Carol Summers

Radical Rudeness: Ugandan Social Critiques in the 1940s

This article asks how the people of colonial Uganda, especially the kingdom of Buganda, understood themselves in the 1940s not just as imperial subjects, but as citizens capable of mobilizing for change. To understand activism and agency in such a context, I explore how power in the protectorate was encoded in manners, politeness, and conventional rituals of sociability—built from complementary Ganda and British expectations—that could be disrupted by activists using tactics of rudeness. Activists lacked a clear issue-based politics, or the resources to engage in active state-building. Instead, they performed a rude, publicly celebrated strategy of insults, scandal mongering, disruption, and disorderliness that broke conventions of colonial friendship, partnership, and mutual benefit. They sought to delineate and make public the real clashes of interest both among Baganda, and between Baganda and Britons, as a way of opening up to public scrutiny the covert practices of negotiation that had produced land deals, cotton policy, bureaucratic appointments, and power within the kingdom and protectorate. By juxtaposing cultural analysis and political history, and using concepts, such as rudeness or manners, that are rooted in local practices, we can gain insights into big historical concepts such as popular activism and nationalist mobilization.

If You Can Educate the Native Woman...: Debates over the Schooling and Education of Girls and Women in Southern Rhodesia, 1900-1934

This article looks at the promotion of schooling for native males and females in Southern Rhodesia during the period 1900-34. After a brief introduction the social and historical context is described as is the development of educational efforts beginning with the missionary schools in the 1890s. While boys were educated to play a socioeconomic role in the development of Southern Rhodesia by the 1920s and 1930s the education of girls was advocated to stabilize family and community life; to stymie the possibility of integrated marriages by providing a supply of suitable wives for educated native men; and to provide a supply of native women who could replace native men in the role of domestic servants for European families. The chapter elaborates on educational efforts begun to further each of these goals and shows how the domestic education programs were developed as a way to control the power of native women without giving them legal adult status and how the servant training programs failed dramatically. The education of females did not seek to promote change and development but to promote harmony and domestic order.

Educational Controversies: African Activism and Educational Strategies in Southern Rhodesia, 1920-1934

This article examines three case studies of conflict between Africans’ concepts of what education should be, and the education actually available in schools in Southern Rhodesia. It focuses on the 1920s and early 1930s, when African education first expanded and attained new levels of direct government involvement, and then began to contract under the economic pressure of the depression. In the Gutu district, students and parents fought for alternatives to the Dutch Reformed Church schools, attempting to enlist government support for alternatives, and attending independent schools. At Inyati, a London Missionary Society school, dissatisfied students struck, forcing major changes on the school as the mission acknowledged a need to provide pupils with not merely subsistence and disciplined learning, but also respect and advancement. The governments schools started out with strikes over academic and industrial curricula, and provided, in the contrast between Domboshawas relative health and popularity, and T...

Jonathon L. Earle. Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire: Political Thought and Historical Imagination in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xx + 271 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index.

recruits. Their unsavory reputation extends even to using recruits as a free workforce for their own private benefit. Further undermining morale is the unfairness of a system that allows some Eritreans to escape service through bribery or personal connections. The forced recruitment of so many young people, Kibreab argues, has furthermore undermined families’ ordinary coping strategies, exacerbated poverty and undernourishment, and left aging parents bereft of their children’s support. Ironically, a policy intended to promote national self-reliance has in reality rendered Eritrean families more dependent than ever on remittances sent from the relatively few sons and daughters who have successfully fled abroad. Kibreab deserves praise for raising awareness concerning the predicament faced by an entire generation of Eritrean youth. Yet due to negligent editing and the author’s penchant for repetition, the book’s length could have been reduced by at least a quarter without detracting from its main arguments. In addition, because the author was for obvious reasons unable to conduct research within Eritrea, he relies instead on various reports from the Eritrean government, the UN, IMF, World Bank, and independent analyses. Kibreab also makes extensive use of in-depth interviews and data gathered from surveys administered to members of the Eritrean diaspora. Yet employing random samplings of opinion among those who have already voted with their feet makes it very difficult to gauge the extent to which their critique is pervasive in Eritrean society. Kibreab frankly acknowledges such methodological limitations; he notes the survey’s findings are “indicative” rather than “conclusive” (10). Even so, his work has immense value as a much needed, albeit incomplete, study of the tragic impact of the ENS upon Eritrean society in general and on the youth of Eritrea in particular. G. Thomas Burgess US Naval Academy Annapolis, Maryland doi:10.1017/asr.2018.38 gburgess@usna.edu

99.99. Cloth. ISBN: 978-1-108-41705-1.

When Britain withdrew recognition from Kabaka Mutesa II in 1953, considering him disloyal for failure to advocate for the new governors progressive initiatives, Bugandas response was distinctive and successful: mourning. Ganda wept publicly, and portrayed themselves as wives forcibly divorced from their king/husband. With the removal of Mutesa, they argued, Britain even violated its own alliance, or marriage, with Buganda. Metaphors of marriage and declarations of loyal wives proved successful in destabilizing imperial efforts to reshape power in Buganda to fit into a unified Uganda. Drawing on specific associations of love and politics associated with Ganda marriage, Ganda fought, successfully, to achieve Mutesa IIs return and to ensure Bugandas distinctive political identity. In the process, though, they declared and institutionalized an identity as subjects of the Kabaka, abandoning ideas of citizenship through Bataka (clans) voiced by earlier activists and enacting troublesome precedents for proponents of Ugandan nationalism.

All the Kabaka's wives: marital claims in Buganda's 1953-5 Kabaka Crisis

Abstract:In late colonial Uganda, British social scientists, development experts, religious leaders, and administrators used the metaphor of adolescence to explain political unrest. If Uganda could be seen as an adolescent, upheaval in the model colony was a sign of successful growth, not a rejection of British administration or global ideas of development and progress. Using the metaphor of adolescence, experts emphasized the period’s turmoil as signs of biosocial, adolescent maturation, rather than symptoms of political competition, clashing class interests, or ethnic patriotisms. Through this powerful metaphor, British observers rejected any politics based in different values, interests, or goals.

Adolescence versus Politics: Metaphors in Late Colonial Uganda

During the 1920s and 1930s, white settlers in Southern Rhodesia (Colonial Zimbabwe) achieved responsible government and sought to claim the region as a settlers’ territory but faced a crisis with their own children and youth. Despite subsidised schools and easily available bursaries, too many white boys grew to adulthood without useful education or skills, and with disruptive expectations and demands. These youth faced immediate unemployment and appeared unlikely to be able ever to qualify as civilised breadwinning patriarchs for future generations. Rhodesia’s white elite ironically responded to this problem by invoking models of socially controlled education initially developed to train and contain groups of people expected to be inferior: white girls, whose practical education prepared them for subordinate social roles, and African boys and men, whose schools sought to channel individual ambition into a defined, appropriate form of education that emphasized rural life and community values. Educational initiatives, though, proved incapable of making the racial and communal logic of segregation viable. In this case study of white crisis and administrative policy response it is possible to trace some of the logical and practical problems with the social planning initiatives of one of the most segregationist regimes anywhere.

Boys, brats and education: reproducing white maturity in colonial Zimbabwe, 1915-1935

their interpretation of the Bible. As the Genoveses ask, “What prevented them from doing so again?” (633–634) Southern Protestants responded that the organic slave society stabilized social relations and supported a conservative world view hostile to the excesses of the Protestant Reformation (antinomianism) and modern capitalism (the creation of a “disaffected working class”). (649) By the 1850s, the Genoveses contend, many southerners believed that their society was threatened both from northern abolitionists and southern acceptance of individualism. (674–679) Some intellectuals responded by supporting “Caesarism,” the belief that a strong leader and strong state were preferable to social chaos brought by excessive democratization. Such attitudes led to secession as many southerners recognized that their slave society needed the protection of a “modern slaveholding republic” so that the South could “break the historical cycle of glory, decadence, and collapse.” (712) The slaveholders’ War for Southern Independence failed and their tragic quest for a modern, stable social order predicated on slavery and southern nationalism ended in ruin. The strength of the book lies in the Genoveses’ depth of research and command of the primary sources. The Mind of the Master Class is an important contribution to southern intellectual history and undoubtedly will be read and debated for years to come.

Race, Resistance, and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa (review)

by the municipal bureaucrats and politicians in Ladysmith and Newcastle who are flocking to East Asia to entice industrialists to Northern Natal. The discourse on globalisation (‘There Is No Alternative’) is itself shaping the process and is, therefore, as disabling as the process itself. Unfortunately, far from presenting her readers with a ‘politically enabling conception of globalization’, she paralyses them with disempowering jargon.