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Michael Tuck, Poverty, Health and Reproduction in Early Colonial Uganda, Social History of Medicine, Volume 19, Issue 1, April 2006, Pages 168–170, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkj022
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Jan Kuhanen, Poverty, Health and Reproduction in Early Colonial Uganda , Joensuu, Finland: University of Joensuu Publications, 2005. Pp. 434. ISBN 952–458–630–4.
This is a book that deserves a wider readership than it is likely to get. The workmanlike title and its publication by a university press in Finland will limit the exposure of a study with insights into a number of important questions. It is framed around contemporary issues of poverty, hunger and ill-health in Africa. It shows how political, social, economic and ecological issues had an impact on the social reproduction of people in colonial Uganda from about 1900 until 1939. While it is not revolutionary for scholars of Africa to analyse these factors in order to explain historical or contemporary conditions, Kuhanen has done some impressive work.
After an introduction which contains a helpful discussion of the book's conceptual and theoretical perspectives, the book is divided chronologically into three main parts. Two relatively brief sections detail first with the precolonial ecological, social and political foundations of Ugandan societies, and then provide an analysis of the crises they experienced in the late nineteenth century. The bulk of the book is subsequently dedicated to the early colonial period. The initial chapters are crucial for establishing the baseline for colonial era changes. Rather than present a static picture, there is a nuance to them, and a consideration of precolonial change as well. As demonstrated clearly in the colonial era chapters, Kuhanen has mastered a range of literature on health, poverty, agriculture, healing, nutrition, colonial development and economy, demography and individual diseases. He succeeds in integrating each into his analysis. He has also achieved a level of mastery of the two precolonial states, Buganda and Bunyoro, which serve as his case studies as they were grouped into one territory by the British. Most scholars of Uganda focus on one or the other and the comparative dimension adds considerably to the work. On almost every topic there is a much richer literature on Buganda than on Bunyoro and, by necessity, Kuhanen spends more time on Buganda. He also compares these two states with other areas of the Protectorate, arguing that the greater colonial attention paid to Buganda and Bunyoro was not a positive thing and that the relative neglect of other areas could indeed be benign.