Traditional Institutions and State Power: Culturalist Contestations in Buganda and Ankole

Abstract

This thesis examines the decolonial potential of society-based campaigns seeking to preserve culture through the creation of kingdoms and skeletal kingdoms in contemporary Uganda. In two different regions of Buganda and Ankole, Uganda experienced two incidents that were seen as direct assaults on the cultures of the peoples of these places. In Buganda, violence broke out in 2009 when the state prevented the Kabaka (king) from visiting a district in his kingdom. In Ankole, members of society erupted in anger when political authorities replaced a cow sculpture at the entrance of Mbarara city in 2019. Whereas the two conflicts are separated by a decade, I approach both as manifestations of nationalism from below at the heart of Uganda’s history and politics. If the protests in Ankole and Buganda erupted in the name of culture, many Ugandan societies see in the creation of kingdoms and cultural institutions the most effective means of preserving culture. Whereas observers have identified some emancipatory potential in such society-based initiatives, this thesis argues that the campaigns for the creation of kingdoms or skeletal kingdoms fuels the politicization of ethnic difference in the sense that they establish ancestry and cultural identity as the basis for political rights in a specific kingdom. In other words, culturalist contestations reproduce the colonial tribalist logic of governance. Such pro-kingdom society-based campaigns are derivative of the colonial fashioning of identity. Deploying an interdisciplinary approach that integrates the methods of historical, political and anthropological studies, the thesis overcomes the conceptual and methodological narrowness that defines the state-centric understanding of nationalism prevalent in African scholarship.