Political Models in the Middle East and Africa (London, 2003), 139–54.Google Scholar
Vansina, Jan, “Recording the Oral History of the Bakuba,” Journal of African History 1 (1960), 43–53, and 257270.Google Scholar
Vansina, Jan, Oral Tradition (London, 1965).Google Scholar
Waliggo, John M., “Bible and Catechism in Uganda,” in: Kinoti, Hannah W., and Waliggo, John M. (eds.), The Bible in African Christianity (Nairobi, 1997), 178–95.Google Scholar
Webster, J. Bertin, “The High Priest of Scepticism Lost in a Footnoted Fairyland: a Reply to David Henige,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 15 (1982), 476–83.Google Scholar
Wright, Michael, Buganda in the Heroic Age (Nairobi, 1971).Google Scholar