Belonging: Identity in Late Colonial Buganda

C. Wrigley, briefing a 1954 constitutional commission, summarized identities in Buganda by asserting “A Muganda... is a Muganda and practically nothing else.” He avoided the question of what a Muganda, a person of Buganda, was. During the 1940s, political activists had sought to define a Ganda citizenship of grandfathers and grandchildren, responsibilities and rights, declaring a Muganda was anyone accepted into a Ganda clan. Within the crisis of the 1950s, however, Baganda stated a Ganda identity rooted in loyalty and devotion to the king akin to that expected of a wife toward her polygynous husband. Ganda identity was not about land, blood, or even language and customs. Even in colonial Uganda, Baganda moved geographically, incorporated individuals with alien parentage, interacted with new immigrants who learned Luganda without becoming Baganda, and acquired new customs with alacrity and without losing a basic identity.

During the 1950s, Baganda and aliens explored and imagined Ganda identities in distinctive ways. Recent studies of identity have moved from naïve primordialism, to celebrations of nationalisms rooted in resistance to colonial rule, revisions that have marked out patterns of “invented” traditions and “tribes”, and more recently toward attention to patronage, youth and mobilized ethnicity. Reading the events and accounts of Buganda in the 1950s, I offer a study of a modern, imagined identity politics in Africa that was creative in its ethical and moral claims regarding Buganda’s past, and its dynamic incorporation of that past into a normative politics for the kingdom’s future.