To Speak and Be Heard: Seeking Good Government in Uganda, Ca. 1500-2015 Hanson Holly

A history of a political practice through which East Africans have sought to create calm, harmonious polities for five hundred years. In contrast to a parliamentary democracy, the Ugandan system requires a level of active engagement much higher than simply casting a vote in periodic elections.These political strategies--assembly, assent, and powerful gifts--can be traced from before the emergence of kingship in East Africa (ca. "To speak and be heard" is a uniquely Ugandan approach to government that aligns power with groups of people that actively demonstrate their assent both through their physical presence and through essential gifts of goods and labor.

They appear in the violence of the Idi Amin years and are present, sometimes in dysfunctional ways, in postcolonial politics. Ugandans 1500) through enslavement, colonial intervention, and anticolonial protest.