In 1983, the historian Terrance Ranger wrote about the “Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa.” During the colonial period, Europeans used invented traditions to co-opt and ideologically solidify certain Africans into positions of leadership, like chiefs, and to redefine power relationships between Europeans and Africans. Since Ranger’s publication, numerous scholars have explored the theme of invented tradition through varying cultural terrains involving tribes, political authorities, land, and even marriage customs in colonial Africa.

Though Ranger’s article created a profound historiographic tree, his base assertions were not without criticism. In a 2003 article in the Journal of African History, the historian Thomas Spear cautioned against a rigid projection of the idea of colonial invention.  He argued that janiform African traditions were usually more complex and continuously contested and reinterpreted by both colonized and colonizer in a dialectical relationship.  Africans, through internal politics, often exposed the limits of European hegemony.

This talk builds upon the work of Ranger and Spear by assessing the discourse over an understudied example of invented tradition in colonial Africa, “traditional” labor, a specific type of coercive labor practice. It analyzes how unpaid “traditional” labor in colonial Uganda, though a colonial invention, was, nonetheless, negotiated and reinterpreted by African elites through their attempts to gain more control over the labor.