Kyapa mu Ngalo and the land question: understanding the politics and dynamics of land reform in Uganda

Abstract

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.