This month Contesting Catholics from James Currey has been published. The book is the first scholarly treatment of Uganda’s first elected ruler and offers new insights into the religious and political history of modern Uganda. To celebrate this exciting new publication we are listing some of our other books with a focus on Uganda from James Currey and University of Rochester Press!
Don’t forget about our Proofed discount, enjoy 35% off any of these titles using code BB897.
Contesting Catholics
Benedicto Kiwanuka and the Birth of Postcolonial Uganda
by Jonathan L. Earle and J.J. Carney
Assassinated by Idi Amin and a democratic ally of J.F. Kennedy during the Cold War, Benedicto Kiwanuka was Uganda’s most controversial and disruptive politician, and his legacy is still divisive. On the eve of independence, he led the Democratic Party (DP), a national movement of predominantly Catholic activists, to end political inequalities and religious discrimination. Along the way, he became Uganda’s first prime minister and first Ugandan chief justice. Earle and Carney show how Kiwanuka and Catholic activists struggled to create an inclusive vision of the state, a vision that resulted in relentless intimidation and extra-judicial killings. Focusing closely on the competing Catholic projects that circulated throughout Uganda, this book offers new ways of thinking about the history of democratic thought, while pushing the study of Catholicism in Africa outside of the church and beyond the gaze of missionaries.
Living Salvation in the East African Revival in Uganda
by Jason Bruner
Starting in the mid-1930s, East African revivalists (or, Balokole: “the saved ones”) proclaimed a message of salvation, hoping to revive the mission churches of colonial East Africa. Frustrated by what they saw as the tepid spiritual state of missionary Christianity, they preached that in order to be saved, converts had to confess their sins publicly, putting them “in the light.” Using archival collections, oral histories, and interviews, this study argues that the Balokole revival was a movement through which African Christians articulated and developed a unique spiritual lifestyle, one that responded creatively to the socio political contexts of late colonial East Africa.
Electricity in Africa
The Politics of Transformation in Uganda
by Christopher Gore
No country has managed to develop beyond a subsistence economy without at least minimum access to electricity for the majority of its population. Yet many sub-Saharan African countries struggle to meet demand. Gore examines the politics and processes surrounding electricity infrastructure, provision and reform, including the shifting role of national governments and multilateral agencies. Drawing on extensive research in Uganda, which has one of the lowest levels of access to electricity in Africa and has struggled to construct several, large hydroelectric dams on the Nile, Gore argues that there is a critical need to recognize how the changing political and social context affects the capacity to fulfil national energy goals, to minimize energy poverty and transform economies.
Ghosts of Kanungu
Fertility, Secrecy & Exchange in the Great Lakes of East Africa
by Richard Vokes
“A compelling account…amongst the outstanding Africanist ethnographies of recent years: a splendid combination of ethnographic investigation with the evaluation of texts and images, and a significant addition to the literature on African-initiated Churches.” AFRICAN AFFAIRS
Richard Vokes examines the Kanungu fire of March 2000, when several hundred members of a Christian sect, the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God (MRTC) burnt to death in Southwestern Uganda. His research reveals the history of this sect, the colonial history of the region, the current AIDS epidemic and the effects of globalization in the Great Lakes region.
Tuning the Kingdom
Kawuugulu Musical Performance, Politics, and Storytelling in Buganda
by Damascus Kafumbe
Tuning the Kingdom draws on oral and written accounts, archival research, and musical analysis to examine how the Kawuugulu Clan-Royal Musical Ensemble has historically managed, structured, modeled, and legitimized power relations among the Baganda people of southcentral Uganda. Damascus Kafumbe argues that the ensemble sustains a complex socio political hierarchy, interweaving and maintaining a delicate balance between kin and clan ties and royal prerogatives through musical performance and storytelling that integrates human and nonhuman stories. He describes this phenomenon as ‘tuning the kingdom,’ and he compares it to the process of tensioning or stretching Kiganda drums, which are always moving in and out of tune. Tuning the Kingdom documents how Kawuugulu has historically articulated and embodied principles of the three inextricably related domains that serve as the backbone of Kiganda politics: kinship, clanship, and kingship.
The Mission of Apolo Kivebulaya
Religious Encounter & Social Change in the Great Lakes c.1865-1935
by Emma Wild-Wood
Apolo Kivebulaya was a practitioner of indigenous religion and a Muslim before he became in 1895 a Christian missionary from Buganda to Toro and Ituri. He is still admired as a churchman and missionary in the Anglican churches of the African Great Lakes, and is a significant civic figure in school curricula in Uganda. This book explores Kivebulaya’s processes of religious adherence, and situates the dynamics of his life within social change in colonial Africa. It provides an intimate history of religious encounter, in which individuals like Kivebulaya remade themselves through conversion to Christianity and re-ordered social relations through preaching a transnational religion which brought technological advantage. By re-examining the role of indigenous agents as harbingers of change, the author offers a new perspective on the northern Great Lakes region.
Women and Politics in Uganda
The Challenge of Associational Autonomy
by Aili Mari Tripp
“…shows, through interview and case studies of conflicts between women’s associations and local level authorities, how that nation’s women’s movement was established with surprising rapidity and considerable autonomy from the state, making itself a powerful force.” Margaret Snyder, CHOICE
Analyses the interrelationship between national and local politics and the women’s movement in Africa. It covers: women’s mobilization and social autonomy; the background to the National Resistance Movement; and decentralization and women’s participation in Uganda.
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