PhD in History (2024)
About
My research interests focus on histories of law, property, gender, and class in 20th-century Eastern Africa. My dissertation titled, In Pursuit of Justice, Rights, and Peace: Ordinary Litigants and the Making of Uganda's Legal Culture, ca, 1900-1970, examines how ordinary Ugandans across different temporal and spatial contexts debated and imagined issues like property rights, authority, social hierarchies, gender roles, and even broader legal and ethical concepts such as justice, right, and peace, offering alternative imaginations that defied the narrow categorizations imposed by colonial and local authorities.Through an exploration of local courts and their localized legal practices, my study reveals how ordinary litigants influenced the content of law and its application by bringing their ideas, attitudes everyday experiences and local evidentiary practices into the formalized legal systems. My findings are based on an extensive archive of 150,000 local courts records that personally discovered, organized and catalogued in 2018 and 2019 in Uganda.
These rchives include records from the High Court of Uganda archive and the Mengo archive which contains Buganda native courts records. Prior to my intervention, both archives were in disarray due to a range of historical and administrative factors. The Mengo Court archive had been discarded by the government of Milton Obote, which abolished the customary court system in 1967, while the High Court archive had grown too unwieldy to be accessible and useful. In 2017 and 2018, I launched and successfully executed two archival projects that saved, organized, and cataloged these records that date back to the early 1900s. This endeavor not only rescued a substantial portion of African legal history for my research but also created the most extensive and accessible archive of its kind on the African continent, which is currently accessible to researchers, academics, and the general public who are interested in the legal and cultural heritage of Uganda.
Beyond my academic pursuits, I am passionate and dedicated to preserving endangered and neglected local archives, which often contain the voices of everyday people. My aim is twofold: first, to write a new legal history that recovers the voices of ordinary people, thus ensuring that their invaluable narratives are not lost in history and archives. Second, to preserve the rich tapestry of legal history and make it accessible to everyone.
Field(s) of Study
- 20th century East Africa
- Law
- Property
- Gender
- Class
- Archival studies
