Neil Kodesh, Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda (Book Review‪)‬

Neil Kodesh, Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. 264 pp. In 1996, when I was accepted for the Ph.D. program in cultural anthropology at Uppsala University, my intention was to go to the northwestern shores of Lake Victoria and the Kampala area in central Uganda, to study the complex interplay between the cultural and political leadership as it played out in the famous Buganda kingdom. I eventually ended up in war-torn northern Uganda instead, but back in 1996, as I was trying to figure out a more specific research agenda, I found myself scanning the secondhand bookshops of Uppsala, in search for anything that I could find on Uganda. Among other books, I came across a torn first-edition copy of James Frederick Cunningham's Uganda and its Peoples (1905). It cost me some twelve US dollars. This coffee-table-kind-of-book covers most of the then British protectorate, although it focuses, as has been the historical and academic bias ever since, on central Uganda and the indigenous kingdoms under British rule. The so-called tribes of Uganda and their racial characteristics are listed in pseudo-anthropological chapters that turn sketchier the more geographically peripheral to the capital Kampala they are. In a parallel development, the more geopolitically peripheral, the more primitive the people described are alleged to be. So when John Hanning Speke and James Augustus Grant famously crossed the Nile on their journey from Buganda to Khartoum, the Australian journalist Alan Moorehead (1960:68) proposes in The White Nile, one of his acclaimed books, "the tribes grew increasingly more primitive; they were back in a region of naked, painted men who carried bows and arrows and who knew nothing of the arts and crafts of Buganda."