History and Temporality
As suggested earlier, assembling this manuscript has required understanding the differences of the presented historical narratives. Steven Feld acknowledges that to construct a historical account, one must first recognize the discrepancies between public and private discourses.
1Feld 2012, 8. At the same time one should also understand that one’s decision to include or exclude historical information impacts how this history comes to life in the present.
2Ibid. In approaching the histories of the court songs examined here,
Interpreting Court Song in Uganda remains conscientious of the divisive potential of examining and writing about history. The project conceives of Ugandan history not as an objective and detached scientific process but as an explicitly subjective, creative, and transformative one. In the same vein, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, this work considers the notion that those who study history must recognize historians’ internal biases and personal discontinuities not as deficiencies of the work in question but as extensions of its historical relevance, because they provide a snapshot into the societal norms and expectations of the time.
3Foucault 1977, 157. Discrepancies or contradictions should not be dismissed; instead, we should examine them as critical elements of a text’s construction. In
Interpreting Court Song in Uganda, this challenge is compounded by the project’s focus on oral tradition, an inherently subjective domain, as well as oral transmission, which is an inherently subjective act and process.
This book further addresses Beverley Diamond’s observation that historical studies have tended to present the views of the indigenous people they study as timeless and ahistorical.
4Diamond 2013, 155. Many anthropologists and ethnographers view native people as being outside history and linear time itself. This assumption serves to dehumanize indigenous populations by relegating them to a time outside of time and imagines them as primitive precursors to the “modernity” of the Western world.
5Ibid., 156. In response to this colonial ideology,
Interpreting Court Song in Uganda affirms the complex ways that different cultures conceptualize time and history and acknowledges that the structures employed to understand the past, present, and future may alternatively complement, contradict, or remain completely disjointed from one another. This notion guides
Interpreting Court Song in Uganda’s treatment of the often-contradictory accounts of composer-performers of the songs featured throughout the following chapters. Kiganda conception of history is more like that of other indigenous cultures in that it does not follow the strict linear model prevalent in Western cultures. From the standpoint of Diamond’s framework, history is not presented as a consistent series of factual events but as sequence of heterogeneous iterations born from a bricolage of collective and individual experience.
Interpreting Court Song in Uganda’s structure also reckons with concepts of temporality, in particular the relationship between the political past, present, and future of Buganda and Uganda. Imagining time as a fluid and multidirectional phenomenon guides this work, especially when relating the historical background of court songs to present and future power dynamics. As mentioned previously, each song-based chapter begins with a composer-performer’s narration of the historical background of the song it investigates. This text provides context for the reader to understand my lyrical analysis as well as non-performers’ interpretations, which problematize the song’s relevance to the present and the future. Putting historical narratives in dialogue with contemporary issues and discourses challenges notions of history as a static and unchanging record, instead conceptualizing it in terms of its living and dynamic interactions with the present and the future.
The song-based structure of the chapters in parts 2 to 6 follows a multilateral approach, which accepts the aforementioned subjectivities and contextual contingencies that are inherent in history. Daniel Reed’s work suggests that multidirectional interpretation, unlike linear narrative structure, aligns with, rather than contradicts, narrative consistency by recognizing the entangled and sometimes contradictory forces from which stories develop.
6Reed 2016, 21–24. This approach is appropriate because of the nature of the works that this project deals with, as many of them are simultaneously song lyrics, stories, interpretations, and sociopolitical ideologies. Throughout the book these domains interlock, much like parts of musical works or ensemble sections, offering an integrated, dialogic narrative without which this book would feel incomplete.
Extending the foregoing discussion and building on John Campbell’s work, one of this book’s guiding principles for studying oral traditions is to consider
nonliteral meanings and contexts.
7Campbell 2006, 84. Some of the literal meanings of these songs historically carry social taboos, which composer-performers were often reluctant to speak about during our interviews. As a result, nonliteral interpretations are useful to imply these hidden truths. Faustine Adima cites a similar challenge in his study of the Lugbara people of northern Uganda.
8Adima 2004, 8. Indeed, inconsistencies in historical account can make it difficult to present a succinct narrative. Furthermore, these discrepancies implicate the process of historical analysis as an intellectually legitimate form of study. In the same way that an analysis of a piece of literature or a painting might involve a creative analysis that positively impacts the form of a work, history is often a collective guessing game that takes shape with each retelling. By exploring and revitalizing various historical accounts,
Interpreting Court Song in Uganda does not simply present the past as a strictly definable point; instead, it imagines a living entity whose representation and meanings morph and fluctuate as time goes on.