Women, "Elite Polygyny," and Buganda State Formation

Abstract

I am grateful to Susan Geiger and Peg Strobel for their constant encouragement and constructive criticism. Susan has also coped cheerfully with the thankless task of editing the manuscript. 'On the institution of marriage, see, e.g., E. J. Krige and J. L. Comaroff, eds., Essays on African Marriage in Southern Africa (Cape Town: Juta, 1981); Kristin Mann, Marrying Well: Marriage, Status and Social Change among the Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Christine Oppong, Middle Class African Marriage (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981); D. Parkin and D. Nyamwaya, eds., Transfortmations in African Marriage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987); Luise White, in the Changing African Family, in African Women South of the Sahara, ed. Jean Hay and Sharon Stichter (Harlow: Longman, 1984). As for the scarcity of detailed studies on polygyny, exceptions are V. Dorjhan, The Factor of Polygyny in African Demography, in Continuity and Change in African Culture, ed. William R. Bascom and Melville J. Herskovits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 87-112; Remi Clignet,