This is an exceptional book, in terms of both its scale and its intellectual achievement. In successive chapters, Peterson examines in rich detail the history of seven societies: Buganda, Bukonzo, and Kigezi in Uganda; Bugufi and Buhaya in Tanganyika; and Gikuyu and Luo in Kenya. The authority of the account rests on the author’s mining of almost fifty archives and his interviews with almost two hundred individuals. The result is the most significant history of the East African Revival yet published, a major contribution to our understanding of politicized ethnicity in East Africa, and the most important scholarship on the history of the East African family produced in many years. Along with the many articles that Peterson has published and the memoirs and archival material that he has edited and organized, it represents a major contribution to East African history and African studies.
One of the greatest strengths of book is its insightful linking of the two phenomena of revivalism and politicized ethnicity. As Peterson explains, tensions between the local and the global, and the individual and the communal, stimulated intense fears for the future and deep anxieties about moral order, leading to a systematic reordering of personal and ethnic histories. By focusing attention on what he defines as the base unit of these societies, the household, and specifically the role of the household head, he constructs an East African intellectual, religious, and political history that manages to link such diverse groups as the self-isolating elites of the Great Lakes kingdoms and “the scrappy, argumentative republicans of central Kenya” (19). Across East Africa, he explains, the ideal householder was marked historically by reserve, restraint, and adherence to the rules of etiquette; external relations were governed by trust based on mutual consideration, and internal affairs were protected by a code of privacy. It was this culture of respect for the managerial skill of a successful householder, shared across monarchical and acephalous societies, that was threatened by nation-builders, religious revivalists, and independent women. Local conservatives viewed nationalism as a homogenizing assault on culture, born-again Christians as undermining civil society through their rejection of social etiquette, and female migrants as a source of ethnic shame. This unlikely, but perceptive, pairing of prostitutes and revivalists, each as indiscreet and publicly sexualized as the other, forms one of the central themes of the book.
Peterson’s avowed goal was to produce an East African history that is not defined by the nation-state or fixated on autonomous ethnicity. “East Africa’s historians,” he argues, “have been seduced by the logic of the archivist, the administrator, and the census-taker” (26). The book, instead, is a study of cosmopolitanism, a context in which ethnic patriots learned from other ethnic models of behavior and organization, and revivalists, incessantly mobile, absorbed lessons from their experiences in other parts of East Africa. These groups represented competitive, rather than complementary, worldviews. Converts questioned cultural heritage and kinship obligations, as well as the modernized localism of patriots. And whereas ethnic conservatives propagated an admonitory, linear history that set out the rules of engagement with the outside world on the basis of a particularist heritage drawn from the wisdom of the ancestors, revivalist teleology anticipated a global apocalypse.
The various strands that run through Ethnic Patriotism come together in the analysis of marriage and the gendered and generational arguments that shaped it in the mid-twentieth century. Peterson argues that just as revivalists undermined ethnic patriotism, they threatened the institution of marriage by publicizing internal discord that aspiring elites sought to silence and discipline. Marriage, like ethnic politics, came under intense strain in the late colonial period, and Peterson contends that the general goal of marital management was similarly one of straightening, tidying, and harmonizing. Nevertheless, this goal manifested itself differently among different ethnic groups, and one of the strengths of Peterson’s writing is that his presentation of a regional history does not occlude local distinctiveness. He shows that marriage among the Ganda and Haya was governed primarily by discretion, whereas the Kiga and Hangaza emphasized marital discipline. These norms were in turn upset in different ways. Among the Luo, male labor migrants sought to control their wives remotely by transforming bridewealth from a marker of enduring obligation into a fixed financial contract. In Bugufi, women who had been abandoned by husbands seeking their fortunes in Buganda protested for years only in the privacy of their homes before finally turning to the courts.
Another strength of the book is that each chapter is elegantly and concisely situated within its local historiography. Chapter 4, for example, opens in 1955 with the Ganda elite carefully demonstrating to visiting constitutional experts how their kingdom had always been separate and distinctive from the rest of East Africa. It then shows how networks of migration had tied Buganda into economic and intellectual networks from which it could not escape. In three pages Peterson perceptively summarizes Buganda’s regional politics, its uncomfortable internal ethnic relationships, and the evolving struggle between radicalism and conservatism that energized and destabilized the kingdom. Although the book was not intended to be a generalist introduction to East African history, no other writing on Uganda (and, similarly, on other areas) conveys so much so quickly.
As with all important scholarly works, Ethnic Patriotism’s contribution consists not only of what it achieves on its own terrain, but also the vacuum it has created in adjacent areas of scholarship. Peterson’s work will surely stimulate new research into late colonial Catholic politics, ethnic politics in areas where the impact of the revival was less significant, and the revival’s interaction with subethnicities (which he discusses particularly perceptively in relation to Bukonzo). It may be that further research will find that the experience of the Haya, whose ethnic patriots came to regard nation builders and their illiberal interventionism as useful resources to be employed in their efforts to control autonomous women, was not so unusual. Buhaya also raises the question of how the Revival itself evolved, as some early converts were absorbed into, and then rose to the top of, church hierarchies. The political relationship between the revivalist and the ethnic patriot was inevitably different, for example, when the saved were led by a bishop. Josiah Kibira, who was “born again” in 1947 and became a bishop in 1964, maintained an emphasis on individual salvation throughout his religious career, but he also sought to integrate Haya concepts of kinship into Lutheran theology. And, in seeking to decolonize the church from missionary control, he found ideological support in the teachings of TANU.
Peterson has not only provoked new research questions, but has also generated archival sources and methodologies that will assist scholars who follow in his path. In recent years few books in African studies have stimulated as much excitement and rethinking of received wisdom as Ethnic Patriotism has. It has without doubt marked its author as one of the leading Africanists of his generation.
