Up Close and Far Away Renarrating Buganda’S Troubled Past
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Up Close and Far Away Renarrating Buganda’s Troubled Past Sidney Littlefield Kasfir ALL PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR EXCEPT WHERE OTHERWISE NOTED ’d like to begin with the matters of presence and absence research has piled up over the past two generations, it has become which Peter Probst has articulated so well (Probst 2011 increasingly clear that artistic agency has been present, and some- and this issue). One of the important ways “heritage” is times vibrant, in even the most iterative workshops, and not just given substance as an idea is through memorialization, in connection with new forms of patronage. I refer here not only the replacement of something which is lost or forgotten to inventiveness, but to the larger effect of agency whereby art- or in some other way absent or in need of being repre- ists develop imagination through their repeated encounters with sented. In Buganda, I suggest that the cultural immersion of art- other artists in the same workshops, art classes, or even just a Iists (as well as a long-embattled citizenry) in the fabric of history closely shared visual landscape (Kasfir and Förster 2012). has affected people in profound though different ways, even as it So if agency in the form of a heightened visual imagination is has been combined with the often unspeakable political events typically a key ingredient in art production anywhere in Africa, which have attempted to drain out their meaning or punish peo- what makes the past, or more accurately, its memorialization, so ple for believing that this history is a permanent feature of life tenacious in some places that it acts as a powerful framing device there. These differences are not easy to summarize briefly but for this agency and artists opt to renarrate it in ever more various they can be thought of as memories of greatness on the one hand ways, even within the broad outlines of modernism? And what and victimhood, suffering, and loss on the other. ambiguities are likely to arise over these renarrations? In order In this essay I not only hope to situate various forms of memo- to understand the weight of the past in the present I describe rialization in Buganda public monuments as well as in personal a group of artists practicing in Uganda and place this descrip- artistic expression: my other intention is to reveal the tension tion within the larger visual landscape of memorialization in the that exists between taking on the framing of the past in the pres- kingdom of Buganda. ent and at the same time practicing as an artist living and work- ing in the moment. Does one end up diminishing the other? If BUGANDA AND THE LONGUE DURÉE: modernism’s most persistent cliché is that artists in late nine- EIGHT HUNDRED YEARS OF CIVILIZATION AND VIOLENCE teenth and early twentieth century Europe perpetrated a “clean In some African countries colonialism was only the second break with the past”—the iconoclasm of a newly formed avant- act, following initial exploration and trading agreements; what garde—what happens when that past is so intransigent that no came afterward in the years since political independence was such break is realistically possible? sometimes as traumatizing as anything which came before. In It used to be thought that this situation was the essence of what Uganda1 this period of political repression and violence began was meant by the term “traditional” art, those masks and figures four years after independence, in 1966, with the shelling of the which populate museum vitrines and are still alive, and some- Lubiiri (kabaka’s palace) by the Uganda Army under Idi Amin times well, in many places in Africa. This notion of being wedded and ended only twenty years later, in 1986, after a guerrilla war to a continuous iteration of the past was easiest to believe when led by Yoweri Museveni successfully overthrew Obote’s second Africa was still very remote to Western scholarship, but as field regime of terror. In the intervening years the Nile at times ran 56 | african arts AUTUMN 2012 VOL. 45, NO. 3 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/AFAR_a_00011 by guest on 26 September 2021 56-69.indd 56 5/3/2012 9:15:45 PM red with blood, corpses piled up in the Mabira Forest, and so 1 Makerere Art School, Kampala, 2008. many thousands of bodies were dumped into Lake Victoria that 2 Makerere University main hall, 1999. commercial fishing all but ceased at one point. It would be impossible to imagine this nightmarish twenty-year period having no effect on artists, yet Makerere University’s School into neighboring regions as satellites of the central kingship of Art2 stayed open throughout it all, even as imports ceased and ruled by a kabaka, and in modern times, its own parliament, the painting supplies ran out and both teachers and students disap- Lukiiko, in the royal capital of Mengo, now surrounded by the peared (Figs. 1–2). One way to write about the artists who were modern city of Kampala. During the reign of Muteesa I (1856– formed during this time would be, so to speak, from the edges, 1884), following the 1862 visit by British explorer John Hanning by looking at the indirect effects of national trauma on art, litera- Speke searching for the source of the Nile and two decades after ture, music, theater, film. Another would be through examining the the arrival of Arab ivory and slave traders from Zanzibar, the longue durée stretching back centuries before the arrival of Euro- kingdom was opened up to long distance, particularly British, pean explorers and Arab slave and ivory traders, and at the accre- contact. Because of the visits of Speke and, later, the journalist- tion of structures of authority and their periodic rupture in Buganda explorer Henry Morton Stanley, Muteesa became “a familiar per- up to an embattled present. Here I couple this ever-present past with son to the literate Englishman of 1885” (Richards 1994:161). recent Ugandan history and the tenacious hold of both, especially in In Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile, Speke Buganda, on politics and art. It is the presentness of this past which himself described the appearance of Muteesa and his courtiers underlies a significant part of aesthetic practice even today and at his first audience (Jeal 2011:147–51). The cabinet of advisors which provides the threads of my argument. (the original lukiiko) wore barkcloth cloaks covered with ante- Buganda itself, with its long-established kingship, attracted lope skins in a patchwork “sewn together as well as any English the interest of Sir James George Frazer, comparative religionist glovers could have pieced them” while the kabaka, “a good-look- at Cambridge University and author of The Golden Bough (12 ing, well-figured, tall young man of twenty-five” wore his hair vols., 1911–1915). Accordingly he sent out his friend the mission- “combed up into a high ridge … like a cockscomb.” In addition ary John Roscoe, armed with a long, detailed questionnaire enti- to rings on every finger and toe he wore on his neck an orna- tled “Questions on the manners, customs, religion, superstitions ment of “beautifully worked small beads, forming elegant pat- &c. of uncivilized or semi-civilized people” (1889), which would terns by their various colours” and finally “… a stocking of very allow Buganda to be added to his scholarly comparisons of pretty beads. Everything was light, neat and elegant in its way.” sacred kingship.3 In contrast to its early entrance into Frazerian The popular press and exploration literature of Victorian Eng- scholarship, Buganda Kingdom has remained almost unnoticed land constructed an image of the Baganda which, on the one by art historians for the simplest of reasons: its highly developed hand, compared them favorably to the Chinese and Japanese musical, architectural, and artisanal traditions did not include but, on the other, emphasized their cruelties. Eli Sagan, in his sculpture.4 It can easily stand as an extraordinary example of study At the Dawn of Tyranny, described the sense of surprise how African aesthetic practices are filtered through Eurocentric (and one has to add, confusion) to Victorians that in Africa, perceptions of what constitutes a visual and performative culture [a]n authoritarian monarch, heading an aristocratic social structure worthy of notice before they can attract Western scholars. of governors, subgovernors, sub-subgovernors and thousands of The Buganda Kingdom, taking shape sometime between 1300 petty bureaucrats, ruled a million people…. A complete legal system, and 1400, has had an almost uninterrupted line of succession of consisting of a hierarchy of courts to which one could appeal, was in thirty-six kings, some famous as despots (Mwanga II), others as place. Specialization of labor had proceeded to the extent that many modernizers, and some as both at the same time (Muteesa I).5 people no longer worked the land but made their living as tax collec- Throughout this long period it has retained its hierarchical struc- tors, army officers, bards, drummers, fishermen, house builders, and ture of administration. This enabled it to expand its hegemony executioners of the thousands sent each year to their death as human sacrifices (Sagan 1985:xv, quoted in Richards 1994:162). VOL. 45, NO. 3 AUTUMN 2012 african arts | 57 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/AFAR_a_00011 by guest on 26 September 2021 56-69.indd 57 5/3/2012 9:15:55 PM This same ambivalence about Buganda, seemingly highly civi- lized but also barbaric, was expressed by the British public toward Benin a decade later, following the Punitive Expedition of 1897 in which world-class copper-alloy and ivory sculpture carried away as loot was counterpoised with the evidence of human sacrifice (Roth 1968, Coombes 1994).