Young Buganda and Old Boys: Youth, Generational Transition, and Ideas of Leadership in Buganda, 1920-1949

Abstract

From the 1920s through the 1940s, Britons and Baganda saw youth and generational transition as both disruptive to public order, and essential for Buganda's future. This article explores how—across the political and social spectrum—Britons and Baganda mobilized around ideas of youth. Britons, as government officials and missionaries, feared youthful conspiracies and adolescent politics. But they nurtured youth leadership and generational transition as essential in maintaining a governing alliance between British and Ganda elites. Baganda framed critiques of the kingdom and protectorate as statements of youth and the future, condemning the older generation's hierarchical and undemocratic political styles. Youth, rather than religion, ethnicity, nation, ideology, or class, provided a subversive, inclusive, flexible, and markedly democratic basis for imagining a new Buganda.