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Wrigley, Christopher : Kingship and State, The Buganda Dynasty: African Studies Series 88

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996

Hardback, first edition, very good condition, no dustjacket, publisher's original dark brown clothboards with gilt blocking to spine, 294 pages including index, 3 b/w maps, two small stamps to title page and last pp - bibl.londin.univ - further small date stamp to front paste-down 10 Dec 1996, otherwise internally clean tight and bright-----Contents: 1. Preamble, 2. The story and its making, 3. Introduction to myth, 4. Introduction to Buganda, 5. The remoter past, 6. Genesis, 7. The cycle of the kings, 8. Fragments of history, 9. Foreign affairs, 10. The making of the state, 11. Reflections. ---------"The precolonial kingdom of Buganda, nucleus of the present Uganda state, has long attracted scholarly interest. Since written records are lacking entirely until l862, historians have had to rely on oral traditions that were recorded from the end of the nineteenth century. These sources provide rich materials on Buganda in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but Christopher Wrigley endeavours to show that the stories which appear to relate to earlier periods are largely mythology. He argues that this does not reduce their value since they are of interest in their own mythical right, revealing ancient traces of sacred kingship, and also throwing oblique light on the development of the recent state. The author has written an elegant, wide-ranging and original study of one of Africa's most famous kingdoms." -----------

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