Modernity and Its Aspirants: Moral Community and Developmental Eutopianism in Buganda

Author(s): Mikael Karlström

Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 45, No. 5 (December 2004), pp. 595-619
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological
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C u r r e n t A n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 5, December 2004
䉷 2004 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2004/4505-0002$10.00
Modernity and Its
Aspirants
Moral Community and
Developmental Eutopianism in
Buganda1
by Mikael Karlström
The recent literature on African modernities, with its emphasis
on witchcraft and the occult, has provided an important but ar-
guably one-sided perspective on popular responses to globaliza-
tion and postcolonial politics. This article argues that the dysto-
pian visions implicit in the efflorescence of occultism need to be
balanced by closer attention to more optimistic orientations and
the sources upon which they draw. Building upon ethnographic
and historical research on Buganda (in Uganda), it focuses on
moral community and its modes of social reproduction as the
dynamic obverse of witchcraft. Empirically, it explores the wide-
spread sense of moral crisis generated by Uganda’s postcolonial
collapse, the recourse to kingship and rituals of social reproduc-
tion as primary loci of moral rehabilitation in the 1990s, and an
earlier period of moral crisis in the 1920s that established the en-
during patterns of cultural self-conception upon which the recent
moral revivalism has been founded. The emphasis throughout is
on the way in which forms and practices of moral community
have enabled Baganda to sustain an aspirational engagement with
their changing world against considerable odds. A general case is
made for greater analytical attention to the motive force of mo-
rality and moral community in human social life.
m i k a e l k a r l s t r ö m is a visiting scholar in African and Afri-
can American Studies at the University of Chicago (his mailing
address: 5200 S. Dorchester, Chicago, IL 60615, U.S.A.
[mkarlstr@uchicago.edu]). Born in 1961, he was educated at
Swarthmore College (B.A., 1983) and the University of Chicago
(M.A., 1991; Ph.D., 1999). His publications include “On the Aes-
thetics and Dialogics of Power in the Postcolony” (Africa 73:
57–76), “Civil Society and Its Presuppositions: Lessons from
Uganda,” in Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Af-
rica, edited by J. L. Comaroff and J. Comaroff (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1999), and “Imagining Democracy: Politi-
cal Culture and Democratisation in Buganda” (Africa 66:
485–505). He is currently doing research and writing on
historical consciousness and cultural self-conceptions in Buganda
on a nine-month fellowship from the American Council of
Learned Societies. The present paper was submitted 11 ix 03 and
accepted 20 iii 04.
1. This essay was originally written for a conference entitled “The
Politics of Social Reproduction in Neoliberal Africa” at the Uni-
versity of Chicago in December 2000. I am grateful to John Com-
aroff for prodding me toward a better formulation of these ideas,
to the journal editor for his helpful advice, to four anonymous re-
viewers for their unusually insightful and challenging comments,
to the U.S. Department of Education (Fulbright-Hays) and the Harry
Frank Guggenheim Foundation for research funding (1991–93,
1995), and to many Ugandans for their help and friendship.
In September 1992, as the thirtieth anniversary of
Uganda’s independence neared, Kampala suffered a
widely publicized spate of child abductions. Here, as
elsewhere in Africa, the disappearance of children is
commonly attributed to occult practitioners, but in this
instance some suspected a different sort of nefarious
agency. Rumor had it that Milton Obote—twice Ug-
anda’s president and twice deposed—was masterminding
these abductions to destabilize the country and pave the
way for a “third coming.” Reviled by many as the true
agent of the country’s postcolonial implosion, Obote was
evidently a plausible perpetrator of abominations ordi-
narily associated with witchcraft. Indeed, 20 years of
misrule and civil war had made “politics,” in the popular
imagination, nearly equivalent to witchcraft in the clas-
sic sense of providing the symbolic vehicle through
which a community envisions the standardized collec-
tive nightmare of its own dissolution (Wilson 1951).
Less than a year after this child abduction panic, on
July 21, 1993, the installation of the first kabaka (king)
of Buganda since Obote’s abolition of Uganda’s old king-
doms in 1967 engendered far rosier dreams, at least
among the country’s largest ethnic group.2 Millions of
Baganda danced through the preceding night in raucous
“trans-night” celebrations and gathered around radios
and televisions for the day-long coronation ceremonies
at Naggalabi Hill. In Ganda popular conception, the king-
ship had come to embody the antithesis of “politics”—
the source and principle of societal reconstruction. Its
restoration enabled Baganda to hope for the rehabilita-
tion of fundamental practices of social reproduction and
moral personhood and thus for a better collective future.
In this article I explore the character and sources of
Ganda collective aspirations as a lens on the modernities
and futurities that Baganda have imagined for them-
selves across the twentieth century. My starting point is
the recent resurgence in the study of witchcraft as a per-
spective on African responses to postcolonial and glob-
alizing modernity. I draw analytical inspiration from this
retheorization of witchcraft, but I also take issue with
the dystopian implications of an excessively narrow fo-
cus on occult imaginaries, arguing that modernist aspi-
rations and their sociocultural and moral underpinnings
deserve greater attention than they have received.
The study of witchcraft has been the locus of what is
perhaps the most significant subdisciplinary renovation
in Africanist anthropology of the past decade. Once rel-
egated to the back closet of the anthropological project
as a traditionalist anachronism in a modernizing post-
colonial subcontinent, witchcraft is now cutting-edge.
The primary impetus behind this reinvention has been
the impulse to forge a new understanding of Africa’s ar-
ticulation with global economic forces and postcolonial
political forms—with what, in academic shorthand, is
usually referred to simply as “modernity” (Comaroff and
Comaroff 1993, 1999; Geschiere 1997; Moore and San-
2. Buganda was a large precolonial kingdom on the northwest shore
of Lake Victoria; Baganda, its ethnic subjects, currently number
nearly 4 million out of a national population of 25 million.
595
596 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 5, December 2004
ders 2001). Against the stereotypic representation of Af-
rica in the terms of a traditional/modern dichotomy, the
African deployment of witchcraft idioms and practices
has been shown to defy such analytical binarism. Rather
than an index of stubborn antimodernism, witchcraft has
been retheorized as an African “mode of modernity”
(MacGaffey 2000:227), a mediating matrix in the conti-
nent’s engagement with contemporary political and eco-
nomic transformations. What has been gained in the pro-
cess is, not least, a new lens on the moral and temporal
dimensions of twentieth-century African worlds—on
their collective nightmares and material fantasies, their
simultaneous sense of ethical peril and tantalizing but
achingly distant goods and riches. Beyond the study of
Africa, this reexamination of African witchcraft and sor-
cery has helped fuel a thoroughgoing reevaluation of the
long-held view of modernity as inherently tending to-
ward rationalization and disenchantment and growing
attention to the forms and anxieties of magical agency
that seem to feature so prominently in contemporary
popular imaginaries (Meyer and Pels 2003, West and San-
ders 2003).
Witchcraft and the occult have, of course, provided
only one of many recent angles of insight into African
modernities.3 But the concentrated attention to which
they have been subject has made them singularly illu-
minating while also, I would argue, generating an im-
balance in our current understandings. Relying too heav-
ily on these phenomena as a lens on African modernities
risks imputing to Africans a fundamentally dystopian
orientation,4 for what witchcraft seems to crystallize in
such contexts is the deepest nightmares of social dis-
ruption, on the one hand, and the most desperate of in-
strumental ambitions for wealth and power, on the other.
True, magical powers are conceived as morally ambiv-
alent in Africa (Geschiere 1997:14; West 2001). Yet the
utility of witchcraft and the occult as an idiom of mo-
dernity seems to lie overwhelmingly in their capacity to
objectify the perils of illicit power and the antisocial
dangers of exploitative accumulation and self-interested
consumption (Moore and Sanders 2001:15–19; see also
Geschiere 1997; Comaroff and Comaroff 1999).
Such dystopian anxieties are unquestionably wide-
spread in contemporary Africa. Yet most popular imag-
inaries, in Africa as elsewhere, contain visions of light
as well as murk, hope as well as fear, aspiration as well
as anxiety. If, as I will argue, a population whose post-
colonial expectations have been as violently shattered as
that of Buganda can sustain a generally stoical optimism,
we need to understand the sources of that hopefulness.
The character of witchcraft itself suggests where those
sources may lie, for if witchcraft, as Geschiere (1997)
insists, is generally the dark underbelly of kinship—the
3. Others include popular culture (Larkin 1997), media (Spitulnik
1998–99), fashion (Gondola 1999), evangelical Christianity (Meyer
1999), modes of urbanity (Ferguson 1999), and political ideology
(Donham 1999).
4. It also risks reinforcing the dystopian pessimism of much re-
cently influential nonanthropological Africanist scholarship (e.g.,
Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou 1999, Mbembe 2001; cf. Karlström 2003).
force that both generates and feeds upon violations of
the fundamental norms of kinship solidarity—then kin-
ship could be said to anchor the optimistic obverse of
the occult. More broadly, as the whole corpus of witch-
craft studies attests, witchcraft is the toxic negation not
only of kinship and family but of socioeconomic and
biological generativity, of neighborly hospitality, and of
norms of reciprocity and moral personhood—ultimately,
of all forms of moral community and their nodes and
modes of reproduction. Thus, the remedy for the one-
sided emphasis on witchcraft and the occult is not, I
think, to reject the rereading of witchcraft as a lens on
African modernity but rather to generalize it, as Werbner
(2004) has advocated, to such practices and institutions
of moral community the creative elaboration of which
has been characterized by van Binsbergen as the orga-
nizing framework for “the entire ideological history of
twentieth-century Africa” (1998:885–86).
If witches are modernity’s malcontents—or at least the
rapaciously destructive objectification of its discon-
tents—it is moral community and its modes of repro-
duction that most consistently sustain its aspirants.
Whereas a world of witchcraft is ultimately dystopian,
a world of workable moral community is not so much
utopian, perhaps, as eutopian. “Eutopia,” coined in a
foretext to Thomas More’s Utopia, designates a place of
happiness and order that is not a “no-place” or utopia—
that is, not a phantasmic impossibility but a realizable
ideal. True, the standardized practices through which so-
cial reproduction takes place tend to project an idealized
world of generative and harmonious sociality and moral
conduct, often in the face of contrary realities. Yet they
also palpably produce such relationalities and disposi-
tions, if only for the moment. In fact, one of the things
they paradigmatically generate is precisely a sense of em-
placement—of the social and geographical “topos” of
moral personhood and collectivity—the very grounds
upon which an aspirational futurity can be constructed.
As Appadurai (2004) has recently argued, this aspect of
human culture—its capacity to sustain and inspire col-
lective aspirations—has rarely been given the systematic
attention it deserves.
None of this is to deny that modes of moral com-
munity and ritual practice can and often do reinforce
social subordination and generate social exclusion. The
role of such subordination and exclusion has been
foregrounded in the long-dominant “invention” perspec-
tive on the categories of tradition, custom, and culture
that are commonly used to classify practices of social
reproduction (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983)—categories
that will figure centrally in my analysis. Useful though
this perspective has been in problematizing an earlier
tendency to take assertions of tradition at face value, its
instrumentalist presuppositions have led toward a re-
ductive functionalism and inattention to real cultural
continuities (Sahlins 1993, Kratz 1993, Spear 2003). But
while both positional interests and cultural continuities
undoubtedly play a role in the formation of reflexive
“traditionalism,” neither of them adequately captures
the underlying motives or specific content of such ide-

ologies. What is crucially at issue is the (re)making of
moral community under conditions of radical transfor-
mation, and it is here that the aspirational edge of culture
is most fundamentally generated. It is by systematically
pursuing this link between collective aspiration and mo-
rality—arguably another neglected analytic (Lambek
2000, Laidlaw 2002)—that I hope to generate a fruitful
perspective on the tradition/modernity problematic and
other issues raised in the burgeoning anthropological lit-
erature on “alternative modernities.”
“Modernity” seems to be used in two distinct senses
in much of this literature. As Knauft points out, it des-
ignates both an objective “social condition” and a sub-
jective “mode of temporality” (2002:6, 32). The former
embraces a broad constellation of economic, political,
and cultural processes and institutions such as markets
and commodification, transport and geographical mo-
bility, state formation, nationalism, bureaucratization,
political liberalization, mass mediation, economic and
cultural globalization, and time-space compression.
“Modernity” in this sense is an analytical construct, one
much debated in social theory and historiography. A cen-
tral aim of the alternative-modernities literature has
been to destabilize the Eurocentric presuppositions that
are built into this conception by demonstrating that
there is far more variety in the way in which the con-
stitutive elements of analytical modernity are configured
and lived than has commonly been grasped. I tend to
agree, however, with those who argue that the analytical
concept of modernity, whether singular or pluralized, is
irretrievably flawed—that, having been dislodged from
its socio-evolutionist moorings, it “melts into air” (Com-
aroff and Comaroff 1993:xii), enduring mainly as a neb-
ulous “sublime” to which contemporary scholarship re-
mains ambivalently enthralled (Kelly 2002; see also
Latour 1993, Piot 2001, Donham 2002, Friedman 2002,
Spitulnik 2002). I dispense, therefore, with the usual
Cook’s tour of analytical approaches to modernity.
My concern is rather with what Knauft refers to as
“the force of the modern as an ideology of aspiration”
(2002:33), particularly with regard to its linear or direc-
tional chronotope5—the conception of a collective tem-
poral trajectory from an inferior past to a qualitatively
different and superior future, often positing a radical dis-
juncture between the two. Since its emergence in the
eighteenth century, modernity in this sense has become
a globally hegemonic ideology. And while there have
been important explorations of its European sources (Blu-
menberg 1983 [1974], Koselleck 1985 [1979], Habermas
1987 [1985], Bowler 1989) and its institutionalized ex-
portation by the colonial state and postcolonial “devel-
opment” apparatus (Ludden 1992, Cowen and Shenton
1995, Cooper 1997), there has been only sporadic inves-
tigation of its myriad local implantations, appropria-
tions, elaborations, and contestations (e.g., Dahl and
5. Bakhtin (1981) coined this term to denote the simultaneously
spatial and temporal schemata governing the protagonist’s char-
acteristic itinerary in specific literary genres: see also Zerubavel
(2003) on temporal topography.
k a r l s t r ö m Modernity and Its Aspirants F 597
Rabo 1992). This theme has been an element in the al-
ternative-modernities literature, to be sure, but it has
received far less attention than modernity in its analyt-
ical sense, with which it has often been elided. It is with
modernity as a distinctive temporal ideology that I will
be primarily concerned in this article.
My analysis proceeds in three stages. First I document
the widespread sense of moral crisis generated by
Uganda’s postcolonial political debacle and the recourse
to ritual forms of social reproduction as the locus of
moral rehabilitation in the 1990s. Next I explore an ear-
lier moral crisis, in the 1920s, which established an en-
during pattern of cultural and historical self-conception
that informs the recent wave of moral revivalism. Finally
I return to the 1990s to examine the relationship between
the desire for moral rehabilitation and popular enthusi-
asm for the restoration of the Buganda kingship, seeking
to demonstrate that different forms and sources of crisis
generate different inflections of moral eutopianism.
Throughout, I emphasize the way in which moral com-
munity and its practices have enabled Baganda to main-
tain an aspirational engagement with their changing
world and a capacity to imagine an active and collective
appropriation of its potentialities.
Postcolonial State Collapse and Moral Crisis
For Baganda, Uganda’s postcolonial disaster lasted 20
years, from 1966 to 1986. Economically privileged and
politically semiautonomous under British colonial rule,
Buganda’s leadership balked at incorporation into a po-
litical entity within which it was virtually assured of
losing this preeminence. The fragile political coalition
that gained the kingdom federal status in the independ-
ence constitution of 1962 had begun to unravel by 1964,
and a conflict between the kingdom authorities and Mil-
ton Obote’s government in 1966 led to the military sei-
zure of the king’s palace and the subsequent abolition of
all traditional rulers. Obote’s regime became increas-
ingly insecure and repressive thereafter, particularly in
Buganda, and increasingly reliant on a military whose
loyalty was to the army commander Idi Amin rather than
Obote. Amin’s coup in 1971 was greeted with jubilation
in Buganda, but when his regime turned viciously pred-
atory this region suffered as much as any other. Eight
years later, Amin’s ouster by Tanzanian troops inaugu-
rated a period of extreme instability, followed by Obote’s
1980 presidential election victory, which was widely
viewed as fraudulent. Thereafter, Obote’s harshly re-
pressive approach to governing a refractory Buganda fu-
eled support for the insurgent National Resistance
Army/Movement (NRA/NRM) under Yoweri Musev-
eni’s leadership, which won power in 1986 following a
five-year armed struggle that cost an estimated 100,000
to 500,000 lives in north-central Buganda, mostly at the
hands of the increasingly desperate and murderous Ugan-
dan army.
598 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 5, December 2004
moral crisis and social reproduction
Like many other Ugandans, Baganda have experienced
their nation’s postcolonial calamity as something more
than a political and economic collapse. They view it per-
haps most intensely as a collapse of morality and of the
social mechanisms that produce moral persons and sus-
tain relational networks of solidarity and reciprocity.
This response was already prominent at the end of
Amin’s rule, when observers noted a generalized sense
of moral crisis (Southall 1980) and documented wide-
spread vigilantism and the breakdown of village sociality
in rural Buganda (Obbo 1988). Reporting from the capital,
Kampala, in the immediate aftermath of the 1986 NRM
victory, Twaddle enumerated a wide range of moral re-
vivalisms, creating what he characterized as a climate
of “moral utopianism” (1988:314). Behrend (1999) de-
scribes a tragically suicidal popular uprising in northern
Uganda in 1986–87 as a mass movement of collective
moral expiation and salvation. Kassimir emphasizes the
tone of moral alarm emanating from both church and
state at this time, with President Museveni declaring,
“There is today a moral crisis . . . which calls for a moral
revolution” and the nation’s Catholic bishops issuing a
pastoral letter calling for “moral rehabilitation” and stat-
ing that Uganda’s greatest tragedy since independence
was “the collapse in the moral standards of our people
and loss of moral conscience” (quoted in Kassimir 1998:
244).
The crux of this moral crisis was the perception of a
disastrous deterioration in the socialization of children
and youth. In the words of one Ugandan political com-
mentator, “Our youths have been completely unhinged
by the conditions created by our rulers. The traditional
respect for elders by the youth was the first to be un-
dermined and the basic social and moral values of our
youth have been completely eroded. So abused are our
youth that in the 1980s the word youth strikes terror
among the people” (Muscat 1984:105). In a general his-
tory of the period, a Ugandan historian devoted a section
to “the deterioration of morality” and “the chaotic con-
ditions in which the young generation was brought up”
(Mutibwa 1993:122).
Scholarly analyses by Ugandans and non-Ugandans
alike tended to ascribe this moral crisis of youth to the
endemic insecurity and scarcity of the preceding 20 years
and the example set by the government and the army
under Amin and Obote.6 Yet political modeling and prag-
matic survival strategies were not the primary causes
adduced by the many rural Baganda with whom I dis-
cussed these matters in the early 1990s. Instead, their
emphasis was on a more specific consequence of the
postcolonial calamity: the breakdown of Ganda culture.
Classified under this heading were, primarily, the prac-
tices and institutions that constitute moral community
and reproduce it through the socialization of children
6. By the late 1980s, the AIDS epidemic and the escalating sense
of emergency generated by the medical community were undoubt-
edly also contributing to a generalized sense of moral panic, at least
in southern Uganda (Bond and Vincent 1997).
and the ritual maintenance of social relations.7 Children,
it was said, were no longer being taught discipline, obe-
dience, deference, respect for parents and elders, and the
priority of kinship solidarities and neighborly reciproc-
ities. Instead of greeting their elders properly—kneeling,
with downcast eyes and limp handshakes—they had
taken up the jauntily informal and egalitarian Swahili
jambo. The maintenance of local sociality through hos-
pitality and generosity with food was said to have been
abandoned by younger Baganda. Above all, it was the
mechanisms and modalities of kinship solidarity and
continuity that were thought to be crumbling. The au-
thority of clan leaders was no longer recognized. People
no longer attended clan meetings or maintained ties with
extended kin, and many no longer even bothered to keep
track of relations of descent. Parents were no longer nam-
ing their children after deceased ancestors, symbolically
“resurrecting” them. Most distressing, many perceived
a gradual erosion of the core practice of lineage conti-
nuity, the kwabya lumbe ceremony whereby virtually
every deceased adult is structurally “replaced” by a lin-
eage successor.
The vocabulary in which the crisis of moral commu-
nity and social reproduction was discussed in rural Bu-
ganda was thus a lexicon of cultural crisis, with the de-
sire for moral rehabilitation articulated as an aspiration
for cultural revival. The kwabya lumbe succession cer-
emony figures so centrally in these conceptions of cul-
ture and moral recovery because of its privileged capacity
to project and enact the principles of moral community
and personhood—to ritually materialize a social eutopia.
lineage succession and the reproduction of
moral community
The kwabya lumbe ceremony effects a restoration of
social continuity and moral order in the face of death,
much along the lines of Hertz’s classic analysis (1960
[1905–6]; also Bloch and Parry 1982). It can take place
anywhere from a few weeks to several years after death
and burial, and the intervening period of mourning is
marked as a state of moral disorder within the immediate
family through the symbolic dereliction of personal
grooming and hygiene. This is also a period during which
no positive forms of personal transformation or social
reproduction can be celebrated by the bereaved family—
no weddings, naming rites, graduation celebrations, or
festivities of any kind. The kwabya lumbe—meaning “to
demolish death”—reverses this state of moral disorder
and blockage through the installation of a successor (mu-
sika) from among the children or, if necessary, collateral
lineage juniors of the deceased. Not to be succeeded in
this way is the ultimate dishonor—proof of a squandered
and meaningless life. Failure to perform the kwabya
lumbe is also widely believed to pose serious dangers
7. On the importance of understanding local conceptions of “cul-
ture” or “tradition” as organized around prototypic content, see
Otto (1992), Kratz (1993), and Foster (1995).

arising from the dissatisfaction of the deceased and the
lingering presence of death upon the house and lineage.
Lineage succession is explicitly conceived as a repro-
duction of social form. The successor “returns in the
feet” or “in the place” of the deceased and, in the case
of a male household head, takes over a semiparental re-
sponsibility for his other children, who are expected to
address the successor as “father.”8 The ceremony is un-
dergone by the successor in tandem with his lubuga—a
sister ritually designated to serve as his symbolic wife.
Following a night of dancing and drumming, the ritual
couple is taken at dawn into the household banana grove
by their father’s sister, who symbolically washes them
with plantain leaves, trims their unkempt hair, and de-
posits this detritus of moral disorder in the trunks of two
appropriately gendered banana trees. These actions ter-
minate the period of mourning and constitute the “dem-
olition of death” proper, after which the successor can
be formally installed by a clan officiant. Here, too, he is
accompanied by his lubuga, with respect to whom the
installation positions him in a relation of gendered com-
plementarity and hierarchy: he is given a spear and a
beer-drinking gourd, robed in a ceremonial barkcloth,
“enthroned” on a chair, and admonished to emulate the
virtues of the deceased, particularly his courage and hos-
pitality; she is given a vegetable knife and a basket,
seated on a barkcloth on the ground at his feet, and told
to prepare food so that guests may always be properly
fed.
Following this ritual reconstitution of the household
core, the ceremony broadens to link the successor with
a larger kinship network. His relatives introduce them-
selves to him, acknowledging his new status as “master”
of the minimal lineage and stating their kin relationship
to him, reaffirming a system of relations that had been
temporarily disrupted or suspended. Thereafter, a visit
is paid to the family graves in the banana grove, including
that of the deceased, which are ceremonially tended and
cleaned, reaffirming lineage connections along a tem-
poral vector.
The final phase of the ceremony reconstitutes a further
axis of sociality by reconnecting the household to its
neighbors through a large-scale feast. Neighboring
householders bring much of the food for the feast, yet
they are also guests, individually served by the successor
himself in the first fulfillment of the hospitality that is
incumbent upon him as the new household head. Indeed,
their roles are structurally complementary, for neighbors
bring the steamed plantains that constitute the core of
any meal, while the successor provides the meat (pref-
erably the deceased’s finest cow) that makes it a feast.
The ceremony thus ends by enacting hospitality and
food-based reciprocity as the principles governing the re-
lationship between the newly reconstituted lineage unit
and its social milieu. Along this axis, the status of the
funerary cycle as the obverse of witchcraft is quite ex-
8. The ceremony is performed for most women as well, but in such
cases it does not reproduce a minimal lineage unit, since her suc-
cessor must be a member of her clan, hence not one of her children.
k a r l s t r ö m Modernity and Its Aspirants F 599
plicit, for nothing is so unerringly diagnostic of malign
magical intent as the failure to attend the funerals and
lumbe ceremonies of one’s neighbors.
In an age of anxiety about social reproduction gone
awry, succession and the lumbe ceremony constitute a
potent nexus for the recuperation and remoralization of
a potentially refractory younger generation. The selec-
tion of successors is based, ideally, on personal achieve-
ment and moral virtue. The successor should be polite,
trustworthy, well-behaved, reliable, considerate, willing
to improve, and unfailing in his participation in neigh-
borhood weddings, funerals, and other ceremonies.
Where adult sons are deemed unworthy, it is common
for a minor to be chosen—even, in many cases, one who
is too young to understand the responsibilities of the
office. Succession itself is generally thought to exert a
positive moral influence on successors, even to the ex-
tent of reforming unworthy ones over time.
The lumbe’s role in affirming parental authority and
the obligations incumbent upon youth is evident in the
lineage council meetings held during the night before
the ceremony. These have a pseudo-juridical character,
focusing primarily on dispute resolution and adjudica-
tion. It is generally parents and elders who bring “cases”
against disobedient children and juniors, for example, for
marrying or naming their children without consulting
their parents, failing to attend family ceremonies or
meetings, speaking impolitely to senior kin, or disobey-
ing a parent. In such disputes the presumption of guilt
on the part of juniors is very strong. Proverbially, mukulu
tayonoona omuto y’ayonoona (only the child misbe-
haves, never the parent); even where a parent or elder’s
accusations are patently unjustified, the principle of pa-
rental authority must be publicly upheld, lest a child be
permitted to shame a parent.
When Baganda are asked about the significance of the
lumbe, most resort neither to directly moral arguments
nor to the dangers of failing to “demolish death.” Instead,
they explain that it is by attending these ceremonies that
clan members “get to know one another” (kuman-
yagana). Indeed, clan members are brought together in
large numbers by lumbe ceremonies, for which they of-
ten travel considerable distances. Thus they serve to
maintain social linkages across space, particularly link-
ages between urban and rural populations of the sort that
have proven surprisingly resilient in much of Africa
(Gugler 2002). And it is in connection with the lumbe
ceremony that many Baganda are most likely to meet
superordinate clan leaders. Kumanyagana thus encodes
an ethics of substantive interpersonal relations, in con-
trast with the destruction and abstraction of such rela-
tions in a polity and economy without grounding in
moral community, for the knowledge generated by clan
activities is a knowledge of the paths of social connec-
tions governed by obligatory reciprocity and assistance.
It is also a self-knowledge encoded in stylized recitations
of one’s ancestry in a formalistically abridged form back
to the founder of the clan—recitations that are rehearsed
primarily at lumbe ceremonies. It is a knowledge of link-
ages across time based on anchorage in space: “The
600 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 5, December 2004
clan,” I was told by a farmer in his sixties, “is where a
person’s ancestor is, and also where his children and de-
scendants are. I can tell my children and descendants
that their father has a place of origin, so they know they
are children with a real meaning.” The failure to acquire
this knowledge gives rise, most dramatically, to the risk
of “incestuous” marriage with a member of one’s own
or one’s mother’s clan. Without the forms of social
knowledge that create moral community people are
prone to the most abhorrent of immoralities. And not
being cognizant of one’s past imperils one’s capacity to
generate a collective future through the proper modes of
social and biological reproduction.
In sum, the kwabya lumbe ceremony enacts an ide-
alized image of the social totality and moral community
along spatial and temporal axes, constructing kin group,
descent, and local community as complementary di-
mensions of a moral totality that is reasserted in the face
of death—dimensions that intersect in the moral per-
sonhood of the successor. Beyond this, as we shall see,
succession and clanship are constitutive elements of Bu-
ganda as an imagined ethno-national moral community
held together by the kingship and capable of an aspira-
tional orientation toward the future.
The Colonial History of Moral Community
The kwabya lumbe ceremony is by no means the only
mechanism involved in the production of moral persons
and the reproduction of moral community in Buganda.
Among the broader range of such mechanisms, however,
it is currently the privileged locus of moral and cultural
rehabilitation. This role is partially motivated by the
specific content of the ceremony, but it is hardly inev-
itable. Other practices (bridewealth, weddings, marriage
strategies, funerals, hospitality, and the ceremonial re-
ception of visiting dignitaries) and institutions (schools,
churches and mosques, and even traditional healers) play
equally important roles in social reproduction and the
moralization of youth. The selectivity of this grounding
of moral community and personhood reflects a pattern
of Ganda cultural and historical self-conception that
dates to an earlier period of moral crisis in the 1920s.
the christianization of social reproduction
In the early 1900s, processes of social reproduction and
forms of moral community in Buganda were under pres-
sure along two axes, one ideological and one socioeco-
nomic. The first was generated by missionary Christi-
anity, which had established cultural and political
dominance within 15 years of the arrival of the first An-
glican and Catholic missionaries in the late 1870s. Their
success in attracting converts among boys and young
chiefs at the royal capital, which was undergoing a de-
stabilizing royal succession in the mid-1880s, led to re-
ligious civil wars that radically reconfigured the Ganda
polity and set the stage for British colonization in the
early 1890s. Having collaborated with the British, these
young converts prospered under the colonial order,
which, under the terms of the Uganda Agreement of
1900, turned them into large-scale landowners and gave
them permanent control over the Buganda system of ad-
ministrative chiefship. The zeal with which they sup-
ported missionary conversion efforts ensured that within
a few decades there were virtually no self-professed “pa-
gans” left in Buganda and only a marginalized minority
of Muslims.
The Christian converts of this first generation were fer-
vent aspirants to modernity as they conceived it. They
enthusiastically embraced the modernist conception of
progress, a chronotope whose linear sense of locomotion
was rendered quite literally in the Luganda phrase ku-
genda mu maaso, “to go straight forward,” implying
movement along a straight and traversable path toward a
vaguely Euro-Christian future. This was a global and un-
differentiated conception positing transformation in all
areas of social life, from brick houses to monogamy, from
clock time to Christian names, and from automobiles to
church attendance. The missionaries from whom they
seem to have primarily imbibed it tended to blur the dis-
tinction between material and spiritual advancement—a
distinction that had at any rate, for Baganda as for many
other Africans, no ontological salience (Low 1960:6; Wal-
iggo 1976:247; cf. Landau 1999; MacGaffey 2000).9 It was
arguably this interlacing of spiritual and material ele-
ments that made it such an appealingly unified perspec-
tive on the radical historical transformation that Buganda
was undergoing, providing the convert chiefs with a
strongly moral sense of their own historical role therein.
Each Christian denomination asserted its status as the
preeminent moral and political community to which its
adherents owed allegiance, subordinating and in some
respects negating the solidarities of kinship, clanship,
and polity that had set the boundaries of collectivity in
precolonial Buganda. As the primary axis of precolonial
political competition, clanship had operated as a prin-
ciple of inclusive incorporation by means of the ritual
mechanisms and administrative structure of the king-
ship. By contrast, the new religious affiliations tended
to promote exclusive allegiances. This had already been
clear in the factional disintegration of the kingdom in
the late 1890s and the inability of Anglicans and Cath-
olics to share power after defeating the Muslim party. It
was further manifest in the subsequent monopolization
of the kingship, which had previously circulated among
the clans, by the Anglicans, who stigmatized Catholics
and Muslims as less loyal to the king and even as less
fully and authentically Baganda than themselves. A par-
ticularly revealing index of this exclusivity lay in the do-
main of marriage: whereas clans were systematically in-
terwoven through prescriptive exogamy, both churches
refused to sanction interdenominational wedlock (Taylor
1958:178).
9. Christian missionaries may seem unlikely purveyors of modern-
ist progressionism, but, as Donham (1999) has shown, the impact
of their teachings can be very different from their ideological pos-
ture at home.

Moral communities require mechanisms of social re-
production, and in their European homelands the Cath-
olic and Protestant churches had of course long main-
tained a degree of control over life-cycle rites such as
baptism, wedding, and funerals, providing them with
crucial points of ecclesiastical authority over the lives
of ordinary Christians. Christian missions in Africa often
sought to reproduce this form of articulation (van Bins-
bergen 1998:896), focusing particularly on the suppres-
sion of initiation rituals, which served in many African
contexts as both a collective transition to adulthood and
a periodic enactment of polity and cosmology (Ranger
1970; Comaroff 1985:151; Beidelman 1982:136; Mills
1995). In the absence of such large-scale transformative
rituals, missionaries in Buganda were primarily con-
cerned with smaller-scale institutions and practices of
social reproduction. They tried to stigmatize polygyny,
which was widespread, particularly among chiefs. They
also tried to suppress or impose ceilings on the payment
of bridewealth, which some viewed as a form of wife-
purchase (Waliggo 1976:286; Hansen 1984:268). They
condemned Ganda naming rites because they employed
magical sanctions to ascertain paternity (Mair 1934:59),
and they were vehemently hostile toward the entire se-
quence of ceremonies prescribed for twin births because
of its focus on fertility and sexuality and the central role
of the native deity Mukasa (Mair 1934:50; Waliggo 1976:
266). The Anglican mission tried to eliminate the Ganda
marriage ceremony as a competitor to the Christian wed-
ding (Mair 1940:5). Both missions were hostile toward
the kwabya lumbe succession ceremony, objecting to its
celebratory aspects, sexual symbolism, mixed-gender
dancing, beer drinking, and elements of magical agency
(Waliggo 1976:268–69; Hansen 1984:280). In place of these
various life-cycle ceremonies, missionaries sought to pro-
mote Christian alternatives such as baptism, church wed-
dings, and funeral rites presided over by clergy.
The progressionist Ganda chiefs not only sought to
promote missionary aims in most of these areas but often
outdid the missionaries themselves in their zeal for
moral reform. They used the legislative powers of the
council of chiefs (lukiiko) to criminalize spirit posses-
sion, discourage non-Christian forms of marriage, dictate
aspects of mortuary and succession practices, and outlaw
specific ritual elements with sexual or “heathen” over-
tones. Although their real powers of enforcement were
quite limited and popular practices changed only in var-
iable and piecemeal ways, their radical intent and su-
preme confidence are evident in a 1918 law governing
marital and sexual morality, pertaining to which they
declared that “all of the native customs . . . are hereby
abolished” (quoted in Hansen 1984:282).
moral crisis
The wholesale Christianization of Ganda social repro-
duction and moral community did not succeed. Yet it
was not the mission-inspired reforms that generated an
ideological reaction. Rather, it was the unanticipated
consequences of Buganda’s rapid socioeconomic and po-
k a r l s t r ö m Modernity and Its Aspirants F 601
litical transformation. Beginning in the late 1910s, there
was a growing sense among the literate elite that Bu-
ganda’s progress had stalled and that the fundamental
reason for this lay in a disastrous deterioration of moral
standards, leading many Baganda to misappropriate and
misuse the resources and liberties made available by the
new order in self-interested and socially divisive ways.10
Instead of maximizing the collective benefits of progress
and its novelties, individuals were exploiting them to
break free of the social networks and obligations that
governed their conduct. And instead of using them to
enhance and advance social relations and secure their
reproduction, they were misusing them in ways that gen-
erated new social disjunctures and antagonisms.
The crisis of the 1920s clearly pertained to issues of
moral community and its reproduction. In letters pub-
lished mostly in two vernacular mission periodicals—
the Anglican Ebifa mu Buganda and the Catholic
Munno—literate Baganda bemoaned the breakdown of a
range of relational patterns and norms.11 A new disregard
was reported for established status differences between
youth and elders, women and men, and people and chiefs.
Chiefs accused commoners of jealousy of their superiors
and a growing unwillingness to recognize their authority.
Commoners accused chiefs of being haughty and con-
descending and of neglecting collective progress in pur-
suit of their own enrichment. Elders accused juniors of
insubordination and juniors charged elders with conde-
scension and contempt. Children were said to be ignor-
ing their parents’ authority and parents to be exploiting
their children. There was general concern about the un-
precedented mobility of unmarried women and their sup-
posed avarice and sexual immorality, which were blamed
for the alarming spread of venereal diseases.12 Clans were
said to be fragmenting, with families and lineages pur-
suing their own narrow self-interest. The mutual hos-
tility of the major religions was increasingly lamented.
According to one diagnosis, Buganda was being con-
sumed from within by jealousy, a poisoned interactional
logic which was eating away at its “national spirit” like
the nnamuginga insect that devours the core of the
sugarcane stalk (Sekanyolya 1921:4). To some it appeared
as though all social cooperation were dissolving in a new
world of untrammeled self-interest, where “what is most
important . . . is for each person to seek or enjoy his own
possessions, and that is why everyone now lives in fear”
(Kiwobe kya Buganda 1926:240).
In the wide-ranging debates about this mounting moral
crisis many argued that its underlying causes were rapid
monetization and the introduction of private property in
land. Both colonial currency and landed property were
new vehicles of value that entered into the mediation of
10. Recent historical studies by Tuck (1997) and Hanson (2003)
richly confirm this sense of moral crisis.
11. The following discussion summarizes a fuller analysis of de-
bates in the vernacular press, ca. 1907–36 (Karlström n.d.); I draw
also on three nonmission periodicals: Sekanyolya, Matalisi, and
Gambuze.
12. The role of a perceived epidemic of syphilis in generating moral
panic is explored by Summers (1991) and Tuck (1997).
602 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 5, December 2004
social relations, subtly but profoundly shifting their
terms and repositioning their participants. They did so
more rapidly in Buganda, perhaps, than in most African
contexts (cf. Guyer 1995; Comaroff and Comaroff 1997:
166–217) and in ways that many Baganda did not approve
and could not reconcile with the promises of progress.
The rapidity with which money was incorporated into
bridewealth and ritual prestations suggests that Baganda,
like many other Africans, found it a pragmatically useful
medium for constructing and reproducing social rela-
tions (Mair 1934:150; cf. Bloch 1989, Geschiere 1992).
Yet this appropriation was accompanied by widespread
anxiety about the transformations that it seemed to en-
tail. Thus, the monetization of bridewealth generated
concern that parental “greed” was inflating bridewealth
rates, thereby preventing young people from marrying,
imperiling their sexual morality, and “turning marriage
into a purchase” (Mukasa 1918:30). But money also
tended to liberate children from parental control, a fact
that prompted one commentator to envisage a nightmare
scenario in which money literally took the place of par-
ents: “nowadays the woman (prostitute) denies her par-
ents, saying they never gave birth to her, instead ‘Shil-
lings are her father and mother’ ” (Ebifa mu Buganda
1926). Indeed, women’s relationship to money seemed
particularly ominous to many men, who saw them es-
tablishing unprecedented autonomy from patriarchal
control through cash-crop cultivation and wage labor.
The monetization of the family food supply—the very
substance of quotidian domestic reproduction—aroused
further anxieties concerning women’s agricultural labor
and domesticity.
Under the 1900 Uganda Agreement, political clientage
was radically reconfigured and monetized by the abrupt
transition to private property in land, which inaugurated
the transformation of a fluid and multiply graded polit-
ical hierarchy into a dichotomous class system. In the
precolonial kusenga relationship, a commoner was com-
mitted to a range of obligations and services in exchange
for use-rights to a plot of land, while retaining the right
to switch allegiance (and residence) to another chief.
Since chiefs gained royal favor and promotion by attract-
ing followers, the allegiance of commoners was the “cur-
rency” of chiefly standing. Thus it was the mobility of
commoners at one end and the transcendent power of
the king at the other that maintained the legitimacy of
this intricately stratified sociopolitical order. When
chiefs became freehold landowners and the voluntary
work and tribute of their followers was replaced by rents,
monetary taxes, and forced labor, kusenga reciprocities
were rapidly undermined (Hanson 2003:146–49, 165–88).
Hence the litany of complaints against chiefs: they no
longer listened to their subjects, they cared only about
private enrichment, and they had usurped the power of
the king. Tenant-subjects experienced spiraling extrac-
tion by landlord-chiefs, while chiefs complained that
rent-paying tenants were no longer deferential and obe-
dient subjects.
The transformation of precolonial land rights into pri-
vate property also had consequences for kinship relations
and the clan system. The heritability of land promoted
a narrowing of succession to the direct line of descent.
Particularly distressing was the privatization of clan
land, which had previously been vested in clan heads as
custodians for the larger kin group. The dispossession of
lower-level clan heads in the land allocation was the crux
of a major political controversy in the 1920s. Meanwhile,
those clan officers who were not dispossessed were
granted freehold rights in their estates and were thus
legally entitled to sell them. This gave rise to a remark-
able piece of incipient commodification when some clan
members “thought it a safe precaution to buy from the
head of the clan the piece of land in which their direct
ancestors [were] buried” (Mair 1934:166). The same logic
contributed to a rapid shift toward domestic burial as a
means of staking permanent claim to tenanted land, un-
dermining the role of clan heads as the guardians of clan
burial grounds and exacerbating fears about the demise
of clanship itself.
custom and moral community
The moral crisis of the 1920s ultimately generated a re-
configuration of the progressionist orthodoxy and a reas-
sertion of Ganda custom as indispensable to the consti-
tution of moral community. Some Baganda began to
argue that the assault on custom had been too indis-
criminate and that some of the practices that had been
stigmatized by the missionaries should be rehabilitated.
This conceptual rehabilitation was facilitated by the se-
mantic breadth and flexibility of the category of custom,
or mpisa, which covers the area of “conduct,” “behav-
ior,” and “habit” and carries no intrinsic temporal or
evaluative connotations—there can be new mpisa as
well as old ones, imported mpisa as well as indigenous
ones, and bad mpisa as well as good ones.13 The reas-
sertion of certain historical practices therefore entailed
no necessary antagonism toward the new Euro-Christian
“customs” embraced by the progressionists. Nonethe-
less, it met with various forms of resistance. Some of
the staunchest establishment progressionists exhorted,
in the words that one of them would later use to entitle
his memoirs, “Don’t go back!” (Mukasa 1938). Two
Christian breakaway movements that arose at this
time—the Society of the One Almighty God (or Bama-
laki) in the late 1920s and the Balokole (Saved Ones) in
the early 1930s—were more broadly hostile to native
custom than the missions and vigorously promoted a
radicalized Christianity as the solution to the crisis of
morality and progress (Welbourn 1961, Robins 1975). By
the late 1930s, however, the revaluation of custom had
won the day.
Among the practices rehabilitated in this process, the
two that involved the most significant reversal of an
13. When used without evaluative qualification mpisa carries the
implication of right or proper conduct and seems to be the closest
thing in the Luganda language to the English “morality” (cf. Ja-
cobson-Widding 1997:58; Paxson 2004:11), although something
akin to “virtue” is conveyed by the less commonly used bun-
tubulamu.

earlier derogation were those pertaining directly to social
reproduction, namely, bridewealth and lineage succes-
sion. Like the kwabya lumbe succession ceremony, the
ritualized negotiation and transfer of bridewealth, which
constitutes the core of the Ganda marriage contract, is
a concentrated locus for the production and reproduction
of social and moral relationships. Through a sequence of
gifts to members of the bride’s family, culminating in a
feast of “introduction” (kwanjula) and the payment of
bridewealth, the suitor’s relationship with the bride is
broadened to involve her natal kin, who adopt him as a
“child of the clan.” This process creates not only a new
household, lineage node, and locus of biological repro-
duction but also an enduring circuit of hospitality and
gift exchange among affines (Mair 1934:137–39).
In the custom debates, the institution of bridewealth
was defended as an antidote to increasing matrimonial
instability, sexual promiscuity, venereal disease, popu-
lation decline, and the loss of respect for parental au-
thority. The pejorative view of bridewealth as a form of
wife-purchase was rejected on the grounds that its pay-
ment was a proof of the suitor’s good intentions and a
guarantee against hasty marriages, while its distribution
among the girl’s natal kin served to consolidate lineage
solidarity. In fact, the stigmatization of bridewealth as a
reduction of social relations to monetary exchange was
reversed. Instead, it was the missionary attack upon
bridewealth that was blamed for stripping marriage of
its social context and anchorage, making it an arrange-
ment of convenience between two individuals and
thereby as fragile as the caprice of those individuals.
Bridewealth was thus refigured as a means of preventing
the monetization and individualization of social rela-
tions and processes of social reproduction.
The rehabilitation of the kwabya lumbe ceremony
was pursued more carefully and selectively, with sug-
gested modifications to make it more palatable to mis-
sionaries and devout Christians. Its value was defended
as lying not in the ritual and magical agency or the
celebratory dancing and feasting that attracted mission-
ary opprobrium but in “the cooperation of clansmen,
meeting and knowing one another, joining together to
discuss the performance of the ceremonies and choose
the successor, and getting to know the head of the clan”
(N. K. N. 1923:204–5). As with bridewealth, lumbe was
asserted as a bulwark against social fragmentation and
the monetization of social relations. Crucially, the re-
valuation and partial reinvention of the lumbe was also
a reassertion of the value of clans as loci of moral com-
munity and vehicles of social reproduction. Indeed, the
principle of clanship became at this time a source of new
sociopolitical imaginaries and a vector of overt popular
opposition to the ruling chiefs (Hanson 2003:203–28).
Whereas each clan had, historically, been a subnational
locus of collective solidarity, clanship was now trans-
formed into a primary nexus of obligation and entitle-
ment uniting all Baganda.
Missionary Christianity had announced itself as a new
principle of moral community and the ethical guarantor
of progress. The moral crisis of the 1920s was therefore
k a r l s t r ö m Modernity and Its Aspirants F 603
also a crisis of faith in this new institutional locus of
collective morality. It was exacerbated by the widening
fault lines inherent in the colonial order, for the dis-
tinction between spiritual and temporal authority,
church and state—which was an ontological and insti-
tutional feature of that order—became increasingly ob-
vious to Baganda as conflicts emerged over divergent pri-
orities (Hansen 1984:234–37, 299). Even missionaries
themselves began to promote the separation of church
and state at this time (Verpoorter 1921; Taylor 1958:71).
Denominational rivalry in chiefly appointments also
damaged the moral authority of the churches. Nonethe-
less, the proponents of custom remained committed to
their religious communities. Rather than negating Chris-
tianity, the revaluation of custom operated by subtly
scaling back the claims of religion in order to make room
for custom as a parallel principle of collective morality.
Arguing that certain practices were “simply customs of
the nation and should not be turned into issues of reli-
gion” (Mulyazawo 1924:40), its proponents carefully con-
structed a conceptual boundary between the categories
of custom and religion. They even appealed to the Chris-
tian Creator as a source of legitimacy for custom and the
moral communities in which it was grounded, “since
God, who is wiser than all of the wise men, gave every
Nation customs” (A. E. K. K. 1929:3). Ganda custom thus
gradually achieved parity with religion as a legitimate
source and locus of moral practice.
To be sure, the forms of moral community that were
reaffirmed in the revaluation of custom had a strongly
patriarchal and hierarchical character. Yet the discourse
of custom was used by both sides of the various sectoral
antagonisms of the day: by chiefs against people and peo-
ple against chiefs, by parents and elders against children
and youth and vice versa. Christianity and the discourse
of progress, moreover, offered ideological resources of
their own for the maintenance of patriarchal domestic
control and political authority—resources of which the
ruling elite often availed themselves. What they evi-
dently did not provide to the satisfaction of many Ba-
ganda was an adequate set of mechanisms for reasserting
moral community and producing moral persons under
conditions of rapid and radical transformation. Thus,
while positional interests can help to explain some of
the specific inflections of revalued custom, they cannot
account for its sudden and widespread appeal. As in the
closely parallel debates over Kikuyu “moral ethnicity”
described by Lonsdale (1992) in early colonial Kenya,
moral and instrumental motives were inextricably in-
tertwined in the rehabilitation of Ganda custom.
from progress to development
Just as the revaluation of custom entailed no antagonism
toward Christianity, neither was it a rejection of the ear-
lier embrace of progress. The weakening of social mo-
ralities and hierarchies, the antagonism between chiefs
and commoners, and the unfettering of individual self-
interest were no part of the promise of progress as con-
veyed by missionaries and colonizers. Rather, they
604 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 5, December 2004
emerged through microsocial and quotidian interactions
among Baganda themselves, arising primarily from
within local socialities rather than being imposed from
without. Thus, it was not money or progress that was
blamed for the deterioration of morality but the deteri-
oration of morality that was said to be stalling Buganda’s
progress and hindering its productive appropriation of
new resources. The revaluation of custom was therefore
promoted not as an alternative to progress but as a way
of restoring Buganda to the forward path, and it was suc-
cessful precisely because it operated within the powerful
idiom of progress rather than against it. In a sense, it can
be said to have operated orthogonally to that idiom, in-
sofar as its primary axis of revaluation was not collective
temporality—the past versus the future—but collective
morality—counterposing a eutopian model of moral
community and its reproduction to patterns of conduct
perceived as antithetical to the survival of such moral
solidarities. But it did carry temporal entailments, even
though they were not in the form of nostalgia for the
past. Rather, it produced a subtly reinflected futurity,
incorporating significant elements of the indigenous past
alongside the novelties of the present and thus running
implicitly counter to the disjunctive chronotope of pro-
gress as a temporal locomotion that would leave the past
behind. Ganda conceptions of collective historicity were
thus tacitly but significantly reconfigured in the process
of revaluing custom.
Explicitly, the proponents of custom were critical only
of what they considered the dangerously accelerated pace
of progress. This, they argued, was the cause of the in-
discriminate renunciation of custom and some of the
new social distortions. According to the Association of
Clan Heads, petitioning in 1921 for a return of clan es-
tates alienated by the Uganda Agreement, “The current
foundation of our country, since 1900, has caused it to
grow only on the side of the few, while the side of the
many has gone askew. . . . We have formed this associ-
ation not out of a desire to make our country grow
quickly but to create a good foundation upon which it
can begin to grow slowly” (Lwanga 1954:105–6). The
same year, a veritable treatise on national progress as-
serted that “a nation needs plenty of time to grow, not
just a day or a month or a year, because if it rushes to
grow it will soon fall, like one of those fruits that ripens
quickly and then rots” (Mulindwa 1921:184). Others
warned that Buganda was a “young” or “junior” nation
in relation to the “senior” or “mature” European ones:
“Although we are nowadays looking forward in order to
reach out for the new things, and that is what we ought
to be doing, we also ought to go slowly, like a child who
is just beginning to walk” (E. K. B. 1926:121).
A deeper dimension of changing historicity is implicit
in the tendency to articulate these arguments through
metaphors of organic growth and maturation instead of
the idiom of linear locomotion. Although the progres-
sionist formula kugenda mu maaso remained superfi-
cially hegemonic into the 1930s, substantive discussions
of historical transformation increasingly deployed ku-
kula (to grow) and kukuza (to make [something] grow)
as their orienting tropes. This reconceptualization of his-
torical temporality as an organic process mobilized com-
plex networks of reference and connotation in multiple
areas of Ganda cultural practice, ranging from agriculture
and human reproduction and maturation to ritual and
political authority. Kukula refers primarily to structured,
cyclical growth of the kind undergone by both human
beings and food crops. For humans, kukula is to mature
to full adulthood, as differentiated from growing old (ku-
kaddiwa). For food crops, it is to grow to productivity,
as distinguished from the ripening of the fruit of the crop
(kwengera). The cognate noun bukulu has a wide range
of meanings as applied to people: generational seniority,
status superiority, adulthood, age, importance, and great-
ness. Kukula and kukuza also had ritual meanings: the
final sequence of the royal installation rituals, in which
a new king was legitimized by the heads of the most
ancient clans, was known as kukula; kukuza was the
name for a symbolic or real act of sexual intercourse
performed in association with important ritual occasions
or life events. The verb kukula thus organizes a whole
range of Ganda conceptions of cyclical, generational
growth and maturation. This organicist reformulation of
the modernist chronotope proved to have an enduring
salience, continuing to orient Ganda conceptions of his-
torical processes and transformations to the present. To-
day, as I discuss below, it is articulated as an idiom of
“development” or kukulaakulanya (the causative, re-
duplicative form of kukula) in contrast to the locomotive
“modernization” promoted by the state.
In rearticulating their sense of historical change
through this constellation of temporal conceptions, lit-
erate Baganda thus formulated a new sense of historicity,
a hybrid sociotemporal consciousness deeply influenced
by Western models of progress yet partially reappro-
priated to processual tropes more deeply grounded in
their own historical imaginary. In the face of unexpected
and unwanted dimensions of the transformative process
they sought ways of securing a moral collectivity as the
form of social entity undergoing transformation—lest it
dissolve into a fractious, divided, and reciprocally de-
structive constellation of antagonistic groups and, worst
of all, antisocially self-interested individuals.
Kingship and Moral Community
Like the revaluation of custom in the 1920s, the cultural
revivalism of the 1990s arose in response to a sense of
moral crisis. It also involved the selective reassertion of
some of the same practices and institutions of social
reproduction and moral community that were central to
the earlier phase. In part, these similarities reflect a ge-
nealogical continuity, for the revaluation of custom es-
tablished an enduring discursive configuration that has
oriented Ganda responses to the multiple socioeconomic
and political transformations and crises of the twentieth
century. But discourses are of course reproduced in de-
terminate historical contexts, and the historical condi-
tions that motivate their deployment also inflect and

reconfigure them. Three features, above all, distinguish
the recent cultural revivalism from the earlier phase: (1)
moral rehabilitation was now deeply associated with the
restoration of kingship; (2) custom and kingship were
subsumed under the newer classificatory master term,
“culture”; and (3) “culture” itself was defined by contrast
with “politics” as its categorial antithesis and nemesis.
These features derive, I argue, from the specific historical
circumstances that generated the postcolonial recourse
to culturalism.
royalism and politics
When the Uganda Constitutional Commission solicited
submissions toward a draft constitution in 1989–91 they
received a flood of contributions from Baganda linking
cultural and moral rehabilitation with the restoration of
kingship. For instance,
Areas where traditional rulers existed should be re-
stored because Uganda has degenerated in cultures
due to lack of traditional rulers. (Kibuuka Salongo)
Traditional institutions should be rejuvenated and
strengthened because societal decay has been a re-
sult of the breakdown of cultural values and norms.
(Vincent Kibuuka)
Traditional Rulers should be restored wherever
such rulers existed [because] they are the cultural
base of their people and source of good customs and
conduct. (Abudala Mmindi)14
Grace Ssemakula, the head of the Pangolin clan and
publisher of the leading vernacular newspaper Ngabo,
provided me with a fuller version of this linkage between
“culture” and kingship in describing the moral sociali-
zation of children:
The culture of Baganda is: be obedient . . . to your
elders. You see, that’s how we [raise] our children.
. . . Now, without a kabaka the system was
dropped, you see, everybody became master of him-
self. And eventually we have riots, people going to
[the] bush to fight, everything [becomes] violence.
. . . Now I’m optimistic that with the kabaka there
our culture will spring up again.
Without kingship and culture, it seems, there is only
anarchy, violence, and the destructive pursuit of indi-
vidual self-interest: “Everyone became master of
himself.”
The capacity of the kingship to crystallize aspirations
for collective moral rehabilitation was founded on its
relationship to the “cultural” practices and institutions
discussed earlier, particularly lineage succession and the
14. Uganda Constitutional Commission archive, translations by
UCC staff. During my fieldwork I found that an overwhelming
majority of rural Baganda were in favor of restoration, while urban
ideological commitments were more diverse (Karlström 1999:
190–96).
k a r l s t r ö m Modernity and Its Aspirants F 605
clan system. The system of ascending kinship units, cul-
minating in the king as ssaabataka, or “head of all clan
heads,” was described to me by the manager of a small
coffee-processing plant in the context of a commentary
on “culture” and the generational transmission of ge-
nealogical knowledge:
Each person is born from somewhere, he has his an-
cestor, and the ancestors of the ancestors. . . . And
whenever someone has a child they tell that child
that my father, your ancestor, is so-and-so, and so-
and-so, and this is where we originate from and this
origin of ours is our culture. . . . Each household be-
longs to a lineage. The lineage belongs to a minor
clan branch. The minor branch belongs to a major
branch. The branches belong to the clan. The clan
. . . has a “roof” head. . . . And above [these] is the
ssaabataka, the one who is the kabaka. That is why
the Baganda are saying that we want to retain our
culture by having a kabaka. Like the termite mound
with a queen; these are the worker termites, but if
you remove the queen you destroy everything. So
also the Baganda and Buganda.
Clanship as moral community is thus an encompassing
architectonics of nesting solidarities out of which Bu-
ganda emerges as a higher-order community of moral
communities united by the kingship: “The Baganda have
a special unity, which is what makes them a mature
nation. . . . This unity has relied upon the knot, the
umbilicus. This knot is the king, the ssaabataka: the
head of all the clans. If you remove the ssaabataka you
may disperse the clans and the nation, and the people
will no longer have a meaning nor a culture” (Jooga
1993). As the structural linchpin of this “special unity,”
the kingship is a remarkably Durkheimian symbolic ob-
jectification and condensation of the moral order—a re-
lationship whereby the representation is conceived as
constitutive of that which it represents (Durkheim 1995
[1912]): without a king, no clans or lineages, no history
or meaning, no morality or culture. The system of suc-
cession in particular is often said to hinge on the king-
ship, for it is the clan heads who confirm successors and
it is the king who confirms succession to clan headships.
It is through such confirmation that he comes to know
his people, much as people come to know one another
through participation in lumbe ceremonies. Without a
king, I was sometimes told, the kwabya lumbe cere-
mony would disappear altogether.
Although the kingship was an important element of
Ganda sociopolitical and historical self-conception
throughout the colonial period, it was of marginal signif-
icance to the revaluation of custom in the 1920s and
1930s. Only after the institution had been thoroughly de-
politicized during the reign of Daudi Chaw (1897–1939)
did it begin to take on the role of structural guarantor
of custom and social reproduction (Karlström 1999:
126–37). This ideological reconfiguration involved the
gradual subsumption of both custom and kingship into
a new master category of Ganda self-representation:
606 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 5, December 2004
by’obuwangwa, or “culture.” Whereas custom (mpisa)
is a broad and flexible category, by’obuwangwa has a
strongly essentializing thrust. Deriving from the verb
kuwanga (to insert), by’obuwangwa covers the English
“original,” “natural,” “intrinsic,” and “constitutive.” In
its ethno-national application as “Ganda culture,” it
therefore unambiguously invokes the past, suggesting a
moment of origin when the constitutive features of the
nation were “inserted.” To designate the kingship as
“cultural” in this sense is to claim for it a deeply foun-
dational status.
In emphasizing the association between kingship and
culture in the 1990s, Baganda were also emphatic in their
rejection of any political role for the restored institution.
Indeed, the opposition between “culture” and “politics”
was fundamental to royalist discourse. Whereas “cul-
ture” encoded the eutopian principles of moral com-
munity, the dystopian side of the postcolonial Ganda
moral imagination had come to be crystallized in the
category of “politics,” or by’obufuzi (from kufuga, “to
rule or govern”). The conventional wisdom was that it
was politics that had destroyed the kingship: that Kabaka
Muteesa had been involuntarily drawn into the political
jockeying surrounding decolonization and this was what
had made him a lightning rod for the destructive fury of
the postcolonial state. More generally, politics and po-
litical parties (bibiina by’obufuzi) were the epitome of
divisive and destructive competition for power, by con-
trast with the regulated and integrating competition
made possible by the unifying aegis of the kingship. Like
witchcraft, politics poisoned social relations, pitting
neighbor against neighbor and children against parents
and generating a boundless greed for power (Karlström
1996:494–96). The popular call for the restoration of a
cultural and nonpolitical kingship was thus a way of
insisting on its role in anchoring the moral order and
effecting a moral rehabilitation—a role that required pro-
tection from the politics that had destroyed it in 1966.
These features of cultural royalism correlate with the
way Baganda have experienced the endangerment of
moral community in the postcolonial period. Whereas
the colonial-era revaluation of custom responded pri-
marily to the perceived disintegration of moral com-
munity from below (or within) by the unexpected un-
fettering of self-interest, postcolonial cultural royalism
has responded to an assault on moral community from
above (or without) by destructive processes of national
political competition and the violently predatory post-
colonial state. Money and property as vehicles of social
corrosion have been replaced by the new media of post-
colonial power. New associational forms—the political
parties that began jockeying for power with growing op-
portunism and ruthlessness as independence approached
in the 1950s—are one such medium. Another is the votes
for which those parties had sporadically competed in na-
tional elections since 1960—an individualizing and re-
strictive currency of power toward which Baganda, like
other Africans, have shown considerable ambivalence
(Karlström 1996). Finally, the violence generated by par-
ties and elections in the transition to independence be-
came an endemic feature of state power and social re-
lations in the 1970s and 1980s—the most deadly and
destructive of these new media of social agency and
power and the one that was most regularly invoked in
the anathematization of politics.
In short, postcolonial state formation and collapse be-
came such a potent source of social disruption and dis-
continuity as to overshadow the earlier ones and render
them virtually irrelevant. Far from worrying about the
individualizing effects of money and private landown-
ership, Baganda had by the early 1990s become thor-
oughly nostalgic for a stable currency regime and pre-
dictable and enforceable property laws. Instead it was
“politics”—the synedochic condensation of the destruc-
tive postcolonial institutions and media of power—that
had become the primary nemesis of moral community
and kingship its eagerly anticipated savior.
the modernity of kingship
After the National Resistance Movement gained power
in 1986, Baganda royalists found themselves engaged in
a debate not unlike the one between the progressionists
and the proponents of custom in the 1920s. They had
hoped that the NRM, which was indebted to widespread
support in Buganda for the success of its armed struggle
against the Obote regime, would willingly allow the res-
toration of kingship. But the NRM leaders, most of
whom were schooled at the University of Dar es Salaam
in the heyday of Tanzanian socialism, were committed
to a Marxist version of linear modernization theory. With
its teleological understanding of history as a series of
socioeconomic transitions, this conception carried a
strong sense of liberation from the past. Both kingship
and “culture” were on the wrong side of the NRM’s core
conceptual antinomies: progress versus backwardness,
modernity versus tradition, science versus superstition,
enlightenment versus ignorance, and patriotism versus
tribalism.
In response to this dismissal of kingship as an anach-
ronism, the royalists insisted that they aspired to both
“the preservation of [Ganda] culture” and “the evolution
of a modern way of living” (Kasirye-Sebalu 1993).
Against the NRM’s locomotive “modernization” they
deployed kukulaakulanya, an organicist chronotope di-
rectly descended from the metaphor of growth and mat-
uration that emerged in the 1920s. Commonly translated
as “development,” kukulaakulanya is “to make [some-
thing] grow and grow,” suggesting an extended devel-
opmental process and continuity with earlier forms of
the entity undergoing change (see also Whyte and Whyte
1998). Far from representing a historical regression, the
kingship was, according to the historian Ssemakula Ki-
wanuka,“the basis of development” in Buganda (quoted
in Ngabo, May 20, 1991). Prince Mutebi’s advisory coun-
cil argued in its submission to the constitutional com-
mission that monarchy “accounts for the relatively high
level of development in the areas where it existed. . . .
Constitutional Traditional Leaders are not merely cere-
monial. They inspire and motivate their people to carry

out developmental projects, self-help projects, etc.” (Ssa-
basajja Ssabataka’s Supreme Council 1991:7–8). Mutebi
and the royalist leadership even promoted the notion of
a “developmental kingship,” with culture among the ar-
eas that the king would help develop.15 “The king I am
hoping for in these times,” wrote a Luganda-language
newspaper editor, “is one who develops my culture”
(Sekeba 1992).
Contemporary cultural royalism, like the earlier re-
valuation of custom, thus articulates an aspirational
modernism. Today, however, the embrace of “modern-
ity” carries a paradoxically nostalgic quality, for the late
colonial and immediate postindependence periods were
the time of Buganda’s greatest prosperity and access to
the benefits associated with participation in the global
order. In the early 1990s, royalists thus looked to the
kingship to help restore a “modernity lost,” to rebuild
Buganda’s erstwhile articulation with the global system
of goods and knowledge. For instance, the elderly Mus-
lim businessman who hosted me at a rural field site was
confident of the king’s ability to restore a productive flow
of international goods: “The kabaka says that the Eu-
ropeans who made an agreement with him [in 1900] have
done him wrong and now the European things are too
expensive. But he intends to go to other countries and
ask that [prices] be reduced for his kingdom so they won’t
load him down with massive debts.” According to a
neighbor, the king would also restore the flow of valued
persons and international expertise: “When we Baganda
have our kabaka in place it will make a big difference.
We will find that people are coming here, like Europeans
coming to stay and bringing us the wisdom of learning.”
Royalists hoped that by reimposing discipline and
unity the king would enable Buganda to recover its one-
time economic supremacy within Uganda. Kingship and
the practices of social reproduction that it anchors were
not conceived as antithetical either to an articulation
with global flows and markets or to “development” con-
ceived partly in terms of economic competitiveness and
market production. On the contrary, in the royalist imag-
inary it was only on the basis of a secure “cultural”
foundation that such articulation and development
could truly and successfully take place. Yet the royalist
discourse also emphatically subordinated the archetyp-
ically individual motives presupposed by liberal models
of economic development to collective ones, as when a
young subcounty chief told me:
We are going to gain a spirit which will help us so
that each person will be able to do good work in his
area, with strength, and voluntarily, because he will
be working for something he likes, with an unshaka-
ble strength, more than when he works without un-
derstanding the reason for it. . . . In the old days
people were ordered to work and they just worked
because the ssaabasajja [man of all men (royal hon-
orific)] was there and he had spoken. . . . If the king-
15. This conception has been extensively elaborated by the royalist
leadership since the kingship was restored (Englebert 2002).
k a r l s t r ö m Modernity and Its Aspirants F 607
ship is restored . . . they will increase their work in
order to develop Buganda.
Or, as I was told by the newspaper editor cited earlier:
There has been a decline in development because
people were not feeling . . . that they still have any-
thing sensible that one can do for himself without a
kabaka. [But] the moment they know that the ka-
baka is there, people will start having the strength
to grow coffee or cash crops and food and so on.
Then they will have got life with a meaning.
Under conditions of social and moral dissolution, per-
sonal gain evidently provides no incentive for diligent
labor, generating only the minimal desire for survival
and subsistence. It is labor driven by collective attach-
ment and voluntary obedience to the king that generates
the motivation and meaning that is necessary to “de-
velop Buganda.”
These discourses of economic aspiration expressed a
longing for access to global resource flows, to be sure,
yet they implied neither a capitulation to liberal market
values nor the sorts of anxieties that often seem to fuel
witchcraft accusations. If there was an element of mag-
ical agency in fantasies about the king’s developmental
powers, this was not the invisible magic of either the
market or the occult. Rather, it was the eminently public
enchantment of legitimate authority and its capacity to
crystallize and channel the energies of moral collectivity.
The restoration of the kingship with the coronation of
Kabaka Ronald Muwenda Mutebi in July 1993 was a po-
tent source of hope for rural Baganda. Despite the dis-
astrous damage that the postcolonial nation-state had
wrought, most of them envisioned the restoration as ush-
ering in a fruitful rearticulation between Buganda and
Uganda rather than as a step toward ethno-national se-
cession.16 They argued that, far from posing an obstacle
to national unity, the return of the kingship would make
Buganda easier to govern and to incorporate into the na-
tional polity. “Buganda will be united,” I was told by a
small-scale businessman, and this unity “will facilitate
[President] Museveni’s rule. . . . You will have the Ba-
ganda collectively.” One village elder predicted that “the
return of the kingship . . . will enable [Museveni] to rule
the people as one.” And a young farmer vowed that “if
the kingship is restored we will be like the worker ter-
mites returning to the mound, meaning that we will
cooperate completely with the government.”
This theory of modular incorporation was articulated
more fully by Grace Ssemakula, the clan head quoted
earlier, who used the analogy of the annual King’s Cup
clan soccer tournament to propose a national structure
of nesting solidarities (quoted in Ngabo, December 14,
1987):
In the clan games we are taught a lesson that every-
16. There were ethno-nationalist and even xenophobic currents
within Ganda royalism as well, but they remained marginal
throughout the 1990s.
608 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 5, December 2004
one needs to learn, that even though there are fifty-
two clans in Buganda they have been able to unite
and play clan football where some are defeated and
still remain united and friendly. . . . Uganda is also
like that, with many nations in it, but concern for
one’s origins and tribal culture should not make one
forget the unity and friendship of Ugandans, because
being divided into many different clans does not
make the Baganda forget to be Baganda, and it even
enables them to feel pride in our Uganda.
Royalists thus sought both to interpose the “cultural”
kingship as a mediating link between ordinary Baganda
and the Ugandan state and to reconceptualize the mul-
tiethnic Ugandan polity as a moral meta-community—
a higher-order transposition of the king-and-clans model
of unity in diversity. Indeed, by allowing the restoration
of the kingship the NRM did consolidate a new ideolog-
ical allegiance toward the state among Baganda, com-
plementing the functional reintegration that they had
engineered by co-opting prominent Baganda politicians
and democratizing local governance since 1986. If this
reconfiguration of the Buganda-Uganda relationship is in
some ways precarious, glossing over both structural con-
tradictions and potentially destabilizing dimensions of
popular royalist ideology, it has nonetheless proven sus-
tainable over the past decade (Karlström 1999:456–61;
Englebert 2002). In this sense, the king’s role as the sym-
bolic objectification of moral community has been ca-
pable of generating a new Ugandan political order that,
however imperfect, is arguably eutopian by comparison
with much of the postcolonial nightmare that came be-
fore it.
Conclusion
Across the twentieth century, Baganda sought to con-
struct and sustain various modes of moral community
in the face of the disruptive transformations wrought by
Buganda’s incorporation into global orders of commerce
and polity. Enough of them did so by deploying “cus-
tomary” institutions and practices of social reproduction
beginning in the 1920s and, later, the constellation of
related conceptions surrounding the “cultural” kingship
to establish these as dominant idioms of collective self-
representation and engagement with those transforma-
tive processes. On the whole, these idioms seem to have
enabled Baganda to sustain an aspirational disposition
toward their own political and economic future, even in
the face of radical postcolonial abjection.
The morally grounded futurity of Ganda traditional-
ism endows it with a specific sort of “modernity.” It is
not modern simply because self-conscious traditional-
ism arises in the vortex of modern capitalism or because
its prototypic traditions are modern inventions or be-
cause of their contemporaneity, adaptability, and refusal
to fade away under the onslaught of modern transfor-
mations. Rather, it is modern in the sense that, far from
implying a rejection of the modernist chronotope, it has
operated in aspirational complementarity with it.
Whether it should therefore be characterized as an “al-
ternative” modernity seems an open question. On the
one hand, there are obvious objective differences from
dominant Euro-American temporal modernities, which
are oriented around neither lineage succession and
bridewealth nor clanship and monarchy. And while Euro-
American conceptions contain both locomotive and or-
ganicist versions, the latter carry a rather different pe-
numbra of connotations from the Ganda concepts of
kukula and kukulaakulanya. On the other hand, there
is little in either phase of Ganda culturalism that is rem-
iniscent of what Chatterjee (1997) characterizes as a self-
conscious effort to formulate a non-Western, indige-
nously grounded modernity in colonial and postcolonial
India. What Baganda seem to have generally aspired to
is a modernity whose archetypal forms they view as un-
ambiguously Western in origin. It is not the telos of their
transformative experience that has primarily preoccu-
pied them but the character of the collective subject
undergoing that change—not the assertion of an alter-
native modernity but the maintenance of moral com-
munities capable of productively and collectively appro-
priating the resources and technologies made available
by a century of colonial and postcolonial incorporation
into the capitalist world order.
Are Baganda unlike other Africans in having sustained
such eutopian imaginaries? Similar configurations of
conception and practice can certainly be discerned else-
where in Africa.17 In Botswana, the enduring salience of
elderhood among Kalanga anchors, via the ritual instal-
lation of patriarchs, an alternative public sphere whose
moral lineaments sustain productive relations of gen-
erational hierarchy and cyclicity, even amidst an accel-
erating process of political and economic class bifurca-
tion (Werbner 2004). In rural Zululand, the circulation
of bridewealth cattle and the sacrificial propitiation of
ancestors continue to orient hopes for migrant employ-
ment and the appropriation of its proceeds to collective
moral ends against worsening postapartheid odds (White
2001). In northern Togo, large-scale initiation ceremo-
nies have long harnessed the energies of labor migration
to the reproduction of the household units that consti-
tute rural Kabre communities (Piot 1999). In urban Zam-
bia, girls’ puberty rites are being revived in a creative
effort to construct and maintain forms of moral com-
munity under conditions of rapid transformation (van
Binsbergen 1998). In Kenya, rural Okiek have incorpo-
rated aspects of their changing circumstances into an
overarching sense of temporal continuity through the
reconfiguration of initiation rituals (Kratz 1993). In west-
ern Cameroon, elaborate wedding ceremonies continue
to reproduce moral personhood and collectivity under
changing conditions (Nyamnjoh 2002), and hereditary
rulers have remained central to the way their subjects
conceive and enact the moral virtues of communal life,
17. Recent broad-gauged survey research has found Africans sur-
prisingly optimistic despite long-standing economic hardship (Af-
robarometer 2004).

deploying titles of nobility and membership in palace
societies as mechanisms for the domestication and le-
gitimation of new sources of wealth and power (Goheen
1996, Fisiy and Goheen 1998). Across much of Africa, in
fact, kings and chiefs are increasingly salient loci of le-
gitimate authority, a phenomenon that is not easily re-
ducible to either strategic interests or reactionary “tra-
ditionalism” (van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal and van Dijk
1999, Perrot and Fauvelle-Aymar 2003).18
In this broader context, the contrast with witchcraft
and the occult is worth revisiting. Whereas witchcraft is
generally the idiom of unchecked and invisible power,
these various rites and institutions are concerned with
constituting visible and circumscribed, hence legitimate,
relations of authority and hierarchy. Whereas witchcraft
often expresses and generates intergenerational antago-
nism, they project intergenerational relations of solidar-
ity and continuity. Whereas witchcraft displaces and de-
personalizes individuals through zombification and
dismemberment, they secure a personalized social order
by anchoring people in knowable social and geographical
space. And whereas the magic of witchcraft serves nar-
rowly personal needs and passions, these forms of en-
chantment are oriented toward the collective good. In
sum, whereas witchcraft is the idiom of a collective
nightmare of power and wealth—as socially divisive, de-
structive, secretive, parasitic—these selectively valor-
ized practices and institutions of social reproduction an-
chor a eutopian moral sociality.
In one sense, this contrast is, of course, a matter of
complementarity: the dystopian occult conjures a moral
world by negation, just as eutopian practices can channel
the moral struggle against witchcraft and other forces of
social disintegration. Hence, for instance, the ability of
royals to domesticate dangerous occult forces in western
Cameroon (Goheen 1996) or the ontological incompati-
bility of kingship and politics in Buganda. My argument,
then, is not that some Africans worry about witchcraft
while others aspire through kingship and life-cycle rites.
Yet the difference between a relative emphasis on one
or the other is not insignificant. Thus, surveying the
saturation of Cameroonian politics with witchcraft anx-
ieties, Geschiere asks whether occult discourses and
practices are capable of generating new and more con-
structive postcolonial political idioms but concludes
that they inspire mainly cynicism and political aliena-
tion (1997:201). By contrast, as I have argued, sustainable
vehicles of aspirational morality seem to have enabled
Baganda to explore new avenues of political integration
with the Ugandan state despite a disastrous postcolonial
experience.
Issues of morality and moral community have led a
rather shadowy existence in recent anthropology. Im-
portant in the history of the discipline, particularly its
18. Nor are such configurations specific to Africa; for Amazonian
and Melanesian examples of the production of a moral futurity
through the codification of mechanisms of social reproduction as
“customary” or “cultural,” see Turner (1991), Donner (1992), and
Foster (1995).
k a r l s t r ö m Modernity and Its Aspirants F 609
Durkheimian strand, they continue to be implicitly and
obliquely invoked but are rarely explicitly thematized or
theorized (Howell 1997, Lambek 2000, Laidlaw 2002).
Indeed, Durkheim’s one-time disciplinary prominence
may be one reason for this, since his social organicism
and one-sided focus on obedience to collective norms led
him to radically downplay processes of public contes-
tation and agentive change in the moral arena—a ten-
dency reproduced in much structural-functionalist an-
thropology. Such tendencies have rightly been the target
of vigorous critiques since the 1960s. But an unfortunate
consequence seems to be that the dominant schools of
thought in sociocultural anthropology since the demise
of structural-functionalism—structuralist culturalism,
practice theory, and the various neo-Marxian, Foucaul-
dian, and postmodernist “hermeneutics of suspicion”—
have all shied away from issues of morality and moral
community. Much is thereby lost to social theory.19
An insistence on the analytical indispensability of
moral motives and orientations need not imply a nega-
tion of the insights into power, ideology, domination, and
contestation that have been central to recent anthro-
pology and social theory. I do not deny that ethical sys-
tems can and often do encode and reproduce relations of
domination and the exclusion of moral “others,” but I
do dispute the common assumption that they are re-
ducible to such dynamics of domination and exclusion.20
Nor do I deny that principles of moral community can
harden into rigid rules that are mechanically and un-
thinkingly reproduced. But neither is this the funda-
mental character of moral collectivity, and I hope that
my analysis of Ganda culturalism has demonstrated the
importance of explicit debates and decisions in gener-
ating conscious commitments to moral community and
determining its core elements. Finally, I do not seek to
privilege morality as the basic organizing principle of
human society or the preeminent motive for human ac-
tion. But I do want to insist that the production and
reproduction of moral collectivities and moral person-
hood is one of the fundamental frameworks orienting
human aims and projects and that we therefore need to
expand our analytical matrix to include moral motives
as a core component of social life and human agency.
Several important recent contributions to a renewal of
attention to morality in anthropology and cultural stud-
ies have advocated a turn to Aristotelian ethics. There
is much to be gained from these deployments of the Ar-
istotelian conception of moral praxis to counterbalance
Durkheimian collectivism with a focus on conscious
moral agency (Lambek 2000, 2002), to reverse the re-
duction of morality to restrictive rules and norms (Eag-
19. There is some irony in this elision, since anthropologists have
simultaneously become acutely attuned to the ethics of their own
theories and practices.
20. See Lambek (2000). Lonsdale (1992) provides an empirical dem-
onstration of this point in his analysis of Kikuyu “moral ethnicity”
as an internal architecture of moral collectivity that precedes the
external political antagonisms of “tribalism.” As Eagleton (2003)
argues, moreover, there can be no emancipatory politics without
an ethical grounding.
610 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 5, December 2004
leton 2003), and to replace a focus on the morality of
discrete acts with a more holistic ethics of life-conduct
(Paxson 2004).21 I would only urge that in our justifiable
eagerness to avoid the functionalist traps of Durkhei-
mian theory we not lose sight of the importance, along-
side the subjective and agentive elements to which an
Aristotelian perspective seems most attuned, of the col-
lective dimensions and reproductive concerns fore-
grounded by Durkheim. It is, I would argue, the collec-
tive dimension of moral engagement that sustains the
aspirational capacity of human culture and life in
common.
Comments
peter geschiere
Amsterdam School for Social Science Research,
University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The
Netherlands (p.l.geschiere@uva.nl) 11 vii 04
Karlström is right that the abrupt resurgence of “witch-
craft” in African anthropology in the 1990s threatens to
become some sort of overkill. His reminder that even in
continuous crisis situations people keep looking for
other registers for moral reflection is certainly welcome.
Moreover, he substantiates his argument with a longer
historical sequence of efforts towards “moral rehabili-
tation” in the Ganda area, from the bataka (“clan el-
ders”) movement in the 1920s to recent ones focusing
on “traditional” kingship.
Karlström is careful not to oppose witchcraft to the
moralizing discourses he focuses upon in terms of kin-
ship and kingship. Towards the end of the article he
speaks, for instance, of “complementarity.” Yet other
passages could suggest that he somewhat underestimates
the pervasiveness of witchcraft discourse and its ten-
dency to turn up in all sorts of contexts. He rightly em-
phasizes that people in Africa reflect on modernity in
other terms as well. However, to balance a possible over-
emphasis among anthropologists on witchcraft it may be
important to explore its easy articulations with other
notions such as kin or king.
I am sympathetic to his search for more positive dis-
courses; reflections on modernity in terms of witchcraft
easily lead to cynicism among both the people concerned
and the anthropologists. But do kin or king really provide
more hope? He describes his examples in quite general
terms, yet with some closer ethnography the picture of
moralizing efforts appealing to custom might be less
rosy. The way the lumbe mourning ritual, with its “pre-
sumption of guilt on the part of the juniors,” reaffirms
the elder’s power may not be considered positive by all
concerned. Often it is precisely when gerontocracy is so
forcefully affirmed that elders themselves may be ac-
21. Laidlaw (2002) pursues a similar agenda by deploying Foucault’s
late work on sexuality and ethical self-fashioning.
cused of witchcraft (as John Middleton [1960] noted for
the Lugbara nearly 50 years ago). Hylton White’s (2001)
study of how sacrificial propitiation of Zulu ancestors
serves to reaffirm the link of urban migrants to the vil-
lage also evokes the latter’s ambiguity. Most urbanites
I know in West Africa still want to relate to the village
but at the same time see it as a millstone around their
necks. Bridewealth and funeral rituals seem to be subject
to a dazzling proliferation of “neotraditional” inventions
which have in common that they cost money and thus
serve to bleed urbanites, with their perceived riches, dry
(see Geschiere 2004, Ashforth 2000).
Moral rehabilitation under the aegis of “customary
chiefs” might raise similar problems. In various parts of
Cameroon chiefs have been eager to participate in party
politics, thus undermining their moral authority with
their subjects (who immediately suspect them of occult
pacts with the new elites). In Ghana and elsewhere,
chiefs have claimed an indispensable role as brokers for
development projects. However, this inevitably raises
the issue of the exclusion of “strangers” who may not
be the chief’s subjects but are nonetheless citizens of the
same state. The central role that “autochthony” has
come to play in democratic politics in several African
countries—as a powerful slogan for excluding “strang-
ers” even if they have the same nationality—shows that
attempts to rebuild a “moral community” in terms of
custom can trigger ever more violent forms of exclusion.
Such doubts certainly do not mean that Karlström’s
alternative efforts towards moral rehabilitation are futile
or just cynical. In view of the crisis and Africa’s desperate
situation in the global economy, it is striking that there
are such efforts at all. But it might be wiser not to present
“custom” or “kingship” as more moral than and there-
fore clear alternatives to witchcraft. I am not so sure that
a return to morality, in its old Aristotelian variant, will
save anthropologists from cynicism. Would it not be pos-
sible to explore other, as yet unclear ways of moralizing?
Witchcraft is also a highly moralizing discourse, albeit
of a special kind. It can evoke enormous moral excite-
ment among both accusers and accused. But this strongly
moralizing tenor seems to be associated with constant
relativizing. Witchcraft is about good and evil but also
about ambiguity: what seems evil can suddenly turn out
to provide protection, and what seems good can prove
deadly dangerous. The need to understand this discon-
certing combination of strongly moral emphasis on good/
evil with constant relativizing and contextualizing may
be the main challenge of witchcraft discourse in Africa
and elsewhere; it may also be the main reason for the
renewed interest in it among anthropologists (especially,
and not accidentally, in America). This is a challenge
that goes beyond the field of African studies.
Karlström’s effort to relativize the link between witch-
craft and African perceptions of modernity is most wel-
come, but I hesitate to separate witchcraft and efforts
towards moral rehabilitation in terms of kin or king. The
challenge may be rather to understand the mutual artic-
ulation of these registers. To bring morality back in, the
notion of subjectivation, mentioned in Karlström’s last

note, may be more promising than a return to Aristotle,
since it evokes an ongoing process of fusion of different
elements in constant flux (see Bayart 2004).
jon holtzman
Department of Anthropology, Western Michigan
University, Kalamazoo, MI 49008, U.S.A. (jon.
holtzman@wmich.edu) 8 vi 04
Karlström’s focus on aspirations is a refreshing counter-
balance not only to the arguably disproportionate atten-
tion afforded phenomena such as witchcraft in the an-
alytical construction of African modernities but also to
broader tensions concerning the role that power and
domination should play in anthropological analysis. We
are right to recognize that power is, ostensibly, every-
where, and, given that anthropologists continue to focus
their analyses on peoples that are disproportionately on
the short end of unequal power relations, we are right
to ensure a degree of moral responsibility in making
these relations transparent in the accounts we produce
of their lives. Yet Karlström also deftly highlights the
dangers that such an emphasis poses. With a singular
focus on power and struggle we may lose sight of im-
portant ways in which our subjects understand their own
lived-in realities, while at the same time we risk negating
the force—or even the existence—of morality itself. Be-
yond this important contribution of the article, I will
focus principally on two additional issues: the role of
“modernity” in this analysis and the issue of “moral
crisis” in relation to differently positioned Baganda.
With regard to the first of these, I am not convinced
that Karlström’s ethnographic exploration of modernity
actually withstands the weight of his own well-placed
theoretical critiques of the concept. The version of mo-
dernity which he paints for the 1990s is one curiously
lacking in both highly defined modernism (in the sense
of a “linear or directional chronotope”) and modern pro-
cesses and institutions, though these are present in con-
temporary Buganda. Granted, he may not agree with me
about the absence of highly defined modernism, arguing
that it is “modern in the sense that, far from implying
a rejection of the modernist chronotope, it has operated
in aspirational complementarity with it.” The phenom-
enon he describes certainly contains some well-digested
elements of the modernist ideologies which have been
part of Ganda life for over a century; it would be rather
surprising if they did not. The aspirations his informants
express—for cheap goods and a unified polity—may owe
something to the modern, but characterizing them as
such strikes me as not very informative. This is not a
disagreement with Karlström’s conclusions but a sug-
gestion that his engagement with a concept whose lim-
itations he makes clear does not add much to his in-
sightful analysis of the role of moral community in
Ganda collective aspirations. If, as he suggests, “mo-
dernity” is “academic shorthand” for articulation with
global economic forces and postcolonial political forms,
I am skeptical of the extent to which Ghanaian witch-
k a r l s t r ö m Modernity and Its Aspirants F 611
craft idioms, Kenyan rap music, South African organ
snatching, Congolese civil war, and Bagandan royal re-
vivalism can fruitfully be encompassed by it. If similar
processes underlie some aspects of many of these varied
phenomena, we are better served by referring with spec-
ificity to the particular processes we find meaningful
than by seeking to articulate them through (or, alter-
natively, use them to explicate the reified contours of) a
concept whose salience may be largely illusory, resting
principally on our own fixations with endlessly trans-
mogrifying dichotomies of Otherness: Europe-Africa,
modern-tradition, global-local, etc.
Two further issues concern variations among differ-
ently positioned Baganda and, relatedly, the question of
moral crisis. As for the first of these, much of the evi-
dence that Karlström brings to bear on his subject comes
disproportionately from the Ganda elite. This has im-
portant implications for his argument. He has provided
ample evidence that at least some Baganda expressed a
profound sense of moral crisis at the two historical mo-
ments with which the article mainly deals. The problem
is that there always seems to be someone who will make
the case for a moral crisis (there has been a moral crisis
in America my whole life, if that says anything). Con-
sequently, the case for these as periods of genuine moral
crisis can only really be made in juxtaposition to a claim
that the intervening periods of colonialism, brutal dic-
tatorship, and civil war were, in contrast, periods of gen-
uine moral stability. This does not necessarily obviate
his broader arguments concerning differences in the rhet-
oric of modernity in these different periods. It does, how-
ever, move us away from a notion of shared crisis
grounded in realities of a somewhat essentialized col-
lective Baganda to explore with more specificity how it
served particular Baganda—differing according to the
usual menu of class, gender, age, religion, education, and
so forth—to employ particular discourses of crisis and
development at particular times or, perhaps, in less in-
strumentalist terms, to experience and express moral cri-
sis in these terms at these particular times.
francis b. nyamnjoh
CODESRIA, Avenue Cheikh Anta Diop, X Canal IV,
BP 3304, CP 18524, Dakar, Senegal (francis.nyamnjoh@
codesria.sn) 29 vi 04
Karlström’s argument that “a world of witchcraft is ul-
timately dystopian” underestimates the possibilities of
witchcraft and the ability of individuals and communi-
ties to harness it. In the Bamenda Grassfields of Cam-
eroon, people distinguish various categories of witch-
craft. Witchcraft is both a source of personal and
collective power or powerlessness and a call for “do-
mesticated agency” (interdependence and conviviality)
against various forms of exploitation, marginalization,
inequality, and individualism. Indeed, the fact that
witchcraft accusations usually occur between kin is in-
dicative of how much people cherish solidarity and are
ready to protect it. Even witches forced to sever links
612 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 5, December 2004
with kin seek alternatives in their “new” community of
witches.
For most people in Bum, everyone is born with either
clairvoyance (seba, two eyes) or innocence (seimok, one
eye). The clairvoyant has the ability to see and do things
beyond the capability of the innocent; clairvoyants are
clever and innocents shortsighted and sometimes fool-
ish. A clairvoyant may be classified as either awung or
msa. Awung includes the wise person (awungadzunga,
good awung) and the sorcerer (awungabe, bad awung).
Msa is subdivided into sly (wutamsamdzung, good per-
son of Msa) and villain (wutamsamba, bad person of
Msa). Sorcerers, seen as jealous and destructive, myste-
riously “eat” or deplete their victims. Those victims
must be kin, as they are expected to prove intimacy and
it is dangerous to victimize strangers. Sorcerers can en-
hance their clairvoyance with medicine or magic that
protects them against fellow sorcerers and against divin-
ers. While sorcerers seek to sever links with kin, diviners
straddle the worlds of kinship and sorcery.
Msa is also a mysterious world of beauty, abundance,
marvels, and infinite possibilities inhabited by very
wicked, hostile, and vicious people known as devils (de-
blisu). It is visible only to the cunning, who alone can
visit it at any time and conjure it up for the innocent to
glimpse. Above all, it is a place in which good and bad,
pleasure and pain, utopia and dystopia are intertwined.
Its inhabitants are the object of both admiration and
envy, especially for their material wealth. Msa is like a
market. To get what one wants one must bargain and
pay for it, but the only currency is the human being, and
those who fail to honour their debts will pay with their
lives.
Msa has a way of luring its victims, first with fantasies
and marvels (utopia) and then with the harsh reality of
exploitation and contradictions (dystopia). As Beben
Ktteh of Fonfuka put it,
At Msa you are first shown only the good, the fan-
tastic, the marvellous. This normally attracts you.
Then you are trapped and caught, and you die. It is
after death that you are shown the . . . bad and dis-
tasteful aspect of it. . . . After your death, you are
enslaved completely: You are ill-treated, overworked,
discriminated against. . . . Sometimes its inhabitants
use you as pillow on their beds, ask you to work on
their farms, to carry water for them, wash their
dishes, and so on. And you do all this work when
their own children and they do just nothing.
The personal success that Msa appears to offer is ul-
timately illusory, and so is the semblance of the new
solidarity and countercommunity that it creates in in-
dividuals by encouraging them to sacrifice kin and tra-
ditional alliances. When the chips are down, Msa’s true
ethos—greed and callous indifference—comes to the
fore, and individuals must make the ultimate sacrifice,
giving their own lives. The surest and safest relationship
with Msa lies not in the permanent severing of links
with kin but in the negotiated belonging that the wise
and the sly epitomize (eutopia).
It is hard to resist seeing Msa as analogous to modern
capitalism, especially as it is experienced on the periph-
ery. While local beliefs in Msa predate the transatlantic
slave trade and communication between the Grassfields
and the coastal regions predates colonialism and plan-
tation agriculture, current narratives on witchcraft in the
Grassfields are heavily coloured by the symbols and as-
sociations of capitalism. True, witchcraft cannot be ex-
plained by the impact of capitalism alone, but it cannot
be explained without it.
Msa and awung are both statements against endan-
gering moral community and against capitalism’s illu-
sion of the permanence of personal success. Like capi-
talism, when undomesticated they bring power and
opportunities only to a few (those with the clairvoyance
and the greed to indulge in them), and their unbridled
pursuit enriches self-seeking individuals at the expense
of family and community. At the same time, they bring
seemingly eternal cycles of indebtedness, manipulation,
zombification, and search for fulfillment. The appetites
that they bring only grow stronger, and those who yield
to their allure are instantly trapped and ultimately con-
sumed—but not before they have consumed their and
others’ sociality. Distinctions between categories of
witchcraft are precisely an attempt at mitigating the dys-
topia of engaging with utopia.
christine obbo
Le Rovdier, Lisle, 24350 Tocane St. Apre, France
(obbox@mageos.com). 29 vi 04
Karlström challenges the perspective of the alternative-
modernities literature on popular African responses to
globalization and postcolonial politics, which portrays
witchcraft as an African “mode of modernity” aimed at
dealing with a “sense of ethical peril and tantalizing but
achingly distant goods and riches.” He proposes an ap-
proach that acknowledges the capacity of culture to sus-
tain and inspire collective aspirations under conditions
of radical transformation, focusing on the way in which
“forms and practices of moral community have enabled
the Baganda to sustain an aspirational engagement with
the changing world against considerable odds.” He ex-
amines two institutions that have been invoked to pro-
duce the moral person and to reproduce a moral com-
munity in Buganda: okwabya lumbe ceremonies and
kingship.
In the 1980s and 1990s people throughout Uganda
called for fundamental moral rehabilitation and aspired
to economic and political rehabilitation. In the 1990s
ethnic groups orchestrated demands for a return of
ebyaffe (our things), autonomous ethnic rights. Tradi-
tional rulers, abolished in 1966, became the rallying
points of discourses on cultural pride and development.
The NRM government regarded this as sectarianism.
Groups devised creative strategies to handle this real-
politik hot potato. The established system of elected

leaders meant that traditional rulers could be restored
only as ceremonial figures. Baganda monarchists were
forced to accommodate the prevailing political ideology
with the understanding that the restored leaders would
be apolitical; they would not have rejected a political
role for the king if it had been an option.
Karlström understates the role of kingship as the struc-
tural guarantor of custom and social reproduction before
the 1930s. The king was ssabataaka (owner of all the
land) and ssabasajja (head of all men [clans vied with
each to provide him wives]) and the final arbiter on lin-
eage succession and clan land disputes. The essential-
izing thrust that Karlström notes in eboybuwangwa (cul-
ture) is due to the circumstances under which the first
king, Kintu, united the aboriginal clans to fight political
tyranny and introduced animal husbandry and crop cul-
tivation. Death rituals were from the beginning impor-
tant because the king came with a brother called
“death.” The rallying point for monarchists in the 1990s
was that “the grandchildren of Kintu will never perish”
(abaana ba Kintu tebaligwawo). Everyone is a direct de-
scendant of Kintu the culture-bearer.
Although Karlström gives by’obuwangwa historical
primacy over mpisa, empisa—observing the customs of
social decency—is what makes a moral person, and eby-
obuwanga is the sum of all the observances that distin-
guish the Baganda from other groups. Empisa grounds
the prescriptions that constitute ebyobuwangwa. Social
discourses commonly insert culture at the beginning of
time; there must be a good reason for assuming that
ebyobuwangwa derives from the verb kuwanga (to in-
sert) when the word has other commonly accepted mean-
ings (to insert a door or a handle into a hoe mortise, treat
badly, injure). What about gwanga (nation, society, or
group)? Obuwangwa is the inherent nature that distin-
guishes societies (mawanga). Thus a native is munag-
wanga, a foreigner, munamawanga, and their cultural
production byabuwangwa.
Karlström stresses that the restoration of kingship “en-
abled Baganda to hope for the rehabilitation of funda-
mental practices of social reproduction and moral per-
sonhood and thus for a better collective future.” He
ignores other morally challenging cultural practices be-
cause he is writing against occult discourses. However,
occult practices and beliefs are part of the mosaic of Ki-
ganda modernity. Consider, for example, the most feared
illnesses, mayembe (speaking horns), which are caused
by malevolent spirits sent voluntarily or involuntarily
by the envious or the wronged. A common topic of con-
versation is the nightmares associated with mayembe.
A listener’s letter on Radio Uganda in May 1992 vividly
articulated the concern over the proliferation of may-
embe, which apparently “multiply [like germs] when the
owners do not take care of them [i.e., store them properly
and offer animal sacrifices]. The mayembe can randomly
attack anyone deemed by their owner to be rich or suc-
cessful. The afflicted persons either die or survive im-
poverished by the cost of exorcism.” The symptoms in-
clude fever, wasting, delirium, or death. Doors being
crashed by invisible Land Rovers or heavy stones feature
k a r l s t r ö m Modernity and Its Aspirants F 613
commonly in patient testimonials. Victims are invisibly
slapped and pushed around until they cannot eat, walk,
or even talk coherently. In terms of economic develop-
ment and modernization, mayembe explain both afflu-
ence and poverty. They are acquired to generate and
maintain wealth and success; they are hired to attack
competitors with better businesses, jobs, gardens, and
marriages. Constant fears of mayembe and poisoning do
not stop people from striving for success. The concern
in the letter quoted above is the moral culpability of
ritually neglectful mayembe owners who endanger un-
suspecting community members. Biomedically, may-
embe are undiagnosable. They are treated by specialist
diviners with powerful mayembe. Divination is a prof-
itable profession. Although mayembe may be named af-
ter gods or natural phenomena, the diviners who give
their mayembe princely names are regarded as the most
effective, and they charge dearly.
susan and michael whyte
Institute of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen,
Frederiksholmskanal 4, DK-1220 Copenhagen K,
Denmark (susan.reynolds.white@anthro.uk.dk).
9 vii 04
Karlström’s emphasis on positive visions of modernity
and morality in African societies is welcome. Uganda is
an excellent case in point for his argument that eutopian
ideals of development have far greater importance as mo-
tive forces than the dystopian images of the occult that
have received so much attention in recent Africanist
scholarship. No one who lives or has worked in Uganda
can doubt that development, progress, and moderniza-
tion are aspirations that must be taken as seriously by
academics as they are by millions of Ugandans. Karl-
ström brings to this project a deep knowledge of Buganda,
where he did fieldwork in 1991–93, and a fascination
with the restoration of the Ganda kingship, which oc-
curred at that time. For those of us who have worked in
other parts of Uganda, his analyses are important because
Buganda has always been seen as the center of devel-
opment for the country. As one of our Banyole friends
in eastern Uganda confided in 1970: “We hate the Ba-
ganda because they are more civilized than anyone else.”
Karlström’s argument is based on the assertion that a
sense of moral crisis pervading everyday life and rela-
tionships finds resolution in Ganda royalism. The king-
ship, he says, is fundamental to the reproduction of
moral community through ceremonies that enact
“proper” kinship. The demonstration of this link be-
tween the kingship and kinship is not unfolded in detail,
but we leave that problem of evidence aside. The article
raises a series of questions that we find valuable, even
though Karlström does not answer them all.
What kinds of places are “-topias”? As a territory, Bu-
ganda has long been an area shared with non-Baganda.
As a political space it is filled by ethnic Baganda and by
many ethnic “others” with diverse political goals and
identifications. This varied population is divided by
614 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 5, December 2004
class, age, gender, and education; there are Muslims,
Catholics, and Protestants, and each faith is further di-
vided into specific religious communities, often with dis-
tinct political agendas. As political space it is home to
Uganda’s capital city, major industrial areas, and an ex-
tensive agricultural upland. Yet Karlström’s eutopia gen-
erates a “sense of emplacement” in terms of an essen-
tialized ethnicity that goes unchallenged by difference.
If a eutopia is not a “no-place” but a “realizable ideal,”
this diversity deserves discussion.
What is a moral community? Karlström presents us
with a Ganda morality framed by patriarchy, hierarchy,
order, and reciprocity and largely abstracted from partic-
ular situations and positions. The moral community is
generated by prescriptive practices such as olumbe cer-
emonies. Yet moral community need not be defined by
agreement and dominant discourse. It can be seen as an
arena in which discussions and debates about morality
occur and various kinds of moral arguments can be made.
It can be the field in which actors have to juggle different
moral considerations that are sometimes incongruent.
For example, the “development” of an individual, a fam-
ily, and a wider unit may be contradictory at some points
(Whyte and Whyte 1998). However, such a line of anal-
ysis would require Karlström to specify situations, in-
terests, and positions.
What is historical context? Karlström points out that
“discourses are reproduced in determinate historical
contexts.” In our view, contexts are chosen by analysts
for their relevance to a particular understanding, but the
choice should not ignore the macro processes that are
generally recognized to structure the world under inves-
tigation. AIDS and the development industry in Uganda
are examples of such historical contexts. Karlström does
not relate olumbe ceremonies and the need for moral
rehabilitation to the AIDS epidemic, which is mentioned
only briefly in a footnote. Yet increasing mortality
throughout the 1990s has meant that funerals and ol-
umbe ceremonies have been restructured and simplified
and that “patriarchal” gender and family relationships
have been challenged (Sabina-Zziwa 1999). The efflores-
cence of the development industry in Uganda from the
late 1980s has been extraordinary: donor-supported ini-
tiatives, NGOs, and efforts by elites to bring develop-
ment projects to their home areas provide an unexplored
context for development eutopianism.
In what sense can culture be opposed to politics?
Karlström argues that what characterizes the present
phase of cultural revivalism in Buganda is that “’culture’
itself was defined by contrast with ’politics’ as its ca-
tegorial antithesis and nemesis.” Where politics were
seen as negative, “dystopian,” culture in the form of roy-
alism gave people a sense of aspiration. Karlström asserts
the opposition without explicitly assessing it. What he
does not mention is the continuing constitutional debate
about “Federo” (Federalism), a form of political organi-
zation that Baganda royalists strongly support and the
NRM government has rejected (Ssemwogerere et al.
2001). Here the issue is political and economic power,
and the debate is as hot today as it was in 1992. It is our
view that in any given case, the relation between “cul-
ture” and politics is a matter for contextualized and sit-
uated empirical investigation. Claims of their disjunc-
ture should be examined, not accepted at face value.
Reply
m i k a e l k a r l s t r ö m
Chicago, Ill., U.S.A. 12 viii 04
Most of these comments are primarily concerned either
with my perspective on witchcraft or with the political
and instrumental dimensions of Ganda royalism and cul-
turalism. I begin with the latter, about which I have
written elsewhere in considerable detail.1
The Whytes call attention to the political agenda of
the royal leadership at Mengo, particularly its long-
standing demand for administrative autonomy or federo
(federal status) for Buganda, in cautioning me against
taking the opposition between culture and politics at
face value. While I agree with their point of caution, I
would warn against conflating the analytical or insti-
tutional sense of “politics” with the local one and the
Mengo leadership with its rural royalists. One of my
intentions has precisely been to get beyond the face value
of the popular royalist culture/politics opposition by
showing that by’obuwangwa and by’obufuzi, despite ob-
vious areas of congruence with the words that are com-
monly used as their English equivalents, carve out a dis-
tinct ontological space and operate as much on a moral
plane as on an institutional one. At the risk of oversim-
plifying, by’obuwangwa could be translated as “consti-
tutive elements [of a nation/people]2 and by’obufuzi as
“divisive and destructive competition for power.” While
Mengo’s federo demands are obviously political from an
analytical institutional perspective, its rural constitu-
ency may not classify them as by’obufuzi unless they
are pursued in divisive ways. Assessing the truth value
of the royalist culture/politics opposition thus seems to
me less illuminating than trying to understand its con-
ceptual logic and cultural and historical sources—which
were a central focus of my paper—and exploring its (an-
alytically and institutionally) political ramifications—
which were not.
The restoration of the kingship in 1993 is a good place
to start. It was, as Obbo rightly emphasizes, a patently
political event: the NRM used it to secure crucial elec-
toral support in Buganda, and the leaders of the royalist
pressure group had an obvious instrumental interest in
1. All of my previous publications are concerned with these issues,
as is much of my dissertation (Karlström 1999:chaps. 1, 3–4, 7–8).
2. The thrust of Obbo’s objection to my derivation of
by’obuwangwa from kuwanga, which is both congruent with the
connotations of the term and has been confirmed by a Ugandan
linguist, is unclear to me; her attribution of original causality to
the actions of an ancestral king, Kintu, whom the historical schol-
arship unanimously regards as mythological is puzzling.

restoring an institution whose leading offices they hoped
to occupy (although I am in no hurry to discount their
moral motives). Obbo is also right that their advocacy
of a cultural and nonpolitical kingship was calculated
(at least in part) to reassure a skeptical NRM government
of their benign intentions. But do these political aims
and strategies discredit my analysis of the moral sources
of culturalist royalism, as Obbo implies? Only if we as-
sume that the broad support among Baganda for a king-
ship segregated from by’obufuzi was the product of ide-
ological manipulation by the royalist leadership. Given
the solidity of this popular view and the modest re-
sources and organizational capacity of the prerestoration
royalist camp, this assumption has a tail-wagging-the-
dog sort of implausibility. Instead, I would argue that the
royalist leaders adopted a conveniently double-edged dis-
cursive strategy, sending two very different messages to
their Baganda supporters and government interlocutors
by using a single set of terms. This strategy succeeded
in getting the kingship restored, but double-edged swords
are notoriously hazardous. This one left Mengo hemmed
in by a constitutional amendment barring “traditional
rulers” from political activities on one side and by its
rural constituency’s aversion to by’obufuzi on the other.
Thus, when frustration over the failure to win federo in
the 1995 constitution led some members of the Mengo
leadership to signal that the king favored the pro-mul-
tiparty opposition in the 1996 presidential election, they
not only risked legal consequences but failed to gain a
majority of votes for the opposition candidate in even a
single county of Buganda. While popular royalism has
bolstered some aspirations that are clearly political in
the analytical and institutional sense, its governing con-
ceptual opposition between by’obuwangwa and by’-
obufuzi has thus also helped to inhibit confrontational
tendencies at Mengo. There are unquestionably those
who benefit politically from popular royalism, but un-
derstanding the extent and limits of their ability to do
so requires the sort of analysis of its sources and char-
acter that I have tried to provide.
Virtually all of the commentators press me to explore
the relevance of positional oppositions and interests to
Ganda royalism and culturalism. Fair enough, since I
insisted on the compatibility of moral and political-in-
strumental analysis. (Of course, I could also point out
that, as Holtzman intimates, their eagerness to pose such
questions and relative lack of interest in my call for an-
alytical attention to moral motives provides inadvertent
evidence for my general thesis about current academic
predispositions.) I had hoped that my analysis of the re-
habilitation of custom in the 1920s would precisely pro-
vide an illustration of moral community as, in the Why-
tes’ phrase, “an arena in which discussions and debates
about morality occur and various kinds of moral argu-
ments can be made”—even, indeed, of the capacity of
such discussions and debates to shift the very principles
in terms of which moral community is conceived. In the
1990s I found a remarkably solid consensus around the
general issues of moral crisis and kingship in rural Bu-
ganda, but there were certainly positionally differenti-
k a r l s t r ö m Modernity and Its Aspirants F 615
ated inflections within it.3 The most ardent rural roy-
alists were generally older men who, having experienced
the institution before its demise (and being men in a
patriarchal society), felt authorized to articulate its vir-
tues to those who had not. Within the shared discourses
of moral rehabilitation they tended to emphasize disci-
pline and hierarchy, whereas those under forty, who were
often more tentative supporters of the restoration, were
more likely to focus on reciprocal obligations and soli-
darities. While the coexistence of such potentially con-
tradictory understandings can indeed lead to situational
conflicts—a notably public one flared up in 1995 over
the degree of deference that politically prominent
women should show the king—it is also arguably crucial
to the broad appeal that this sociocultural ontology has
exerted. What I have been arguing against is not the ex-
istence of such positional differences but only the com-
mon assumption that they are ultimate causes.
The issues of autochthonism and ethnic coexistence
raised by Geschiere and the Whytes are of great concern.
The Whytes are right to note the literally spatial dimen-
sion of Ganda eutopianism, for the geographical territory
of Buganda contains not only Uganda’s ethnically diverse
capital but several areas incorporated into the kingdom
only in the 1890s and a large immigrant population that
mostly arrived as laborers during the colonial period. The
latter, above all, risk political marginalization under fed-
ero as currently envisaged by the royalist leadership,
which involves only a limited democratization of the
Buganda parliament.4 The ownership of land in Buganda
by non-Baganda is a perennially inflammatory issue, and
non-Baganda have been subjected to horrifyingly casual
violence in times of state collapse (Obbo 1988:211–12).
But while autochthonism is a real danger, it is not in-
evitable. Just as I advocate attention to the obverse of
witchcraft, I would urge mindfulness of the obverse of
ethnic chauvinism. Indeed, Ganda cultural self-concep-
tion contains a distinctly incorporative strand: “Bu-
ganda, since its inception 700 years ago,” says the prime
minister, Joseph Ssemwogerere, in an interview pub-
lished as I was writing this response, “has always wel-
comed, and will continue to welcome with open arms
all other people” (The Monitor, August 4, 2004, Internet
edition). Indeed, the precolonial kingdom was an expan-
sive ethno-polity with established mechanisms for the
peaceful incorporation of conquered populations. During
the colonial period, alongside their hauteur toward other
Africans, Baganda were remarkably amenable to rapid
assimilation by immigrants. When rival anti-Obote rebel
groups sprang up in Buganda in the 1980s it was not the
Buganda-identified Uganda Freedom Movement but the
non-Baganda-led NRM that gained widespread support.
Attempts to arouse ethnic hostility toward the NRM in
the 1996 presidential elections fell flat, and some of the
3. Holtzman suggests that my evidence is biased toward elite views,
but while I may have paid insufficient attention to the socioeco-
nomic distribution of those who are quoted here, my data contain
similar formulations from people at all levels.
4. This has proven the biggest sticking point in the currently (and
vituperatively) stalled federo negotiations.
616 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 5, December 2004
rural voters I interviewed found them offensive in light
of their relations with non-Baganda neighbors and rela-
tives. Thus, while Ganda culturalism is certainly sus-
ceptible to escalating autochthonism—a kind of secular
witchcraft hysteria—there are also grounds for a more
inclusive elaboration of moral eutopianism.
Those who express reservations about my perspective
on witchcraft seem most uneasy with my characteriza-
tion of it as dystopian, although Geschiere acknowledges
the cynicism generated by “reflections on modernity in
terms of witchcraft” and there is a distinctly dystopian
ring to Obbo’s description of mayembe multiplying “like
germs.”5 The contrast that I draw between the dystopi-
anism of witchcraft and the eutopianism of custom and
kingship is not a matter of morality per se. Anxieties
about witchcraft proliferation are closely akin to the anx-
ieties about deficient personal morality and its conse-
quences that drove the rehabilitation of custom in the
1920s and the consolidation of culturalist royalism in
the 1990s. But these responses to moral crisis do seem
to produce divergent outcomes. Witchcraft anxieties typ-
ically generate either a defensive resort to the same oc-
cult forces, engendering a vicious cycle, or the perse-
cution and expulsion of suspects. In Buganda, at least,
discourses of custom and kingship have been more cen-
trally oriented toward moral rehabilitation and collective
responsibility than toward individual culpability and ret-
ribution. The contrast should not be overdrawn: there
are forms of witch finding capable of reintegrating sus-
pected witches, and during the political crises of the late
colonial period an inflamed Ganda royalism incited the
violent scapegoating of “traitors.” But there remains an
irreducible difference between these modes of collective
objectification: whereas witchcraft beliefs objectify real
or imagined threats to moral community, what custom
and kingship objectify is moral community itself. This
may be one way of accounting for the dystopian tenden-
cies of the one and the eutopian potential of the other.6
“Do kin and king really provide more hope?” asks Ges-
chiere. Subjectively, in Buganda I think they irrefutably
do, warts and all: however beleaguered individuals may
5. Obbo’s concern is that I deny occult practices and beliefs a place
in “the mosaic of [Ganda] modernity.” While I do not deny their
significance, neither do I think they are nearly as central to the
way contemporary Baganda conceive and enact their relationship
to “modern” forces and institutions as the nexus of culture and
kingship discussed in my paper.
6. There is a paradox about this aspect of witchcraft that I do not
claim to be able to resolve: while magical forces are conceived as
morally ambiguous and amenable to both constructive and destruc-
tive uses, the mobilization of beliefs about such forces in response
to “modern” political and economic phenomena invariably seems
to generate anxiety-ridden visions of rapacity and destruction. I
sometimes suspect that this problem is an artifact of analytical
unclarity, insofar as we tend to apply to term “witchcraft” rather
indiscriminately to a broad range of powers and agents. In Buganda,
at least, witches (balogo) are categorically evil and spirit mediums
or diviners (basamize) are presumptively not. If they deploy some
of the same powerful but dangerous forces, this does not make
either them or the forces morally ambiguous, any more than such
ambiguity attaches to the use of guns by murderers and UN
peacekeepers.
feel by the particular configuration of kinship and other
social obligations in which they are enmeshed, most
would rather try to reform them than abandon them,
because it is here that the meaning of individual lives is
anchored. Objectively, there are certainly complications
and dangers of the sort emphasized by Geschiere and
others, and neither kinship nor kingship is going to re-
verse Africa’s political and economic deterioration in the
absence of national and continental political reform and
global political will. But without institutions that pro-
duce moral persons and crystallize collective aspirations,
how can any society survive the sort of trauma that
Ugandans, like many other Africans, have endured—or,
more generally, the insatiably instrumentalizing eco-
nomic engine of capitalism? Herein lies a deeper truth
of Ganda culturalism.
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