The Western Impact and the African Reaction: Buganda, 1880-1900
Buganda lies some eight hundred miles inland from the east coast of Africa. 1 For European travelers in the nineteenth century both explorers and missionaries it was a long, hard walk. Few made the journey, and none without a compelling reason. One important consequence of this relative isolation was the fact that there were never more than a handful of Europeans in Buganda. Whatever the impact of western culture on Africans, it would be primarily through the medium of a few strongwilled individual missionaries with their own personal idiosyncracies. Those who endured the rigors of the march and the debilitating effects of disease and disappointment were impressive men, and they impressed the Africans. But they, in turn, were impressed with the people whom they came to convert.
The aims of this paper are to present a case study of a music group which was carried out during a fieldwork in the year 1991 in Bolivia and to make some reflections about the group. The main theor ...