Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda

Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda. By Holly Elizabeth Hanson. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003. Pp. xxi, 264. $26.95 paper. A wave of European anthropologists and administrators made land tenure their focus around the 1950s-when colonial powers were losing their grip, when land matters seemed to be one of the reasons why, and when the struggle to record and fathom the "customary law" about landholding seemed like a race against time. Today the World Bank and other aid agencies also seem to be at a loss for answers, realizing that their strategy of promoting private property in land across Africa has not been working as planned. A new generation of scholars has taken up the questions raised by the 1900 establishment of mailo land tenure-the sudden establishment of private property in square mile chunks in the Buganda kingdom, registered under the names of chiefs and other prominent persons-questions that keep reverberating through discussions of property, wealth, and poverty, and of power and ethnicity. This is clearly a topic that speaks to more than one age. In Landed Obligation, Holly Hanson hinges her contribution on a few fairly simple observations about Ganda politics. "When people in Buganda thought about power," her opener reads, "they spoke about love." In pre-European and early European times, she argues, leaders and followers shared a general understanding of mutual obligation, a kind of vertical social contract in which the ruler owed the subjects as much affection and loyalty as they owed the ruler labor. When kabaka-hood (or kingship) and chiefship became brutal and arbitrary under late nineteenth-century colonial taxation and labor demands that chiefs passed on to their followers, these bonds-between farming people and chiefs, and between chiefs and king-were stretched to the breaking point. It was only after a period of fear and violence that a set of chiefs-now with altered authority and legitimacy in local eyes-persuaded London to allow them to grab title to Buganda's land in large blocks under their own names. But by then the old ties of affection had snapped, only partly through the land-grab itself. Private property in land now became the whipping hawser, the loose fire hose, that Baganda have been struggling to control ever since. After reviewing a wide variety of official and unofficial sources, Hanson is convinced of the widespread effects of the attempted property reform. She follows stories of gainers and losers, and she charts the sentiments of popular songs in claiming that "Mailo land ... turned people into slaves" (p. 222)-suggesting that "mailo land led to greed, and greed led to ill will in society" (p. …