A performance culture of illness and wellness In southern Uganda, ritual healing traditions called kusamira and nswezi rely on music to treat sickness and maintain well-being. Peter J. Hoesing blends ethnomusicological fieldwork with analysis to examine how kusamira and nswezi performance socializes dynamic processes of illness, wellness, and health. People participate in these traditions for reasons that range from preserving ideas to generating strategies that allow them to navigate changing circumstances. Indeed, the performance of kusamira and nswezi reproduces ideas that remain relevant for succeeding generations. Hoesing shows the potential of this social reproduction of well-being to shape development in a region where over 80 percent of the population relies on traditional healers for primary health care. Comprehensive and vivid with eyewitness detail, Kusamira Music in Uganda offers insight into important healing traditions and the overlaps between expressive culture and healing practices, the human and other-than-human, and Uganda's past and future.

The aim of this book is to stimulate debate by offering a critique of discourse about African music. Who writes about African music, how, and why? What assumptions and prejudices influence the presentation of ethnographic data? Even the term "African music" suggests there is an agreed-upon meaning, but African music signifies differently to different people. This book also poses the question then, "What is African music?" Agawu offers a new and provocative look at the history of African music scholarship that will resonate with students of ethnomusicology and post-colonial studies. He offers an alternative "Afro-centric" means of understanding African music, and in doing so, illuminates a different mode of creativity beyond the usual provenance of Western criticism. This book will undoubtedly inspire heated debate--and new thinking--among musicologists, cultural theorists, and post-colonial thinkers. Also includes 15 musical examples.

Revered in South Africa as "An African American Mother of the Nation," Madie Beatrice Hall Xuma spent her extraordinary life immersed in global women's activism. Wanda A. Hendricks's biography follows Hall Xuma from her upbringing in the Jim Crow South to her leadership role in the African National Congress (ANC) and beyond. Hall Xuma was already known for her social welfare work when she married South African physician and ANC activist Alfred Bitini Xuma. Becoming president of the ANC Women’s League put Hall Xuma at the forefront of fighting racial discrimination as South Africa moved toward apartheid. Hendricks provides the long-overlooked context for the events that undergirded Hall Xuma’s life and work. As she shows, a confluence of history, ideas, and organizations both shaped Hall Xuma and centered her in the histories of Black women and women’s activism, and of South Africa and the United States.

Higher Powers draws on four years of collaborative fieldwork carried out with Ugandans working to reconstruct their lives after attempting to leave behind problematic alcohol use. Given the relatively recent introduction of biomedical ideas of alcoholism and addiction in Uganda, most of these people have used other therapeutic resources, including herbal aversion therapies, engagements with balubaale spirits, and forms of deliverance and spiritual warfare practiced in Pentecostal churches. While these methods are at times severe, they contain within them understandings of the self and practices of sociality that point away from models of addiction as a chronic relapsing brain disease and towards the possibility of release. Higher Powers offers a reconceptualization of addiction and recovery that may prove relevant well beyond Uganda.

Decolonization of knowledge has become a major issue in African Studies in recent years, brought to the fore by social movements such as #RhodesMustFall and #BlackLivesMatter. This timely book explores the politics and disputed character of knowledge production in colonial and postcolonial Uganda, where efforts to generate forms of knowledge and solidarity that transcend colonial epistemologies draw on long histories of resistance and refusal. Bringing together scholars from Africa, Europe and North America, the contributors in this volume analyse how knowledge has been created, mobilized, and contested across a wide range of Ugandan contexts. In so doing, they reveal how Ugandans have built, disputed, and reimagined institutions of authority and knowledge production in ways that disrupt the colonial frames that continue to shape scholarly analyses and state structures. From the politics of language and gender in Bakiga naming practices to ways of knowing among the Acholi, the hampering of critical scholarship by militarism and authoritarianism, and debates over the names of streets, lakes, mountains, and other public spaces, this book shows how scholars and a wide range of Ugandan activists are reimagining the politics of knowledge in Ugandan public life.p by militarism and authoritarianism, and debates over the names of streets, lakes, mountains, and other public spaces, this book shows how scholars and a wide range of Ugandan activists are reimagining the politics of knowledge in Ugandan public life.p by militarism and authoritarianism, and debates over the names of streets, lakes, mountains, and other public spaces, this book shows how scholars and a wide range of Ugandan activists are reimagining the politics of knowledge in Ugandan public life.p by militarism and authoritarianism, and debates over the names of streets, lakes, mountains, and other public spaces, this book shows how scholars and a wide range of Ugandan activists are reimagining the politics of knowledge in Ugandan public life.

This book investigates the ways in which the war on terror has transformed the postcolonial state in Africa. Taking American intervention in Islamic education in Uganda as the entry point, the book demonstrates how state control over Islamic truth production and everyday Muslim life has increased. During the colonial period, the Muslims in Uganda were governed in two ways: partly as lesser citizens within the Christian-dominated civil sphere and partly as members of a distinct Muslim domain. In this domain, a local system of Islamic education developed with a degree of autonomy that reflected the limits of the colonial state in shaping the Muslim subject. In the subsequent postcolonial period, systems of patronage and clientalistic networks dominated, and Muslim leaders were co-opted by the state, but without much real interference in the day-to-day lives of ordinary Muslims. However, as part of the war on terror, the US State Department seeks to bring the mechanisms of Islamic truth production, especially the madrasa, under direct state control and civil society scrutiny. This book argues that the "Muslim domain as a separate entity is coming to an end as it is being absorbed into the civil sphere, unifying the state’s domination of society." The book also analyzes local Ugandan Muslim initiatives to modernise and contextualize their own education and religion and how these initiatives are shaped by and transcend the dominant power. A thorough exploration of US foreign policy and Islamic education, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of Political Studies, African Studies and Religious Studies.

Examines how the Kawuugulu Clan-Royal Musical Ensemble uses musical performance and storytelling to manage, structure, model, and legitimize power relations among the Baganda people of south-central Uganda.