Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda

Notes

notes 1. Public Healing, Political Complexity, and the Production of Knowledge 1. Ssalongo Benedicto Walusimbi, interview, 12 October 2001. 2. Ibid. Mulago hospital is the largest public hospital in Kampala. 3. George William Kalule, interviews, 29 September and 3 October 2001. 4. For an extremely useful introduction to the voluminous literature on Buganda, see Karlström, ‘‘Buganda.’’ More recently published works on early Ganda history include Wrigley, Kingship and State; Richard Reid, Political Power; Hanson, Landed Obligation; and Médard, Le royaume du Buganda. For a historiographic review of the secondary literature, see Richard Reid, Political Power, 7–12. 5. Schoenbrun, ‘‘Past Whose Time Has Come.’’ 6. For a discussion of how Ganda royal o≈cials sought to fortify their positions of power during the early colonial period, see Kodesh, ‘‘Renovating Tradition.’’ See also Twaddle, ‘‘On Ganda Historiography’’; and Rowe, ‘‘Myth, Memoir, and Moral Admonition.’’ 7. Like many early writers, Apolo Kaggwa tended to ignore the often significant distinction between doubled consonants, which carry a heavy sound in Luganda, and single consonants, which have a soft sound. Thus the prime minister spelled his name Kagwa, which I retain in citations and in the bibliographic entries, while using the now widely accepted form Kaggwa in the text. 8. See, e.g., Bikunya, Ky’Abakama Ba Bunyoro; K.W., ‘‘Kings of Bunyoro-Kitara,’’ ‘‘The Kings of Bunyoro-Kitara. Part II,’’ and ‘‘The Kings of Bunyoro-Kitara. Part III’’; Nyakatura, Abakama ba Bunyoro-Kitara (Anatomy of an African Kingdom); Lubogo , History of Busoga; and Katate and Kamugungunu, Abagabe b’Ankole. 9. Southwold, Bureaucracy and Chiefship; Kiwanuka, History of Buganda (quotation on iii); Wrigley, ‘‘Changing Economic Structure’’ and Kingship and State. 10. This continuity stems in part from the fact that much of this scholarship relied for sources on the works of earlier Ganda intellectuals. In his fascinating study of Buganda’s early history, for example, Christopher Wrigley comments that his work ‘‘is in the main an extended commentary on Kagwa’s Kings.’’ Wrigley, Kingship and State, 7. Despite being published in 1996, Wrigley’s book was the culmination of several decades of research in the region. In an e√ort to bring evidence other than oral traditions to the question of Buganda’s early history, Benjamin Ray skillfully analyzes Ganda royal rituals to shed light on the kingdom ’s origins. Yet in so doing Ray accepts the orthodox accounts of dynastic traditions and presents a rather static account of the kingdom’s development that does not allow for change until foreign influence. Ray, Myth, Ritual, and Kingship. 11. Richard Reid, Political Power; Hanson, Landed Obligation, ch. 3; Médard, Le royaume du Buganda. ∞Ω∫ : Notes to Pages 7–10 12. McIntosh, ‘‘Pathways to Complexity,’’ 4. 13. See, e.g., Guyer and Belinga, ‘‘Wealth in People’’; Hanson, Landed Obligation; Apter, Black Kings and Critics; Packard, Chiefship and Cosmology; Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals; Newbury, Kings and Clans; McIntosh, Beyond Chiefdoms; and MacGa√ey, Religion and Society in Central Africa. 14. Arens and Karp, introduction. 15. Kuper, ‘‘Lineage Theory,’’ 92. Despite this pronouncement, Kuper explained that he did not expect the lineage model to be abandoned completely because it ‘‘suit[ed] modern notions of how primitive societies were organized’’ (92). 16. MacGa√ey, ‘‘Changing Representations,’’ 189, 198, 197. MacGa√ey focuses in particular on Europeans’ fascination with matriliny, but his comments apply more broadly to a preoccupation with lineality in general. 17. Ibid., 207. 18. Guyer and Belinga, ‘‘Wealth in People,’’ quotation on 118. 19. Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests, 258. MacGa√ey recognizes as much, noting that Kongo ‘‘have a clear idea of a corporate matrilineal clan subdivided into matrilineages , and think of their society as organized by a repetitive series of them.’’ MacGa√ey, ‘‘Changing Representations,’’ 197. Justin Willis makes a similar point in his examination of clanship in western Uganda. Willis, ‘‘Clan and History in Western Uganda,’’ 583–84. 20. Willis, ‘‘Clan and History in Western Uganda,’’ 583. For examples of pioneering works on East Africa that drew upon the clan as a unit of analysis, although not always explicitly, see Ogot, History of the Southern Luo; Muriuki, History of the Kikuyu; and Katoke, Karagwe Kingdom. 21. Willis, ‘‘Clan and History in Western Uganda,’’ 584–85. As Willis notes, this undertaking was embraced with particular enthusiasm by historians of Uganda, where the recurrence of clan names and totemic avoidances over a wide area hinted at the prospect of writing about the deep past as a ‘‘history of the clans’’ (584). For examples of...