Conjuring the modern in Africa: Durability and rupture in histories of public healing between the great lakes of east Africa

American Historical Review

Volumn 111, Issue 5, 2006, Pages 1403-1439

  Schoenbrun, David L ^a  

^a NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AFRICA SOUTH OF THE SAHARA; ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE; CLASSIFICATION; ETHICS; ETHNOLOGY; HISTORY; METHODOLOGY; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; REVIEW; UTILIZATION REVIEW; WITCHCRAFT;

AFRICA SOUTH OF THE SAHARA; HISTORY, 17TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 18TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; SPIRITUAL THERAPIES; WITCHCRAFT;

EID: 33846508474     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.111.5.1403     Document Type: Review

References (446)

1. Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham, N.C., 1999);
2. see also Filip de Boeck, "Postcolonialism, Power and Identity: Local and Global Perspectives from Zaire," in Richard Werbner and Terence Ranger, eds., Postcolonial Identities in Africa (London, 1996), 100.
3. Florence Bernault, "Body, Power and Sacrifice in Equatorial Africa," Journal of African History 47, no. 3 (2006): 207-239;
4. see also Bethwell Allan Ogot, "British Administration in the Central Nyanza District of Kenya, 1900-1960," Journal of African History 4, no. 2 (1963): 249-273;
5. Karen Fields, Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa (Princeton, N.J., 1985), 62-78.
6. John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 1: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago, 1991), chap. 4.
7. Notwithstanding the fact that "there is much more to the historical anthropology of the Tswana world, c. 1820 to the present, than the colonial encounter"; Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff. "Revelations upon Revelation: After Shocks, Afterthoughts," Interventions 3, no. 1 (2001): 117.
8. See also Elizabeth Elbourne, "Word Made Flesh: Christianity, Modernity, and Cultural Colonialism in the Work of Jean and John Comaroff," AHR 108, no. 2 (April 2003): 444-445, 449-450, on the impact of colonialism arriving before colonialists and on the appropriate scale and cultural makeup of the regional setting for "Tswana" and "Missionary" interactions;
9. Greg Dening, "The Comaroffs Out of Africa: A Reflection Out of Oceania," AHR 108, no. 2 (2003): 471-478, warns against the Imperium of a divide between the moment before and moment after colonial contact;
10. Steven Feierman, "The Comaroffs and the Practice of Historical Ethnography," Interventions 3, no. 1 (2001): 27-28;
11. Donald Donham, "Thinking Temporally or Modernizing Anthropology," American Anthropologist 103, no. 1 (2001): 139, 143-145:
12. and Paul Landau, "Hegemony and History in Jean and John L. Comaroff's Of Revelation and Revolution," Africa 70, no. 3 (2000): 501-519.
13. Relations between "traditional" monarchies and political culture today, the ethnic roots of political violence, and to a lesser extent the cultural politics of health have sustained an interest in the precolonial dimensions of these issues; see David Newbury, "Precolonial Burundi and Rwanda: Local Loyalties, Regional Royalties," International Journal of African Historical Studies 34, no. 2 (2001): 255-314;
14. Jean-Pierre Chretien, The Great Lakes of Africa, trans. Scott Straus (New York, 2003);
15. Jan Vansina, Antecedents to Modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya Kingdom (Madison, Wis., 2004);
16. Holly Elisabeth Hanson, Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda (Portsmouth, N.H., 2003);
17. Peter R. Schimdt, "Historical Ecology and Landscape Transformation in Eastern Equatorial Africa," in Carole Crumley, ed., Historical Ecology (Santa Fe, N.Mex., 1994), 99-125. The cultural politics and political economies of trade, especially of slavery and commodification and diaspora, engage the precolonial with what came after; among many others,
18. see Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830 (Madison, Wis., 1988), 3-164;
19. Thomas Spear, "Early Swahili History Reconsidered," International Journal of African Historical Studies 33, no. 2 (2000): 257-290;
20. Rosalind Shaw, Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone (Chicago, 2002).
21. Regional legacies shaped which historiographies the African precolonial inflects; see Joseph C. Miller, "History and Africa/Africa and History," AHR 104, no. 1 (February 1999): 1-32.
22. Steven Feierman, "Colonizers, Scholars, and the Creation of Invisible Histories," in Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley, Calif., 1999), 186;
23. expanding on ideas first set out in Steven Feierman, "African Histories and the Dissolution of World History," in Robert H. Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Jean O'Barr, eds., Africa and the Disciplines (Chicago, 1993), 167-212, esp. 197-199.
24. Feierman, "Colonizers, Scholars," 206; Feierman, "African Histories," 197-199.
25. For a rich exploration of the constitution of a conceptual archive from the guild of Central African studies, see Wyatt MacGaffey, "Changing Representations in Central African History," Journal of African History 46, no. 2 (2005): 206-207;
26. on "the region," see Claudio Lomnitz-Adler, "Concepts for the Study of Regional Culture," American Ethnologist 18 (1991): 195-214.
27. Quote from Feierman, "Colonizers, Scholars," 207; see also Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J., 2000), 82-83. Temporally deep African regional histories alter the cumulative impact and structuring of microhistories while relying on them for their very possibility;
28. see Thomas C. McCaskie, Asante Identities: History and Modernity in an African Village, 1850-1950 (London, 2000), 19-23;
29. David W. Cohen, Womunafu's Bunafu: A Study of Authority in a Nineteenth-Century African Community (Princeton, N.J., 1977), 16-19.
30. Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass., 1991);
31. Johannes Fabian, "Culture, Time, and the Object of Anthropology," in Fabian, Time and the Work of Anthropology: Critical Essays, 1971-1991 (Philadelphia, Pa., 1991), 198;
32. Timothy Mitchell, "Introduction," in Timothy Mitchell, ed., Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis, Minn., 2000), xii-xiii;
33. Lynn Thomas, The Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkeley, Calif., 2003), 18-19;
34. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, Calif., 2005), 131-135;
35. Julie Livingston, Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Bloomington, Ind., 2005), 5.
36. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 6;
37. see also Michael Hanchard, "Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora," Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1999): 245-268, esp. 250-257.
38. Abiola Irele, "The African Scholar," Transition 51 (1991): 59-60, 62. Jacob F. A. Àjàyí refused the causal force of this conundrum, insisting that historians study how African institutions "have been adapted to the changing circumstances" of colonial conquest;
39. see his "The Continuity of African In stitutions under Colonialism," in Terence O. Ranger, ed., Emerging Themes of African History (Dar es Salaam, 1968), 189-200.
40. See Peter Ekeh, "Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement," Comparative Studies in Society and History 17, no. 1 (1975): 97;
41. Merrick Posnansky, "Foreword," in Christopher R. DeCorse, ed., West Africa during the Slave Trade: Archaeological Perspectives (London, 2001). xi-xiv;
42. Feierman, "African Histories," 167-199;
43. Miller, "History and Africa/Africa and History," 1-32; and Frederick Cooper, "Africa's Pasts and Africa's Historians," Canadian Journal of African Studies 34 (2000): 298-336.
44. Feierman, "Colonizers, Scholars," 183-187; Achille Mberabe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, Calif., 2001), 1-23;
45. Stephen Ellis, "Writing Histories of Contemporary Africa," Journal of African History 43, no. 1 (2002): 24-26;
46. Donham, "Thinking Temporally," 144; David Newbury and Catharine Newbury, "Bringing the Peasants Back In: Agrarian Themes in the Construction and Corrosion of Statist Historiography in Rwanda," AHR 105, no. 3 (June 2000): 835-836.
47. For exceptions, see Randall Pouwels, Horn and Crescent: Cultural Change and Traditional Islam on the East African Coast, 800-1900 (Cambridge, 1987);
48. Paulo F. de Moraes Parias, Arabic Medieval Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali: Epigraphy, Chronicles, and Songhay-Tuāreg History (Oxford, 2003);
49. Rudolph T. Ware, "Knowledge, Faith, and Power: A History of Qur'anic Schooling in 20th century Senegal" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2004), 37-52.
50. This section owes much to Terence O. Ranger, "The Invention of Tradition Revisited: The Case of Africa," in Terence Ranger and Olufemi Vaughan, eds., Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth Century Africa (London, 1993), 62-111;
51. see also Thomas Spear, "Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa," Journal of African History 44, no. 1 (2003): 5-8.
52. Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison, Wis., 1990);
53. see also Kairn A. Klieman, "The Pygmies Were Our Compass": Bantu and Batwa in the History of West Central Africa, Early Times to c. 1900 C.E. (Portsmouth, N.H., 2003);
54. Jan Vansina, How Societies Are Bom: Governance in West Central Africa before 1600 (Charlottesville, Va., 2004).
55. Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests, 6-7, 257-260;
56. Vansina, How Societies Are Born, 265-272.
57. Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests, 247.
58. Vansina has offered "collective memory" as a means to think about this; see his Antecedents to Modern Rwanda, 200.
59. Steven Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in Tanzania (Madison, Wis., 1990), 3.
60. Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago, 1991), 38.
61. See Wyatt MacGaffey, Kongo Political Culture: The Conceptual Challenge of the Particular (Bloomington, Ind., 2000), x;
62. Carolyn Hamilton, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (Cambridge, Mass., 1998);
63. Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2: 28-29, 423 n. 43;
64. Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 10-11, 28;
65. Livingston, Debility and the Moral Imagination, 16-19, 152-154.
66. See Roderick J. McIntosh, Peoples of the Middle Niger: The Island of Gold (Oxford, 1998), 294-303;
67. MacGaffey, Kongo Political Culture, 5-7, 18-23;
68. Jean-François Bayart, "Africa in the World: A History of Extraversion," African Affairs 99 (2000): 218-222, 231-237.
69. Geoffrey Kamali, "Kampala's Night Secret Movement," New Vision. Sunday Edition, September 14, 1997, 17.
70. Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 1: 49-125, and 2: 36-39, 166-217;
71. and Comaroff and Comaroff, "Of Fallacies and Fetishes: A Rejoinder to Donham," American Anthropologist 103, no. 1 (2001): 155;
72. Feierman, "Colonizers, Scholars," 182-216.
73. V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa (Bloomington, Ind., 1988), 187-200;
74. Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (Charlottesville, Va., 1997);
75. Francis Nyamjoh, "Comment on Mikael Karström, 'Modernity and Its Aspirants,' " Current Anthropology 45, no. 5 (2004): 612;
76. Adam Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa (Chicago, 2005). 11-19.
77. Feierman, "Colonizers, Scholars," 185; Livingston, Debility and the Moral Imagination, 5, 19-22.
78. Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 13. A full accounting of how Africans reconfigured social practices related to public healing during the twentieth century lies beyond the scope of this essay, but see Feierman, "Colonizers, Scholars," 186-194, 196-206;
79. Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford, Calif., 1991);
80. Susan Reynolds Whyte, Questioning Misfortune: The Pragmatics of Uncertainty in Eastern Uganda (Cambridge, 1997);
81. and Sheryl McCurdy, "Transforming Associations: Fertility, Therapy, and the Manyema Diaspora in Urban Kigoma, Tanzania, c. 1850-1993" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2000).
82. David L. Schoenbrun, A Green Place, a Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender, and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th Century (Portsmouth, N.H., 1998), 4-6;
83. Bayart, "Africa in the World," 217-222, 264-267.
84. Marshal Sahlins, "Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of 'the World System,' " in Marshal Sahlins, Culture in Practice: Selected Essays (New York, 2000), 417. Dismantling assumptions about the continental formulations informing this move lies beyond the scope of this essay,
85. but see Fernando Coronil, "Beyond Occidentalism: Toward Non-Imperial Geohistorical Categories," Cultural Anthropology 11 (1995): 51-87;
86. Kåren Wigen and Martin Lewis, Myth of Continents (Berkeley, Calif., 1999).
87. On the complexities of representing "social processes with very different temporalities," see William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005), 9-12.
88. Jim Freedman, Nyabingi: The Social History of an African Divinity (Butare, 1984);
89. Feierman, "Healing as Social Criticism in the Time of Colonial Conquest," African Studies 54, no. 1 (1995): 73-88.
90. Schoenbrun, A Green Place, 199-202, 204-206;
91. David L. Schoenbrun, The Historical Reconstruction of Great Lakes Bantu Cultural Vocabulary: Etymologies and Distributions (Cologne, 1997), 226-228:
92. Neil Kodesh, "Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Collective Well-Being in Buganda" (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 2004); Audrey Wipper, Rural Rebels: A Study of Two Protest Movements in Kenya (London, 1977);
93. Sloan Mahone, "The Psychology of Rebellion: Colonial Medical Responses to Dissent in British East Africa," Journal of African History 47, no. 2 (2006): 241-258.
94. Schoenbrun, A Green Place, 26, 182, 211 n. 47;
95. Luise White, "Blood Brotherhood Revisited: Kinship, Relationship and the Body in East and Central Africa," Africa 64, no. 3 (1994): 359-372.
96. John Janzen, Ngoma: Discourses of Healing in Central and Southern Africa (Berkeley, Calif., 1992), 57-84;
97. Schoenbrun, A Green Place, 106.
98. Hanson, Landed Obligation, 10, 95, 97;
99. Richard Reid, Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda (Oxford, 2002), chap. 8.
100. Mikael Karlström, "Modernity and Its Aspirants: Moral Community and Developmental Eutopianism in Buganda," Current Anthropology 45, no. 5 (2004): 596-597.
101. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 255.
102. Ibid., 49, 249.
103. Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 149;
104. see also Hanchard, "Afro-Modernity," 255-257, for a gloss on such struggles that puts race at the center of contests over the appropriation and control of the use and meanings of time.
105. Miller, "History and Africa/Africa and History," 9-19.
106. David L. Schoenbrun, "The Contours of Vegetation Change and Human Agency in Eastern Africa's Great Lakes Region: ca. 2000 BC to ca. AD 1000," History in Africa 21 (1994): 269-302;
107. David Taylor and Peter Robertshaw, "Sedimentary Sequences in Western Uganda as Records of Human Environmental Impacts," Palaeoecology of Africa 27 (2001): 63-76;
108. Sharon E. Nicholson, "Historical Fluctuations of Lake Victoria and Other Lakes in the Northern Rift Valley of East Africa," in John T. Lehman, ed., Environmental Change and Response in East African Lakes (Dordrecht, 1998), 7-35.
109. J. Bertin Webster, ed., Chronology, Migration, and Drought in Interlacustrine Africa (London, 1979);
110. Vansina, Antecedents to Modem Rwanda, 120-121, 127.
111. Shane Doyle, Environmental Crisis and Population Decline: A History of Bunyoro, 1860-1955 (Oxford, 2006);
112. Jean-Pierre Chrétien, ed., Histoire rurale de L'Afrique des Grands Lacs: Guide de recherches: Bibliographie et textes (Paris, 1983);
113. de l'Epine, "Historique des famines et disettes dans l'Urundi," Bulletin Agricole du Congo Belge 20, no. 3 (1929): 440-442.
114. Jan Vansina, "Historians, Are Archaeologists Your Siblings?" History in Africa 22 (1995): 369408;
115. Peter Robertshaw, "Sibling Rivalry? The Intersection of Archaeology and History," History in Africa 21 (2000): 261-286.
116. Alison Wylie, Thinking from Things: Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology (Berkeley, Calif., 2002), xiv-xv;
117. Ann Brower Stahl, Making History in Banda (Cambridge, 2001), 27-40. On "correlating" inferences resting on archaeological and linguistic evidence,
118. see Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs. eds., Archaeology and Language, vol. 1: Theoretical and Methodological Orientations (London, 1997), and vol. 2: Correlating Archaeological and Linguistic Hypotheses (London, 1998).
119. Peter Schmidt, "Oral Traditions, Archaeology, and History: A Short Reflective History," in Peter Robertshaw, ed., A History of African Archaeology (London, 1990), 252-270;
120. Robertshaw, "The Age and Function of the Ancient Earthworks of Western Uganda," Uganda Journal 47 (2001): 20-33.
121. Schmidt, "Oral Traditions," 255-256, 268-270; Robertshaw, "The Age and Function of the Ancient Earthworks," 29-30.
122. See David W. Cohen, Stephan F. Miescher, and Luise White, "Voices, Words, and African History," in White, Miescher, and Cohen, eds., African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History (Bloomington, Ind., 2001), 4-16.
123. See also Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison, Wis., 1985);
124. Farias, Inscriptions, Ixxxv-cvi;
125. Bethwell Alan Ogot, "Luo History and Identity," in White. Miescher, and Cohen, African Words, African Voices, 48-50.
126. "Dynastic" or "court" traditions foreground royal figures or figures linked to royalty. "Clan" traditions foreground the activities of important clan ancestors, sometimes mentioning royal figures. Formal oral and kinesthetic modes of representation facilitate transmission. For approaches to analyzing these sources, see Vansina, Antecedents to Modem Rwanda, 5-13, 207-220;
127. Steven Feierman, The Shambaa Kingdom (Madison, Wis., 1974), 40-90;
128. Ogot, "Luo History and Identity," 32-50;
129. Neu Kodesh, "History from the Healer's Shrine: Genre, Historical Imagination, and Early Ganda History," Comparative Studies in Society and History (2007), forthcoming.
130. Feierman, "Colonizers, Scholars," 192.
131. Iris Berger, Religion and Resistance (Tervuren, 1981), 32-43;
132. and Berger, "Fertility as Power: Spirit Mediums, Priestesses and the Pre-Colonial State in Interlacustrine East Africa," in David Anderson and Douglas Johnson, eds., Revealing Prophets (London, 1994), 65-82;
133. Renee Louise Tantala, "The Early History of Kitara in Western Uganda: Process Models of Religious and Political Change" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1989), 322-329;
134. Nakanyike B. Musisi, "Transformations of Baganda Women: From the Earliest Times to the Demise of the Kingdom in 1966" (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1991), 50-133.
135. Terry Crowley, An Introduction to Historical Linguistics, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1997);
136. Mark Durie and Malcolm Ross, eds., The Comparative Method Reviewed: Regularity and Irregularity in Language Change (Oxford, 1996), esp. 3-38;
137. Christopher Ehret, "Language and History," in Bernd Heine and Derek Nurse, eds., African Languages: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2000), 272-297. For historical classifications,
138. see Ehret, "Bantu Expansions: Re-envisioning a Central Problem in Early African History," International Journal of African Historical Studies 34, no. 1 (2001): 5-41 and "Comments," 43-87;
139. Felix Chami, "Comment," International Journal of African Historical Studies 34, no. 3 (2001): 647-651;
140. and David Schoenbrun, "Representing the Bantu Expansions: What's at Stake?" International Journal of African Historical Studies 34, no. 1 (2001): 1-4.
141. Crowley,An Introduction to Historical Linguistics, 22-26. In the Great Lakes region, the raw data concerning words and meanings come from archival and published sources, as well as field collections, made since the 1850s. On the complexities of authorship lying behind the creation of early dictionaries,
142. see Derek Peterson, "Translating the Word: Dialogism and Debate in Two Gikuyu Dictionaries," Journal of Religious History 23, no. 1 (1999): 31-50.
143. Thilo C. Schadeberg, "Historical Linguistics," in Derek Nurse and Gerard Philippson, eds., The Bantu Languages (London, 2003), 160-163;
144. Crowley, An Introduction to Historical Linguistics, 19-26;
145. Malcolm Ross, "Social Networks and Kinds of Speech-Community Event," in Blench and Spriggs, Archaeology and Language, 209-261;
146. Edward Sapir, Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture: A Study in Method (Ottawa, 1916);
147. William N. Fenton, "Ethnohistory and Its Problems," Ethnohistory 9 (1962): 1-23;
148. Ehret, "Language and History," 272-297. Critiques of historical narratives based on these unconventional sources include Stahl, Making History in Banda, 1-40, and MacGaffey, "Changing Representations," 189-207.
149. Vansina, How Societies Are Born, 5; the notion of regular sound change-"the sound change in any particular language proceeds on the whole according to regularly formulatable rules"-underwrites arguments about linguistic relatedness;
150. Ehret, "Language and History," 273-275, 277-278.
151. The "semantogram" is my invention, designed to display the most significant relationships between the key data supporting historical inferences from comparative linguistics. Their form and function are explained further, below.
152. This circumstance is represented below in the semantograms through notation of the new or additional meanings in the row opposite the subgroup in which they occurred. The semantograms thus display historical information about the shape of words and about inherited and innovated meanings.
153. Vansina, How Societies Are Born, 6.
154. On the historical reality of the different subgroups of "Great Lakes Bantu," see David Schoenbrun, "Great Lakes Bantu: Classification and Settlement Chronology," Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika 14 (1994): 1-62;
155. Derek Nurse, "Historical Classifications of East African Bantu Languages," in Jean-Marie Hombert and Larry M. Hyman, eds., Bantu Historical Linguistics: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives (Stanford, Calif., 1999), 7-10, 27-29.
156. Thilo C. Schadeberg, "Derivation," in Nurse and Philippson, The Bantu Languages, 71-89;
157. Vansina, How Societies Are Born, 7-8.
158. As translations, word reconstructions and meanings given in English create differences in meaning that seem mediated by notions of equivalence, when, in fact, the very notion of equivalence muddies the waters; see Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 17-18. For struggles over the creation of third terms of meaning in the construction of dictionaries,
159. see Peterson, "Translating the Word," 32, 38-50.
160. For an extended example of this, see Schoenbrun, A Green Place, 265-269.
161. Karlström, "Modernity and Its Aspirants," 595-597, 614-616;
162. Nyamjoh, "Comment," 611-612. For more on this debate,
163. see Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy, 1-3, 15-19, 243-248;
164. Diane Ciekawy and Peter Geschiere, "Containing Witchcraft: Conflicting Scenarios in Postcolonial Africa," African Studies Review 41, no. 3 (1998): 1-14.
165. Karlström, "Modernity and Its Aspirants," 596, leaves aside the epistemological conundrum at the core of witchcraft, stated nicely by Adam Ashforth as "the presumption ... that the people among whom one lives have the capacity for extraordinary action in the form of witchcraft"; Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy, 13. Because one cannot know who has a motive for such action, the means to act in that manner are also secret; one can therefore only presume that the capable witch is capable of anything.
166. See also T. Luhrmann, "Witchcraft, Morality, and Magic in Contemporary London," International Journal of Moral and Social Sciences 1 (1986): 77-94.
167. Karlström, "Modernity and Its Aspirants," 595-596, 604-608;
168. see also Ekeh, "Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa," 91-112, Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy, 15-19, 66-72.
169. Hanson, Landed Obligation, 25-53;
170. Reid, Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda, 95-132.
171. Karlström, "Modernity and Its Aspirants," 605.
172. M. Semakula M. Kiwanuka, A History of Buganda from the Foundations of the Kingdom to 1900 (New York, 1972);
173. Christopher Wrigley, Kingship and State: The Buganda Dynasty (Cambridge, 1996):
174. Hanson, Landed Obligation, 59-87;
175. Kodesh, "Beyond the Royal Gaze," 254-331.
176. Hanson, Landed Obligation, 165-197;
177. Karlström, "Modernity and Its Aspirants." 600-604.
178. Karlström, "Modernity and Its Aspirants," 604, 605.
179. Ibid., 609.
180. Steven Feierman and John M. Janzen, "Introduction," in Feierman and Janzen, eds., The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa (Berkeley, Calif., 1992), 1, 12;
181. Livingston, Debility and the Moral Imagination, 2-22. The question of how African healing has been read into and through "religion" in Africa lies beyond the scope of this essay,
182. but see Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago, 1985);
183. Rosalind Shaw, "The Invention of 'African Traditional Religion,'" Religion 20 (1990): 339-353;
184. Paul Landau, "'Religion' and Christian Conversion in African History: A New Model," Journal of Religious History 23, no. 1 (1999): 8-30, esp. 19-29.
185. Steven Feierman, "Explanation and Uncertainty in the Medical World of Ghaambo," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74 (2000): 320-334; Livingston, Debility and the Moral Imagination, 64-106,163179;
186. Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy, 10.
187. Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals, 253.
188. Such distinctions and causality are quite old in the region; see Janzen, Ngoma, 65-67;
189. Svein Bjerke, "Witchcraft as Explanation: The Case of the Zinza," in Anita Jacobson-Widding and David Westerlund, eds., Culture, Experience, and Pluralism: Essays on African Ideas of Illness and Healing (Stockholm, 1989), 219-233;
190. Livingston, Debility and the Moral Imagination, 73-90.
191. Gloria Waite, "Public Health in Precolonial East-Central Africa," in Feierman and Janzen, The Social Basis of Health and Healing, 214-216;
192. Livingston, Debility and the Moral Imagination, 73-86:
193. Berger, "Fertility as Power," 68;
194. Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals, 253-256.
195. Waite, "Public Health," 215; J. Matthew Schoffeleers, River of Blood: The Genesis of a Martyr Cult in Southern Malawi, c. A.D. 1600 (Madison, Wis., 1999).
196. Doyle, Environmental Crisis and Population Decline; McCurdy, "Transforming Associations."
197. Susan Reynolds Whyte, Sjaak van der Geest, and Anita Hardon. Social Lives of Medicines (Cambridge, 2002), 5.
198. Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, N.Y., 1967), 350:
199. cited in Whyte, van der Geest, and Hardon, Social Lives of Medicines, 10.
200. MacGaffey, Kongo Political Culture, 86-87; for more on metonymie chains and the power of medicines, see 78-81.
201. Byron J. Good, Medicine, Rationality, and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective (Cambridge, 1994), 2, 5, 65-115. Some of the meaning carried by words corresponds regularly to empirical realitiespeople use them to speak about what exists and how things happen-while other meaning is embroiled in issues of why some things exist, or cease to exist, and why things happen.
202. Livingston, Debility and the Moral Imagination, 163.
203. Byron J. Good, "The Heart of What's the Matter: The Semantics of Illness in Iran," Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 1 (1977): 27. But experience introduces inconsistencies and innovations into what scholars routinely treat as a medical "system" to render it effectively a non-system for patients who nevertheless rely on it;
204. see Murray Last, "The Importance of Knowing about Not Knowing: Observations from Hausaland," in Feierman and Janzen, The Social Basis of Health and Healing, 393-406.
205. Janzen, Ngoma, 69-71, 197. Although ngòmà cults are present across this large zone, they are not necessarily the most prevalent form of healing;
206. see Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy, 50-61.
207. Janzen, Ngoma, 77-79, 83. The political economy of ngòmà is explored in Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry and Rebellion on the Swahili Coast, 1856-1888 (Portsmouth, N.H., 1995);
208. Terence O. Ranger, Dance and Society in Eastern Africa: The Beni Ngoma (London, 1975);
209. Rebecca Gearhart, "Ngoma Memories: How Ritual Music and Dance Shaped the Northern Kenya Coast," African Studies Review 48, no. 3 (2005): 22-35. The focus on public healing underestimates the centrality of familial care-giving to achieving health.
210. See Livingston, Debility and the Moral Imagination, 235.
211. Amandina Lihamba, "Health and the African Theatre," Review of African Political Economy 36 (1986): 35-40.
212. Feierman, "Colonizers, Scholars," 199, emphasizes the radical difference between the evanescent power in public healing and the stable power of states;
213. Janzen, Ngoma, 75-77,
214. and Berger, Religion and Resistance, emphasize public healing as opposition to state power.
215. C. H. Stuart, "Review of Lemba 1650-1930," Africana Journal 13 (1986): 235-237.
216. A point gleaned from discussions with Steven Feierman, Kathryn Geurts, Nancy Rose Hunt. Murray Last, Julie Livingston, Sinfree Makoni, and Lynn Thomas.
217. Whyte, van der Geest, and Harden, Social Lives of Medicines, 113.
218. Livingston, Debility and the Moral Imagination, 19.
219. For the broader context in the Great Lakes region, see Bethwell Alan Ogot, "The Great Lakes Region," in Djibril Tamsir Niane, ed., Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century (Paris, 1984). 498-524;
220. Schoenbrun, A Green Place;
221. Chrétien, The Great Lakes of Africa.
222. Berger, Religion and Resistance, 67-70;
223. Schoenbrun, Historical Reconstruction. 178-179;
224. Schoenbrun, A Green Place, 112, 202-204, 233-234;
225. Tantala, "The Early History of Kitara," 313-315.
226. See Schoenbrun, Historical Reconstruction, 178-179, 46-47, 109-110;
227. Schoenbrun,A Green Place, 266-269;
228. Claire Grégoire, "Le champ sémantique du théme bantou *-bánjá," African Languages/Langues Africaines 2 (1976): 1-12.
229. Steven Feierman, "Struggles for Control: The Social Roots of Health and Healing in Modern Africa," African Studies Review 28, nos. 2/3 (1985): 73-147, 82;
230. Janzen, Ngoma, 63-74;
231. Gloria Waite, Traditional Medicine and Health Care (Lewiston, Maine, 1992), 11-19;
232. Schoenbrun, A Green Place. 107113.
233. On divination and sacrifice, see Schoenbrun, Historical Reconstruction, 207-208, 239-241;
234. on the relationship of speech to a medicine's healing capacities, see Feierman, "Explanation and Uncertainty." 324-326;
235. on public healing, see Feierman, "Colonizers, Scholars"; on efficacy more generally, see Schoenbrun, A Green Place, 107-115;
236. Whyte, Questioning Misfortune, 87-152;
237. Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy, 57-61.
238. James Augustus Grant, A Walk across Africa (London, 1864), 266-267;
239. John Manning Spekc, Journal of the Discovery of the Sources of the Nile (Edinburgh, 1863), 261 ;
240. Harry H. Johnston, The Uganda Protectorate, 2 vols. (London, 1902), 2: 587-590, 631-632, 678;
241. G. Schweinfurth et al., Emin Pasha in Central Africa: Being a Collection of His Letters and Journals (London, 1888), 92, 285;
242. Samuel W. Baker, The Albert N'yanza (London, 1866), 444-445.
243. On the antiquity of popularizing mediumship, see Berger, Religion and Resistance, 68-73;
244. Tantala, "The Early History of Kitara," 319-322.
245. Janzen, Ngoma, 67-68;
246. Schoenbrun, Historical Reconstruction, 139, 186-187, 201-202, 203;
247. Christopher Ehret, An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History, 1000 B.C. to A.D. 400 (Charlottesville, Va., 1998), 158-160;
248. Catherine Cymone Fourshey, "Agriculture, Ecology, Kinship and Gender: A Social and Economic History of Tanzania's Corridor, 400 BC to 1900 AD" (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 2002), 148-150;
249. Rhonda Gonzales, "Continuity and Change: Thought, Belief, and Practice in the History of the Ruvu Peoples of Central East Tanzania, 200 B.C. to A.D. 1800" (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 2002), 78-98. On the earlier history of *-kú̧mú̧,
250. see Jan Vansina, "Deep Down Time: Political Tradition in Central Africa," History in Africa 16 (1989): 341-362.
251. Schoenbrun, A Green Place, 107-115;
252. Taylor and Robertshaw, "Sedimentary Sequences in Western Uganda," 72-74;
253. on glottochronology. a technique used to measure in years the patterned accu mulation of new vocabulary items, and thus the dates at which various speech communities formed and dispersed, which may then be correlated with various archaeologically attested pottery traditions, see Christopher Ehret, "Testing the Expectations of Giottochronology against the Correlations of Archaeology and Language in Africa," in Colin Renfrew, Alison McMahon, and Leonard Trask, eds., Time Depth in Historical Linguistics, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 2000), 2: 373-399;
254. for a critique of glottochronology and a suggestion for direct associations between the archaeological and historical linguistic records, see Vansina, How Societies are Born, 4-11.
255. On livestock and bananas between the Great Lakes, see Schoenbrun, A Green Place, 70-83;
256. Ehret. An African Classical Age, 77-88, 133-136;
257. Gerda Rossel, A Taxonomic-Linguistic Study of Plantain in Africa (Leiden, 1998), 183-188;
258. B. Julius Lejju, Peter Robertshaw, and David Taylor, "Africa's Earliest Bananas?" Journal of Archaeological Science 33 (2006): 102-113;
259. Peter Robertshaw and David Taylor. "Climate Change and the Rise of Political Complexity in Western Uganda," Journal of African History 41, no. 1 (2000): 1-28;
260. Wrigley, Kingship and State, 60-62, 235, 238;
261. Reid, Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda, 22-25;
262. Andrew Reid, "The Role of Cattle in the Later Iron Age of Southern Uganda" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1991).
263. The following two paragraphs rely on Schoenbrun, A (Green Place, 1 99-203;
264. additional data appear in Schoenbrun, Historical Reconstruction, 226-228;
265. Kodesh, "Beyond the Royal Gaze," 144-194.
266. Words for unilineal inheritance rules and for forms of property defined by the presence of perennial crops were innovated at the same time in several parts of the region; see Schoenbrun, A Green Place, 131-146, 171-184, 222-226, 231-234.
267. Robertshaw and Taylor, "Climate Change," 24-27, warn against privileging cattle over the capacity of grain crops to weather climatic oscillations.
268. See also Hanson, Landed Obligation, 72-73, for a brilliant rendering of how people saw a state as a coming together around forms and nodes of authority based on followers, on spiritual power, and on relationships with a king.
269. On regional trade routes, see John Tosh, "The Northern Interlacustrine Region," in Richard Gray and David Birmingham, eds., Pre-Colonial African Trade (London, 1970), 103-118;
270. Reid. Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda, 135-148;
271. Henri Médard, "Croissance et crises de la royauté du Buganda au XIXe siécle," 2 vols. (Thése de doctorat, Université Paris 1, 2001), 1: 137-147;
272. on beads and bracelets, see Peter Robertshaw, "Munsa Earthworks: A Preliminary Report," Azania 32 (1997): 15, 17.
273. Robertshaw, "The Age and Function of the Ancient Earthworks," 29;
274. Schoenbrun, A Green Place, 199-207, 219-226.
275. On clan networks, see Chrétien, The Great Lakes of Africa, 121-132;
276. on clans and therapeutic networks in Buganda, see Kodesh, "History from the Healer's Shrine."
277. Schoenbrun, A Green Place, 131-151, 185-195, 219-226;
278. David Newbury, Kings and Clans: Ijwi Island and the Lake Kivu Rift, 1780-1840 (Madison, Wis., 1991), 141-142, 209-226;
279. Chrétien, The Great Lakes of Africa, 88-94, 170-183;
280. David W. Cohen, "The Political Transformation of Northern Busoga, 1600-1900," Cahiers d'Études Africaines 22, no. 3/4 (1982): 465-485.
281. The following arguments draw on and revise Schoenbrun, A Green Place, 202, 204-206. On territorial cults,
282. see Berger, Religion and Resistance, 68-70;
283. Richard Werbner, "Introduction," in Werbner, ed., Regional Cults (London, 1977), xxiv-xxxvi;
284. J. Matthew Schoffeleers, "Introduction," in Schoffeleers, ed., Guardians of the Land (Gwelo, 1979), 1-46;
285. Christopher Wrigley, "The River God and the Historians: Myth and History in the Shire Valley," Journal of African History 29, no. 2 (1988): 367-383.
286. David W. Cohen, "The Cultural Topography of a 'Bantu Borderland': Busoga, 1500-1850," Journal of African History 29, no. 1 (1988): 57-79.
287. For Buganda, see Hanson, Landed Obligation, 72-75;
288. for southern Lake Kivu, see Newbury, Kings and Clans, 156-177;
289. for Busoga, see Cohen, "The Political Transformation of Northern Busoga," 472;
290. for Rwanda, see Vansina, Antecedents to Modern Rwanda, 44-66; more widely on clan politics and royal ritual,
291. see Chrétien, The Great Lakes of Africa, 88-94, 121-130.
292. These are the newly wealthy chiefdoms at sites such as Ntusi, west of Lake Victoria; see Robertshaw and Taylor, "Climate Change," 26-28.
293. On violence and state centralization in Buganda, Rwanda, and the Kivu Rift, respectively, see Wrigley, Kingship and State, 192-206;
294. Vansina, Antecedents to Modern Rwanda, 67-79;
295. Newbury, "Precolonial Burundi and Rwanda," 276-280;
296. Reid, Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda, 185-198.
297. Tantala, "The Early History of Kitara," 607-608; Kodesh, "Beyond the Royal Gaze," 71-100.
298. Taylor and Robertshaw, "Sedimentary Sequences in Western Uganda," 71 ; Nicholson, "Historical Fluctuations of Lake Victoria," 15.
299. Robertshaw and Taylor, "Climate Change," 6-7; Reid, "The Role of Cattle."
300. Schoenbrun, Historical Reconstruction, 111;
301. Schoenbrun, A Green Place, 196-197, 238-240;
302. and Rhiannon Stephens, "Historical Linguistic Approaches to a History of Motherhood in West Nyanza, 500-1500 CE" (Seminar Paper, Northwestern University, 2003), 14-24.
303. Taylor and Robertshaw, "Sedimentary Sequences in Western Uganda," 72;
304. Robertshaw and Taylor, "Climate Change";
305. Nicholson, "Historical Fluctuations of Lake Victoria." From about the 1480s to the 1580s, relative humidity increased. The return to aridity in the later sixteenth century may be a regional expression of the Little Ice Age in temperate latitudes.
306. On gendered dimensions to these conflicts, see Schoenbrun, A Green Place, 171-175;
307. Berger, "Fertility as Power," 79-80;
308. Peter Robertshaw, "Women, Labor, and State Formation in Western Uganda," in Elisabeth. A. Baucus and Lisa J. Lucero, eds., Complex Polities in the Ancient Tropical World (Washington, D.C., 2000), 51, 55, 62;
309. Hanson, Landed Obligation, chap. 2. On conflict between royalty and healers,
310. see Tantala, "The Early History of Kitara," 825-829;
311. David Newbury, " 'Bunyabungo': The Western Rwandan Frontier, c. 1750-1850," in Igor Kopytoff, ed., The African Frontier (Bloomington, Ind., 1987), 164-173;
312. Peter Schmidt, Historical Archaeology (Westport, Conn., 1978), chap. 5;
313. J. Bertin Webster, Bethwell A. Ogot, and Jean-Pierre Chrétien, "The Great Lakes Region, 1500-1800," in Bethwell A. Ogot, ed., Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Paris, 1992), 812-827;
314. Wrigley, Kingship and State, 184-187;
315. Schoenbrun, A Green Place, 234-245;
316. Chrétien, The Great Lakes of Africa, 132-137.
317. But Wrigley, Kodesh, Vansina, and MacGaffey reject the bifurcation of power smuggled into the discussion by pitting healers or ritualists against royals; see Kodesh, "Beyond the Royal Gaze," chap. 3.
318. Kodesh, "Beyond the Royal Gaze," 257-302;
319. Vansina, Antecedents to Modern Rwanda.
320. Tantala, "The Early History of Kitara," 435-439, 671-694;
321. Chrétien, The Great Lakes of Africa, 121-137;
322. Wrigley, Kingship and State, 182-187, This paragraph draws on
323. Schoenbrun, A Green Place 236.
324. On resistance, see Berger, Religion and Resistance, 83-87,
325. and Tantala, "The Early History of Kitara," chap. 8;
326. Ferdinand Nahimana, Le Rwanda, émergence d'un état (Paris, 1993), 159-222. On royal alliances with shrines and their bureaucracies,
327. see Schmidt, Historical Archaeology, chap. 5;
328. Wrigley. Kingship and State, 182-184;
329. Chrétien, The Great Lakes of Africa, 132-137.
330. Using detailed shrine and clan histories from Buganda, Kodesh argues for a very close overlap in responsibilities of shrine-keepers as managers of village affairs and as healers; "Beyond the Royal Gaze," chap. 3. Onomastics play important signifying roles connecting royals to shrines, their priests, and their mediums. See, for example. Israel N. Katoke, The Kingdom of Karagwe:A History of the Abanyambo of North-west Tanzania (Nairobi. 1975), 140-174.
331. See Johannes M. M. Van Der Burgt. Dictionnaire Français-Kirundi avec l'indication succincte de la signification Swahili et Allemande (Bois-ie-duc, 1903), 220.
332. See Tantala, "The Early History of Kitara," 290-291.
333. These two paragraphs draw on Schoenbrun, A Green Place, 239;
334. see also Peter Robertshaw, "The Origins of the State in East Africa," in Chapurukha M. Kusimba and Sibel B. Kusimba, eds., East African Archaeology: Foragers, Potters, Smiths, and Traders (Philadelphia, Pa., 2003), 159-163.
335. Luc de Heusch. Le Rwanda et la civilization interlacustre (Brussels, 1966), 294-302;
336. and Berger, Religion and Resistance. chaps. 5 and 6, place this development squarely within a resistance paradigm. Tantala, "The Early History of Kitara," chaps. 3, 4, and 8;
337. and Schoenbrun, A Green Place, 217-243, emphasize an emerging concern with infertility in general;
338. Chrétien, The Great Lakes of Africa, 95-121, 142-153, reads Cwezi stories as both religious and political charters against the oppressive impacts of political centralization on the narrower "logic" of clans.
339. See also Webster, Ogot, and Chrétien, "The Great Lakes Region, 1500-1800." For military success legitimizing royal claims on ritual authority, old and new, see Vansina, Antecedents to Modern Rwanda, 90-95.
340. Reid, Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda, 185-198;
341. Vansina, Antecedents to Modern Rwanda, 73-79,181-194;
342. Newbury, "Precolonial Burundi and Rwanda," 281-294;
343. Webster, Ogot, and Chrétien, "The Great Lakes Region, 1500-1800."
344. For Nyabingi and others similarly concerned with centralized power, begin with A. G. Katate and L. Kamugungunu, Abagabe b'Ankole (History of the Kings ofAnkole, Books 1-2), 2 vols. (Kampala, 1953), 2: 530-532;
345. Francis X. Lwamgira, Amakuru ga Kiziba n'Abakama bamu: The History of Kiziba and Its Kings, 2nd ed., trans. Ephraim Kamuhangire (Kampala, 1969), 21;
346. Edmond Césard, "Histoire des rois du Kyamtwara d'arprȩs l'ensemble des traditions des famille régnante," Anthropos 26, no. 3/4 (1931): 533-543;
347. Jan Vansina, "Historical Tales (Ibitéekerezo) and the History of Rwanda," History in Africa 27 (2000): 375-414;
348. Freedman, Nyabingi, 27-59;
349. de Heusch, Le rwanda, 344-350;
350. Berger, Religion and Resistance, 76-87;
351. and Marcel d'Hertefelt and Danielle de Lame, Société, culture et histoire du Rwanda: Encyclopédie bibliographique, 1863-1980/1987, 2 vols. (Tervuren, 1987), 2: 1807.
352. Feierman, "Colonizers, Scholars," 197.
353. See David Newbury, "Lake Kivu Regional Trade in the Nineteenth Century," Journal des africanistes 50, no. 2 (1980): 6-30;
354. Reid, Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda, 198-248;
355. David W. Cohen, "Peoples and States of the Great Lakes Region," in Jacob F. A. Àjàyí, ed., Africa in the Nineteenth Century until the 1880s (Paris, 1989), 273-276, 282-293;
356. Michael Kenny, "Precolonial Trade in Eastern Lake Victoria," Azania 14 (1979): 97-107;
357. Katoke I.K., The Kingdom of Karagwe, 60-68, 75-81;
358. Joseph Mbwiliza, "The Hoe and the Stick: A Political Economy of the Heru Kingdom," in Emile Mworoha, ed., La Civilisation Ancienne des Peuples des Grands Lacs (Paris, 1981), 100-114;
359. Chretien, The Great Lakes of Africa, 191-199, 244-251;
360. Hanson, Landed Obligation, chap. 3.
361. Newbury and Newbury, "Bringing the Peasants Back In," 847;
362. David Newbury, "The Rwakayihura Famine of 1928-1929: A Nexus of Colonial Rule in Rwanda," in Département d'histoire de l'Université du Burundi, Histoire sociale de l'Afrique de l'est (Bujumbura, 1991), 269-285;
363. Bernard Lugan, "Causes et effets de la famine 'Rumanura' au Rwanda, 1916-1918," Canadian Journal of African Studies 10 (1976): 347-356;
364. Chrétien, The Great Lakes of Africa, 214-220, 224-236, 251-263. Droughts and wars. especially when they occurred together, caused famines long before the nineteenth century;
365. see Vansina, Antecedents to Modern Rwanda, 22.
366. Alison Des Forges, "'The Drum Is Greater Than the Shout': The 1912 Rebellion in Northern Rwanda," in Donald Crummey, ed., Banditry, Rebellion, and Social Protest in Africa (London, 1986). 311-333;
367. Chrétien, The Great Lakes of Africa, 261;
368. Ian Linden, Church and Revolution in Rwanda (Manchester, 1977), 123;
369. F. S. Brazier, "The Incident at Nyakishenyi, 1917," Uganda Journal 32, no. 1 (1968): 17-27;
370. Joseph Gahama, Le Burundi sous administration belge (Paris, 1983), 383-390;
371. Murindwa Rutanga, Nyabingi Movement: People's Anti-colonial Struggles in Kigezi, 1910-1930 (Kampala, 1991), 30-36;
372. Freedman, Nyabingi, 91-104;
373. Bernard Zuure, Croyances et pratiques religieuses des Burundi (Brussels, 1929), 36-98;
374. Njangu Canda-Ciri, "La secte de binji-binji ou la renaissance de la résistance des bashi (juillet-septembre 1931)," in Lyangombe: Mythe et rites-Actes du 2me Colloque du CERUKI, 10-14 Mai 1976 (Bukavu, Zaïre, 1979), 121-128;
375. Capt. J. E. T. Philipps, "The Nabingi: An Anti-European Secret Society in Africa, in British Ruanda, Ndorva and the Congo (Kivu)," Congo 1/9 (1928), 310-321.
376. Barry Chevannes, Rastafari: Roots and Ideology (Syracuse, N.Y., 1994), 43, 164-165, 231-239.
377. Freedman, Nyabingi, 35.
378. The fact that the British saw fit to send the head of Ndochibiri, a Nyabingi "leader," to the British Museum, following a preemptive strike against "Nyabingi leaders" in southwestern Uganda in 1919. reveals the depths of misguided British animosity toward "the" Nyabingi; see Holger Bernt Hansen, "The Colonial Control of Spirit Cults in Uganda," in Anderson and Johnson, Revealing Prophets, 148;
379. Feierman, "Colonizers, Scholars," 200-201; M. J. Bessel, "Nyabingi," Uganda Journal 6, no. 1 (1938): 73-86, 83.
380. Feierman, "Colonizers, Scholars," 198, drawing on Philipps, "The Nabingi," 314-317;
381. see also Cohen, Womunafu's Bunafu, 157-159, for a poetic reading of the evanescence of authority.
382. Hansen, "The Colonial Control of Spirit Cults," 151-160.
383. See Shane Doyle, "Population Decline and Delayed Recovery in Bunyoro, 1860-1960," Journal of African History 41, no. 3 (2000): 436, 448-451;
384. Schweinfurth et al., Emin Pasha, 84-85;
385. Michael Tuck, "Kabaka Mutesa and Venereal Disease: An Essay on Medical History and Sources in Precolonial Buganda," History in Africa 30 (2003): 309-325. Naming and tracking sexually transmitted diseases were central to twentieth-century colonial (and postcolonial) efforts to control women's sexuality.
386. See Sheryl McCurdy, "Urban Threats: Manyema Women, Low Fertility, and Venereal Diseases in Tanganyika, 1926-1936," in Dorothy L. Hodgson and Sheryl A. McCurdy, eds., "Wicked" Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa (Portsmouth, N.H., 2001), 212-233.
387. Shane Doyle and Henri Médard, eds., Slavery in the Great Lakes Region (Oxford, forthcoming);
388. Cohen, Womunafu's Bunafu.
389. Randall Packard, "Chiefship and the History of Nyavingi Possession among the Bashu of Eastern Zaire," Africa 52, no. 4 (1982): 67-86, 90;
390. Gerald Hartwig, "Social Consequences of Epidemic Diseases: The Nineteenth Century in Eastern Africa," in Hartwig and K. David Patterson, eds., Disease in African History: An Introductory Survey and Case Studies (Durham, N.C., 1978);
391. Kirk Hoppe, "Lords of the Fly: Colonial Visions and Revisions of African Sleeping-Sickness Environments on Ugandan Lake Victoria, 1906-61,"Africa 67, no. 1 (1997): 86-104;
392. Helge Kjekshsus, Ecology Control and Economic Development in East African History: The Case of Tanganyika, 1850-1950 (Berkeley, Calif., 1977), 24-25;
393. Doyle, "Population Decline and Delayed Recovery," 437-445;
394. Michele Wagner, "Environment, Community, and History: 'Nature in the Mind' in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Buha," in Gregory Maddox, James Giblin, and Isaria Kimambo, eds., Custodians of the Land: Ecology and Culture in the History of Tanzania (London, 1996), 175-199;
395. Richard Waller, "Ecology, Migration, and Expansion in East Africa," African Affairs 84, no. 3 (1985): 347-370;
396. Vansina, Antecedents to Modern Rwanda, 136-137.
397. John Beattie, "Sorcery in Bunyoro," in John Middleton and Edward H. Winter, eds., Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa (London, 1963), 28;
398. Wipper, Rural Rebels; Hansen, "The Colonial Control of Spirit Cults";
399. Holger Bernt Hansen, Mission, Church, and State in a Colonial Setting: Uganda 1890-1925 (New York, 1984), 280-282;
400. Feierman, "Healing as Social Criticism"; Karlström, "Modernity and Its Aspirants," 601.
401. Feierman and Janzen, "Introduction," 20; for a rich and suggestive exploration of this complex entanglement of healing and medicine,
402. see Livingston, Debility and the Moral Imagination, 66-98, 145152, 179-195;
403. McCurdy, "Transforming Associations." The themes of religious mission and conversion in narratives of conquest and colonialism often include aspects of public healing; see Derek Peterson and Jean Allman, "Introduction: New Directions in the History of Missions in Africa," Journal of Religious History 23, no. 1 (1999): 1-7.
404. Captain Pitman, Uganda's Game Warden, remarked that "recently a European planter in Kyagwe came across numerous well-beaten trails leading through dense jungle to a python coiled around a pile of eggs, to which had been made offerings of eggs, vegetables, coffee berries, groundnuts, pieces ol coloured cloth, cents, etc. But let any one enquire about python worship, past or present-and, in the terminology of the film world, overwhelming surprise is at once registered, coupled with studied ignorance." Captain C. R. S. Pitman, "The Mabira Forest," Uganda Journal 1, no. 1 (1934): 8;
405. Packard, "Chiefship and the History of Nyavingi Possession," 83; Brett L. Shadle, "Patronage, Millennialism and the Serpent God Mumbo in South-West Kenya, 1912-34," Africa 72, no. 1 (2002): 43-48;
406. Mahone, "The Psychology of Rebellion," 242-243, 250-256.
407. Ogot, "Luo History and Identity," 31; Karlström, "Modernity and Its Aspirants," 608-610.
408. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, "Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming," Public Culture 12, no. 2 (2000): 316, 317.
409. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 39,
410. citing Meaghan Morris, "Metamorphoses at Sydney Tower," New Formations 11 (1990): 10.
411. Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy, 88-110;
412. Karlström, "Modernity and Its Aspirants," 600.
413. Karlström, "Modernity and Its Aspirants," 607.
414. See Rosalind Shaw, "The Production of Witchcraft/Witchcraft as Production: Memory, Modernity, and the Slave Trade in Sierra Leant," American Ethnologist 24, no. 4 (1997): 856-876;
415. Neil Kodesh, "Renovating Tradition: The Discourse of Succession in Colonial Buganda," International Journal of African Historical Studies 34, no. 3 (2001): 511-541;
416. Hanson, Landed Obligation, 233-236.
417. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 239, 244.
418. Sahlins, "Cosmologies of Capitalism," 418.
419. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 16;
420. MacGaffey, "Changing Representations," 201-206.
421. Feierman, "African Histories and the Dissolution of World History," 186-196. Greg Dening insists on writing across "the cliché" of "a Time Before and a Time After in the encounter between first peoples and empires";
422. see his "The Comaroffs Out of Africa," 474, 475. On translation, see Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 17-18, 27-30;
423. Charles Piot, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (Chicago, 1999), 22. The break at stake in this project lies in the social reproduction of professional method and not in the historical destruction of "other" intellectual traditions;
424. see Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 5-6,65-66;
425. on narrative conventions, see MacGaffey, "Changing Representations," 18-90.
426. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 245;
427. see also MacGaffey, Kongo Political Culture, 6-7.
428. A sustained engagement of these issues in a South African setting today is Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy, 243-318.
429. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 239, 244;
430. see also Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 124.
431. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 249. Cooper criticizes Chakrabarty's emphasis on "incommensurabilities" between abstract modern subjects and "other ways of thinking and other ways of putting together community life"-because it appears to him that the former entails the loss of the latter;
432. Colonialism in Question, 122. Yet Cooper also touches on Chakrabarty's problem of "heterotemporality" in his critique of modernity as a useful concept for thinking about social justice; ibid., 121-127.
433. MacGaffey, drawing on Gregory Bateson (Steps to an Ecology of Mind [New York, 1972], 64), sees these ways of thinking as "points of view we take in our studies rather than separate realities existing in the world";
434. MacGaffey, Kongo Political Culture, 7.
435. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 14, 16, 40, 250, 253;
436. Stephen Ellis and Gerrie Ter Haar, Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa (New York, 2004), 142-162,177-178, 184-187.
437. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 249. Cooper does not discuss African precolonial histories, apparently preferring to slot them as particularist resources for confronting current issues of social justice;
438. see Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 139.
439. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 22-23, 250, quote from 251.
440. Karlström, "Modernity and Its Aspirants," 604;
441. Carol Summers, "Grandfathers, Grandsons, Morality, and Radical Politics in Late Colonial Buganda," International Journal of African Historical Studies 38, no. 3 (2005): 427-447.
442. Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 239-240.
443. Ibid., 19-20;
444. Karlström, "Modernity and Its Aspirants," 608.
445. Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 140.
446. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 254-255.