Description
Book SynopsisThrough detailed archival research, Hanson reveals the origins of Uganda’s strategies for good government—assembly, assent, and powerful gifts—and explains why East African party politics often fail.
Trade ReviewIn this thought-provoking new book Holly Hanson has cut clean through the conventional but hated three-part periodization of African historiography—pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial—with its equally unhelpful oppositions of tradition and modernity. With persuasive evidence she shows that Ugandans have for centuries sought consultative, accountable governance, often with institutional checks on the caprice of kings, governors, or presidents. They have long spoken up in public in the conviction that loyalty from below deserves attention from above, and now hope that premodern strategies to secure good governance will help to conjure up a better modernity. -- John Lonsdale, coauthor of Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa
This book ‘speaks loudly’ in the hope that it will ‘be heard.’ Holly Hanson successfully demonstrates how in pursuit of a just and moral polity, physical and conceptual spaces created out of people’s presence and actions provided an opportunity through which people can speak to the powerful and expect to be heard. To Speak and be Heard is a prototype of how a blended study of overt ‘spaces’ and ‘speaking’ can reveal larger political engagement and accountability trends in a complex and rapidly changing world. It superbly demonstrates how those trends could be encapsulated and discerningly written about in the twenty-first century. -- Nakanyike B. Musisi, University of Toronto, coauthor of Decentralisation and Transformation of Governance in Uganda
Holly Hanson weaves into her account of good government a history of inequality, revealing the kind of thing that can make the formula for direct democracy fail to produce the desired results and atrophy. The next challenge is to speak up, be heard, and figure out the obligations that will diminish inequality. Crossing all major periods in Ugandan history, but focused on the last century and a half, this is a landmark book in African history. -- David L. Schoenbrun, author of The Names of the Python: Belonging in East Africa, 900 to 1930
Holly Hanson’s survey has unearthed massive evidence to show that autocracy, one person rule and tyranny did not define African precolonial systems, much as western visitors focused on it or as current media depicts African systems of governance. [Hanson] proves that there were defined mechanisms for the expression … of alternative views of managing society. These views were implemented because there were ample spaces for people to speak and be heard. -- A.B.K. Kasozi, author of The Social Origins of Violence in Uganda, 1964–1985
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Long History of Political Voice
Chapter 1. Building Polities through Assent, Assembly, and Voice in Ancient East Africa
Chapter 2. Incorporating Strangers in the Time of Two Lukikos
Chapter 3. Seeking Justice at the Palace and the Lake
Chapter 4. The Modernity That Might Have Been: How Ugandans Lost Mechanisms of Accountability in the Transition to Independence
Chapter 5. The Pretense of Assent and the Power of Assembly in the Time of Amin
Conclusion: The Shape of the Present
Notes
Bibliography
Index
