Ethnicity and Nationhood in Precolonial Africa: The Case of Buganda

Abstract

While recent historical scholarship has attempted to read back the existence of nations into medieval Europe, a similar revisionism has yet to take place amongst scholars of Africa. Here I take up the case of Buganda, a precolonial kingdom on the northern edge of Lake Victoria in what is now central Uganda. I show that Buganda in the mid-19th century fits various definitions of both ethnic groups and nations, while its neighbors largely do not. Thus the Bugandan case both demonstrates further evidence for the existence of premodern nations and illuminates the great variety of precolonial identities present in Africa.

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