Buganda and Uganda at Crossroads - Prof. Mamdani

Prof. Mahmood Mamdani made the presentation below at the 3rd Annual Abu Mayanja Memorial lecture held at Kampala Serena Hotel on Friday.

I am greatly honoured to have been asked to give this lecture. I met the late Abu Mayanja in 1961. I was a student at Old Kampala Senior Secondary School, and Hon. Mayanja was the new Minister of Education in the Buganda Government. I was also the Secretary of the Do-it-Yourself Physics Club at the School. In 1961, we held a Science exhibition at the school, and invited Hon. Mayanja to officiate at the opening. He was gracious enough to accept our invitation. I remember it as the first time I got to shake the hand of a well-known political leader.

I subsequently met Hon. Mayanja at several workshops in the 1990s. We did not agree on everything. Nor did we disagree on everything. I became aware of him as a man possessed of acute intelligence, one who never shied away from controversial issues.
The one controversial issue to which Hon. Mayanja dedicated his political life was that of the political relation between Buganda and Uganda. 

It can be said that Hon. Mayanja straddled that relationship. He was determined to negotiate it as a pioneer, no matter the risks involved. This is why when I was invited to give this lecture several months ago, I had no doubt that it had to be on the question to which Hon. Mayanja had dedicated his political life. 

I believe that we are today at a national impasse. Everyone knows that the Movement that came to power with the promise of ‘fundamental change’ in 1986 turned around and promised ‘no change’ in the multi-party elections that followed the adoption of the new Constitution in 1995. 

On its own admission, the Movement had a modest vision of change, limited to the realisation of security: ‘at least we can now sleep’. Having achieved this goal, at least in most of the country, its vision was exhausted. Its energies now appear to be invested in preventing change, an objective that no one in history has ever succeeded to achieve.
The Opposition is narrowly focused on the question of exercising power. 

Impatient to rule, it regularly protests the ruling party’s failure to observe the two term limit on the exercise of Presidential power as no less that a subversion of the spirit of the constitution. But the Opposition does not observe the two-term rule in its own ranks. It has failed to practice what it preaches. 

This is the least of our problems. For the political impasse we face is more than just electoral. It concerns more than just the question of transfer of power. The government that came to power in 1986 pioneered a radically new notion of rights. In the Resistance Councils and Committees of the Luwero Triangle, rights were based on residence, not on descent. Today, this same government has turned around. 

Starting with a political fragmentation of the country into multiple districts, its political leadership has recently proposed to ring-fence elective political office from immigrants, albeit in one region. If implemented, this policy will divide Ugandans all over the country into two groups, one defined as indigenous and the other as non-indigenous, and escalate tensions between them. 

The proposal indicates a dramatic narrowing of political vision. The familiar anti-colonial language of indigenous and non-indigenous, native and settler, only conceals this change from us. To understand the full magnitude of the proposed change, we need grasp how this proposal defines the settler, and thus, the native. 

During the nationalist struggle, the settler was identified with the colonial power. In the Amin period, the settler was identified with Asians, whether Ugandans or not. Now, the settler is every Ugandan who does not come from a particular district. Given that the market economy tends to move people – and not just products – from one place to another, a growing number of Ugandans, indeed a majority, if not now then soon, will find themselves branded settlers where they live. 

The real shift is in the definition of citizenship. Nationalists defined citizenship as Ugandan, regardless of origin; Amin defined it as black Ugandan. 
But, today, it is proposed that the core rights of citizenship – the right to political representation – be defined on a tribal basis. 

The NRM is the first government in the history of independent Uganda to propose a dilution of national citizenship in favour of a tribal citizenship. 
My argument is that if we adopt this proposal, we shall be returning to an arrangement resembling colonial rule. 

I do not want to reduce the question before us to that of individual leadership. For the political impasse transcends personalities. Every government in Uganda’s post-colonial history has had to face the colonial legacy. In moments of crisis, every government has been tempted to adopted measures from the colonial handbook, but none has dared to suggest as wholesale a return to colonial methods of rule as does the NRM leadership today. This is why I intend to focus, not on the personality of those who have governed us, but on the techniques they have employed to govern.

If you want to understand income disparities in a country, and ask an economist for help, he or she will suggest you look at national income statistics, starting with the Gross Domestic Product. GDP statistics will tell you about how wealth is produced and distributed, but it will not tell you about how the producers of wealth are governed. The set of statistics that can best explain to you how a population is governed – and in the process divided – is called the census. 

Every census is a fundamentally political document. The central political question in any census is how to categorise the population. Take any colonial census in 20th century Africa and you will find that it divided the population into two broad groups: one was called races, the other tribes. My argument is that this single distinction illuminated the technology of colonial governance. Five observations will help explain this fact. 

First, when the census collector came, you were either counted as belonging to a tribe or to a race, but not to both. Why were some tagged as members of a race and others as members of a tribe? When you read through census results, the answer seems simple: non-natives were tagged as races, whereas natives were said to belong to tribes. 
Races comprised those not indigenous to Africa (Europeans, Asians), or those who were said to be not indigenous (Arabs, Coloreds, Tutsi). All those defined as indigenous in origin were said to belong to tribes – which we now call ethnic groups. The state thus distinguished non-indigenous races from indigenous tribes.

Second, what was the point of this distinction? Immediately, it was legal. Depending on whether you were defined as a race or a tribe decided the law that would govern you. All races were governed under a single law, civil law. This, however, was not true of tribes and customary law. There was never a single customary law for all tribes as natives, a single racialised group. Each tribe was ruled under a separate set of laws, called customary laws. If you asked the governor why, he would have said this is because native tradition is tribal; this is why it is only fair that each tribe be governed by a law reflecting its own tradition. 

Yet most would agree that the cultural difference between races – such as Whites, Asians and Arabs – was greater than that between different tribes. To begin with, different races spoke different languages, mutually unintelligible. Often, they practiced different religions. They also came from different parts of the world, each with its own historical archive. Different tribes, in contrast, were neighbors and usually spoke languages that were mutually intelligible. 

My point is simple: even if races were as different culturally as whites, Asians, and Arabs, they were ruled under a single law, imported European law, called civil law, modified to suit a colonial context. Even if their languages were similar and mutually intelligible, tribes were governed under separate laws, called ‘customary’ laws, which were in turn administered by ethnically distinct native authorities. 

With races, the cultural difference was not translated into separate legal systems. Instead, it was contained, even negotiated, within a single legal system, and was enforced by a single administrative authority. But with tribes, the case was the opposite: cultural difference was reinforced, exaggerated, and built up into different legal systems and, indeed, separate administrative and political authorities. 

Why? The answer is political. In a nutshell, different races were meant to have a common future; different tribes were not. Third, both legal systems were inherently discriminatory. The discriminatory character of colonial civil law is well known to us, for it was based on race. Racial discrimination distinguished between master races (Europeans) and subject races (Asians, Arabs, Coloured and so on). Subject races were excluded from the exercise of those rights considered the prerogative of only members of the master race. 

Less known is how the colonial power perverted the tribal system into a set of discriminations. First, he tribal system was purged of its democratic elements: the most important change was in the reorganisation of power, now dubbed the customary authority. Colonialism recognised only one authority as traditional: that of the hierarchy of male chiefs. 

We need to remember that most African colonies did not have the political history of an absolutist state. In a centralised state, there is a single law-giving authority, the centralised state. Where power is decentralised, there are multiple rule-making authorities, a different one for each social field. In pre-colonial Africa, the definers of tradition were many: not just chiefs, but also clan heads, women’s groups, age groups, religious groups, and so on.