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ItemKyapa mu Ngalo and the land question: understanding the politics and dynamics of land reform in Uganda(Makerere University, 2024)Taking Buganda kingdom’s Kyapa mu Ngalo program and the central government’s calls to abolish Mailo land tenure as entry points, this thesis interrogates the contemporary land question in Buganda by tracing its historical development. It contends with existing explanations that attribute the question to cultural nationalism and neopatrimonialism to argue that the land question in [B]Uganda is rooted in the historical and political economy contexts within which it has materialized. Deploying interdisciplinary approaches while foregrounding heterodox political economy, the thesis analyzes the colonial and postcolonial framing of - and responses to - the land question in [B]Uganda and the material conditions within which peasant subjects have subsisted to show how land reforms and ‘development’ initiatives have historically marginalized, subjectified, alienated and dispossessed the peasant society. To illustrate this argument, the thesis summons oral, archival and library sources to explores the ways in which the colonial epistemological, political and economic transformations displaced precolonial land relations in ways that produced and reproduced colonial state power and consolidated the colonial capitalist economy. The colonial and capitalist processes of depoliticization, commodification and privatization of land resulted into dispossessions, alienations, displacements and evictions of peasants. The thesis further highlights how the postcolonial states’ attempts at (re)framing and responding to the land question have innovatively reified the colonial and capitalist logics in ways that have intensified land problems. Reflecting an enduring process of capitalist incorporation, the Buganda land question has been worsened by the growing influence of neoliberalism and the structural power of (finance) capital, rendering it a state-market affair with the exclusion of society in ways that depoliticize and weaponize the peasants to achieve political legitimacy and sustain capitalist accumulation. Contrary to their stated objective of addressing the land question, the postcolonial land reforms, and the political and discursive contest between the central government and Buganda kingdom, have instead exacerbated the peasant subject condition. Lastly, the thesis recenters the peasants by engaging discourses that emerge from society as a decolonial move to imagine conditions of possibility for peasant emancipation. I think with the society’s discourse of Ettaka Nyaffe as mirroring possible alternative modes of socio-economic organization. In doing so, the thesis foregrounds the multiple and complex forms of land use, values and meanings that the society has embraced historically as an epistemological counter to the neoliberal market-oriented conception of the land question, one that fortifies colonial and neoliberal capitalist principles.
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ItemTraditional Institutions and State Power: Culturalist Contestations in Buganda and Ankole(Makerere University, 2024-11-04)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.
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ItemFrom Nägarit to National Sovereignty: Lineages of Political Modernity in Ethiopia(Makerere University, 2024-12-01)This study shows that modern state power in Ethiopia emerged in a historical process of change and continuity marked by the colonial transformations of Italian East Africa (1936-1941). Theoretically conceived as a transformation from nägarit to national sovereignty, this historical process shows a shift in the form of state power from the premodern right and power of military authorities to issue professionally and provincially specific commands by drumbeats to the modern juridical power of a national sovereign body to make or suspend state laws in an official gazette. The study also shows that the violent political contestations witnessed in the history of the making of national sovereignty in Ethiopia since 1942 can be conceived as a postcolonial derivative dialectic between, on the one hand, state power that represents the sovereign national majority, and, on the other hand, minority resistance emanating from groups rendered political minorities through exclusion from the postcolonial project of national sovereignty in its centralized mode from 1942 to 1991 or its decentralized mode since 1995. The study’s methodological approach can be understood as conceptual and political historiography of the present. The theoretical discourses and empirical materials examined in the study are obtained through archival and library research and ethnographic fieldwork. Accordingly, a history of an existing political concept in Ethiopia, identified as “nägarit,” is reconstructed in the long duration to show how its intellectual articulation in different modes of political thought and its institutional use in different political practices transformed from as early as the thirteenth century to the present. The result of this historical account produces three major historical lineages of modern state power in Ethiopia: the first is the premodern lineage (or what the study conceives as the Aksimarosian lineage) from around the thirteenth to the early twentieth century, the second is the colonial lineage from 1936 to 1941, and the third is the postcolonial-contemporary lineage since 1942. The study can be read as a critique of the dominant literature in Ethiopian political theory and historiography impaired by the analytical straitjackets of colonial, liberal, Marxist, and nationalist interpretations drawn mainly from Western political thoughts and practices. In showing that the conceptual and the political are inseparable, the study emphasizes the need for a combined task of epistemic and political decolonization in Ethiopia.
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ItemPeople and State: A Genealogy of the Political Constitution of the Nigerian State(Makerere University, 2024-07-04)Recent agitations to restructure the Nigerian state reflect the deep discontent that has defined the political constitution of Nigeria since the 1940s. Extant explanations attribute the absence of an agreeable political constitution to the undemocratic constitution-making process, the lopsided nature of the so-called over-centralized federal system and the failure to constitute the state based on 'true federalism'. Combining the approaches of history and political science, I examine official publications, Hansards, draft constitutions, constitution documents, constitutional conference proceedings and reports, autobiographies, biographies and relevant political writings sourced in archives and libraries to challenge these explanations. The thesis argues that the challenge of evolving an agreeable political constitution derives not merely from the competing political imaginations of the nationalist intelligentsia, military elites and constitution framers but also from the enunciation of political blueprints that uncritically reproduced the colonial regime of ethnic difference and thus foreclosed the prospects for inclusive political community. The study traces the genealogy of the colonial regime of difference to a distortion, one that assumed that the modern colonial state in Nigeria was created out of an assemblage of fixed, discrete pre-colonial ethnic groups and nationalities. I show how this regime of difference was similarly reproduced by nationalists and regionalists in the context of the struggle for independence in the 1940s and 50s, military elites in the 1960s and 70s and by constitution framers in cahoots with the military in the context of the transition to civil rule in the 1970s. Yet despite differences in the blueprints enunciated, the thesis argues that they represented two sides of a coin given their shared commitment to managing the ethnic question. Critiquing these blueprints from the standpoint of decolonization, the thesis maps a lineage of alternative discourse to the colonial regime of difference articulated at different times between the 1940s and 70s. Beginning with Nnamdi Azikiwe's problematization of ethnicity in the 1940s, Aguiyi Ironsi's desire to detribalize political society in the mid-1960s and the Constitution Drafting Committee's attempt to premise national integration on resident-based citizenship in the 1970s. I argue that the decolonial potentials of these ideas were subverted by entanglements with ideas that embodied the colonial logic. Drawing lessons from these proposals for an alternative political constitution, the thesis argues that decolonizing the political should grapple with the challenges of forging inclusive political communities at the triadic levels of the Nigerian federation: beginning by reconceiving localities from domains of tribal privileges to communities of residents united by productive, cooperative, social relations; reconceiving subnational states from domains of ethnic privileges by unleashing their potential as territorial and resident-based communities and rethinking the Nigerian state from a federation of ethnic communities to a federation of territorial units.
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ItemBeyond Religio-Cultural Violence: A Historico-Political Re-contextualization of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God(Makerere University, 2023-11-05)In conceptualizing the emergence of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God (MRTCG) and the mass violence that the religious movement orchestrated, scholarship and popular literature have accentuated the primacy of culture. The MRTCG is claimed to have arisen from ethnic Bakiga’s embrace of Marian and Millenarian religious traditions. The MRTCG violence which climaxed with the 2000 Kanungu Inferno is also essentialized as a predestined result of inherently violent ethnic and religious traditions. This study however de-emphasizes the culturalist conceptions of the MRTCG and its violence. It deploys decolonization as a methodology and critically utilizes aspects of anthropology, historicism and political science to explore the context within which the MRTCG both emerged as a breakaway religious movement and descended into violence. The study contends that the MRTCG arose from multiplicities of the history of political marginalization within institutions of the nation-state. It illustrates that the MRTCG is a product of the colonial politicization of ethnicity, political parties and religion. The study further argues that the MRTCG violence erupted within the context of Uganda’s regulation and criminalization of religious movements. In making sense of the agency of breakaway religious movements in postcolonial Africa, the study calls for a historicization that focuses on their interaction with institutions of nation-state power. It contends that breakaway religious movements arise not only as a critique but also a creation of the undemocratized state.