Catholic Action and Ugandan Radicalism: Political Activism in Buganda, 1930-1950

Abstract

[Various scholars have shown that dreams and visions constituted an important means for apprehending religious truths in Ethiopian society. Drawing on these works, the present study focuses on the role of dreams and visions in the process of Christian Ethiopians' conversion to Catholicism during the early 1600s. In the first three decades of that century, the Jesuit mission sought—albeit with mixed results—to implant Catholicism into the Ethiopian Empire. Dreams and visions helped neophytes cope with the crises that were triggered by the new religion, as individuals turned to them in order to bridge the demands laid down by the missionaries and the norms of their own community and thereby intensify their devotion to their newfound faith. Alternatively, others used dreams and visions to resist the encroachment of the European missionaries., 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.]