Radical Rudeness: Ugandan Social Critiques in the 1940S‪.‬

In a scathing letter of eighteen single-spaced typed pages, Semakula Mulumba declined the Bishop of Uganda's 1948 invitation to dinner. Dinners and other forms of entertainments and hospitality were, Mulumba asserted, pernicious forms of corruption. Dinners and friendly associations among missionaries and protectorate officials, and between Baganda and Britons, had allowed the British to plot among themselves, seize Ugandans' resources, seduce Buganda's leaders and block Ganda efforts toward individual and corporate progress. (1) Mulumba's response to a dinner invitation with a critique of the colonial order--as a closely interlocked system of cooperation among officials and missions, the Kingdom of Buganda and protectorate officials--was rude, deliberately rude, an attack on the forms of manners and politeness that had shaped both British and Ganda deployments of power and influence in Buganda since at least the beginning of the Uganda Protectorate in 1900. Mulumba, and other Baganda rebels of the late 1940s were disorderly, intemperate and obnoxious within the polite sociopolitical world of colonial Buganda as they drew on their extensive experiences with Britons--officials, missionaries, and others--to reject the polite accommodations around them. What made their rudeness more than just adolescent immaturity, though, was that it was rooted in an understanding of the significance of social rituals, constituted a strategy to disrupt them, and was tied to an effort to build new sorts of public sociability to replace the older elite private networks. Teleologies of political development, whether imagining progress toward a liberal democracy, or toward popular socialism, have guided much of the historiography to date on nationalisms. In the 1960s and 1970s, scholars published celebratory works on the rise of African nations, and since the 1980s have followed these works with studies that implicitly or explicitly ask what went wrong. Nations and nation-states were central to historians' definitions of progress, development and social change. As imperial archives open secret intelligence files, anthropologists of the 1940s and 1950s archive their field notes, and senior African activists retire from active politics to more dissociated reminiscences, it is possible to move away from straightforward discussions of state-based nationalism to ask more complex questions about struggles over democracy, political participation, legitimacy, and decolonization. (2) We can revisit specific events or crises never subject to much serious analysis, such as the Ugandan general strike of 1945 or the insurrection of 1949. But we can also do more, asking how the people of the post-war period understood themselves as not just subjects, but political beings--citizens--capable of hoping for a new politics and organizing to pursue change. To do this, and break from the prison of nationalist teleology, we need to ask different questions from those of the social scientists of the late 20th century, and we need to ask them differently. Instead of understanding all politics as Nationalism--as a break with pre-colonial ideals and as opposition to the colonial system--we must understand the connections that activists built as they developed hybrid movements that may appear incoherent or contradictory from the perspective of conventional political analysis. And we should look at how activists mobilized, deploying not simply imperial or statist forms of opposition, but tactics rooted in a far-from-impoverished culture elaborated and re-made during the colonial episode.