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Landed Obligation The Practice of Power in Buganda
Holly Elisabeth Hanson
Book Code: E07037
ISBN: 0-325-07037-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-325-07037-7
288 pages, maps, photos
Heinemann
Publication: 11/20/2003
List Price: $74.95 (UK Sterling Price: £41.95)
Availability: In Stock
Media Type: Hardcover
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Subjects: Reviews:
  • [H]anson's book frames provocative questions in multiple ways, and it provides a rounded picture of a complex history up to pretty recent times--competently, lucidly, and without showing off.
    —International Journal of African Historical Studies     July 2006
  • Endorsement From Iris Berger
    Professor of History
    State University of New York-Albany:     Through her innovative reading of sources and her focus on the association between love and power, Holly Hansen has produced a strikingly original interpretation of Buganda's history. Insightful and provocative, the book provides a new perspective on the East African past and a path-breaking model for future historians.
  • Endorsement From Thomas Spear
    Professor of History
    University of Wisconsin-Madison:     In this carefully researched and gracefully written account, Hanson fundamentally questions a number of received truths of Buganda history.
Description: Focusing on love's importance to power, Hanson suggests new interpretations of the history of Buganda. She traces an African habit of thoughtthe idea that people ought to be tied by bonds of affectionto show how people used this idea to knot together a kingdom and criticize colonial practices of power. Scholars and students of Buganda, as well as readers intrigued by comparative study of social structure, power, and power's practices in Africa, will find Hanson's vital analysis extremely valuable. "When people in Buganda thought about power, they spoke about love." So begins this study of practices of power and mutual obligation between people with authority, and those they ruled in the East African kingdom of Buganda. Hanson follows the Ganda association of love and power from the origins of the kingdom through the tumultuous argument over the nature of good government that occurred in Buganda in the 1920s. She examines what love in governance meant to the Baganda, and how a rhetoric of loving concern came to rationalize the extreme violence of 19th-century Ganda rulers. The Baganda used reciprocal obligation, pledged in land but understood as an expression of affection, to create connections, to incorporate strangers, and to vanquish competitors in an ongoing struggle for followers and prestige.
Table of Contents:
  • Illustrations
  • Acknowledgments
  • A Note on Language
  • A Dynastic Chronology of the Buganda Kingdom
  • A Timeline for Buganda and Uganda
  • Introduction
  • Creating Relationships with Gifts of Land: Lineages, Chiefs, and Royals Interact to Make the State, ca. 900-ca. 1700
  • Kabakas Struggle to Hold the center: The Destabilizing Consequences of Stolen People and Unobligated Power, ca. 1500-ca. 1800
  • Chiefship in the Dissolution and Restoration of Civil Order, 1857-1899 When the Miles Came: Asserting Sovereignty with Land
  • The Erosion of Reciprocal Obligation, 1906-1920
  • The Order of Miles on Trial
  • Conclusion
  • Afterword: What Happened to Mailo Land?
  • Glossary
  • Selected Bibliography
  • Index
LC Card Number: 2003056676
LCC Class: DT433
Dewey Class: 967
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