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DREAMS AND POLITICAL IMAGINATION IN COLONIAL BUGANDA*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2017

JONATHON L. EARLE
JONATHON L. EARLE*
Affiliation:
Centre College, Kentucky
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Abstract

This article explores the intellectual history of dreaming practices in the eastern African kingdom of Buganda. Whereas Muslim dissenters used their dreams to challenge colonial authority following the kingdom's late nineteenth-century religious wars, political historians such as Apolo Kaggwa removed the political practice of dreaming from Buganda's official histories to deplete the visionary archives from which dissenters continued to draw. Kaggwa's strategy, though, could only be pressed so far. Recently unearthed vernacular sources show that Christian activists, such as Erieza Bwete and Eridadi Mulira, continued to marshal their dreams and literacy to imagine competing visions of Buganda's colonial monarchy. Earlier scholars had argued that modernity and literacy would displace the political function of dreams. This article, by contrast, proposes that sleeping visions took on new, more complicated meanings throughout the twentieth century. Literacy offered new technologies to expound upon the political implications of dreams and a vast repository of symbols to enrich interpretative performances.

Keywords

Ugandaliteracyintellectual historypolitical cultureChristianityIslammodernity
Type
Disputing Political Power in Buganda
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , March 2017 , pp. 85 - 105
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank Ssalongo George Mpanga Lutwama, Sarah Holloway, and the two anonymous reviewers for their critical suggestions. Any omissions are my own. Author's email: [email protected]

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62 The following narration is taken from loose manuscripts that I found amongst Erieza Bwete's private papers. Fragmented, disheveled, and difficult to decipher Luganda penmanship resulted in translation difficulties. The larger corpus from which I draw is taken from an account Bwete recorded much later in life (9 Oct. 1999). It is not certain to what extent Bwete wished to publish his later revision, or how accurately they represent the original dream.

63 Derek Peterson similarly argues that revivalists throughout eastern Africa in the interwar period used their dreams to envision alternative forms of political mobility and ethnic patriotisms. See Peterson, D. R., Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent, c. 1935–1972 (Cambridge, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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94 Institute of Commonwealth Studies/PP.UG/PP/1, ‘Self-government for Uganda: an African State manifesto by the Progressive Party’, [c. 1956], 15.

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96 Ibid . 15.

97 Ibid . 17.

98 Ibid . 2. The proverb, Ssaagala Agalamidde, ‘No more slumbers’ or ‘Wake up!’, was rhythmically sounded by drums throughout Buganda's nineteenth- and early to mid-twentieth-century kingdom by local chiefs and clan heads to call communities to serve in communal labour.

99 Uganda Eyogera, 30 Nov. 1954.