Ethnicity, Christianity, and the Development of Social Stratification in Colonial Ankole, Uganda

Abstract

Analysts of social change in Africa frequently focus on colonial intervention as the major catalyst in the process of structural transformation, first describing the precolonial situation, then contrasting it with subsequent developments. All too often, however, these efforts have been limited to only one of two purposes. One considers the distinctive characteristics or cultural attributes of a particular society, supposedly rooted in tradition, which the researcher traces through the colonial period and beyond in order to document how change has been mediated and accommodated in that particular case. The continuity of culture is a theme which has long been pervasive in much of the anthropological and historical literature on single African societies incorporated into colonial frameworks. The other perspective is different and disregards much of the detail. Again colonial intervention is treated as a major watershed, but in this case African societies are seen as molded to the image, or shaped by the intention, of the colonizing power into either modernizing states or the exploited reservoirs of human and material resources. The stress is on the force and consequences of colonialism and imperialism rather than on what is distinctive or culturally specific. Tradition becomes a residual category. Detailed sociopolitical features of a particular people may scarcely figure in the analysis of change, or may be considered separately from outside influences, leaving ambiguous how colonial processes impinged upon and transformed social structures. These differences are matters of emphasis, related in part to disciplinary traditions, in part to other kinds of preferences. But as points of view they can illuminate one set of conditions and eclipse another. In