Catholic action and Ugandan radicalism: political activism in Buganda, 1930-1950

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Periodical article

Title:	Catholic action and Ugandan radicalism: political activism in Buganda, 1930-1950
Author:	Summers, Carol
Year:	2009
Periodical:	Journal of Religion in Africa
Volume:	39
Issue:	1
Pages:	60-90
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Uganda
Subjects:	Catholic Church political action Buganda polity 1930-1939 1940-1949
External link:	https://doi.org/10.1163/157006609X409076
Abstract:	In late colonial Uganda, Catholic individuals, communities, institutions and ideals shaped the rise of a popular politics that rejected the colonial alliance between Britain and Baganda oligarchs and called for change. Catholics valued and worked effectively with hierarchies, used elaborate catechisms and questioning in their calls for action, and deployed networks of activist cells and intelligence gathering as they sought community solidarity around their central goals. These methods provided a template for action for the more directly political initiatives of Catholics and lapsed Catholics of the late 1940s in the Bataka Union and the mobilized cotton communities of Masaka and Kampala. The Catholic antecedents of 1940s and 1950s activism help explain elements of activists' initiatives that fail to fit more conventional analytic structures assessing politics through the lenses of class or nationalism. Notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]