Reading revolution in late colonial Buganda

This article explores the intellectual project of dissenting Protestant Ignatius K. Musazi, a key organiser of social protest in late colonial Buganda. Scholars of Uganda have positioned dissenting politics in the 1920s and 1940s alongside Bataka activism. But there were no less than two bodies of political dissenters in the 1940s: Bataka protesters and Musazi's Farmers’ Unionists. While Musazi and Bataka both sought to push Buganda's colonial chiefs toward the margins, their projects were conceptually different in one important respect: whereas Bataka used Buganda's pre-monarchical past to critique Buganda's hierarchy and colonial power, Musazi imagined a distinctly royalist past where moral kings ruled Buganda with equity. Looking closely into Musazi's project, this article uses biography and emerging methods in global intellectual history to suggest new ways of enriching Uganda's social history. In particular, it uses Musazi's annotated library to show how global history and theological text were conterminously used to inform a certain moral philosophy of monarchy that was conceptually shaped by Bulemeezi's royalist past, Harold Laski and the biblical prophets.