The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them.1

I

When Margaret Trowell began campaigning for the formal teaching of arts and crafts to British colonial subjects in the Uganda Protectorate in the 1930s, she was partly motivated by her concern for the apparent decline of the region’s ‘native’ cultures. Unless something was done, she warned,

“one whole side of the life of the African people will, at best, be submerged under western materialism for several generations, at the most it may even go altogether.”2

Trowell had reasonable grounds for making such a prediction: in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Christian missionaries had set out to undermine and to dismantle the indigenous cultures of East Africa so as to demolish the ‘pagan’ belief systems within which they were embedded. Producing Christian converts entailed, as they saw it, the obliteration of “native claims to culture”,3 and thus swathes of indigenous cultural production and practice were destroyed, confiscated and outlawed.

Until the 1930s, in the handful of schools in the Uganda Protectorate that offered a western-style education to the children of the indigenous elite, arts and crafts occupied the most inferior position in the hierarchy of subjects. To a certain extent, the parents were responsible: they sent their children to school “to learn the skill of the European”:4 they saw no sense in schools offering subjects that could just as easily be taught at home. Trowell also observed that handwork was something the students themselves seemed to feel was beneath them: “During those early years”, she later recalled, “any attempt to arouse interest in the indigenous crafts was met with a deep suspicion as an attempt to keep [the African students] down to a lowly level”.5 This was a reflection of local class politics – as Trowell herself explained, “[i]n Uganda there is a definite native aristocracy, and crafts are considered to be the work of the peasants”;6 but it was also perhaps an indication of the perceived superiority of a European ‘academic’ curriculum.

It should be noted that the colonisers’ wholesale reorientation of local economies, in particular the creation of a peasant class and an urban...