The recent literature on African modernities, with its emphasis on witchcraft and the occult, has provided an important but arguably one‐sided perspective on popular responses to globalization and postcolonial politics. This article argues that the dystopian visions implicit in the efflorescence of occultism need to be balanced by closer attention to more optimistic orientations and the sources upon which they draw. Building upon ethnographic and historical research on Buganda (in Uganda), it focuses on moral community and its modes of social reproduction as the dynamic obverse of witchcraft. Empirically, it explores the widespread sense of moral crisis generated by Uganda’s postcolonial collapse, the recourse to kingship and rituals of social reproduction as primary loci of moral rehabilitation in the 1990s, and an earlier period of moral crisis in the 1920s that established the enduring patterns of cultural self‐conception upon which the recent moral revivalism has been founded. The emphasis throughout is on the way in which forms and practices of moral community have enabled Baganda to sustain an aspirational engagement with their changing world against considerable odds. A general case is made for greater analytical attention to the motive force of morality and moral community in human social life.
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