Prologue
Songs, Stories, and Strategies
This book critically examines twenty-one songs from the essential repertoires of selected royal court musicians of Buganda. It draws on two decades of research activities to demonstrate how song can be wielded as a tool for promoting mutually beneficial relationships. The research activities include extended performance and research collaborations with court composer-performers; their accounts of the repertoires’ origins and meanings; lyrical analyses by a group of Ugandan citizens who interpret the songs through the lens of national politics; my own analysis of both the repertoire and research collaborators’ contributions; and my consultation of the work of scholars from various fields. In court musicians’ explanations of the stories and meanings behind their song repertoires, they relay enthralling tales of how the Baganda people have traditionally served, supported, admired, advised, praised, evaluated, and challenged royals and non-royals. Non-performers who interpret the songs then reframe them, diverting from their historical purposes and highlighting their connections to current national political realities in Uganda and beyond. Most of their interpretations engage with universal themes that pervade both personal and official spheres of life. Problematizing the relevance of historical royalist lyrics to twenty-first-century national politics, interpreters and I show how court songs live in a dialogue with contemporary Ugandan political life.
Through these activities, and within past and present contexts, we find unique perspectives to the myriad hidden meanings related to power relations, which surface via lyrical interpretation. These meanings are embedded in daily interactions among common people as well as between leaders and subjects. Some of the meanings are difficult to articulate in written word because the full affective texture of the court songs I examine does not come just from their lyrics but also from the process by which composer-performers re-create them. The musicians’ improvisatory presentations depend on the mood of their performance environment and theatrical abilities, and they occur in a nonlinear order. The songs’ meanings also depend on the stories that have trickled into, formed around, and defined the songs since time immemorial. The songs are passed on to new generations, and their meanings undergo various levels of abstraction such as renaming characters and recontextualizing events. In this sense, the broader Kiganda storytelling tradition I describe in the following pages provides a framework for discourse wherein new signifiers can come to represent previous ones, which then allows meaning to branch off in many analytical directions. The multiplicity of meanings that I allude to throughout this book refers to the all-encompassing interpretive possibilities that are typical of oral tradition.
Throughout the book I foreground the perspectives and political experiences of composer-performers and interpreters, an approach through which I bridge the gap between researcher-centered analysis and the unique knowledge of Ugandans who contribute to the project’s overall narrative. Essentially, these research collaborators are my co-analysts, and it is by this orientation that we reach the insights we do about the court song repertoire that Interpreting Court Song in Uganda investigates, thus achieving a more informed understanding of Ugandan political life. The project uniquely assumes a discourse about power via song, but it is also a journey through the interpretation process premised on the argument that meaning is not singular, static, and monolithic but dynamic and multivalent. In this sense, we come to understand many hidden meanings related to power relations behind Kiganda court songs.