Blessed with fertile and well-watered soil, East Africa's kingdom of Buganda supported a relatively dense population and became a major regional power by the mid-nineteenth century. This complex and fascinating state has also long been in need of a thorough study that cuts through the image of autocracy and military might. Most studies of the kingdom have focused on the political power of central institutions and the ruling elite. Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda explores the material basis of Ganda political power, examining in particular land, labor, commerce, and military change. The book gives us a new understanding of what Ganda power meant in real terms, and relates the story of how the kingdom used the resources at its disposal to meet the challenges that confronted it. Reid further explains how these same challenges ultimately limited Buganda's dominance of the East African Great Lakes region.
Buganda was one of the largest, most powerful polities in pre-colonial East Africa. It is also one of the most studied, although mainly a generation ago, and with an overwhelmingly political focus. Reid offers a welcome, ambitious break from this norm in this book on the material and military bases of political power in 19th-century Buganda, especially post-1850.
Emphasizing abundance and diversity, Part 1 examines the overall Ganda economy and the kinds of raw materials and economic resources which nineteenth century Buganda had at its disposal, and how the control and utilization of these led to political, social and cultural development. Reid describes how the evolution of Buganda owed much to the individual's relative economic freedom, in terms of both commercial activity and production. Its textile and metal working industries placed Buganda at the center of a thriving commercial system.
Part 2 focuses on the organization of public labor in the construction of roads and buildings, the development of state taxation, and relationship between particular professional and social groups within the labor system. The utilization of human beings compelled Ganda society to consider such concepts as liberty and slavery. However, Reid emphasizes that the Ganda system was never inflexible, and that individuals, free and otherwise, might aspire to higher status whatever their starting point.
Part 3 highlights the central importance of domestic, regional and long-distance trade to Buganda's material wealth and power. First, long-established domestic and regional trade, then 19th-century long-distance commerce connected with the East African coast, transformed Buganda's economy and foreign relations, both augmenting and undermining the wealth and power of the kingdom and its central authority. Reid points out that the Ganda were vigorous traders and that the kingdom to some extent owed it regional dominance in the nineteenth century to its commercial strength.
Finally, in Part 4, Reid turns to military organization, including the constitution of the army, the development of weaponry and the impact of firearms. Reid argues that the development of a naval fleet of enormous canoes in the nineteenth century, which had its origins in Buganda's ancient fishing communities, was created in order to compensate for military failure on land and to control long-distance trade, which had become vital to the kingdom. The Ganda army seems to have become excessively organized burdened by hierarchy and obsessed with structural detail.
Reid's book is well researched and he effectively demonstrates the influence the economy had on the type of state that pre-colonial Buganda became. Buganda still has much to offer the interested historian. Hopefully Reid's interpretation of reasons for the pre-colonial phenomena of Ganda organization, expansion and decline will kindle new interest and further debate concerning what exactly was special about Buganda in the nineteenth century.
Reviewed by David S. Fick, Author of Entrepreneurship in Africa, A Study of Successes
