Benedicto K.M. Kiwanuka, Theological Imagination and the Making of Constitutional Discourse in Colonial Uganda: A Global Intellectual History

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Jon Earle, Selwyn College, Cambridge
• Thursday 20 October 2011, 14:30-16:00
• Library Seminar Room, 1st Floor, St. John's Library.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Faridah Zaman.

This paper explores the conceptual history of a single, moral ideal, –bwenkanya, justice, and how it was reasoned and re-imagined in Catholic Buganda throughout the twentieth-century. Throughout the first half of the twentieth-century, etymological and proverb-use development indicate a gradual, yet fundamental shift in the conceptual classification of ‘justice’, particularly among Ganda Catholics. There developed a discursive shift away from the pre-colonial language of decisiveness and precision (sala ‘musango)—which had come to be effectively legislated by a ruling minority in the post-1900 state—to the language of participation and mutual discussion, – kkaanya (–kkaanyizza). By envisioning the latter, Catholics sought to create political space for majority-based participation. In the context of Uganda’s imminent independence, Uganda’s first elected prime minister, Catholic politician Benedicto Kiwanuka, radicalised participatory-oriented conceptualisations of justice with theological abstraction, on the one hand, and the constitutional ideals of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the other, to not only imagine political space for marginalised Ganda Catholics, but also non-Catholic, non-Baganda as well. By drawing on the political philosophies of Locke and Rousseau, Kiwanuka envisioned a nation ‘which stood firmly together’, while debating internal contestations of authority and recasting religiously biased monarchicalism.

This talk is part of the World History Workshop series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Library Seminar Room, 1st Floor, St. John's Library
• World History Workshop

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.