Pursuing Justice in Africa

Competing Imaginaries and Contested Practices

Jessica Johnson, George Hamandishe Karekwaivanane

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780821446485
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Pursuing Justice in Africa focuses on the many actors pursuing many visions of justice across the African continent—their aspirations, divergent practices, and articulations of international and vernacular idioms of justice. The essays selected by editors Jessica Johnson and George Hamandishe Karekwaivanane engage with topics at the cutting edge of contemporary scholarship across a wide range of disciplines. These include activism, land tenure, international legal institutions, and postconflict reconciliation.

Building on recent work in sociolegal studies that foregrounds justice over and above concepts such as human rights and legal pluralism, the contributors grapple with alternative approaches to the concept of justice and its relationships with law, morality, and rights. While the chapters are grounded in local experiences, they also attend to the ways in which national and international actors and processes influence, for better or worse, local experiences and understandings of justice. The result is a timely and original addition to scholarship on a topic of major scholarly and pragmatic interest.

Contributors:
Felicitas Becker, Jonathon L. Earle, Patrick Hoenig, Stacey Hynd, Fred Nyongesa Ikanda, Ngeyi Ruth Kanyongolo, Anna Macdonald, Bernadette Malunga, Alan Msosa, Benson A. Mulemi, Holly Porter, Duncan Scott, Olaf Zenker.

PART ONE

Morality, Religion, and Languages of Justice

ONE

Competing Conceptions of Justice in Colonial Buganda

JONATHON L. EARLE

THIS CHAPTER EXPLORES THE INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF JUSTICE in the colonial eastern African kingdom of Buganda. It begins by examining the genealogies of justice in modern history to argue that the logic of international justice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was tied to larger reconfigurations of global power and, in the case of sub-Saharan Africa, the emergence of racialized hierarchies that accompanied the expansion of colonial empires. It then shows how Protestant Baganda used folktales and historical argumentation in the early 1900s to create forms of justice that legitimized the kingdom’s Protestant order. Protestant articulations of justice often underscored the importance of executive authority in legal and social adjudication. Justice was a highly contentious ideal, though, in colonial southern Uganda. Catholic intellectuals in the 1900s complicated Protestant claims by defining justice as the practice of dissenting parties gathering to resolve disputes (-bwenkanya). In doing so, Catholics sought to equalize power in a state structured principally around the authority of Buganda’s Protestant monarchy and chieftaincies. The chapter concludes by exploring the political thought of Uganda’s first elected prime minister, the Catholic activist Benedicto Kiwanuka. To castigate Uganda’s Protestant elite, Kiwanuka drew from both classical liberal and Catholic sources to shape larger vernacular debates about the purported meaning and function of justice in colonial society.

While this chapter recognizes that Protestant and Catholic communities in colonial Buganda were not homogenous, it makes particular claims about competing etymological classifications of justice throughout the twentieth century to explore the extent to which colonial knowledge was reworked into local political argumentation. Where previous scholars have tended to focus their studies on 1950s Uganda by emphasizing the impact of postwar democratization movements or the force of religious claims, I use the recently unearthed library of Benedicto Kiwanuka to argue that textual practices among late colonial intellectuals blurred European literary classifications. These readings complicate contemporary scholarship on literacy in Africa, which has tended to focus on either religious or secular literacy. Moving beyond this dichotomy allows us to think in more complicated ways about shifting conceptions of justice in colonial eastern Africa. This piece also recognizes that debates regarding justice were unfolding beyond central Uganda. These processes, however, are beyond the current scope of this study, which is concerned with Buganda’s ideational arena.

Genealogies of International Justice

By the early nineteenth century, the standardization of internationally recognizable forms of justice was tied to emerging understandings of territorial sovereignty. As the legal scholar Gerry Simpson has argued, early global classifications of war criminals, international outlaws, and terrorists were first described as perpetrators of crimes against the law of nations.¹ The emergence of industrial economies by the mid-1800s resulted in the reformulation of these emerging constructions of justice—and how justice would become commonly talked about in international politics. The transition toward colonial empires resulted in a noticeable shift in how legal relations were negotiated across national borders. Building on the earlier work of Charles H. Alexandrowicz,² for example, Partha Chatterjee has shown how trade practices between European states and India and South East Asia had been largely equitable prior to the nineteenth century. Even as Indian rulers surrendered territories in Bengal, Karnataka, and Maratha to the East India Company, notes Chatterjee, they did so as sovereign state builders through international treaties.³

As European traders and governments sought to increasingly control the regulatory apparatuses of global flows, international law and justice were recast in the language of positivist legal theory. Where earlier revolutionaries in Europe and the New World sought to use natural law to imbue the historical world with universal or inalienable rights in the 1700s, later positivist approaches were used by the intellectual architects of emerging empires in Asia and Africa to argue that local political rulers and communities possessed recognizable legal rights only to the extent that their respective territories maintained European formulations of statutory law. It was argued that unruly regions needed, if not welcomed all together, newfound partnerships to administer local rule and expanding economies. Commenting on this transition, historians such as Kenneth Pomeranz and Christopher Bayly have shown how economic developments in modern China resulted in new trade regulations that were protected by European legal institutions.⁴ The governor of India, Sir John Malcolm, concluded that among Indians “the very permanency of usurpation was a blessing; and it was natural for them to forget their prejudices against their European masters in a contemplation of that superior regard to justice, good faith, and civilization, by which they saw their rule accompanied.”⁵

In eastern Africa, where communities’ fluctuating purchasing habits impacted textile production in Massachusetts and Bombay,⁶ similar arguments were made. Early colonial administrators asserted that precolonial kings were unwilling—if not entirely unable—to create and maintain just societies without external compulsion. In the late 1800s, the British mercenary Frederick Lugard used military force to compel the monarch of Buganda, Kabaka Mwanga, one who “had been found incapable of doing justice,”⁷ to sign a treaty that placed political power under the control of the region’s Christian chieftaincy. In doing so, Lugard sought to control trade routes that connected central Uganda with the Zanzibari coast, whose enslaved communities and citizens must “appreciate the advantages of equal laws and of a justice of which, till now, they have had no experience or conception.”⁸ The argument that social fairness within and between local “tribes” did not exist was used to reinforce the validity of empire in public debates across Europe.⁹ Indeed, advocates for international colonization were often compelled to present their work as being about the business of creating and supporting ostensibly just polities to legitimize imperial strategy within the context of politics at home.¹⁰

But from the 1880s until the postwar period, the institutionalization of international justice was suspect. As the historian Mark Lewis has argued, the First and Second World Wars showed just how far the language of “violations of the laws of humanity,” “crimes against humanity,” “crimes against peace,” and “crimes against international peace and security” were adapted to reinforce shifting power dynamics in global politics.¹¹ Among Soviet state builders and historians in the early to mid-twentieth century, for instance, the language of justice was used to legitimize the expansion of Soviet interests throughout Eurasia and, in time, Cold War Africa.¹² In postwar Japan, the invention and implementation of international justice was no less controversial. Historians such as John Dower have convincingly argued that the Tokyo Tribunals pivoted around the production and performance of American jurisprudence. In a trial that took nearly three times as long to conclude as the Nuremburg prosecutions, eleven justices, the majority of whom were American, deliberated over cases during which attorneys argued that Japanese aggression demonstrated “criminal act without provocation, without parallel, and almost entirely without context.”¹³ The chief prosecutor, George Keenan, in a courtroom setting that Japanese litigants suggested had “the lighting of Hollywood,”¹⁴ concluded that the Japanese had “determined to destroy democracy and its essential basis—freedom and the respect of human personality.”¹⁵ American embargoes and Europe’s broader military involvement in the region were not discussed. Japanese communities were challenged to talk about justice—seigi or kōsei (public correctness)—in ways that made sense out of postwar economies and evolving governance throughout the occupation. Japanese historians sought to talk about social order and justice in ways that elicited idyllic pasts and alternative futures: possibilities beyond militarized cultures governed by Meiji generals or Truman’s bureaucrats.¹⁶

That ideas of justice were tied to broader expressions of nationalism, sovereignty, and the regulation of economies following the Second World War meant that Africa’s first generation of academic historians in the 1960s were challenged to adapt the language of justice and human rights. It was contended that newly formed states would transition into democracies to the extent that activists reworked localized legal frameworks to conform to the standards of modern human rights.¹⁷ The burden to create societies governed by both statutory law and supposedly independent judiciaries was part of a much older historical process, the origins of which dated to abolitionist debates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.¹⁸ The transition from transatlantic trade in human cargo toward “legitimate” commerce accompanied the institutionalization of comprehensive legal measures that sought to civilize African communities trapped in an ahistorical,¹⁹ Hobbesian world. The invention of justice in colonial Africa was driven by much deeper claims being made about racial and cultural hierarchies. As I indicate in this chapter’s conclusion, there is continuity between these nineteenth-century discourses and popular reflections on justice or human rights—or their alleged absences—in twenty-first century Uganda.

Protestant Historical Vision and Justice in Early Colonial Buganda

The Buganda kingdom in southern Uganda was a highly sophisticated state by the mid-nineteenth century.²⁰ Through the development and regulation of power between kings and clans, Ganda societies had developed different ways of talking about and practicing justice prior to the emergence of long-distance trade in the mid-nineteenth century. This resulted in numerous proverbs and songs about the supposed functions of justice in society.²¹ In time, this large body of discourse provided an extensive archive from which Baganda could articulate different conceptions or characteristics of justice throughout the colonial period. As groups throughout the kingdom interacted with Zanzibari and European missionaries and exchanged goods and ideas, they worked to reinforce and recast older beliefs about the organization of fair societies. Throughout the colonial period, Ganda historians operating from different religious frameworks employed literary practices to show how their respective communities were supposedly influential in stabilizing the kingdom during a period of territorial expansion and religious conflict during the 1880s and 1890s. Protestant chiefs and British cartographers by the early 1900s had used military technologies to restructure Buganda’s precolonial counties and courts according to religious devotion. Buganda’s Muslim king, Kabaka Kalema (r. 1889–1890), was removed from power during a Christian coup. And chieftaincies and land were redistributed according to new-fangled religious allegiances; Muslim and Catholic communities received far fewer government posts and land titles than their Protestant counterparts.

Following the ousting of Buganda’s Muslim administration, whose chiefs had deeply affected kingdom politics for approximately fifty years, Protestant intellectuals, who worked alongside British administrators, incorporated missionary literacy to rewrite Buganda’s past and imagine new forms of jurisprudence that required the state’s Christian chiefs. No Ganda historian utilized Arabic and English literacy more effectively than Apolo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• IntroductionRe-centering Justice in African Studies
• Part I: Morality, Religion, and Languages of Justice
• Part II: Gender Justice
• Part III: Resources, Conflict, and Justice
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index