modernity and its aspirants

Modernity and Its Aspirants: Moral Community and Developmental Eutopianism in BugandaAuthor(s): Mikael KarlströmSource: Current Anthropology, Vol. 45, No. 5 (December 2004), pp. 595-619Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for AnthropologicalResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/423974 .Accessed: 15/02/2011 14:44

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C u r r e n t A n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 5, December 2004� 2004 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2004/4505-0002$10.00

Modernity and ItsAspirants

Moral Community andDevelopmental Eutopianism inBuganda1

by Mikael Karlstrom

The recent literature on African modernities, with its emphasison witchcraft and the occult, has provided an important but ar-guably one-sided perspective on popular responses to globaliza-tion and postcolonial politics. This article argues that the dysto-pian visions implicit in the efflorescence of occultism need to bebalanced by closer attention to more optimistic orientations andthe sources upon which they draw. Building upon ethnographicand historical research on Buganda (in Uganda), it focuses onmoral community and its modes of social reproduction as thedynamic obverse of witchcraft. Empirically, it explores the wide-spread sense of moral crisis generated by Uganda’s postcolonialcollapse, the recourse to kingship and rituals of social reproduc-tion as primary loci of moral rehabilitation in the 1990s, and anearlier period of moral crisis in the 1920s that established the en-during patterns of cultural self-conception upon which the recentmoral revivalism has been founded. The emphasis throughout ison the way in which forms and practices of moral communityhave enabled Baganda to sustain an aspirational engagement withtheir changing world against considerable odds. A general case ismade for greater analytical attention to the motive force of mo-rality and moral community in human social life.

m i k a e l k a r l s t r o m is a visiting scholar in African and Afri-can American Studies at the University of Chicago (his mailingaddress: 5200 S. Dorchester, Chicago, IL 60615, U.S.A.[[email protected]]). Born in 1961, he was educated atSwarthmore College (B.A., 1983) and the University of Chicago(M.A., 1991; Ph.D., 1999). His publications include “On the Aes-thetics and Dialogics of Power in the Postcolony” (Africa 73:57–76), “Civil Society and Its Presuppositions: Lessons fromUganda,” in Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Af-rica, edited by J. L. Comaroff and J. Comaroff (Chicago: Univer-sity of Chicago Press, 1999), and “Imagining Democracy: Politi-cal Culture and Democratisation in Buganda” (Africa 66:485–505). He is currently doing research and writing onhistorical consciousness and cultural self-conceptions in Bugandaon a nine-month fellowship from the American Council ofLearned Societies. The present paper was submitted 11 ix 03 andaccepted 20 iii 04.

1. This essay was originally written for a conference entitled “ThePolitics of Social Reproduction in Neoliberal Africa” at the Uni-versity of Chicago in December 2000. I am grateful to John Com-aroff for prodding me toward a better formulation of these ideas,to the journal editor for his helpful advice, to four anonymous re-viewers for their unusually insightful and challenging comments,to the U.S. Department of Education (Fulbright-Hays) and the HarryFrank Guggenheim Foundation for research funding (1991–93,1995), and to many Ugandans for their help and friendship.

In September 1992, as the thirtieth anniversary ofUganda’s independence neared, Kampala suffered awidely publicized spate of child abductions. Here, aselsewhere in Africa, the disappearance of children iscommonly attributed to occult practitioners, but in thisinstance some suspected a different sort of nefariousagency. Rumor had it that Milton Obote—twice Ug-anda’s president and twice deposed—was mastermindingthese abductions to destabilize the country and pave theway for a “third coming.” Reviled by many as the trueagent of the country’s postcolonial implosion, Obote wasevidently a plausible perpetrator of abominations ordi-narily associated with witchcraft. Indeed, 20 years ofmisrule and civil war had made “politics,” in the popularimagination, nearly equivalent to witchcraft in the clas-sic sense of providing the symbolic vehicle throughwhich a community envisions the standardized collec-tive nightmare of its own dissolution (Wilson 1951).

Less than a year after this child abduction panic, onJuly 21, 1993, the installation of the first kabaka (king)of Buganda since Obote’s abolition of Uganda’s old king-doms in 1967 engendered far rosier dreams, at leastamong the country’s largest ethnic group.2 Millions ofBaganda danced through the preceding night in raucous“trans-night” celebrations and gathered around radiosand televisions for the day-long coronation ceremoniesat Naggalabi Hill. In Ganda popular conception, the king-ship had come to embody the antithesis of “politics”—the source and principle of societal reconstruction. Itsrestoration enabled Baganda to hope for the rehabilita-tion of fundamental practices of social reproduction andmoral personhood and thus for a better collective future.

In this article I explore the character and sources ofGanda collective aspirations as a lens on the modernitiesand futurities that Baganda have imagined for them-selves across the twentieth century. My starting point isthe recent resurgence in the study of witchcraft as a per-spective on African responses to postcolonial and glob-alizing modernity. I draw analytical inspiration from thisretheorization of witchcraft, but I also take issue withthe dystopian implications of an excessively narrow fo-cus on occult imaginaries, arguing that modernist aspi-rations and their sociocultural and moral underpinningsdeserve greater attention than they have received.

The study of witchcraft has been the locus of what isperhaps the most significant subdisciplinary renovationin Africanist anthropology of the past decade. Once rel-egated to the back closet of the anthropological projectas a traditionalist anachronism in a modernizing post-colonial subcontinent, witchcraft is now cutting-edge.The primary impetus behind this reinvention has beenthe impulse to forge a new understanding of Africa’s ar-ticulation with global economic forces and postcolonialpolitical forms—with what, in academic shorthand, isusually referred to simply as “modernity” (Comaroff andComaroff 1993, 1999; Geschiere 1997; Moore and San-

2. Buganda was a large precolonial kingdom on the northwest shoreof Lake Victoria; Baganda, its ethnic subjects, currently numbernearly 4 million out of a national population of 25 million.

596 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 5, December 2004

ders 2001). Against the stereotypic representation of Af-rica in the terms of a traditional/modern dichotomy, theAfrican deployment of witchcraft idioms and practiceshas been shown to defy such analytical binarism. Ratherthan an index of stubborn antimodernism, witchcraft hasbeen retheorized as an African “mode of modernity”(MacGaffey 2000:227), a mediating matrix in the conti-nent’s engagement with contemporary political and eco-nomic transformations. What has been gained in the pro-cess is, not least, a new lens on the moral and temporaldimensions of twentieth-century African worlds—ontheir collective nightmares and material fantasies, theirsimultaneous sense of ethical peril and tantalizing butachingly distant goods and riches. Beyond the study ofAfrica, this reexamination of African witchcraft and sor-cery has helped fuel a thoroughgoing reevaluation of thelong-held view of modernity as inherently tending to-ward rationalization and disenchantment and growingattention to the forms and anxieties of magical agencythat seem to feature so prominently in contemporarypopular imaginaries (Meyer and Pels 2003, West and San-ders 2003).

Witchcraft and the occult have, of course, providedonly one of many recent angles of insight into Africanmodernities.3 But the concentrated attention to whichthey have been subject has made them singularly illu-minating while also, I would argue, generating an im-balance in our current understandings. Relying too heav-ily on these phenomena as a lens on African modernitiesrisks imputing to Africans a fundamentally dystopianorientation,4 for what witchcraft seems to crystallize insuch contexts is the deepest nightmares of social dis-ruption, on the one hand, and the most desperate of in-strumental ambitions for wealth and power, on the other.True, magical powers are conceived as morally ambiv-alent in Africa (Geschiere 1997:14; West 2001). Yet theutility of witchcraft and the occult as an idiom of mo-dernity seems to lie overwhelmingly in their capacity toobjectify the perils of illicit power and the antisocialdangers of exploitative accumulation and self-interestedconsumption (Moore and Sanders 2001:15–19; see alsoGeschiere 1997; Comaroff and Comaroff 1999).

Such dystopian anxieties are unquestionably wide-spread in contemporary Africa. Yet most popular imag-inaries, in Africa as elsewhere, contain visions of lightas well as murk, hope as well as fear, aspiration as wellas anxiety. If, as I will argue, a population whose post-colonial expectations have been as violently shattered asthat of Buganda can sustain a generally stoical optimism,we need to understand the sources of that hopefulness.The character of witchcraft itself suggests where thosesources may lie, for if witchcraft, as Geschiere (1997)insists, is generally the dark underbelly of kinship—the

3. Others include popular culture (Larkin 1997), media (Spitulnik1998–99), fashion (Gondola 1999), evangelical Christianity (Meyer1999), modes of urbanity (Ferguson 1999), and political ideology(Donham 1999).4. It also risks reinforcing the dystopian pessimism of much re-cently influential nonanthropological Africanist scholarship (e.g.,Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou 1999, Mbembe 2001; cf. Karlstrom 2003).

force that both generates and feeds upon violations ofthe fundamental norms of kinship solidarity—then kin-ship could be said to anchor the optimistic obverse ofthe occult. More broadly, as the whole corpus of witch-craft studies attests, witchcraft is the toxic negation notonly of kinship and family but of socioeconomic andbiological generativity, of neighborly hospitality, and ofnorms of reciprocity and moral personhood—ultimately,of all forms of moral community and their nodes andmodes of reproduction. Thus, the remedy for the one-sided emphasis on witchcraft and the occult is not, Ithink, to reject the rereading of witchcraft as a lens onAfrican modernity but rather to generalize it, as Werbner(2004) has advocated, to such practices and institutionsof moral community the creative elaboration of whichhas been characterized by van Binsbergen as the orga-nizing framework for “the entire ideological history oftwentieth-century Africa” (1998:885–86).

If witches are modernity’s malcontents—or at least therapaciously destructive objectification of its discon-tents—it is moral community and its modes of repro-duction that most consistently sustain its aspirants.Whereas a world of witchcraft is ultimately dystopian,a world of workable moral community is not so muchutopian, perhaps, as eutopian. “Eutopia,” coined in aforetext to Thomas More’s Utopia, designates a place ofhappiness and order that is not a “no-place” or utopia—that is, not a phantasmic impossibility but a realizableideal. True, the standardized practices through which so-cial reproduction takes place tend to project an idealizedworld of generative and harmonious sociality and moralconduct, often in the face of contrary realities. Yet theyalso palpably produce such relationalities and disposi-tions, if only for the moment. In fact, one of the thingsthey paradigmatically generate is precisely a sense of em-placement—of the social and geographical “topos” ofmoral personhood and collectivity—the very groundsupon which an aspirational futurity can be constructed.As Appadurai (2004) has recently argued, this aspect ofhuman culture—its capacity to sustain and inspire col-lective aspirations—has rarely been given the systematicattention it deserves.

None of this is to deny that modes of moral com-munity and ritual practice can and often do reinforcesocial subordination and generate social exclusion. Therole of such subordination and exclusion has beenforegrounded in the long-dominant “invention” perspec-tive on the categories of tradition, custom, and culturethat are commonly used to classify practices of socialreproduction (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983)—categoriesthat will figure centrally in my analysis. Useful thoughthis perspective has been in problematizing an earliertendency to take assertions of tradition at face value, itsinstrumentalist presuppositions have led toward a re-ductive functionalism and inattention to real culturalcontinuities (Sahlins 1993, Kratz 1993, Spear 2003). Butwhile both positional interests and cultural continuitiesundoubtedly play a role in the formation of reflexive“traditionalism,” neither of them adequately capturesthe underlying motives or specific content of such ide-

karlstrom Modernity and Its Aspirants F 597

ologies. What is crucially at issue is the (re)making ofmoral community under conditions of radical transfor-mation, and it is here that the aspirational edge of cultureis most fundamentally generated. It is by systematicallypursuing this link between collective aspiration and mo-rality—arguably another neglected analytic (Lambek2000, Laidlaw 2002)—that I hope to generate a fruitfulperspective on the tradition/modernity problematic andother issues raised in the burgeoning anthropological lit-erature on “alternative modernities.”

“Modernity” seems to be used in two distinct sensesin much of this literature. As Knauft points out, it des-ignates both an objective “social condition” and a sub-jective “mode of temporality” (2002:6, 32). The formerembraces a broad constellation of economic, political,and cultural processes and institutions such as marketsand commodification, transport and geographical mo-bility, state formation, nationalism, bureaucratization,political liberalization, mass mediation, economic andcultural globalization, and time-space compression.“Modernity” in this sense is an analytical construct, onemuch debated in social theory and historiography. A cen-tral aim of the alternative-modernities literature hasbeen to destabilize the Eurocentric presuppositions thatare built into this conception by demonstrating thatthere is far more variety in the way in which the con-stitutive elements of analytical modernity are configuredand lived than has commonly been grasped. I tend toagree, however, with those who argue that the analyticalconcept of modernity, whether singular or pluralized, isirretrievably flawed—that, having been dislodged fromits socio-evolutionist moorings, it “melts into air” (Com-aroff and Comaroff 1993:xii), enduring mainly as a neb-ulous “sublime” to which contemporary scholarship re-mains ambivalently enthralled (Kelly 2002; see alsoLatour 1993, Piot 2001, Donham 2002, Friedman 2002,Spitulnik 2002). I dispense, therefore, with the usualCook’s tour of analytical approaches to modernity.

My concern is rather with what Knauft refers to as“the force of the modern as an ideology of aspiration”(2002:33), particularly with regard to its linear or direc-tional chronotope5—the conception of a collective tem-poral trajectory from an inferior past to a qualitativelydifferent and superior future, often positing a radical dis-juncture between the two. Since its emergence in theeighteenth century, modernity in this sense has becomea globally hegemonic ideology. And while there havebeen important explorations of its European sources (Blu-menberg 1983 [1974], Koselleck 1985 [1979], Habermas1987 [1985], Bowler 1989) and its institutionalized ex-portation by the colonial state and postcolonial “devel-opment” apparatus (Ludden 1992, Cowen and Shenton1995, Cooper 1997), there has been only sporadic inves-tigation of its myriad local implantations, appropria-tions, elaborations, and contestations (e.g., Dahl and

5. Bakhtin (1981) coined this term to denote the simultaneouslyspatial and temporal schemata governing the protagonist’s char-acteristic itinerary in specific literary genres: see also Zerubavel(2003) on temporal topography.

Rabo 1992). This theme has been an element in the al-ternative-modernities literature, to be sure, but it hasreceived far less attention than modernity in its analyt-ical sense, with which it has often been elided. It is withmodernity as a distinctive temporal ideology that I willbe primarily concerned in this article.

My analysis proceeds in three stages. First I documentthe widespread sense of moral crisis generated byUganda’s postcolonial political debacle and the recourseto ritual forms of social reproduction as the locus ofmoral rehabilitation in the 1990s. Next I explore an ear-lier moral crisis, in the 1920s, which established an en-during pattern of cultural and historical self-conceptionthat informs the recent wave of moral revivalism. FinallyI return to the 1990s to examine the relationship betweenthe desire for moral rehabilitation and popular enthusi-asm for the restoration of the Buganda kingship, seekingto demonstrate that different forms and sources of crisisgenerate different inflections of moral eutopianism.Throughout, I emphasize the way in which moral com-munity and its practices have enabled Baganda to main-tain an aspirational engagement with their changingworld and a capacity to imagine an active and collectiveappropriation of its potentialities.

Postcolonial State Collapse and Moral Crisis

For Baganda, Uganda’s postcolonial disaster lasted 20years, from 1966 to 1986. Economically privileged andpolitically semiautonomous under British colonial rule,Buganda’s leadership balked at incorporation into a po-litical entity within which it was virtually assured oflosing this preeminence. The fragile political coalitionthat gained the kingdom federal status in the independ-ence constitution of 1962 had begun to unravel by 1964,and a conflict between the kingdom authorities and Mil-ton Obote’s government in 1966 led to the military sei-zure of the king’s palace and the subsequent abolition ofall traditional rulers. Obote’s regime became increas-ingly insecure and repressive thereafter, particularly inBuganda, and increasingly reliant on a military whoseloyalty was to the army commander Idi Amin rather thanObote. Amin’s coup in 1971 was greeted with jubilationin Buganda, but when his regime turned viciously pred-atory this region suffered as much as any other. Eightyears later, Amin’s ouster by Tanzanian troops inaugu-rated a period of extreme instability, followed by Obote’s1980 presidential election victory, which was widelyviewed as fraudulent. Thereafter, Obote’s harshly re-pressive approach to governing a refractory Buganda fu-eled support for the insurgent National ResistanceArmy/Movement (NRA/NRM) under Yoweri Musev-eni’s leadership, which won power in 1986 following afive-year armed struggle that cost an estimated 100,000to 500,000 lives in north-central Buganda, mostly at thehands of the increasingly desperate and murderous Ugan-dan army.


moral crisis and social reproduction

Like many other Ugandans, Baganda have experiencedtheir nation’s postcolonial calamity as something morethan a political and economic collapse. They view it per-haps most intensely as a collapse of morality and of thesocial mechanisms that produce moral persons and sus-tain relational networks of solidarity and reciprocity.This response was already prominent at the end ofAmin’s rule, when observers noted a generalized senseof moral crisis (Southall 1980) and documented wide-spread vigilantism and the breakdown of village socialityin rural Buganda (Obbo 1988). Reporting from the capital,Kampala, in the immediate aftermath of the 1986 NRMvictory, Twaddle enumerated a wide range of moral re-vivalisms, creating what he characterized as a climateof “moral utopianism” (1988:314). Behrend (1999) de-scribes a tragically suicidal popular uprising in northernUganda in 1986–87 as a mass movement of collectivemoral expiation and salvation. Kassimir emphasizes thetone of moral alarm emanating from both church andstate at this time, with President Museveni declaring,“There is today a moral crisis . . . which calls for a moralrevolution” and the nation’s Catholic bishops issuing apastoral letter calling for “moral rehabilitation” and stat-ing that Uganda’s greatest tragedy since independencewas “the collapse in the moral standards of our peopleand loss of moral conscience” (quoted in Kassimir 1998:244).

The crux of this moral crisis was the perception of adisastrous deterioration in the socialization of childrenand youth. In the words of one Ugandan political com-mentator, “Our youths have been completely unhingedby the conditions created by our rulers. The traditionalrespect for elders by the youth was the first to be un-dermined and the basic social and moral values of ouryouth have been completely eroded. So abused are ouryouth that in the 1980s the word youth strikes terroramong the people” (Muscat 1984:105). In a general his-tory of the period, a Ugandan historian devoted a sectionto “the deterioration of morality” and “the chaotic con-ditions in which the young generation was brought up”(Mutibwa 1993:122).

Scholarly analyses by Ugandans and non-Ugandansalike tended to ascribe this moral crisis of youth to theendemic insecurity and scarcity of the preceding 20 yearsand the example set by the government and the armyunder Amin and Obote.6 Yet political modeling and prag-matic survival strategies were not the primary causesadduced by the many rural Baganda with whom I dis-cussed these matters in the early 1990s. Instead, theiremphasis was on a more specific consequence of thepostcolonial calamity: the breakdown of Ganda culture.Classified under this heading were, primarily, the prac-tices and institutions that constitute moral communityand reproduce it through the socialization of children

6. By the late 1980s, the AIDS epidemic and the escalating senseof emergency generated by the medical community were undoubt-edly also contributing to a generalized sense of moral panic, at leastin southern Uganda (Bond and Vincent 1997).

and the ritual maintenance of social relations.7 Children,it was said, were no longer being taught discipline, obe-dience, deference, respect for parents and elders, and thepriority of kinship solidarities and neighborly reciproc-ities. Instead of greeting their elders properly—kneeling,with downcast eyes and limp handshakes—they hadtaken up the jauntily informal and egalitarian Swahilijambo. The maintenance of local sociality through hos-pitality and generosity with food was said to have beenabandoned by younger Baganda. Above all, it was themechanisms and modalities of kinship solidarity andcontinuity that were thought to be crumbling. The au-thority of clan leaders was no longer recognized. Peopleno longer attended clan meetings or maintained ties withextended kin, and many no longer even bothered to keeptrack of relations of descent. Parents were no longer nam-ing their children after deceased ancestors, symbolically“resurrecting” them. Most distressing, many perceiveda gradual erosion of the core practice of lineage conti-nuity, the kwabya lumbe ceremony whereby virtuallyevery deceased adult is structurally “replaced” by a lin-eage successor.

The vocabulary in which the crisis of moral commu-nity and social reproduction was discussed in rural Bu-ganda was thus a lexicon of cultural crisis, with the de-sire for moral rehabilitation articulated as an aspirationfor cultural revival. The kwabya lumbe succession cer-emony figures so centrally in these conceptions of cul-ture and moral recovery because of its privileged capacityto project and enact the principles of moral communityand personhood—to ritually materialize a social eutopia.

lineage succession and the reproduction ofmoral community

The kwabya lumbe ceremony effects a restoration ofsocial continuity and moral order in the face of death,much along the lines of Hertz’s classic analysis (1960[1905–6]; also Bloch and Parry 1982). It can take placeanywhere from a few weeks to several years after deathand burial, and the intervening period of mourning ismarked as a state of moral disorder within the immediatefamily through the symbolic dereliction of personalgrooming and hygiene. This is also a period during whichno positive forms of personal transformation or socialreproduction can be celebrated by the bereaved family—no weddings, naming rites, graduation celebrations, orfestivities of any kind. The kwabya lumbe—meaning “todemolish death”—reverses this state of moral disorderand blockage through the installation of a successor (mu-sika) from among the children or, if necessary, collaterallineage juniors of the deceased. Not to be succeeded inthis way is the ultimate dishonor—proof of a squanderedand meaningless life. Failure to perform the kwabyalumbe is also widely believed to pose serious dangers

7. On the importance of understanding local conceptions of “cul-ture” or “tradition” as organized around prototypic content, seeOtto (1992), Kratz (1993), and Foster (1995).


arising from the dissatisfaction of the deceased and thelingering presence of death upon the house and lineage.

Lineage succession is explicitly conceived as a repro-duction of social form. The successor “returns in thefeet” or “in the place” of the deceased and, in the caseof a male household head, takes over a semiparental re-sponsibility for his other children, who are expected toaddress the successor as “father.”8 The ceremony is un-dergone by the successor in tandem with his lubuga—asister ritually designated to serve as his symbolic wife.Following a night of dancing and drumming, the ritualcouple is taken at dawn into the household banana groveby their father’s sister, who symbolically washes themwith plantain leaves, trims their unkempt hair, and de-posits this detritus of moral disorder in the trunks of twoappropriately gendered banana trees. These actions ter-minate the period of mourning and constitute the “dem-olition of death” proper, after which the successor canbe formally installed by a clan officiant. Here, too, he isaccompanied by his lubuga, with respect to whom theinstallation positions him in a relation of gendered com-plementarity and hierarchy: he is given a spear and abeer-drinking gourd, robed in a ceremonial barkcloth,“enthroned” on a chair, and admonished to emulate thevirtues of the deceased, particularly his courage and hos-pitality; she is given a vegetable knife and a basket,seated on a barkcloth on the ground at his feet, and toldto prepare food so that guests may always be properlyfed.

Following this ritual reconstitution of the householdcore, the ceremony broadens to link the successor witha larger kinship network. His relatives introduce them-selves to him, acknowledging his new status as “master”of the minimal lineage and stating their kin relationshipto him, reaffirming a system of relations that had beentemporarily disrupted or suspended. Thereafter, a visitis paid to the family graves in the banana grove, includingthat of the deceased, which are ceremonially tended andcleaned, reaffirming lineage connections along a tem-poral vector.

The final phase of the ceremony reconstitutes a furtheraxis of sociality by reconnecting the household to itsneighbors through a large-scale feast. Neighboringhouseholders bring much of the food for the feast, yetthey are also guests, individually served by the successorhimself in the first fulfillment of the hospitality that isincumbent upon him as the new household head. Indeed,their roles are structurally complementary, for neighborsbring the steamed plantains that constitute the core ofany meal, while the successor provides the meat (pref-erably the deceased’s finest cow) that makes it a feast.The ceremony thus ends by enacting hospitality andfood-based reciprocity as the principles governing the re-lationship between the newly reconstituted lineage unitand its social milieu. Along this axis, the status of thefunerary cycle as the obverse of witchcraft is quite ex-

8. The ceremony is performed for most women as well, but in suchcases it does not reproduce a minimal lineage unit, since her suc-cessor must be a member of her clan, hence not one of her children.

plicit, for nothing is so unerringly diagnostic of malignmagical intent as the failure to attend the funerals andlumbe ceremonies of one’s neighbors.

In an age of anxiety about social reproduction goneawry, succession and the lumbe ceremony constitute apotent nexus for the recuperation and remoralization ofa potentially refractory younger generation. The selec-tion of successors is based, ideally, on personal achieve-ment and moral virtue. The successor should be polite,trustworthy, well-behaved, reliable, considerate, willingto improve, and unfailing in his participation in neigh-borhood weddings, funerals, and other ceremonies.Where adult sons are deemed unworthy, it is commonfor a minor to be chosen—even, in many cases, one whois too young to understand the responsibilities of theoffice. Succession itself is generally thought to exert apositive moral influence on successors, even to the ex-tent of reforming unworthy ones over time.

The lumbe’s role in affirming parental authority andthe obligations incumbent upon youth is evident in thelineage council meetings held during the night beforethe ceremony. These have a pseudo-juridical character,focusing primarily on dispute resolution and adjudica-tion. It is generally parents and elders who bring “cases”against disobedient children and juniors, for example, formarrying or naming their children without consultingtheir parents, failing to attend family ceremonies ormeetings, speaking impolitely to senior kin, or disobey-ing a parent. In such disputes the presumption of guilton the part of juniors is very strong. Proverbially, mukulutayonoona omuto y’ayonoona (only the child misbe-haves, never the parent); even where a parent or elder’saccusations are patently unjustified, the principle of pa-rental authority must be publicly upheld, lest a child bepermitted to shame a parent.

When Baganda are asked about the significance of thelumbe, most resort neither to directly moral argumentsnor to the dangers of failing to “demolish death.” Instead,they explain that it is by attending these ceremonies thatclan members “get to know one another” (kuman-yagana). Indeed, clan members are brought together inlarge numbers by lumbe ceremonies, for which they of-ten travel considerable distances. Thus they serve tomaintain social linkages across space, particularly link-ages between urban and rural populations of the sort thathave proven surprisingly resilient in much of Africa(Gugler 2002). And it is in connection with the lumbeceremony that many Baganda are most likely to meetsuperordinate clan leaders. Kumanyagana thus encodesan ethics of substantive interpersonal relations, in con-trast with the destruction and abstraction of such rela-tions in a polity and economy without grounding inmoral community, for the knowledge generated by clanactivities is a knowledge of the paths of social connec-tions governed by obligatory reciprocity and assistance.It is also a self-knowledge encoded in stylized recitationsof one’s ancestry in a formalistically abridged form backto the founder of the clan—recitations that are rehearsedprimarily at lumbe ceremonies. It is a knowledge of link-ages across time based on anchorage in space: “The


clan,” I was told by a farmer in his sixties, “is where aperson’s ancestor is, and also where his children and de-scendants are. I can tell my children and descendantsthat their father has a place of origin, so they know theyare children with a real meaning.” The failure to acquirethis knowledge gives rise, most dramatically, to the riskof “incestuous” marriage with a member of one’s ownor one’s mother’s clan. Without the forms of socialknowledge that create moral community people areprone to the most abhorrent of immoralities. And notbeing cognizant of one’s past imperils one’s capacity togenerate a collective future through the proper modes ofsocial and biological reproduction.

In sum, the kwabya lumbe ceremony enacts an ide-alized image of the social totality and moral communityalong spatial and temporal axes, constructing kin group,descent, and local community as complementary di-mensions of a moral totality that is reasserted in the faceof death—dimensions that intersect in the moral per-sonhood of the successor. Beyond this, as we shall see,succession and clanship are constitutive elements of Bu-ganda as an imagined ethno-national moral communityheld together by the kingship and capable of an aspira-tional orientation toward the future.

The Colonial History of Moral Community

The kwabya lumbe ceremony is by no means the onlymechanism involved in the production of moral personsand the reproduction of moral community in Buganda.Among the broader range of such mechanisms, however,it is currently the privileged locus of moral and culturalrehabilitation. This role is partially motivated by thespecific content of the ceremony, but it is hardly inev-itable. Other practices (bridewealth, weddings, marriagestrategies, funerals, hospitality, and the ceremonial re-ception of visiting dignitaries) and institutions (schools,churches and mosques, and even traditional healers) playequally important roles in social reproduction and themoralization of youth. The selectivity of this groundingof moral community and personhood reflects a patternof Ganda cultural and historical self-conception thatdates to an earlier period of moral crisis in the 1920s.

the christianization of social reproduction

In the early 1900s, processes of social reproduction andforms of moral community in Buganda were under pres-sure along two axes, one ideological and one socioeco-nomic. The first was generated by missionary Christi-anity, which had established cultural and politicaldominance within 15 years of the arrival of the first An-glican and Catholic missionaries in the late 1870s. Theirsuccess in attracting converts among boys and youngchiefs at the royal capital, which was undergoing a de-stabilizing royal succession in the mid-1880s, led to re-ligious civil wars that radically reconfigured the Gandapolity and set the stage for British colonization in theearly 1890s. Having collaborated with the British, these

young converts prospered under the colonial order,which, under the terms of the Uganda Agreement of1900, turned them into large-scale landowners and gavethem permanent control over the Buganda system of ad-ministrative chiefship. The zeal with which they sup-ported missionary conversion efforts ensured that withina few decades there were virtually no self-professed “pa-gans” left in Buganda and only a marginalized minorityof Muslims.

The Christian converts of this first generation were fer-vent aspirants to modernity as they conceived it. Theyenthusiastically embraced the modernist conception ofprogress, a chronotope whose linear sense of locomotionwas rendered quite literally in the Luganda phrase ku-genda mu maaso, “to go straight forward,” implyingmovement along a straight and traversable path toward avaguely Euro-Christian future. This was a global and un-differentiated conception positing transformation in allareas of social life, from brick houses to monogamy, fromclock time to Christian names, and from automobiles tochurch attendance. The missionaries from whom theyseem to have primarily imbibed it tended to blur the dis-tinction between material and spiritual advancement—adistinction that had at any rate, for Baganda as for manyother Africans, no ontological salience (Low 1960:6; Wal-iggo 1976:247; cf. Landau 1999; MacGaffey 2000).9 It wasarguably this interlacing of spiritual and material ele-ments that made it such an appealingly unified perspec-tive on the radical historical transformation that Bugandawas undergoing, providing the convert chiefs with astrongly moral sense of their own historical role therein.

Each Christian denomination asserted its status as thepreeminent moral and political community to which itsadherents owed allegiance, subordinating and in somerespects negating the solidarities of kinship, clanship,and polity that had set the boundaries of collectivity inprecolonial Buganda. As the primary axis of precolonialpolitical competition, clanship had operated as a prin-ciple of inclusive incorporation by means of the ritualmechanisms and administrative structure of the king-ship. By contrast, the new religious affiliations tendedto promote exclusive allegiances. This had already beenclear in the factional disintegration of the kingdom inthe late 1890s and the inability of Anglicans and Cath-olics to share power after defeating the Muslim party. Itwas further manifest in the subsequent monopolizationof the kingship, which had previously circulated amongthe clans, by the Anglicans, who stigmatized Catholicsand Muslims as less loyal to the king and even as lessfully and authentically Baganda than themselves. A par-ticularly revealing index of this exclusivity lay in the do-main of marriage: whereas clans were systematically in-terwoven through prescriptive exogamy, both churchesrefused to sanction interdenominational wedlock (Taylor1958:178).

9. Christian missionaries may seem unlikely purveyors of modern-ist progressionism, but, as Donham (1999) has shown, the impactof their teachings can be very different from their ideological pos-ture at home.


Moral communities require mechanisms of social re-production, and in their European homelands the Cath-olic and Protestant churches had of course long main-tained a degree of control over life-cycle rites such asbaptism, wedding, and funerals, providing them withcrucial points of ecclesiastical authority over the livesof ordinary Christians. Christian missions in Africa oftensought to reproduce this form of articulation (van Bins-bergen 1998:896), focusing particularly on the suppres-sion of initiation rituals, which served in many Africancontexts as both a collective transition to adulthood anda periodic enactment of polity and cosmology (Ranger1970; Comaroff 1985:151; Beidelman 1982:136; Mills1995). In the absence of such large-scale transformativerituals, missionaries in Buganda were primarily con-cerned with smaller-scale institutions and practices ofsocial reproduction. They tried to stigmatize polygyny,which was widespread, particularly among chiefs. Theyalso tried to suppress or impose ceilings on the paymentof bridewealth, which some viewed as a form of wife-purchase (Waliggo 1976:286; Hansen 1984:268). Theycondemned Ganda naming rites because they employedmagical sanctions to ascertain paternity (Mair 1934:59),and they were vehemently hostile toward the entire se-quence of ceremonies prescribed for twin births becauseof its focus on fertility and sexuality and the central roleof the native deity Mukasa (Mair 1934:50; Waliggo 1976:266). The Anglican mission tried to eliminate the Gandamarriage ceremony as a competitor to the Christian wed-ding (Mair 1940:5). Both missions were hostile towardthe kwabya lumbe succession ceremony, objecting to itscelebratory aspects, sexual symbolism, mixed-genderdancing, beer drinking, and elements of magical agency(Waliggo 1976:268–69; Hansen 1984:280). In place of thesevarious life-cycle ceremonies, missionaries sought to pro-mote Christian alternatives such as baptism, church wed-dings, and funeral rites presided over by clergy.

The progressionist Ganda chiefs not only sought topromote missionary aims in most of these areas but oftenoutdid the missionaries themselves in their zeal formoral reform. They used the legislative powers of thecouncil of chiefs (lukiiko) to criminalize spirit posses-sion, discourage non-Christian forms of marriage, dictateaspects of mortuary and succession practices, and outlawspecific ritual elements with sexual or “heathen” over-tones. Although their real powers of enforcement werequite limited and popular practices changed only in var-iable and piecemeal ways, their radical intent and su-preme confidence are evident in a 1918 law governingmarital and sexual morality, pertaining to which theydeclared that “all of the native customs . . . are herebyabolished” (quoted in Hansen 1984:282).

moral crisis

The wholesale Christianization of Ganda social repro-duction and moral community did not succeed. Yet itwas not the mission-inspired reforms that generated anideological reaction. Rather, it was the unanticipatedconsequences of Buganda’s rapid socioeconomic and po-

litical transformation. Beginning in the late 1910s, therewas a growing sense among the literate elite that Bu-ganda’s progress had stalled and that the fundamentalreason for this lay in a disastrous deterioration of moralstandards, leading many Baganda to misappropriate andmisuse the resources and liberties made available by thenew order in self-interested and socially divisive ways.10

Instead of maximizing the collective benefits of progressand its novelties, individuals were exploiting them tobreak free of the social networks and obligations thatgoverned their conduct. And instead of using them toenhance and advance social relations and secure theirreproduction, they were misusing them in ways that gen-erated new social disjunctures and antagonisms.

The crisis of the 1920s clearly pertained to issues ofmoral community and its reproduction. In letters pub-lished mostly in two vernacular mission periodicals—the Anglican Ebifa mu Buganda and the CatholicMunno—literate Baganda bemoaned the breakdown of arange of relational patterns and norms.11 A new disregardwas reported for established status differences betweenyouth and elders, women and men, and people and chiefs.Chiefs accused commoners of jealousy of their superiorsand a growing unwillingness to recognize their authority.Commoners accused chiefs of being haughty and con-descending and of neglecting collective progress in pur-suit of their own enrichment. Elders accused juniors ofinsubordination and juniors charged elders with conde-scension and contempt. Children were said to be ignor-ing their parents’ authority and parents to be exploitingtheir children. There was general concern about the un-precedented mobility of unmarried women and their sup-posed avarice and sexual immorality, which were blamedfor the alarming spread of venereal diseases.12 Clans weresaid to be fragmenting, with families and lineages pur-suing their own narrow self-interest. The mutual hos-tility of the major religions was increasingly lamented.According to one diagnosis, Buganda was being con-sumed from within by jealousy, a poisoned interactionallogic which was eating away at its “national spirit” likethe nnamuginga insect that devours the core of thesugarcane stalk (Sekanyolya 1921:4). To some it appearedas though all social cooperation were dissolving in a newworld of untrammeled self-interest, where “what is mostimportant . . . is for each person to seek or enjoy his ownpossessions, and that is why everyone now lives in fear”(Kiwobe kya Buganda 1926:240).

In the wide-ranging debates about this mounting moralcrisis many argued that its underlying causes were rapidmonetization and the introduction of private property inland. Both colonial currency and landed property werenew vehicles of value that entered into the mediation of

10. Recent historical studies by Tuck (1997) and Hanson (2003)richly confirm this sense of moral crisis.11. The following discussion summarizes a fuller analysis of de-bates in the vernacular press, ca. 1907–36 (Karlstrom n.d.); I drawalso on three nonmission periodicals: Sekanyolya, Matalisi, andGambuze.12. The role of a perceived epidemic of syphilis in generating moralpanic is explored by Summers (1991) and Tuck (1997).


social relations, subtly but profoundly shifting theirterms and repositioning their participants. They did somore rapidly in Buganda, perhaps, than in most Africancontexts (cf. Guyer 1995; Comaroff and Comaroff 1997:166–217) and in ways that many Baganda did not approveand could not reconcile with the promises of progress.

The rapidity with which money was incorporated intobridewealth and ritual prestations suggests that Baganda,like many other Africans, found it a pragmatically usefulmedium for constructing and reproducing social rela-tions (Mair 1934:150; cf. Bloch 1989, Geschiere 1992).Yet this appropriation was accompanied by widespreadanxiety about the transformations that it seemed to en-tail. Thus, the monetization of bridewealth generatedconcern that parental “greed” was inflating bridewealthrates, thereby preventing young people from marrying,imperiling their sexual morality, and “turning marriageinto a purchase” (Mukasa 1918:30). But money alsotended to liberate children from parental control, a factthat prompted one commentator to envisage a nightmarescenario in which money literally took the place of par-ents: “nowadays the woman (prostitute) denies her par-ents, saying they never gave birth to her, instead ‘Shil-lings are her father and mother’ ” (Ebifa mu Buganda1926). Indeed, women’s relationship to money seemedparticularly ominous to many men, who saw them es-tablishing unprecedented autonomy from patriarchalcontrol through cash-crop cultivation and wage labor.The monetization of the family food supply—the verysubstance of quotidian domestic reproduction—arousedfurther anxieties concerning women’s agricultural laborand domesticity.

Under the 1900 Uganda Agreement, political clientagewas radically reconfigured and monetized by the abrupttransition to private property in land, which inauguratedthe transformation of a fluid and multiply graded polit-ical hierarchy into a dichotomous class system. In theprecolonial kusenga relationship, a commoner was com-mitted to a range of obligations and services in exchangefor use-rights to a plot of land, while retaining the rightto switch allegiance (and residence) to another chief.Since chiefs gained royal favor and promotion by attract-ing followers, the allegiance of commoners was the “cur-rency” of chiefly standing. Thus it was the mobility ofcommoners at one end and the transcendent power ofthe king at the other that maintained the legitimacy ofthis intricately stratified sociopolitical order. Whenchiefs became freehold landowners and the voluntarywork and tribute of their followers was replaced by rents,monetary taxes, and forced labor, kusenga reciprocitieswere rapidly undermined (Hanson 2003:146–49, 165–88).Hence the litany of complaints against chiefs: they nolonger listened to their subjects, they cared only aboutprivate enrichment, and they had usurped the power ofthe king. Tenant-subjects experienced spiraling extrac-tion by landlord-chiefs, while chiefs complained thatrent-paying tenants were no longer deferential and obe-dient subjects.

The transformation of precolonial land rights into pri-vate property also had consequences for kinship relations

and the clan system. The heritability of land promoteda narrowing of succession to the direct line of descent.Particularly distressing was the privatization of clanland, which had previously been vested in clan heads ascustodians for the larger kin group. The dispossession oflower-level clan heads in the land allocation was the cruxof a major political controversy in the 1920s. Meanwhile,those clan officers who were not dispossessed weregranted freehold rights in their estates and were thuslegally entitled to sell them. This gave rise to a remark-able piece of incipient commodification when some clanmembers “thought it a safe precaution to buy from thehead of the clan the piece of land in which their directancestors [were] buried” (Mair 1934:166). The same logiccontributed to a rapid shift toward domestic burial as ameans of staking permanent claim to tenanted land, un-dermining the role of clan heads as the guardians of clanburial grounds and exacerbating fears about the demiseof clanship itself.

custom and moral community

The moral crisis of the 1920s ultimately generated a re-configuration of the progressionist orthodoxy and a reas-sertion of Ganda custom as indispensable to the consti-tution of moral community. Some Baganda began toargue that the assault on custom had been too indis-criminate and that some of the practices that had beenstigmatized by the missionaries should be rehabilitated.This conceptual rehabilitation was facilitated by the se-mantic breadth and flexibility of the category of custom,or mpisa, which covers the area of “conduct,” “behav-ior,” and “habit” and carries no intrinsic temporal orevaluative connotations—there can be new mpisa aswell as old ones, imported mpisa as well as indigenousones, and bad mpisa as well as good ones.13 The reas-sertion of certain historical practices therefore entailedno necessary antagonism toward the new Euro-Christian“customs” embraced by the progressionists. Nonethe-less, it met with various forms of resistance. Some ofthe staunchest establishment progressionists exhorted,in the words that one of them would later use to entitlehis memoirs, “Don’t go back!” (Mukasa 1938). TwoChristian breakaway movements that arose at thistime—the Society of the One Almighty God (or Bama-laki) in the late 1920s and the Balokole (Saved Ones) inthe early 1930s—were more broadly hostile to nativecustom than the missions and vigorously promoted aradicalized Christianity as the solution to the crisis ofmorality and progress (Welbourn 1961, Robins 1975). Bythe late 1930s, however, the revaluation of custom hadwon the day.

Among the practices rehabilitated in this process, thetwo that involved the most significant reversal of an

13. When used without evaluative qualification mpisa carries theimplication of right or proper conduct and seems to be the closestthing in the Luganda language to the English “morality” (cf. Ja-cobson-Widding 1997:58; Paxson 2004:11), although somethingakin to “virtue” is conveyed by the less commonly used bun-tubulamu.


earlier derogation were those pertaining directly to socialreproduction, namely, bridewealth and lineage succes-sion. Like the kwabya lumbe succession ceremony, theritualized negotiation and transfer of bridewealth, whichconstitutes the core of the Ganda marriage contract, isa concentrated locus for the production and reproductionof social and moral relationships. Through a sequence ofgifts to members of the bride’s family, culminating in afeast of “introduction” (kwanjula) and the payment ofbridewealth, the suitor’s relationship with the bride isbroadened to involve her natal kin, who adopt him as a“child of the clan.” This process creates not only a newhousehold, lineage node, and locus of biological repro-duction but also an enduring circuit of hospitality andgift exchange among affines (Mair 1934:137–39).

In the custom debates, the institution of bridewealthwas defended as an antidote to increasing matrimonialinstability, sexual promiscuity, venereal disease, popu-lation decline, and the loss of respect for parental au-thority. The pejorative view of bridewealth as a form ofwife-purchase was rejected on the grounds that its pay-ment was a proof of the suitor’s good intentions and aguarantee against hasty marriages, while its distributionamong the girl’s natal kin served to consolidate lineagesolidarity. In fact, the stigmatization of bridewealth as areduction of social relations to monetary exchange wasreversed. Instead, it was the missionary attack uponbridewealth that was blamed for stripping marriage ofits social context and anchorage, making it an arrange-ment of convenience between two individuals andthereby as fragile as the caprice of those individuals.Bridewealth was thus refigured as a means of preventingthe monetization and individualization of social rela-tions and processes of social reproduction.

The rehabilitation of the kwabya lumbe ceremonywas pursued more carefully and selectively, with sug-gested modifications to make it more palatable to mis-sionaries and devout Christians. Its value was defendedas lying not in the ritual and magical agency or thecelebratory dancing and feasting that attracted mission-ary opprobrium but in “the cooperation of clansmen,meeting and knowing one another, joining together todiscuss the performance of the ceremonies and choosethe successor, and getting to know the head of the clan”(N. K. N. 1923:204–5). As with bridewealth, lumbe wasasserted as a bulwark against social fragmentation andthe monetization of social relations. Crucially, the re-valuation and partial reinvention of the lumbe was alsoa reassertion of the value of clans as loci of moral com-munity and vehicles of social reproduction. Indeed, theprinciple of clanship became at this time a source of newsociopolitical imaginaries and a vector of overt popularopposition to the ruling chiefs (Hanson 2003:203–28).Whereas each clan had, historically, been a subnationallocus of collective solidarity, clanship was now trans-formed into a primary nexus of obligation and entitle-ment uniting all Baganda.

Missionary Christianity had announced itself as a newprinciple of moral community and the ethical guarantorof progress. The moral crisis of the 1920s was therefore

also a crisis of faith in this new institutional locus ofcollective morality. It was exacerbated by the wideningfault lines inherent in the colonial order, for the dis-tinction between spiritual and temporal authority,church and state—which was an ontological and insti-tutional feature of that order—became increasingly ob-vious to Baganda as conflicts emerged over divergent pri-orities (Hansen 1984:234–37, 299). Even missionariesthemselves began to promote the separation of churchand state at this time (Verpoorter 1921; Taylor 1958:71).Denominational rivalry in chiefly appointments alsodamaged the moral authority of the churches. Nonethe-less, the proponents of custom remained committed totheir religious communities. Rather than negating Chris-tianity, the revaluation of custom operated by subtlyscaling back the claims of religion in order to make roomfor custom as a parallel principle of collective morality.Arguing that certain practices were “simply customs ofthe nation and should not be turned into issues of reli-gion” (Mulyazawo 1924:40), its proponents carefully con-structed a conceptual boundary between the categoriesof custom and religion. They even appealed to the Chris-tian Creator as a source of legitimacy for custom and themoral communities in which it was grounded, “sinceGod, who is wiser than all of the wise men, gave everyNation customs” (A. E. K. K. 1929:3). Ganda custom thusgradually achieved parity with religion as a legitimatesource and locus of moral practice.

To be sure, the forms of moral community that werereaffirmed in the revaluation of custom had a stronglypatriarchal and hierarchical character. Yet the discourseof custom was used by both sides of the various sectoralantagonisms of the day: by chiefs against people and peo-ple against chiefs, by parents and elders against childrenand youth and vice versa. Christianity and the discourseof progress, moreover, offered ideological resources oftheir own for the maintenance of patriarchal domesticcontrol and political authority—resources of which theruling elite often availed themselves. What they evi-dently did not provide to the satisfaction of many Ba-ganda was an adequate set of mechanisms for reassertingmoral community and producing moral persons underconditions of rapid and radical transformation. Thus,while positional interests can help to explain some ofthe specific inflections of revalued custom, they cannotaccount for its sudden and widespread appeal. As in theclosely parallel debates over Kikuyu “moral ethnicity”described by Lonsdale (1992) in early colonial Kenya,moral and instrumental motives were inextricably in-tertwined in the rehabilitation of Ganda custom.

from progress to development

Just as the revaluation of custom entailed no antagonismtoward Christianity, neither was it a rejection of the ear-lier embrace of progress. The weakening of social mo-ralities and hierarchies, the antagonism between chiefsand commoners, and the unfettering of individual self-interest were no part of the promise of progress as con-veyed by missionaries and colonizers. Rather, they


emerged through microsocial and quotidian interactionsamong Baganda themselves, arising primarily fromwithin local socialities rather than being imposed fromwithout. Thus, it was not money or progress that wasblamed for the deterioration of morality but the deteri-oration of morality that was said to be stalling Buganda’sprogress and hindering its productive appropriation ofnew resources. The revaluation of custom was thereforepromoted not as an alternative to progress but as a wayof restoring Buganda to the forward path, and it was suc-cessful precisely because it operated within the powerfulidiom of progress rather than against it. In a sense, it canbe said to have operated orthogonally to that idiom, in-sofar as its primary axis of revaluation was not collectivetemporality—the past versus the future—but collectivemorality—counterposing a eutopian model of moralcommunity and its reproduction to patterns of conductperceived as antithetical to the survival of such moralsolidarities. But it did carry temporal entailments, eventhough they were not in the form of nostalgia for thepast. Rather, it produced a subtly reinflected futurity,incorporating significant elements of the indigenous pastalongside the novelties of the present and thus runningimplicitly counter to the disjunctive chronotope of pro-gress as a temporal locomotion that would leave the pastbehind. Ganda conceptions of collective historicity werethus tacitly but significantly reconfigured in the processof revaluing custom.

Explicitly, the proponents of custom were critical onlyof what they considered the dangerously accelerated paceof progress. This, they argued, was the cause of the in-discriminate renunciation of custom and some of thenew social distortions. According to the Association ofClan Heads, petitioning in 1921 for a return of clan es-tates alienated by the Uganda Agreement, “The currentfoundation of our country, since 1900, has caused it togrow only on the side of the few, while the side of themany has gone askew. . . . We have formed this associ-ation not out of a desire to make our country growquickly but to create a good foundation upon which itcan begin to grow slowly” (Lwanga 1954:105–6). Thesame year, a veritable treatise on national progress as-serted that “a nation needs plenty of time to grow, notjust a day or a month or a year, because if it rushes togrow it will soon fall, like one of those fruits that ripensquickly and then rots” (Mulindwa 1921:184). Otherswarned that Buganda was a “young” or “junior” nationin relation to the “senior” or “mature” European ones:“Although we are nowadays looking forward in order toreach out for the new things, and that is what we oughtto be doing, we also ought to go slowly, like a child whois just beginning to walk” (E. K. B. 1926:121).

A deeper dimension of changing historicity is implicitin the tendency to articulate these arguments throughmetaphors of organic growth and maturation instead ofthe idiom of linear locomotion. Although the progres-sionist formula kugenda mu maaso remained superfi-cially hegemonic into the 1930s, substantive discussionsof historical transformation increasingly deployed ku-kula (to grow) and kukuza (to make [something] grow)

as their orienting tropes. This reconceptualization of his-torical temporality as an organic process mobilized com-plex networks of reference and connotation in multipleareas of Ganda cultural practice, ranging from agricultureand human reproduction and maturation to ritual andpolitical authority. Kukula refers primarily to structured,cyclical growth of the kind undergone by both humanbeings and food crops. For humans, kukula is to matureto full adulthood, as differentiated from growing old (ku-kaddiwa). For food crops, it is to grow to productivity,as distinguished from the ripening of the fruit of the crop(kwengera). The cognate noun bukulu has a wide rangeof meanings as applied to people: generational seniority,status superiority, adulthood, age, importance, and great-ness. Kukula and kukuza also had ritual meanings: thefinal sequence of the royal installation rituals, in whicha new king was legitimized by the heads of the mostancient clans, was known as kukula; kukuza was thename for a symbolic or real act of sexual intercourseperformed in association with important ritual occasionsor life events. The verb kukula thus organizes a wholerange of Ganda conceptions of cyclical, generationalgrowth and maturation. This organicist reformulation ofthe modernist chronotope proved to have an enduringsalience, continuing to orient Ganda conceptions of his-torical processes and transformations to the present. To-day, as I discuss below, it is articulated as an idiom of“development” or kukulaakulanya (the causative, re-duplicative form of kukula) in contrast to the locomotive“modernization” promoted by the state.

In rearticulating their sense of historical changethrough this constellation of temporal conceptions, lit-erate Baganda thus formulated a new sense of historicity,a hybrid sociotemporal consciousness deeply influencedby Western models of progress yet partially reappro-priated to processual tropes more deeply grounded intheir own historical imaginary. In the face of unexpectedand unwanted dimensions of the transformative processthey sought ways of securing a moral collectivity as theform of social entity undergoing transformation—lest itdissolve into a fractious, divided, and reciprocally de-structive constellation of antagonistic groups and, worstof all, antisocially self-interested individuals.

Kingship and Moral Community

Like the revaluation of custom in the 1920s, the culturalrevivalism of the 1990s arose in response to a sense ofmoral crisis. It also involved the selective reassertion ofsome of the same practices and institutions of socialreproduction and moral community that were central tothe earlier phase. In part, these similarities reflect a ge-nealogical continuity, for the revaluation of custom es-tablished an enduring discursive configuration that hasoriented Ganda responses to the multiple socioeconomicand political transformations and crises of the twentiethcentury. But discourses are of course reproduced in de-terminate historical contexts, and the historical condi-tions that motivate their deployment also inflect and


reconfigure them. Three features, above all, distinguishthe recent cultural revivalism from the earlier phase: (1)moral rehabilitation was now deeply associated with therestoration of kingship; (2) custom and kingship weresubsumed under the newer classificatory master term,“culture”; and (3) “culture” itself was defined by contrastwith “politics” as its categorial antithesis and nemesis.These features derive, I argue, from the specific historicalcircumstances that generated the postcolonial recourseto culturalism.

royalism and politics

When the Uganda Constitutional Commission solicitedsubmissions toward a draft constitution in 1989–91 theyreceived a flood of contributions from Baganda linkingcultural and moral rehabilitation with the restoration ofkingship. For instance,

Areas where traditional rulers existed should be re-stored because Uganda has degenerated in culturesdue to lack of traditional rulers. (Kibuuka Salongo)

Traditional institutions should be rejuvenated andstrengthened because societal decay has been a re-sult of the breakdown of cultural values and norms.(Vincent Kibuuka)

Traditional Rulers should be restored whereversuch rulers existed [because] they are the culturalbase of their people and source of good customs andconduct. (Abudala Mmindi)14

Grace Ssemakula, the head of the Pangolin clan andpublisher of the leading vernacular newspaper Ngabo,provided me with a fuller version of this linkage between“culture” and kingship in describing the moral sociali-zation of children:

The culture of Baganda is: be obedient . . . to yourelders. You see, that’s how we [raise] our children.. . . Now, without a kabaka the system wasdropped, you see, everybody became master of him-self. And eventually we have riots, people going to[the] bush to fight, everything [becomes] violence.. . . Now I’m optimistic that with the kabaka thereour culture will spring up again.

Without kingship and culture, it seems, there is onlyanarchy, violence, and the destructive pursuit of indi-vidual self-interest: “Everyone became master ofhimself.”

The capacity of the kingship to crystallize aspirationsfor collective moral rehabilitation was founded on itsrelationship to the “cultural” practices and institutionsdiscussed earlier, particularly lineage succession and the

14. Uganda Constitutional Commission archive, translations byUCC staff. During my fieldwork I found that an overwhelmingmajority of rural Baganda were in favor of restoration, while urbanideological commitments were more diverse (Karlstrom 1999:190–96).

clan system. The system of ascending kinship units, cul-minating in the king as ssaabataka, or “head of all clanheads,” was described to me by the manager of a smallcoffee-processing plant in the context of a commentaryon “culture” and the generational transmission of ge-nealogical knowledge:

Each person is born from somewhere, he has his an-cestor, and the ancestors of the ancestors. . . . Andwhenever someone has a child they tell that childthat my father, your ancestor, is so-and-so, and so-and-so, and this is where we originate from and thisorigin of ours is our culture. . . . Each household be-longs to a lineage. The lineage belongs to a minorclan branch. The minor branch belongs to a majorbranch. The branches belong to the clan. The clan. . . has a “roof” head. . . . And above [these] is thessaabataka, the one who is the kabaka. That is whythe Baganda are saying that we want to retain ourculture by having a kabaka. Like the termite moundwith a queen; these are the worker termites, but ifyou remove the queen you destroy everything. Soalso the Baganda and Buganda.

Clanship as moral community is thus an encompassingarchitectonics of nesting solidarities out of which Bu-ganda emerges as a higher-order community of moralcommunities united by the kingship: “The Baganda havea special unity, which is what makes them a maturenation. . . . This unity has relied upon the knot, theumbilicus. This knot is the king, the ssaabataka: thehead of all the clans. If you remove the ssaabataka youmay disperse the clans and the nation, and the peoplewill no longer have a meaning nor a culture” (Jooga1993). As the structural linchpin of this “special unity,”the kingship is a remarkably Durkheimian symbolic ob-jectification and condensation of the moral order—a re-lationship whereby the representation is conceived asconstitutive of that which it represents (Durkheim 1995[1912]): without a king, no clans or lineages, no historyor meaning, no morality or culture. The system of suc-cession in particular is often said to hinge on the king-ship, for it is the clan heads who confirm successors andit is the king who confirms succession to clan headships.It is through such confirmation that he comes to knowhis people, much as people come to know one anotherthrough participation in lumbe ceremonies. Without aking, I was sometimes told, the kwabya lumbe cere-mony would disappear altogether.

Although the kingship was an important element ofGanda sociopolitical and historical self-conceptionthroughout the colonial period, it was of marginal signif-icance to the revaluation of custom in the 1920s and1930s. Only after the institution had been thoroughly de-politicized during the reign of Daudi Chaw (1897–1939)did it begin to take on the role of structural guarantorof custom and social reproduction (Karlstrom 1999:126–37). This ideological reconfiguration involved thegradual subsumption of both custom and kingship intoa new master category of Ganda self-representation:


by’obuwangwa, or “culture.” Whereas custom (mpisa)is a broad and flexible category, by’obuwangwa has astrongly essentializing thrust. Deriving from the verbkuwanga (to insert), by’obuwangwa covers the English“original,” “natural,” “intrinsic,” and “constitutive.” Inits ethno-national application as “Ganda culture,” ittherefore unambiguously invokes the past, suggesting amoment of origin when the constitutive features of thenation were “inserted.” To designate the kingship as“cultural” in this sense is to claim for it a deeply foun-dational status.

In emphasizing the association between kingship andculture in the 1990s, Baganda were also emphatic in theirrejection of any political role for the restored institution.Indeed, the opposition between “culture” and “politics”was fundamental to royalist discourse. Whereas “cul-ture” encoded the eutopian principles of moral com-munity, the dystopian side of the postcolonial Gandamoral imagination had come to be crystallized in thecategory of “politics,” or by’obufuzi (from kufuga, “torule or govern”). The conventional wisdom was that itwas politics that had destroyed the kingship: that KabakaMuteesa had been involuntarily drawn into the politicaljockeying surrounding decolonization and this was whathad made him a lightning rod for the destructive fury ofthe postcolonial state. More generally, politics and po-litical parties (bibiina by’obufuzi) were the epitome ofdivisive and destructive competition for power, by con-trast with the regulated and integrating competitionmade possible by the unifying aegis of the kingship. Likewitchcraft, politics poisoned social relations, pittingneighbor against neighbor and children against parentsand generating a boundless greed for power (Karlstrom1996:494–96). The popular call for the restoration of acultural and nonpolitical kingship was thus a way ofinsisting on its role in anchoring the moral order andeffecting a moral rehabilitation—a role that required pro-tection from the politics that had destroyed it in 1966.

These features of cultural royalism correlate with theway Baganda have experienced the endangerment ofmoral community in the postcolonial period. Whereasthe colonial-era revaluation of custom responded pri-marily to the perceived disintegration of moral com-munity from below (or within) by the unexpected un-fettering of self-interest, postcolonial cultural royalismhas responded to an assault on moral community fromabove (or without) by destructive processes of nationalpolitical competition and the violently predatory post-colonial state. Money and property as vehicles of socialcorrosion have been replaced by the new media of post-colonial power. New associational forms—the politicalparties that began jockeying for power with growing op-portunism and ruthlessness as independence approachedin the 1950s—are one such medium. Another is the votesfor which those parties had sporadically competed in na-tional elections since 1960—an individualizing and re-strictive currency of power toward which Baganda, likeother Africans, have shown considerable ambivalence(Karlstrom 1996). Finally, the violence generated by par-ties and elections in the transition to independence be-

came an endemic feature of state power and social re-lations in the 1970s and 1980s—the most deadly anddestructive of these new media of social agency andpower and the one that was most regularly invoked inthe anathematization of politics.

In short, postcolonial state formation and collapse be-came such a potent source of social disruption and dis-continuity as to overshadow the earlier ones and renderthem virtually irrelevant. Far from worrying about theindividualizing effects of money and private landown-ership, Baganda had by the early 1990s become thor-oughly nostalgic for a stable currency regime and pre-dictable and enforceable property laws. Instead it was“politics”—the synedochic condensation of the destruc-tive postcolonial institutions and media of power—thathad become the primary nemesis of moral communityand kingship its eagerly anticipated savior.

the modernity of kingship

After the National Resistance Movement gained powerin 1986, Baganda royalists found themselves engaged ina debate not unlike the one between the progressionistsand the proponents of custom in the 1920s. They hadhoped that the NRM, which was indebted to widespreadsupport in Buganda for the success of its armed struggleagainst the Obote regime, would willingly allow the res-toration of kingship. But the NRM leaders, most ofwhom were schooled at the University of Dar es Salaamin the heyday of Tanzanian socialism, were committedto a Marxist version of linear modernization theory. Withits teleological understanding of history as a series ofsocioeconomic transitions, this conception carried astrong sense of liberation from the past. Both kingshipand “culture” were on the wrong side of the NRM’s coreconceptual antinomies: progress versus backwardness,modernity versus tradition, science versus superstition,enlightenment versus ignorance, and patriotism versustribalism.

In response to this dismissal of kingship as an anach-ronism, the royalists insisted that they aspired to both“the preservation of [Ganda] culture” and “the evolutionof a modern way of living” (Kasirye-Sebalu 1993).Against the NRM’s locomotive “modernization” theydeployed kukulaakulanya, an organicist chronotope di-rectly descended from the metaphor of growth and mat-uration that emerged in the 1920s. Commonly translatedas “development,” kukulaakulanya is “to make [some-thing] grow and grow,” suggesting an extended devel-opmental process and continuity with earlier forms ofthe entity undergoing change (see also Whyte and Whyte1998). Far from representing a historical regression, thekingship was, according to the historian Ssemakula Ki-wanuka,“the basis of development” in Buganda (quotedin Ngabo, May 20, 1991). Prince Mutebi’s advisory coun-cil argued in its submission to the constitutional com-mission that monarchy “accounts for the relatively highlevel of development in the areas where it existed. . . .Constitutional Traditional Leaders are not merely cere-monial. They inspire and motivate their people to carry


out developmental projects, self-help projects, etc.” (Ssa-basajja Ssabataka’s Supreme Council 1991:7–8). Mutebiand the royalist leadership even promoted the notion ofa “developmental kingship,” with culture among the ar-eas that the king would help develop.15 “The king I amhoping for in these times,” wrote a Luganda-languagenewspaper editor, “is one who develops my culture”(Sekeba 1992).

Contemporary cultural royalism, like the earlier re-valuation of custom, thus articulates an aspirationalmodernism. Today, however, the embrace of “modern-ity” carries a paradoxically nostalgic quality, for the latecolonial and immediate postindependence periods werethe time of Buganda’s greatest prosperity and access tothe benefits associated with participation in the globalorder. In the early 1990s, royalists thus looked to thekingship to help restore a “modernity lost,” to rebuildBuganda’s erstwhile articulation with the global systemof goods and knowledge. For instance, the elderly Mus-lim businessman who hosted me at a rural field site wasconfident of the king’s ability to restore a productive flowof international goods: “The kabaka says that the Eu-ropeans who made an agreement with him [in 1900] havedone him wrong and now the European things are tooexpensive. But he intends to go to other countries andask that [prices] be reduced for his kingdom so they won’tload him down with massive debts.” According to aneighbor, the king would also restore the flow of valuedpersons and international expertise: “When we Bagandahave our kabaka in place it will make a big difference.We will find that people are coming here, like Europeanscoming to stay and bringing us the wisdom of learning.”

Royalists hoped that by reimposing discipline andunity the king would enable Buganda to recover its one-time economic supremacy within Uganda. Kingship andthe practices of social reproduction that it anchors werenot conceived as antithetical either to an articulationwith global flows and markets or to “development” con-ceived partly in terms of economic competitiveness andmarket production. On the contrary, in the royalist imag-inary it was only on the basis of a secure “cultural”foundation that such articulation and developmentcould truly and successfully take place. Yet the royalistdiscourse also emphatically subordinated the archetyp-ically individual motives presupposed by liberal modelsof economic development to collective ones, as when ayoung subcounty chief told me:

We are going to gain a spirit which will help us sothat each person will be able to do good work in hisarea, with strength, and voluntarily, because he willbe working for something he likes, with an unshaka-ble strength, more than when he works without un-derstanding the reason for it. . . . In the old dayspeople were ordered to work and they just workedbecause the ssaabasajja [man of all men (royal hon-orific)] was there and he had spoken. . . . If the king-

15. This conception has been extensively elaborated by the royalistleadership since the kingship was restored (Englebert 2002).

ship is restored . . . they will increase their work inorder to develop Buganda.

Or, as I was told by the newspaper editor cited earlier:

There has been a decline in development becausepeople were not feeling . . . that they still have any-thing sensible that one can do for himself without akabaka. [But] the moment they know that the ka-baka is there, people will start having the strengthto grow coffee or cash crops and food and so on.Then they will have got life with a meaning.

Under conditions of social and moral dissolution, per-sonal gain evidently provides no incentive for diligentlabor, generating only the minimal desire for survivaland subsistence. It is labor driven by collective attach-ment and voluntary obedience to the king that generatesthe motivation and meaning that is necessary to “de-velop Buganda.”

These discourses of economic aspiration expressed alonging for access to global resource flows, to be sure,yet they implied neither a capitulation to liberal marketvalues nor the sorts of anxieties that often seem to fuelwitchcraft accusations. If there was an element of mag-ical agency in fantasies about the king’s developmentalpowers, this was not the invisible magic of either themarket or the occult. Rather, it was the eminently publicenchantment of legitimate authority and its capacity tocrystallize and channel the energies of moral collectivity.

The restoration of the kingship with the coronation ofKabaka Ronald Muwenda Mutebi in July 1993 was a po-tent source of hope for rural Baganda. Despite the dis-astrous damage that the postcolonial nation-state hadwrought, most of them envisioned the restoration as ush-ering in a fruitful rearticulation between Buganda andUganda rather than as a step toward ethno-national se-cession.16 They argued that, far from posing an obstacleto national unity, the return of the kingship would makeBuganda easier to govern and to incorporate into the na-tional polity. “Buganda will be united,” I was told by asmall-scale businessman, and this unity “will facilitate[President] Museveni’s rule. . . . You will have the Ba-ganda collectively.” One village elder predicted that “thereturn of the kingship . . . will enable [Museveni] to rulethe people as one.” And a young farmer vowed that “ifthe kingship is restored we will be like the worker ter-mites returning to the mound, meaning that we willcooperate completely with the government.”

This theory of modular incorporation was articulatedmore fully by Grace Ssemakula, the clan head quotedearlier, who used the analogy of the annual King’s Cupclan soccer tournament to propose a national structureof nesting solidarities (quoted in Ngabo, December 14,1987):

In the clan games we are taught a lesson that every-

16. There were ethno-nationalist and even xenophobic currentswithin Ganda royalism as well, but they remained marginalthroughout the 1990s.


one needs to learn, that even though there are fifty-two clans in Buganda they have been able to uniteand play clan football where some are defeated andstill remain united and friendly. . . . Uganda is alsolike that, with many nations in it, but concern forone’s origins and tribal culture should not make oneforget the unity and friendship of Ugandans, becausebeing divided into many different clans does notmake the Baganda forget to be Baganda, and it evenenables them to feel pride in our Uganda.

Royalists thus sought both to interpose the “cultural”kingship as a mediating link between ordinary Bagandaand the Ugandan state and to reconceptualize the mul-tiethnic Ugandan polity as a moral meta-community—a higher-order transposition of the king-and-clans modelof unity in diversity. Indeed, by allowing the restorationof the kingship the NRM did consolidate a new ideolog-ical allegiance toward the state among Baganda, com-plementing the functional reintegration that they hadengineered by co-opting prominent Baganda politiciansand democratizing local governance since 1986. If thisreconfiguration of the Buganda-Uganda relationship is insome ways precarious, glossing over both structural con-tradictions and potentially destabilizing dimensions ofpopular royalist ideology, it has nonetheless proven sus-tainable over the past decade (Karlstrom 1999:456–61;Englebert 2002). In this sense, the king’s role as the sym-bolic objectification of moral community has been ca-pable of generating a new Ugandan political order that,however imperfect, is arguably eutopian by comparisonwith much of the postcolonial nightmare that came be-fore it.

Conclusion

Across the twentieth century, Baganda sought to con-struct and sustain various modes of moral communityin the face of the disruptive transformations wrought byBuganda’s incorporation into global orders of commerceand polity. Enough of them did so by deploying “cus-tomary” institutions and practices of social reproductionbeginning in the 1920s and, later, the constellation ofrelated conceptions surrounding the “cultural” kingshipto establish these as dominant idioms of collective self-representation and engagement with those transforma-tive processes. On the whole, these idioms seem to haveenabled Baganda to sustain an aspirational dispositiontoward their own political and economic future, even inthe face of radical postcolonial abjection.

The morally grounded futurity of Ganda traditional-ism endows it with a specific sort of “modernity.” It isnot modern simply because self-conscious traditional-ism arises in the vortex of modern capitalism or becauseits prototypic traditions are modern inventions or be-cause of their contemporaneity, adaptability, and refusalto fade away under the onslaught of modern transfor-mations. Rather, it is modern in the sense that, far fromimplying a rejection of the modernist chronotope, it has

operated in aspirational complementarity with it.Whether it should therefore be characterized as an “al-ternative” modernity seems an open question. On theone hand, there are obvious objective differences fromdominant Euro-American temporal modernities, whichare oriented around neither lineage succession andbridewealth nor clanship and monarchy. And while Euro-American conceptions contain both locomotive and or-ganicist versions, the latter carry a rather different pe-numbra of connotations from the Ganda concepts ofkukula and kukulaakulanya. On the other hand, thereis little in either phase of Ganda culturalism that is rem-iniscent of what Chatterjee (1997) characterizes as a self-conscious effort to formulate a non-Western, indige-nously grounded modernity in colonial and postcolonialIndia. What Baganda seem to have generally aspired tois a modernity whose archetypal forms they view as un-ambiguously Western in origin. It is not the telos of theirtransformative experience that has primarily preoccu-pied them but the character of the collective subjectundergoing that change—not the assertion of an alter-native modernity but the maintenance of moral com-munities capable of productively and collectively appro-priating the resources and technologies made availableby a century of colonial and postcolonial incorporationinto the capitalist world order.

Are Baganda unlike other Africans in having sustainedsuch eutopian imaginaries? Similar configurations ofconception and practice can certainly be discerned else-where in Africa.17 In Botswana, the enduring salience ofelderhood among Kalanga anchors, via the ritual instal-lation of patriarchs, an alternative public sphere whosemoral lineaments sustain productive relations of gen-erational hierarchy and cyclicity, even amidst an accel-erating process of political and economic class bifurca-tion (Werbner 2004). In rural Zululand, the circulationof bridewealth cattle and the sacrificial propitiation ofancestors continue to orient hopes for migrant employ-ment and the appropriation of its proceeds to collectivemoral ends against worsening postapartheid odds (White2001). In northern Togo, large-scale initiation ceremo-nies have long harnessed the energies of labor migrationto the reproduction of the household units that consti-tute rural Kabre communities (Piot 1999). In urban Zam-bia, girls’ puberty rites are being revived in a creativeeffort to construct and maintain forms of moral com-munity under conditions of rapid transformation (vanBinsbergen 1998). In Kenya, rural Okiek have incorpo-rated aspects of their changing circumstances into anoverarching sense of temporal continuity through thereconfiguration of initiation rituals (Kratz 1993). In west-ern Cameroon, elaborate wedding ceremonies continueto reproduce moral personhood and collectivity underchanging conditions (Nyamnjoh 2002), and hereditaryrulers have remained central to the way their subjectsconceive and enact the moral virtues of communal life,

17. Recent broad-gauged survey research has found Africans sur-prisingly optimistic despite long-standing economic hardship (Af-robarometer 2004).


deploying titles of nobility and membership in palacesocieties as mechanisms for the domestication and le-gitimation of new sources of wealth and power (Goheen1996, Fisiy and Goheen 1998). Across much of Africa, infact, kings and chiefs are increasingly salient loci of le-gitimate authority, a phenomenon that is not easily re-ducible to either strategic interests or reactionary “tra-ditionalism” (van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal and van Dijk1999, Perrot and Fauvelle-Aymar 2003).18

In this broader context, the contrast with witchcraftand the occult is worth revisiting. Whereas witchcraft isgenerally the idiom of unchecked and invisible power,these various rites and institutions are concerned withconstituting visible and circumscribed, hence legitimate,relations of authority and hierarchy. Whereas witchcraftoften expresses and generates intergenerational antago-nism, they project intergenerational relations of solidar-ity and continuity. Whereas witchcraft displaces and de-personalizes individuals through zombification anddismemberment, they secure a personalized social orderby anchoring people in knowable social and geographicalspace. And whereas the magic of witchcraft serves nar-rowly personal needs and passions, these forms of en-chantment are oriented toward the collective good. Insum, whereas witchcraft is the idiom of a collectivenightmare of power and wealth—as socially divisive, de-structive, secretive, parasitic—these selectively valor-ized practices and institutions of social reproduction an-chor a eutopian moral sociality.

In one sense, this contrast is, of course, a matter ofcomplementarity: the dystopian occult conjures a moralworld by negation, just as eutopian practices can channelthe moral struggle against witchcraft and other forces ofsocial disintegration. Hence, for instance, the ability ofroyals to domesticate dangerous occult forces in westernCameroon (Goheen 1996) or the ontological incompati-bility of kingship and politics in Buganda. My argument,then, is not that some Africans worry about witchcraftwhile others aspire through kingship and life-cycle rites.Yet the difference between a relative emphasis on oneor the other is not insignificant. Thus, surveying thesaturation of Cameroonian politics with witchcraft anx-ieties, Geschiere asks whether occult discourses andpractices are capable of generating new and more con-structive postcolonial political idioms but concludesthat they inspire mainly cynicism and political aliena-tion (1997:201). By contrast, as I have argued, sustainablevehicles of aspirational morality seem to have enabledBaganda to explore new avenues of political integrationwith the Ugandan state despite a disastrous postcolonialexperience.

Issues of morality and moral community have led arather shadowy existence in recent anthropology. Im-portant in the history of the discipline, particularly its

18. Nor are such configurations specific to Africa; for Amazonianand Melanesian examples of the production of a moral futuritythrough the codification of mechanisms of social reproduction as“customary” or “cultural,” see Turner (1991), Donner (1992), andFoster (1995).

Durkheimian strand, they continue to be implicitly andobliquely invoked but are rarely explicitly thematized ortheorized (Howell 1997, Lambek 2000, Laidlaw 2002).Indeed, Durkheim’s one-time disciplinary prominencemay be one reason for this, since his social organicismand one-sided focus on obedience to collective norms ledhim to radically downplay processes of public contes-tation and agentive change in the moral arena—a ten-dency reproduced in much structural-functionalist an-thropology. Such tendencies have rightly been the targetof vigorous critiques since the 1960s. But an unfortunateconsequence seems to be that the dominant schools ofthought in sociocultural anthropology since the demiseof structural-functionalism—structuralist culturalism,practice theory, and the various neo-Marxian, Foucaul-dian, and postmodernist “hermeneutics of suspicion”—have all shied away from issues of morality and moralcommunity. Much is thereby lost to social theory.19

An insistence on the analytical indispensability ofmoral motives and orientations need not imply a nega-tion of the insights into power, ideology, domination, andcontestation that have been central to recent anthro-pology and social theory. I do not deny that ethical sys-tems can and often do encode and reproduce relations ofdomination and the exclusion of moral “others,” but Ido dispute the common assumption that they are re-ducible to such dynamics of domination and exclusion.20

Nor do I deny that principles of moral community canharden into rigid rules that are mechanically and un-thinkingly reproduced. But neither is this the funda-mental character of moral collectivity, and I hope thatmy analysis of Ganda culturalism has demonstrated theimportance of explicit debates and decisions in gener-ating conscious commitments to moral community anddetermining its core elements. Finally, I do not seek toprivilege morality as the basic organizing principle ofhuman society or the preeminent motive for human ac-tion. But I do want to insist that the production andreproduction of moral collectivities and moral person-hood is one of the fundamental frameworks orientinghuman aims and projects and that we therefore need toexpand our analytical matrix to include moral motivesas a core component of social life and human agency.

Several important recent contributions to a renewal ofattention to morality in anthropology and cultural stud-ies have advocated a turn to Aristotelian ethics. Thereis much to be gained from these deployments of the Ar-istotelian conception of moral praxis to counterbalanceDurkheimian collectivism with a focus on consciousmoral agency (Lambek 2000, 2002), to reverse the re-duction of morality to restrictive rules and norms (Eag-

19. There is some irony in this elision, since anthropologists havesimultaneously become acutely attuned to the ethics of their owntheories and practices.20. See Lambek (2000). Lonsdale (1992) provides an empirical dem-onstration of this point in his analysis of Kikuyu “moral ethnicity”as an internal architecture of moral collectivity that precedes theexternal political antagonisms of “tribalism.” As Eagleton (2003)argues, moreover, there can be no emancipatory politics withoutan ethical grounding.


leton 2003), and to replace a focus on the morality ofdiscrete acts with a more holistic ethics of life-conduct(Paxson 2004).21 I would only urge that in our justifiableeagerness to avoid the functionalist traps of Durkhei-mian theory we not lose sight of the importance, along-side the subjective and agentive elements to which anAristotelian perspective seems most attuned, of the col-lective dimensions and reproductive concerns fore-grounded by Durkheim. It is, I would argue, the collec-tive dimension of moral engagement that sustains theaspirational capacity of human culture and life incommon.

Comments

peter geschiereAmsterdam School for Social Science Research,University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, TheNetherlands ([email protected]) 11 vii 04

Karlstrom is right that the abrupt resurgence of “witch-craft” in African anthropology in the 1990s threatens tobecome some sort of overkill. His reminder that even incontinuous crisis situations people keep looking forother registers for moral reflection is certainly welcome.Moreover, he substantiates his argument with a longerhistorical sequence of efforts towards “moral rehabili-tation” in the Ganda area, from the bataka (“clan el-ders”) movement in the 1920s to recent ones focusingon “traditional” kingship.

Karlstrom is careful not to oppose witchcraft to themoralizing discourses he focuses upon in terms of kin-ship and kingship. Towards the end of the article hespeaks, for instance, of “complementarity.” Yet otherpassages could suggest that he somewhat underestimatesthe pervasiveness of witchcraft discourse and its ten-dency to turn up in all sorts of contexts. He rightly em-phasizes that people in Africa reflect on modernity inother terms as well. However, to balance a possible over-emphasis among anthropologists on witchcraft it may beimportant to explore its easy articulations with othernotions such as kin or king.

I am sympathetic to his search for more positive dis-courses; reflections on modernity in terms of witchcrafteasily lead to cynicism among both the people concernedand the anthropologists. But do kin or king really providemore hope? He describes his examples in quite generalterms, yet with some closer ethnography the picture ofmoralizing efforts appealing to custom might be lessrosy. The way the lumbe mourning ritual, with its “pre-sumption of guilt on the part of the juniors,” reaffirmsthe elder’s power may not be considered positive by allconcerned. Often it is precisely when gerontocracy is soforcefully affirmed that elders themselves may be ac-

21. Laidlaw (2002) pursues a similar agenda by deploying Foucault’slate work on sexuality and ethical self-fashioning.

cused of witchcraft (as John Middleton [1960] noted forthe Lugbara nearly 50 years ago). Hylton White’s (2001)study of how sacrificial propitiation of Zulu ancestorsserves to reaffirm the link of urban migrants to the vil-lage also evokes the latter’s ambiguity. Most urbanitesI know in West Africa still want to relate to the villagebut at the same time see it as a millstone around theirnecks. Bridewealth and funeral rituals seem to be subjectto a dazzling proliferation of “neotraditional” inventionswhich have in common that they cost money and thusserve to bleed urbanites, with their perceived riches, dry(see Geschiere 2004, Ashforth 2000).

Moral rehabilitation under the aegis of “customarychiefs” might raise similar problems. In various parts ofCameroon chiefs have been eager to participate in partypolitics, thus undermining their moral authority withtheir subjects (who immediately suspect them of occultpacts with the new elites). In Ghana and elsewhere,chiefs have claimed an indispensable role as brokers fordevelopment projects. However, this inevitably raisesthe issue of the exclusion of “strangers” who may notbe the chief’s subjects but are nonetheless citizens of thesame state. The central role that “autochthony” hascome to play in democratic politics in several Africancountries—as a powerful slogan for excluding “strang-ers” even if they have the same nationality—shows thatattempts to rebuild a “moral community” in terms ofcustom can trigger ever more violent forms of exclusion.

Such doubts certainly do not mean that Karlstrom’salternative efforts towards moral rehabilitation are futileor just cynical. In view of the crisis and Africa’s desperatesituation in the global economy, it is striking that thereare such efforts at all. But it might be wiser not to present“custom” or “kingship” as more moral than and there-fore clear alternatives to witchcraft. I am not so sure thata return to morality, in its old Aristotelian variant, willsave anthropologists from cynicism. Would it not be pos-sible to explore other, as yet unclear ways of moralizing?Witchcraft is also a highly moralizing discourse, albeitof a special kind. It can evoke enormous moral excite-ment among both accusers and accused. But this stronglymoralizing tenor seems to be associated with constantrelativizing. Witchcraft is about good and evil but alsoabout ambiguity: what seems evil can suddenly turn outto provide protection, and what seems good can provedeadly dangerous. The need to understand this discon-certing combination of strongly moral emphasis on good/evil with constant relativizing and contextualizing maybe the main challenge of witchcraft discourse in Africaand elsewhere; it may also be the main reason for therenewed interest in it among anthropologists (especially,and not accidentally, in America). This is a challengethat goes beyond the field of African studies.

Karlstrom’s effort to relativize the link between witch-craft and African perceptions of modernity is most wel-come, but I hesitate to separate witchcraft and effortstowards moral rehabilitation in terms of kin or king. Thechallenge may be rather to understand the mutual artic-ulation of these registers. To bring morality back in, thenotion of subjectivation, mentioned in Karlstrom’s last


note, may be more promising than a return to Aristotle,since it evokes an ongoing process of fusion of differentelements in constant flux (see Bayart 2004).

jon holtzmanDepartment of Anthropology, Western MichiganUniversity, Kalamazoo, MI 49008, U.S.A. ([email protected]) 8 vi 04

Karlstrom’s focus on aspirations is a refreshing counter-balance not only to the arguably disproportionate atten-tion afforded phenomena such as witchcraft in the an-alytical construction of African modernities but also tobroader tensions concerning the role that power anddomination should play in anthropological analysis. Weare right to recognize that power is, ostensibly, every-where, and, given that anthropologists continue to focustheir analyses on peoples that are disproportionately onthe short end of unequal power relations, we are rightto ensure a degree of moral responsibility in makingthese relations transparent in the accounts we produceof their lives. Yet Karlstrom also deftly highlights thedangers that such an emphasis poses. With a singularfocus on power and struggle we may lose sight of im-portant ways in which our subjects understand their ownlived-in realities, while at the same time we risk negatingthe force—or even the existence—of morality itself. Be-yond this important contribution of the article, I willfocus principally on two additional issues: the role of“modernity” in this analysis and the issue of “moralcrisis” in relation to differently positioned Baganda.

With regard to the first of these, I am not convincedthat Karlstrom’s ethnographic exploration of modernityactually withstands the weight of his own well-placedtheoretical critiques of the concept. The version of mo-dernity which he paints for the 1990s is one curiouslylacking in both highly defined modernism (in the senseof a “linear or directional chronotope”) and modern pro-cesses and institutions, though these are present in con-temporary Buganda. Granted, he may not agree with meabout the absence of highly defined modernism, arguingthat it is “modern in the sense that, far from implyinga rejection of the modernist chronotope, it has operatedin aspirational complementarity with it.” The phenom-enon he describes certainly contains some well-digestedelements of the modernist ideologies which have beenpart of Ganda life for over a century; it would be rathersurprising if they did not. The aspirations his informantsexpress—for cheap goods and a unified polity—may owesomething to the modern, but characterizing them assuch strikes me as not very informative. This is not adisagreement with Karlstrom’s conclusions but a sug-gestion that his engagement with a concept whose lim-itations he makes clear does not add much to his in-sightful analysis of the role of moral community inGanda collective aspirations. If, as he suggests, “mo-dernity” is “academic shorthand” for articulation withglobal economic forces and postcolonial political forms,I am skeptical of the extent to which Ghanaian witch-

craft idioms, Kenyan rap music, South African organsnatching, Congolese civil war, and Bagandan royal re-vivalism can fruitfully be encompassed by it. If similarprocesses underlie some aspects of many of these variedphenomena, we are better served by referring with spec-ificity to the particular processes we find meaningfulthan by seeking to articulate them through (or, alter-natively, use them to explicate the reified contours of) aconcept whose salience may be largely illusory, restingprincipally on our own fixations with endlessly trans-mogrifying dichotomies of Otherness: Europe-Africa,modern-tradition, global-local, etc.

Two further issues concern variations among differ-ently positioned Baganda and, relatedly, the question ofmoral crisis. As for the first of these, much of the evi-dence that Karlstrom brings to bear on his subject comesdisproportionately from the Ganda elite. This has im-portant implications for his argument. He has providedample evidence that at least some Baganda expressed aprofound sense of moral crisis at the two historical mo-ments with which the article mainly deals. The problemis that there always seems to be someone who will makethe case for a moral crisis (there has been a moral crisisin America my whole life, if that says anything). Con-sequently, the case for these as periods of genuine moralcrisis can only really be made in juxtaposition to a claimthat the intervening periods of colonialism, brutal dic-tatorship, and civil war were, in contrast, periods of gen-uine moral stability. This does not necessarily obviatehis broader arguments concerning differences in the rhet-oric of modernity in these different periods. It does, how-ever, move us away from a notion of shared crisisgrounded in realities of a somewhat essentialized col-lective Baganda to explore with more specificity how itserved particular Baganda—differing according to theusual menu of class, gender, age, religion, education, andso forth—to employ particular discourses of crisis anddevelopment at particular times or, perhaps, in less in-strumentalist terms, to experience and express moral cri-sis in these terms at these particular times.

francis b . nyamnjohCODESRIA, Avenue Cheikh Anta Diop, X Canal IV,BP 3304, CP 18524, Dakar, Senegal ([email protected]) 29 vi 04

Karlstrom’s argument that “a world of witchcraft is ul-timately dystopian” underestimates the possibilities ofwitchcraft and the ability of individuals and communi-ties to harness it. In the Bamenda Grassfields of Cam-eroon, people distinguish various categories of witch-craft. Witchcraft is both a source of personal andcollective power or powerlessness and a call for “do-mesticated agency” (interdependence and conviviality)against various forms of exploitation, marginalization,inequality, and individualism. Indeed, the fact thatwitchcraft accusations usually occur between kin is in-dicative of how much people cherish solidarity and areready to protect it. Even witches forced to sever links


with kin seek alternatives in their “new” community ofwitches.

For most people in Bum, everyone is born with eitherclairvoyance (seba, two eyes) or innocence (seimok, oneeye). The clairvoyant has the ability to see and do thingsbeyond the capability of the innocent; clairvoyants areclever and innocents shortsighted and sometimes fool-ish. A clairvoyant may be classified as either awung ormsa. Awung includes the wise person (awungadzunga,good awung) and the sorcerer (awungabe, bad awung).Msa is subdivided into sly (wutamsamdzung, good per-son of Msa) and villain (wutamsamba, bad person ofMsa). Sorcerers, seen as jealous and destructive, myste-riously “eat” or deplete their victims. Those victimsmust be kin, as they are expected to prove intimacy andit is dangerous to victimize strangers. Sorcerers can en-hance their clairvoyance with medicine or magic thatprotects them against fellow sorcerers and against divin-ers. While sorcerers seek to sever links with kin, divinersstraddle the worlds of kinship and sorcery.

Msa is also a mysterious world of beauty, abundance,marvels, and infinite possibilities inhabited by verywicked, hostile, and vicious people known as devils (de-blisu). It is visible only to the cunning, who alone canvisit it at any time and conjure it up for the innocent toglimpse. Above all, it is a place in which good and bad,pleasure and pain, utopia and dystopia are intertwined.Its inhabitants are the object of both admiration andenvy, especially for their material wealth. Msa is like amarket. To get what one wants one must bargain andpay for it, but the only currency is the human being, andthose who fail to honour their debts will pay with theirlives.

Msa has a way of luring its victims, first with fantasiesand marvels (utopia) and then with the harsh reality ofexploitation and contradictions (dystopia). As BebenKtteh of Fonfuka put it,

At Msa you are first shown only the good, the fan-tastic, the marvellous. This normally attracts you.Then you are trapped and caught, and you die. It isafter death that you are shown the . . . bad and dis-tasteful aspect of it. . . . After your death, you areenslaved completely: You are ill-treated, overworked,discriminated against. . . . Sometimes its inhabitantsuse you as pillow on their beds, ask you to work ontheir farms, to carry water for them, wash theirdishes, and so on. And you do all this work whentheir own children and they do just nothing.

The personal success that Msa appears to offer is ul-timately illusory, and so is the semblance of the newsolidarity and countercommunity that it creates in in-dividuals by encouraging them to sacrifice kin and tra-ditional alliances. When the chips are down, Msa’s trueethos—greed and callous indifference—comes to thefore, and individuals must make the ultimate sacrifice,giving their own lives. The surest and safest relationshipwith Msa lies not in the permanent severing of links

with kin but in the negotiated belonging that the wiseand the sly epitomize (eutopia).

It is hard to resist seeing Msa as analogous to moderncapitalism, especially as it is experienced on the periph-ery. While local beliefs in Msa predate the transatlanticslave trade and communication between the Grassfieldsand the coastal regions predates colonialism and plan-tation agriculture, current narratives on witchcraft in theGrassfields are heavily coloured by the symbols and as-sociations of capitalism. True, witchcraft cannot be ex-plained by the impact of capitalism alone, but it cannotbe explained without it.

Msa and awung are both statements against endan-gering moral community and against capitalism’s illu-sion of the permanence of personal success. Like capi-talism, when undomesticated they bring power andopportunities only to a few (those with the clairvoyanceand the greed to indulge in them), and their unbridledpursuit enriches self-seeking individuals at the expenseof family and community. At the same time, they bringseemingly eternal cycles of indebtedness, manipulation,zombification, and search for fulfillment. The appetitesthat they bring only grow stronger, and those who yieldto their allure are instantly trapped and ultimately con-sumed—but not before they have consumed their andothers’ sociality. Distinctions between categories ofwitchcraft are precisely an attempt at mitigating the dys-topia of engaging with utopia.

christ ine obboLe Rovdier, Lisle, 24350 Tocane St. Apre, France([email protected]). 29 vi 04

Karlstrom challenges the perspective of the alternative-modernities literature on popular African responses toglobalization and postcolonial politics, which portrayswitchcraft as an African “mode of modernity” aimed atdealing with a “sense of ethical peril and tantalizing butachingly distant goods and riches.” He proposes an ap-proach that acknowledges the capacity of culture to sus-tain and inspire collective aspirations under conditionsof radical transformation, focusing on the way in which“forms and practices of moral community have enabledthe Baganda to sustain an aspirational engagement withthe changing world against considerable odds.” He ex-amines two institutions that have been invoked to pro-duce the moral person and to reproduce a moral com-munity in Buganda: okwabya lumbe ceremonies andkingship.

In the 1980s and 1990s people throughout Ugandacalled for fundamental moral rehabilitation and aspiredto economic and political rehabilitation. In the 1990sethnic groups orchestrated demands for a return ofebyaffe (our things), autonomous ethnic rights. Tradi-tional rulers, abolished in 1966, became the rallyingpoints of discourses on cultural pride and development.The NRM government regarded this as sectarianism.Groups devised creative strategies to handle this real-politik hot potato. The established system of elected


leaders meant that traditional rulers could be restoredonly as ceremonial figures. Baganda monarchists wereforced to accommodate the prevailing political ideologywith the understanding that the restored leaders wouldbe apolitical; they would not have rejected a politicalrole for the king if it had been an option.

Karlstrom understates the role of kingship as the struc-tural guarantor of custom and social reproduction beforethe 1930s. The king was ssabataaka (owner of all theland) and ssabasajja (head of all men [clans vied witheach to provide him wives]) and the final arbiter on lin-eage succession and clan land disputes. The essential-izing thrust that Karlstrom notes in eboybuwangwa (cul-ture) is due to the circumstances under which the firstking, Kintu, united the aboriginal clans to fight politicaltyranny and introduced animal husbandry and crop cul-tivation. Death rituals were from the beginning impor-tant because the king came with a brother called“death.” The rallying point for monarchists in the 1990swas that “the grandchildren of Kintu will never perish”(abaana ba Kintu tebaligwawo). Everyone is a direct de-scendant of Kintu the culture-bearer.

Although Karlstrom gives by’obuwangwa historicalprimacy over mpisa, empisa—observing the customs ofsocial decency—is what makes a moral person, and eby-obuwanga is the sum of all the observances that distin-guish the Baganda from other groups. Empisa groundsthe prescriptions that constitute ebyobuwangwa. Socialdiscourses commonly insert culture at the beginning oftime; there must be a good reason for assuming thatebyobuwangwa derives from the verb kuwanga (to in-sert) when the word has other commonly accepted mean-ings (to insert a door or a handle into a hoe mortise, treatbadly, injure). What about gwanga (nation, society, orgroup)? Obuwangwa is the inherent nature that distin-guishes societies (mawanga). Thus a native is munag-wanga, a foreigner, munamawanga, and their culturalproduction byabuwangwa.

Karlstrom stresses that the restoration of kingship “en-abled Baganda to hope for the rehabilitation of funda-mental practices of social reproduction and moral per-sonhood and thus for a better collective future.” Heignores other morally challenging cultural practices be-cause he is writing against occult discourses. However,occult practices and beliefs are part of the mosaic of Ki-ganda modernity. Consider, for example, the most fearedillnesses, mayembe (speaking horns), which are causedby malevolent spirits sent voluntarily or involuntarilyby the envious or the wronged. A common topic of con-versation is the nightmares associated with mayembe.A listener’s letter on Radio Uganda in May 1992 vividlyarticulated the concern over the proliferation of may-embe, which apparently “multiply [like germs] when theowners do not take care of them [i.e., store them properlyand offer animal sacrifices]. The mayembe can randomlyattack anyone deemed by their owner to be rich or suc-cessful. The afflicted persons either die or survive im-poverished by the cost of exorcism.” The symptoms in-clude fever, wasting, delirium, or death. Doors beingcrashed by invisible Land Rovers or heavy stones feature

commonly in patient testimonials. Victims are invisiblyslapped and pushed around until they cannot eat, walk,or even talk coherently. In terms of economic develop-ment and modernization, mayembe explain both afflu-ence and poverty. They are acquired to generate andmaintain wealth and success; they are hired to attackcompetitors with better businesses, jobs, gardens, andmarriages. Constant fears of mayembe and poisoning donot stop people from striving for success. The concernin the letter quoted above is the moral culpability ofritually neglectful mayembe owners who endanger un-suspecting community members. Biomedically, may-embe are undiagnosable. They are treated by specialistdiviners with powerful mayembe. Divination is a prof-itable profession. Although mayembe may be named af-ter gods or natural phenomena, the diviners who givetheir mayembe princely names are regarded as the mosteffective, and they charge dearly.

susan and michael whyteInstitute of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen,Frederiksholmskanal 4, DK-1220 Copenhagen K,Denmark ([email protected]).9 vii 04

Karlstrom’s emphasis on positive visions of modernityand morality in African societies is welcome. Uganda isan excellent case in point for his argument that eutopianideals of development have far greater importance as mo-tive forces than the dystopian images of the occult thathave received so much attention in recent Africanistscholarship. No one who lives or has worked in Ugandacan doubt that development, progress, and moderniza-tion are aspirations that must be taken as seriously byacademics as they are by millions of Ugandans. Karl-strom brings to this project a deep knowledge of Buganda,where he did fieldwork in 1991–93, and a fascinationwith the restoration of the Ganda kingship, which oc-curred at that time. For those of us who have worked inother parts of Uganda, his analyses are important becauseBuganda has always been seen as the center of devel-opment for the country. As one of our Banyole friendsin eastern Uganda confided in 1970: “We hate the Ba-ganda because they are more civilized than anyone else.”

Karlstrom’s argument is based on the assertion that asense of moral crisis pervading everyday life and rela-tionships finds resolution in Ganda royalism. The king-ship, he says, is fundamental to the reproduction ofmoral community through ceremonies that enact“proper” kinship. The demonstration of this link be-tween the kingship and kinship is not unfolded in detail,but we leave that problem of evidence aside. The articleraises a series of questions that we find valuable, eventhough Karlstrom does not answer them all.

What kinds of places are “-topias”? As a territory, Bu-ganda has long been an area shared with non-Baganda.As a political space it is filled by ethnic Baganda and bymany ethnic “others” with diverse political goals andidentifications. This varied population is divided by


class, age, gender, and education; there are Muslims,Catholics, and Protestants, and each faith is further di-vided into specific religious communities, often with dis-tinct political agendas. As political space it is home toUganda’s capital city, major industrial areas, and an ex-tensive agricultural upland. Yet Karlstrom’s eutopia gen-erates a “sense of emplacement” in terms of an essen-tialized ethnicity that goes unchallenged by difference.If a eutopia is not a “no-place” but a “realizable ideal,”this diversity deserves discussion.

What is a moral community? Karlstrom presents uswith a Ganda morality framed by patriarchy, hierarchy,order, and reciprocity and largely abstracted from partic-ular situations and positions. The moral community isgenerated by prescriptive practices such as olumbe cer-emonies. Yet moral community need not be defined byagreement and dominant discourse. It can be seen as anarena in which discussions and debates about moralityoccur and various kinds of moral arguments can be made.It can be the field in which actors have to juggle differentmoral considerations that are sometimes incongruent.For example, the “development” of an individual, a fam-ily, and a wider unit may be contradictory at some points(Whyte and Whyte 1998). However, such a line of anal-ysis would require Karlstrom to specify situations, in-terests, and positions.

What is historical context? Karlstrom points out that“discourses are reproduced in determinate historicalcontexts.” In our view, contexts are chosen by analystsfor their relevance to a particular understanding, but thechoice should not ignore the macro processes that aregenerally recognized to structure the world under inves-tigation. AIDS and the development industry in Ugandaare examples of such historical contexts. Karlstrom doesnot relate olumbe ceremonies and the need for moralrehabilitation to the AIDS epidemic, which is mentionedonly briefly in a footnote. Yet increasing mortalitythroughout the 1990s has meant that funerals and ol-umbe ceremonies have been restructured and simplifiedand that “patriarchal” gender and family relationshipshave been challenged (Sabina-Zziwa 1999). The efflores-cence of the development industry in Uganda from thelate 1980s has been extraordinary: donor-supported ini-tiatives, NGOs, and efforts by elites to bring develop-ment projects to their home areas provide an unexploredcontext for development eutopianism.

In what sense can culture be opposed to politics?Karlstrom argues that what characterizes the presentphase of cultural revivalism in Buganda is that “’culture’itself was defined by contrast with ’politics’ as its ca-tegorial antithesis and nemesis.” Where politics wereseen as negative, “dystopian,” culture in the form of roy-alism gave people a sense of aspiration. Karlstrom assertsthe opposition without explicitly assessing it. What hedoes not mention is the continuing constitutional debateabout “Federo” (Federalism), a form of political organi-zation that Baganda royalists strongly support and theNRM government has rejected (Ssemwogerere et al.2001). Here the issue is political and economic power,and the debate is as hot today as it was in 1992. It is our

view that in any given case, the relation between “cul-ture” and politics is a matter for contextualized and sit-uated empirical investigation. Claims of their disjunc-ture should be examined, not accepted at face value.

Reply

mikael karlstromChicago, Ill., U.S.A. 12 viii 04

Most of these comments are primarily concerned eitherwith my perspective on witchcraft or with the politicaland instrumental dimensions of Ganda royalism and cul-turalism. I begin with the latter, about which I havewritten elsewhere in considerable detail.1

The Whytes call attention to the political agenda ofthe royal leadership at Mengo, particularly its long-standing demand for administrative autonomy or federo(federal status) for Buganda, in cautioning me againsttaking the opposition between culture and politics atface value. While I agree with their point of caution, Iwould warn against conflating the analytical or insti-tutional sense of “politics” with the local one and theMengo leadership with its rural royalists. One of myintentions has precisely been to get beyond the face valueof the popular royalist culture/politics opposition byshowing that by’obuwangwa and by’obufuzi, despite ob-vious areas of congruence with the words that are com-monly used as their English equivalents, carve out a dis-tinct ontological space and operate as much on a moralplane as on an institutional one. At the risk of oversim-plifying, by’obuwangwa could be translated as “consti-tutive elements [of a nation/people]2 and by’obufuzi as“divisive and destructive competition for power.” WhileMengo’s federo demands are obviously political from ananalytical institutional perspective, its rural constitu-ency may not classify them as by’obufuzi unless theyare pursued in divisive ways. Assessing the truth valueof the royalist culture/politics opposition thus seems tome less illuminating than trying to understand its con-ceptual logic and cultural and historical sources—whichwere a central focus of my paper—and exploring its (an-alytically and institutionally) political ramifications—which were not.

The restoration of the kingship in 1993 is a good placeto start. It was, as Obbo rightly emphasizes, a patentlypolitical event: the NRM used it to secure crucial elec-toral support in Buganda, and the leaders of the royalistpressure group had an obvious instrumental interest in

1. All of my previous publications are concerned with these issues,as is much of my dissertation (Karlstrom 1999:chaps. 1, 3–4, 7–8).2. The thrust of Obbo’s objection to my derivation ofby’obuwangwa from kuwanga, which is both congruent with theconnotations of the term and has been confirmed by a Ugandanlinguist, is unclear to me; her attribution of original causality tothe actions of an ancestral king, Kintu, whom the historical schol-arship unanimously regards as mythological is puzzling.


restoring an institution whose leading offices they hopedto occupy (although I am in no hurry to discount theirmoral motives). Obbo is also right that their advocacyof a cultural and nonpolitical kingship was calculated(at least in part) to reassure a skeptical NRM governmentof their benign intentions. But do these political aimsand strategies discredit my analysis of the moral sourcesof culturalist royalism, as Obbo implies? Only if we as-sume that the broad support among Baganda for a king-ship segregated from by’obufuzi was the product of ide-ological manipulation by the royalist leadership. Giventhe solidity of this popular view and the modest re-sources and organizational capacity of the prerestorationroyalist camp, this assumption has a tail-wagging-the-dog sort of implausibility. Instead, I would argue that theroyalist leaders adopted a conveniently double-edged dis-cursive strategy, sending two very different messages totheir Baganda supporters and government interlocutorsby using a single set of terms. This strategy succeededin getting the kingship restored, but double-edged swordsare notoriously hazardous. This one left Mengo hemmedin by a constitutional amendment barring “traditionalrulers” from political activities on one side and by itsrural constituency’s aversion to by’obufuzi on the other.Thus, when frustration over the failure to win federo inthe 1995 constitution led some members of the Mengoleadership to signal that the king favored the pro-mul-tiparty opposition in the 1996 presidential election, theynot only risked legal consequences but failed to gain amajority of votes for the opposition candidate in even asingle county of Buganda. While popular royalism hasbolstered some aspirations that are clearly political inthe analytical and institutional sense, its governing con-ceptual opposition between by’obuwangwa and by’-obufuzi has thus also helped to inhibit confrontationaltendencies at Mengo. There are unquestionably thosewho benefit politically from popular royalism, but un-derstanding the extent and limits of their ability to doso requires the sort of analysis of its sources and char-acter that I have tried to provide.

Virtually all of the commentators press me to explorethe relevance of positional oppositions and interests toGanda royalism and culturalism. Fair enough, since Iinsisted on the compatibility of moral and political-in-strumental analysis. (Of course, I could also point outthat, as Holtzman intimates, their eagerness to pose suchquestions and relative lack of interest in my call for an-alytical attention to moral motives provides inadvertentevidence for my general thesis about current academicpredispositions.) I had hoped that my analysis of the re-habilitation of custom in the 1920s would precisely pro-vide an illustration of moral community as, in the Why-tes’ phrase, “an arena in which discussions and debatesabout morality occur and various kinds of moral argu-ments can be made”—even, indeed, of the capacity ofsuch discussions and debates to shift the very principlesin terms of which moral community is conceived. In the1990s I found a remarkably solid consensus around thegeneral issues of moral crisis and kingship in rural Bu-ganda, but there were certainly positionally differenti-

ated inflections within it.3 The most ardent rural roy-alists were generally older men who, having experiencedthe institution before its demise (and being men in apatriarchal society), felt authorized to articulate its vir-tues to those who had not. Within the shared discoursesof moral rehabilitation they tended to emphasize disci-pline and hierarchy, whereas those under forty, who wereoften more tentative supporters of the restoration, weremore likely to focus on reciprocal obligations and soli-darities. While the coexistence of such potentially con-tradictory understandings can indeed lead to situationalconflicts—a notably public one flared up in 1995 overthe degree of deference that politically prominentwomen should show the king—it is also arguably crucialto the broad appeal that this sociocultural ontology hasexerted. What I have been arguing against is not the ex-istence of such positional differences but only the com-mon assumption that they are ultimate causes.

The issues of autochthonism and ethnic coexistenceraised by Geschiere and the Whytes are of great concern.The Whytes are right to note the literally spatial dimen-sion of Ganda eutopianism, for the geographical territoryof Buganda contains not only Uganda’s ethnically diversecapital but several areas incorporated into the kingdomonly in the 1890s and a large immigrant population thatmostly arrived as laborers during the colonial period. Thelatter, above all, risk political marginalization under fed-ero as currently envisaged by the royalist leadership,which involves only a limited democratization of theBuganda parliament.4 The ownership of land in Bugandaby non-Baganda is a perennially inflammatory issue, andnon-Baganda have been subjected to horrifyingly casualviolence in times of state collapse (Obbo 1988:211–12).But while autochthonism is a real danger, it is not in-evitable. Just as I advocate attention to the obverse ofwitchcraft, I would urge mindfulness of the obverse ofethnic chauvinism. Indeed, Ganda cultural self-concep-tion contains a distinctly incorporative strand: “Bu-ganda, since its inception 700 years ago,” says the primeminister, Joseph Ssemwogerere, in an interview pub-lished as I was writing this response, “has always wel-comed, and will continue to welcome with open armsall other people” (The Monitor, August 4, 2004, Internetedition). Indeed, the precolonial kingdom was an expan-sive ethno-polity with established mechanisms for thepeaceful incorporation of conquered populations. Duringthe colonial period, alongside their hauteur toward otherAfricans, Baganda were remarkably amenable to rapidassimilation by immigrants. When rival anti-Obote rebelgroups sprang up in Buganda in the 1980s it was not theBuganda-identified Uganda Freedom Movement but thenon-Baganda-led NRM that gained widespread support.Attempts to arouse ethnic hostility toward the NRM inthe 1996 presidential elections fell flat, and some of the

3. Holtzman suggests that my evidence is biased toward elite views,but while I may have paid insufficient attention to the socioeco-nomic distribution of those who are quoted here, my data containsimilar formulations from people at all levels.4. This has proven the biggest sticking point in the currently (andvituperatively) stalled federo negotiations.


rural voters I interviewed found them offensive in lightof their relations with non-Baganda neighbors and rela-tives. Thus, while Ganda culturalism is certainly sus-ceptible to escalating autochthonism—a kind of secularwitchcraft hysteria—there are also grounds for a moreinclusive elaboration of moral eutopianism.

Those who express reservations about my perspectiveon witchcraft seem most uneasy with my characteriza-tion of it as dystopian, although Geschiere acknowledgesthe cynicism generated by “reflections on modernity interms of witchcraft” and there is a distinctly dystopianring to Obbo’s description of mayembe multiplying “likegerms.”5 The contrast that I draw between the dystopi-anism of witchcraft and the eutopianism of custom andkingship is not a matter of morality per se. Anxietiesabout witchcraft proliferation are closely akin to the anx-ieties about deficient personal morality and its conse-quences that drove the rehabilitation of custom in the1920s and the consolidation of culturalist royalism inthe 1990s. But these responses to moral crisis do seemto produce divergent outcomes. Witchcraft anxieties typ-ically generate either a defensive resort to the same oc-cult forces, engendering a vicious cycle, or the perse-cution and expulsion of suspects. In Buganda, at least,discourses of custom and kingship have been more cen-trally oriented toward moral rehabilitation and collectiveresponsibility than toward individual culpability and ret-ribution. The contrast should not be overdrawn: thereare forms of witch finding capable of reintegrating sus-pected witches, and during the political crises of the latecolonial period an inflamed Ganda royalism incited theviolent scapegoating of “traitors.” But there remains anirreducible difference between these modes of collectiveobjectification: whereas witchcraft beliefs objectify realor imagined threats to moral community, what customand kingship objectify is moral community itself. Thismay be one way of accounting for the dystopian tenden-cies of the one and the eutopian potential of the other.6

“Do kin and king really provide more hope?” asks Ges-chiere. Subjectively, in Buganda I think they irrefutablydo, warts and all: however beleaguered individuals may

5. Obbo’s concern is that I deny occult practices and beliefs a placein “the mosaic of [Ganda] modernity.” While I do not deny theirsignificance, neither do I think they are nearly as central to theway contemporary Baganda conceive and enact their relationshipto “modern” forces and institutions as the nexus of culture andkingship discussed in my paper.6. There is a paradox about this aspect of witchcraft that I do notclaim to be able to resolve: while magical forces are conceived asmorally ambiguous and amenable to both constructive and destruc-tive uses, the mobilization of beliefs about such forces in responseto “modern” political and economic phenomena invariably seemsto generate anxiety-ridden visions of rapacity and destruction. Isometimes suspect that this problem is an artifact of analyticalunclarity, insofar as we tend to apply to term “witchcraft” ratherindiscriminately to a broad range of powers and agents. In Buganda,at least, witches (balogo) are categorically evil and spirit mediumsor diviners (basamize) are presumptively not. If they deploy someof the same powerful but dangerous forces, this does not makeeither them or the forces morally ambiguous, any more than suchambiguity attaches to the use of guns by murderers and UNpeacekeepers.

feel by the particular configuration of kinship and othersocial obligations in which they are enmeshed, mostwould rather try to reform them than abandon them,because it is here that the meaning of individual lives isanchored. Objectively, there are certainly complicationsand dangers of the sort emphasized by Geschiere andothers, and neither kinship nor kingship is going to re-verse Africa’s political and economic deterioration in theabsence of national and continental political reform andglobal political will. But without institutions that pro-duce moral persons and crystallize collective aspirations,how can any society survive the sort of trauma thatUgandans, like many other Africans, have endured—or,more generally, the insatiably instrumentalizing eco-nomic engine of capitalism? Herein lies a deeper truthof Ganda culturalism.

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