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7. Youth, Elders, and Metaphors of Political Change in Late Colonial Buganda
- Ohio University Press
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Youth, Elders, and Metaphors of Political Change in Late Colonial Buganda carol summers “The young African,” argued Robert Kakembo in a 1946 pamphlet calling for sweeping changes in Uganda, “will no longer tolerate the old out-of-date chiefs. They must give room to the young generation.”1 In his progressive vision of Uganda’s politics, modern “youth,” qualified in new ways, were agitating against senior leadership and for new opportunities. Late colonialism, for Kakembo as for colonial officials, experts, and church leaders, was an era of youth, which Kakembo described with blunt and modern metaphors: “We are born in a queer age—an age of speed; it is a flying age. We are very impatient, because we want to grow overnight. We want to get the steering of our country from the old shaky faltering hands, and drive away at a break-neck speed. It is all right—it is a quality of all things young. We shall only learn by making mistakes. . . . That is the opinion of the African young men of today.”2 Reading Kakembo and a variety of other Ugandan, missionary or official observers of the simultaneously hopeful and perilous “break-neck speed” of the 1940s, youth seems a natural analytic category, a metaphor used by historical actors to interpret conflict as the growing pains of adolescence. Here, though, I seek to complicate simple ideas of youth. I briefly explore the idea of Buganda as a young or “adolescent” nation, an idea that was proffered in late colonial Buganda by missionary and official actors as well as by specific Ganda activists. I then reread Kakembo’s metaphors in a specifically Ugandan context by looking at patterns of Ganda politics and historical tales to show how Ganda social thinkers had at least two additional, alternative ways of thinking about the metaphor of youth—ways they continued to use during the turmoil of the 1940s and 1950s. The first of these provided an internal logic for the “Bataka Union,” as activists saw youth as politically significant through their integration into a community of clan members as inheritors and stewards, responsible for communal resources. Youth inherited not just individual fates, but the community itself from “old shaky faltering hands” that had once been strong but could no longer steer. Second, in uniting to demand the return of Mutesa II as kabaka during the crisis of the 7 c a r o l s u m m e r s 1950s, Ganda loyalists drew on a model of youth, particularly the youth of the king and the elite, as a volatile, dangerous time of struggle that—far from being simple delinquency—allowed for both the emergence of brilliant individuals and a cyclical strengthening and remaking of the kingdom. Kakembo’s invocation of “break-neck speed” and his statement that “We shall only learn by making mistakes ” simultaneously acknowledged the dangers of this disruptive struggle and its creative necessity. Together, the existence of these three models—the developmentalist one of adolescence and the alternative Ganda ideas of youth as heirs or challengers—complicates any vision of youth as a straightforward category. Instead, the category’s heterogeneity suggests questions about how a variety of historical actors used the idea of youth for their own social ends. This study of assumptions encoded in the metaphor of youth thus encourages us to think about the history of youth as an intellectual and cultural history, rather than a description of what youth did. And this sort of history may offer new insights into changes and continuities in values and power in a specific historical context. Liberal Colonialism and Buganda as an Adolescent Nation During the 1930s and throughout the 1940s, British officials, missionaries, and even some Ganda activists, referred to Buganda as an “adolescent.”3 In doing so, they responded to the challenges of a difficult time: the men who had made the alliance between Britain and Buganda in 1900, as young men, were aging and sometimes dying, but not retiring gracefully.4 The country’s wealth and its leaders’ investments in schools and governance meant that a rising generation of young men were ambitious and saw resources available for their visions of individual and group progress.Thus,as the Anglican bishop of Uganda complained,“[T]he Baganda are in a very difficult adolescent period . . . [e]merging from childhood where they were willing to be controlled but not yet having reached sensible thinking manhood .”5 The bishop’s vision of history was perhaps too rosy...