An effort to decolonise knowledge in Uganda has to begin with fundamental premises regarding political power. By assuming and looking for dominating power, people have made invisible a kind of power that is unlocked by a group, a ‘power with’ instead of ‘power over’. To see this power, we have to recognise and remove multiple frames that organise our thought – not only colonial, but also Eurocentric and patriarchal – which imply that leading is active and being led is passive. We have to infuse followership with meaning. Political accountability built on assent looks different from that built on dissent. Once we have recognised that colonised knowledge imposes on Uganda a political philosophy premised on conflict, it is imperative to develop a methodology for actually decolonising knowledge. We have to read carefully, interrogate evidence, and see change that colonial categories make invisible. Recognising assent as a potent political strategy reveals hitherto unacknowledged intentions and aspirations in the key events of the 1940s, allows a fuller interpretation of the archival record of the late colonial period, and undermines the myth of Buganda exceptionalism.

Looking closely at the long history of societies in eastern Africa, there is a logic of collective endeavour, of the power of participation, which begins with our earliest opportunities to observe, and continues – in changing forms – over time. In ancient eastern Africa, being ruled did not mean quietly accepting and obeying whatever powerful people decreed, and it did not mean participation for narrow, instrumental ends. Using the sources that allow historians to look into the deep African past, we can see a set of strategies that the peoples who now live in Uganda used to create functional polities over a great time depth. People sought to create calm, harmonious good government through at least three strategies. They actively demonstrated assent through being present in gatherings which constituted and affirmed the polity, they contributed to the hearing of cases and decision making through speaking in councils and in the hearing of cases, and they helped to compose groups which combined diverse elements through giving valuable gifts. These strategies are visible in oral traditions regarding the emergence of kingdoms around 500 years ago, and in peoples’ memories of how they responded to kings who ruled badly.

Introduction

A new form of chiefship, the ekitongole, emerged in the Buganda kingdom in the eighteenth century. An ekitongole (pl. ebitongole) was a collection of people under a chief organised to do a particular work on a particular piece of land. While older chiefships bore the name of their territory or a name which asserted an ancient service of the chief to the monarch, the names of ebitongole announced their purpose. The Ekikinakulya, for example, was created and named ‘for the purpose of things to eat’, and Ekibukula Mabira, ‘for the purpose of opening up of the forests’, was created to supply hunters who were needed to drive away elephants and buffaloes that were attacking people. Kabakas (kings) created the first ebitongole, but chiefs who grew wealthy through trade created their own ebitongole in the late nineteenth century.

The implications of the emergence of a new form of chiefship tied particularly to production raise fascinating issues which have not yet been fully explored by historians of Buganda. This essay argues that ebitongole chiefship became a mechanism for organising the labour of war captives, and that this incorporation of war captives in ebitongole profoundly destabilised the Buganda kingdom.

This interpretation challenges well-accepted habits of thought about Buganda. It suggests an alternative to the idea that ebitongole chiefships were part of a consolidation of royal power, the making of a ‘modernising bureaucracy’, in which royal power replaced clan authority. Although historians M.S.M. Kiwanuka, John Rowe and Michael Twaddle have all noted that this concept oversimplifies the relationship of kings, clans and chiefs, the idea of the modernising Baganda continues to appear in scholarly works – most recently as ‘defensive modernisers’ in Philip Curtin's study of imperialism. The increasing power of kings to allocate land in chiefships does not tell the whole story of ebitongole, however. This emerging institution can also be understood as an attempt to institutionalise enslavement which contributed to increasing social violence and the collapse of patterns of reciprocal obligation that had previously drawn the polity together. The underlying premise of my argument is that the masses of captive people brought into Buganda during its wars of expansion represented a significant challenge to the polity; they caused a crisis in the ordering of the kingdom, and led to a drastic decline in the status of ordinary Baganda, especially women.