The Crime of Pseudonymity: Freedom and Authority in the Buganda Boycott of 1959/1960

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Edgar Taylor
Kellogg Institute Visiting Fellow
Lecturer in Department of History, Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Makerere University

This presentation uses a case study from an anti-colonial movement in 1950s Uganda to argue that concepts such as freedom, democracy and justice are always historically contingent, linguistically and conceptually complex, and socially contested, even as they allow actors to connect their struggles across time and space. The talk will focus on a movement that used writing to deliberately destabilize connections between static constituencies, unified ideologies, and reified authorities, which historians and social scientists spend much of our time attempting to decode. In 1959, activists backed by wealthy ministers in Buganda Kingdom launched a boycott campaign against non-African owned shops and foreign commodities in an effort to weaken British colonial authority and empower African traders. The English word “freedom” was central to multilingual Luganda speakers’ contestations over urban social, political and economic life, as they used different media to intervene in centuries of struggle over just relationships of authority in Buganda. However, neither monarchist activists nor their nationalist adversaries were able to enforce a single hegemonic meaning of freedom or claim toauthority. Activists used rallies, loudspeakers and newspapers in an effort to control boycott policy and aims. Meanwhile, anonymous people also used writing and violence – usually undercover of night – to challenge stable conceptions of authority and normative concepts of freedom.