Myth, Ritual, and Kingship in Buganda

Myth, Ritual, and Kingship in Buganda
Author: Benjamin C. Ray
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 272
Release: 1991
Genre: History
ISBN:

Buganda was the most prominent of the four traditional Bantu kingdoms of Uganda, which ceased to exist when the country was declared a Republic in 1967. The Kabakaship (kingship), the central institution of Buganda, was saturated with rituals and mythic images. Based on fieldwork and using extensive Luganda-language source material, this book describes and interprets the myths, rituals, shrines, and sacred regalia of the kingship within the changing contexts of the precolonial, colonial, and post-independence eras. Interpreting the Kabakaship as the symbolic center of the precolonial kingdom, this book examines James G. Frazer's theory of divine kingship, Buganda's creation myth, traditions about the origins of the kingship, regicide, royal ancestor shrines, and theories about the connection between Buganda and Ancient Egypt.

Kingship and State

Kingship and State
Author: Christopher Wrigley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2002-05-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521894357

The precolonial kingdom of Buganda, nucleus of the present Uganda state, has long attracted scholarly interest. Since written records are lacking entirely until 1862, historians have had to rely on oral traditions that were recorded from the end of the nineteenth century. These sources provide rich materials on Buganda in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but in this 1996 book Christopher Wrigley endeavours to show that the stories which appear to relate to earlier periods are largely mythology. He argues that this does not reduce their value since they are of interest in their own mythical right, revealing ancient traces of sacred kingship, and also throwing oblique light on the development of the recent state. He has written an elegant and wide-ranging study of one of Africa's most famous kingdoms.

Great Kingdoms of Africa

Great Kingdoms of Africa
Author: John Parker
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2023-03-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520395689

A groundbreaking, sweeping overview of the great kingdoms in African history and their legacies, written by world-leading experts. This is the first book for nonspecialists to explore the great precolonial kingdoms of Africa that have been marginalized throughout history. Great Kingdoms of Africa aims to decenter European colonialism and slavery as the major themes of African history and instead explore the kingdoms, dynasties, and city-states that have shaped cultures across the African continent. This groundbreaking book offers an innovative and thought-provoking overview that takes us from ancient Egypt and Nubia to the Zulu Kingdom almost two thousand years later. Each chapter is written by a leading historian, interweaving political and social history and drawing on a rich array of sources, including oral histories and recent archaeological findings. Great Kingdoms of Africa is a timely and vital book for anyone who wants to expand their knowledge of Africa's rich history.

Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire

Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire
Author: Jonathon L. Earle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2017-08-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108268080

Colonial Buganda was one of the most important and richly documented kingdoms in East Africa. In this book, Jonathon L. Earle offers the first global intellectual history of the Kingdom, using a series of case studies, interviews and previously inaccessible private archives to offer new insights concerning the multiple narratives used by intellectuals. Where previous studies on literacy in Africa have presupposed 'sacred' or 'secular' categories, Earle argues that activists blurred European epistemologies as they reworked colonial knowledge into vernacular debates about kingship and empire. Furthermore, by presenting Catholic, Muslim and Protestant histories and political perspectives in conversation with one another, he offers a nuanced picture of the religious and social environment. Through the lives, politics, and historical contexts of these African intellectuals, Earle presents an important argument about the end of empire, making the reader rethink the dynamics of political imagination and historical pluralism in the colonial and postcolonial state.

Decolonising State and Society in Uganda

Decolonising State and Society in Uganda
Author: Katherine Bruce-Lockhart
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 419
Release: 2022-12-13
Genre:
ISBN: 1847012973

Decolonization of knowledge has become a major issue in African Studies in recent years, brought to the fore by social movements such as #RhodesMustFall and #BlackLivesMatter. This timely book explores the politics and disputed character of knowledge production in colonial and postcolonial Uganda, where efforts to generate forms of knowledge and solidarity that transcend colonial epistemologies draw on long histories of resistance and refusal. Bringing together scholars from Africa, Europe and North America, the contributors in this volume analyse how knowledge has been created, mobilized, and contested across a wide range of Ugandan contexts. In so doing, they reveal how Ugandans have built, disputed, and reimagined institutions of authority and knowledge production in ways that disrupt the colonial frames that continue to shape scholarly analyses and state structures. From the politics of language and gender in Bakiga naming practices to ways of knowing among the Acholi, the hampering of critical scholarship by militarism and authoritarianism, and debates over the names of streets, lakes, mountains, and other public spaces, this book shows how scholars and a wide range of Ugandan activists are reimagining the politics of knowledge in Ugandan public life.p by militarism and authoritarianism, and debates over the names of streets, lakes, mountains, and other public spaces, this book shows how scholars and a wide range of Ugandan activists are reimagining the politics of knowledge in Ugandan public life.p by militarism and authoritarianism, and debates over the names of streets, lakes, mountains, and other public spaces, this book shows how scholars and a wide range of Ugandan activists are reimagining the politics of knowledge in Ugandan public life.p by militarism and authoritarianism, and debates over the names of streets, lakes, mountains, and other public spaces, this book shows how scholars and a wide range of Ugandan activists are reimagining the politics of knowledge in Ugandan public life.

Readings in African Politics

Readings in African Politics
Author: Tom Young
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2003
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780253343598

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Beyond the Royal Gaze

Beyond the Royal Gaze
Author: Neil Kodesh
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2010-03-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813929709

Winner of the 2011 African Studies Association Herskovits Award Beyond the Royal Gaze shifts the perspective from which we view early African politics by asking what Buganda, a kingdom located on the northwest shores of Lake Victoria in present-day Uganda, looked like to people who were not of the center but nevertheless became central to its functioning. Drawing on insights from a variety of disciplines—history, historical linguistics, archaeology, and anthropology—Neil Kodesh argues that the domains of politics and public healing were intimately entwined in Buganda from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted throughout Buganda, Kodesh demonstrates how efforts to ensure collective prosperity and perpetuity—usually expressed in the language of health and healing—lay at the heart of community-building processes in Buganda. Kodesh's work offers a novel approach to the use of oral sources and opens up new possibilities for researching and writing histories of more distant periods in Africa's past. Beyond the Royal Gaze will appeal to students and scholars of health and healing, political complexity, and the production of knowledge in places where limited documentary evidence exists.

Encyclopedia of African Religion

Encyclopedia of African Religion
Author: Molefi Kete Asante
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 473
Release: 2009
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1412936365

Collects almost five hundred entries that cover the African response to spirituality, taboos, ethics, sacred space, and objects.

Missions, States, and European Expansion in Africa

Missions, States, and European Expansion in Africa
Author: Chima J. Korieh
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2007-11-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135915334

Missions, States, and European Expansion in Africa aims to explore the ways Christianity and colonialism acted as hegemonic or counter hegemonic forces in the making of African societies. As Western interventionist forces, Christianity and colonialism were crucial in establishing and maintaining political, cultural, and economic domination. Indeed, both elements of Africa’s encounter with the West played pivotal roles in shaping African societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This volume uses a wide range of perspectives to address the intersection between missions, evangelism, and colonial expansion across Africa. The contributors address several issues, including missionary collaboration with the colonizing effort of European powers; disagreements between missionaries and colonizing agents; the ways in which missionaries and colonial officials used language, imagery, and European epistemology to legitimize relations of inequality with Africans; and the ways in which both groups collaborated to transform African societies. Thus, Missions, States, and European Expansion in Africa transcends the narrow boundaries that often separate the role of these two elements of European encounter to argue that missionary endeavours and official colonial actions could all be conceptualized as hegemonic institutions, in which both pursued the same civilizing mission, even if they adopted different strategies in their encounter with African societies.