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Court Cases as Epistemology: Reconstructing African History through Legal Archives

Mengo files, assorted photographs by the author.

Can court records be more than legal sources – can they serve as epistemological workshops for reconstructing African history? This essay argues that they can, drawing on more than 150,000 case files I discovered, organized, and catalogued from Buganda’s native courts and the High Court of Uganda. These records reveal how knowledge, justice, and authority were produced, debated, and negotiated in court. They preserve not only the outcomes of disputes but also the processes through which truth (amazima), justice (obwenkanya), peace (emirembe), and reputation (ekitiibwa) were defined, debated, and determined – through testimony, gossip networks, social standing, and the active participation of community members whose knowledge and judgments were crucial in resolving court cases. These concepts made law a living practice, constituted through social relationships and local knowledge, rather than an abstract system.They also challenge the conceptual frameworks through which African legal history has often been written, frameworks that have privileged colonial categories of law over African epistemologies and practices. The essay explores the theoretical and methodological stakes of reading legal archives as spaces where knowledge, justice, and historical meaning were continually made and unmade.

In 1949, in Kakindu Gombolola of Sabawali, within Busujju County in the Buganda Kingdom, two schoolteachers, Mbawadde and Nabitosi, did something remarkable: they brought a case against two local chiefs, Mayanja and Kiwanuka, accusing them of attempted rape. The women, who lived together and taught at Kakindu School, testified that the chiefs entered their home late at night, separated them into different rooms, and that Mayanja tried to assault Mbawadde. They raised an alarm enduulu – and neighbors rushed to the scene, apprehended Mayanja, and gathered evidence before reporting the matter to the Gombolola chief. He responded by summoning community members with a drum call, a customary practice in Buganda, and turned the gathering into a hearing where witnesses recounted what they had seen and heard. Yet because the accused were chiefs and exercised undue influence, the Gombolola chief did not resolve the case. Undeterred, Mbawadde and Nabitosi pursued their claim further, enlisting the support of a priest and the Ssaza chief until the matter reached the Principal Court of Buganda. In court, both parties and witnesses gave detailed testimonies. One recalled: “We all arrived together and met the girls in the yard, where they were raising an alarm. While still in the yard, Mayanja emerged from the house, half-dressed. Muwonge had a torch and entered the house, where he found a coat, kanzu, and two bottles of native beer on a table.”1 Although some discrepancies emerged, like some witnesses describing hearing the cries as “murders,” the court convicted both chiefs based on the consistency and credibility of the testimonies. Mayanja was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment with hard labor, and Kiwanuka to two months for aiding and abetting. Both men appealed to the British courts, citing inconsistencies in testimony, the absence of medical evidence, and British legal precedents. Their appeal failed. The British judge upheld the native court’s judgment, noting the “general agreement” among witnesses and emphasizing that “the Principal Court found the witness testimonies to be credible.”2

The outcome of this case is particularly significant given the historical moment – the late colonial period, when British officials were introducing major legal reforms aimed at systematizing the courts and creating a unified and rationalized body of law based on English principles of justice. From the 1940s onward, the colonial administration sought to standardize judicial practice across Uganda by codifying aspects of customary law, introducing statutory procedure and statutory criminal law, separating judicial from administrative authority, and training native court judges in the procedures and principles of British law.3 The aim was to professionalize native courts and bureaucratize their procedures so they aligned more closely with British evidentiary standards and trial practices. During this period, British law began to assume growing importance, but the timing and extent of this influence is the key story. Although historians of colonialism in Africa have often treated British institutions as superior and their law as the primary source of authority, the Mbawadde case shows that the legal system did not operate as colonial officials intended. Even as British courts and laws assumed more importance, they did not provide the only sites or conceptual frameworks for resolving disputes. In practice, the legal order was localized and profoundly decentralized, with native courts and ordinary people exercising considerable influence over law and justice. Jurisdiction determined the authority. British courts presided over conflicts involving non-Africans, while native courts retained jurisdiction over Africans. This division was not merely administrative – it reflected a layered legal order in which colonial and indigenous institutions coexisted and interacted, though they largely operated apart. Although British courts served as the final courts of appeal, they frequently took guidance from native law and practices in cases involving African litigants. Native decisions were not marginal; they were officially recognized, with appellate rulings integrating them as a central component of colonial law.

This legal structure was established in earlier political agreements, most importantly the 1900 Buganda Agreement.4 This treaty formalized Buganda’s place within the colonial system and granted its native government broad authority over governance and the administration of justice. Legal authority was never confined to the colonial state; it was dispersed across multiple sites and exercised most visibly in native courts at the miruka(parish), gombolola (sub-county), and ssaza (county) levels, but also in more private settings such as households, churches, and communities, where much of the daily work of governance and justice took place. Kakindu Gombolola, like other localities in Buganda, was part of this hierarchical system, in which chiefs exercised jurisdiction at different levels and most disputes began in local forums convened by them. Hearings could take place wherever space allowed – in a chief’s house, in his yard, or under a tree – and it was in these spaces that most people encountered the law. Native courts were close to the people and were the legal jurisdictions most Ugandans knew best. In this setting, law was not a distant abstraction but a lived practice, shaped by social relations, reputation, and custom. Community members played active roles in these proceedings, gathering evidence, giving testimony, and observing the process, as illustrated in Mbawadde’s case.

I discovered this case in 2018 while surveying the Mengo archive of Buganda’s native court records, after a judiciary staff member directed me there while I was organizing the High Court files. The High Court archive was the first archive I encountered; it housed appellate rulings from across Uganda but had long been neglected and inaccessible. To access it for my research, we negotiated an agreement with the Uganda Judiciary to organize and catalogue the materials. Although the High Court records are broad in geographic scope and offer insight into the workings of Uganda’s formal legal system at the highest judicial level, they reflect the hierarchical and textual structure of British colonial law. Typed in English and shaped by legal formalism, these records provide the kind of material a legal historian might expect – statutes, appellate decisions, and legal reasoning filtered through the institutional voices of judges and magistrates. Yet, these records often functioned to promote British legal principles while dismissing local ones as backward. British judges actively advanced these principles not only by compiling and preserving their own documentary sources, but also by crafting judicial narratives that marginalized native legal practices. In their decisions, they constructed accounts of law that read as a negation of human agency in the conception of law and justice. Litigants’ voices rarely appeared directly; their arguments were reframed in narrow legal terms, stripped of urgency, emotion, or social context. The archive thus reduces disputes to technical matters of law or procedural abstractions, detaching them from the lived realities that shaped the original conflicts.

Recognizing these epistemological limitations, I turned to the Mengo court records to fill these gaps in knowledge. These files contained the voices of ordinary people and offered a compelling example of vernacular legal culture – one that relied on participation, opinion, and locally situated knowledge to administer justice. My initial interpretation viewed these courts as vehicles for participatory justice, but I soon realized they were more than that: they were sites of epistemological practice, where law and knowledge were co-produced. Influential scholars such as Martin Chanock5, and Sally Falk Moore6 have shown that colonial and customary courts were spaces of encounter, where legal, moral, and epistemic orders were constantly negotiated. Native courts differed fundamentally from British appellate courts, not just in institutional design but in how they approached judgment. As trial forums, native courts resolved disputes through oral testimony, community participation, and situated judgments that drew upon local knowledge, custom and social dynamics. Chiefs, litigants, and witnesses worked together to make sense of contradictory facts and to reach decisions grounded in common knowledge, local customs and what was right.

Native courts in Buganda were not simply arenas for administration of justice or instruments of colonial rule, as some scholars have argued. They were also institutions where legal knowledge was actively produced, contested, and redefined. Each dispute – whether over land, labor, personal honor, or sexual violence – forced judges, litigants, and witnesses to weigh competing accounts, confront uncertainty, and assess the credibility of testimony. Unlike British courts, which treated individuals as legal abstractions and decontextualized facts, native courts situated facts within their social and cultural contexts in which they arose, where situational knowledge was central to adjudication. Chiefs resolved disputes not by applying codified rules in a rigid manner but by drawing upon shared vocabularies of truth, fairness, and justice. These concepts were themselves open to debate and continually reshaped by tradition and emerging social aspirations. The 1949 case of Mbawadde demonstrates this epistemic process. Although the Buganda Adultery and Fornication Law of 1918 defined rape as intercourse without a woman’s consent, Mayanja’s lawyer invoked the English case R v. Lloyd to contest the native court’s interpretation of intent and consent. The Judicial Adviser dismissed the appeal, insisting that native courts were not bound by British precedent, and upheld the conviction on the strength of obujulizi (evidence) provided by abajulizi (witnesses). Their testimony that Mayanja attempted to force liquor on Mbawadde, physically restrained her, and that they raised the enduulu, a culturally recognized cry signaling refusal, demonstrated both intent and lack of consent. Such testimonies did more than recount what had taken place; they situated events within social and cultural context, evaluated the intentions and actions of the parties involved, and conveyed moral and subjective judgment. The native court records show how Ugandans imagined law and justice in expansive ways that extended far beyond the categories recognized in law by their leaders or colonial authorities. The legal process in Buganda courts was not simply the application of rules, but a socially anchored practice that prioritized maintaining peace and doing what was considered right and just – though not everyone agreed on what that meant, and not all opinions carried equal weight, given the social hierarchies and inequalities. These court records raise broader questions about the conceptual location and production of law and knowledge by extending the field into local courts, the lives of ordinary people, the practices of local communities, and the moral vocabularies through which disputes were judged.

In stark contrast, British courts were appellate bodies concerned with transforming lived events into “facts of law” through interpretation and procedural correctness. What counted as a fact in this setting was not a shared social understanding or situated knowledge, but information stabilized through legal form – written memoranda, documentary evidence, and procedural conformity. Their allegiance to technical rules of evidence and procedure produced records that were sanitized and detached from the lived experiences of ordinary people. The legal process was largely textual and procedural: cases were often resolved through written submissions by legal counsel, with little direct participation from litigants themselves. This structure left no space for the socially embedded knowledge and communal negotiations that characterized native court trials. For example, a 1928 arson case decided by Chief Justice Sir Charles Griffin makes this contrast clear. Griffin overturned a native court conviction for arson, denounced the reliance on hearsay and rumor as a miscarriage of justice, and dismissed native courts as an “anachronism.”7 His judgment reveals the epistemological assumptions of British law, which privileged documentary evidence and treated oral or communal knowledge as irrational or insufficient. Such judgments did not simply resolve individual cases; they actively delegitimized alternative ways of knowing and interpreting events. This sharp divide demonstrates why British appellate records have limited value for historians interested in the epistemic practices of African societies: they foreclose the possibility of understanding how communities constructed and weighed evidence, interpreted events, and reached judgments in ways rooted in their own social worlds. Native court records, by contrast, are indispensable for reconstructing African legal and social history from the inside out. They offer a historical anthropology of how knowledge, credibility, truth, and justice were determined through specific social interactions and communal assessment. To recover these epistemic practices is to recover a history of law in Africa that is both richer and more grounded, one in which African actors were central to the production and contestation of legal knowledge.

Court Trials as sites of Epistemic Practice

Native courts in Africa performed a wide array of functions that extended well beyond governance, the simple administration of justice, or the enforcement of customary rules. They also served as arenas where social knowledge, community memory, and personal reputation were mobilized to adjudicate conflicts. These courts were much closer to the people and deeply embedded in the everyday lives of litigants and their communities. For most, native courts were the legal jurisdictions they knew and relied upon, while the British courts remained a distant, often inaccessible entity. In native courts, the presence and opinions of community members shaped every stage of a case – from the initial complaint to the final judgment. This proximity – both physical and conceptual – distinguished native courts from British colonial courts, which privileged written evidence and procedural regularity over lived experience and oral testimony, and which too often abstracted justice away from the communities most affected by legal decisions.

The legal process in the native courts depended less on the application of universal rules than on people’s situated knowledge of the events and individuals involved. In reaching decisions, native judges relied heavily on eyewitnesses (abajulizi) who appeared at hearings and offered information (obujulizi)  – a term that referred to both oral testimonies and physical evidence. Oral testimonies, whether based on direct observation, hearsay, or reputation, often carried more weight than physical evidence, since truth was judged through the perceived credibility of the speaker rather than the existence of documentary proof or expert testimony. Chiefs and elders assessed the credibility of both the speaker and the testimony on the basis of an individual’s reputation as well as broader social markers such as age, gender, class, and ethnicity. While older people and those of high social standing were often seen as more trustworthy, these courts also recognized and validated the voices of those typically marginalized, including women. For example, a woman’s testimony about her husband’s impotence could be decisive in resolving a dispute. Although social hierarchies and inequalities shaped many outcomes, powerful individuals could still be called to account when their actions threatened communal peace, even if they were not always subjected to the same degree of public shame or sanction. Community members often distinguished between the severity of an offense and the social identity of the accused, viewing wrongdoing through a relational rather than strictly legalistic lens.

This dynamic is vividly captured in the record of Mbawadde v. Kiwanuka and Mayanja, where a witness, upon finding Kiwanuka half-dressed at the scene, remarked, “He is a big chief. We cannot take him undressed.”8 This remark illustrates both the deference accorded to rank and the social dynamics that shaped the legal process, which was highly personalized and inseparable from local social relations. The Ganda approached crime as part of everyday life and were able to distinguish between offenses and offenders. Because native courts aimed to restore social peace, law acknowledged social gradations of status and reputation and was inseparable from the dynamics of people’s lives. The idea of peace meant that law was constituted through social relationships, and keeping the peace required keeping everyone in their appropriate place, as defined by the social inequalities of the precolonial order. Seen in this light, native court trials were not only moments of dispute resolution but also sites of epistemic practice, where law and social knowledge were created and tested in public. Recognizing this has important implications for how we read the surviving legal archives today.

Reading Legal Archives as Records of Knowledge-Making

Legal archives, particularly the native court files in the Mengo archive, are not merely repositories of disputes but living records of epistemic practice, showing how communities in Buganda produced and negotiated knowledge about truth and justice. Unlike the polished appellate decisions of the High Court, where judges evaluated facts against statutes and precedent, the Mengo files capture the lived process of judgment: how truth emerged from conversation, deliberation, and collective assessment. Testimonies mattered not only for their content but also for how they aligned with social expectations of right conduct, the credibility of the speaker, and the ability of witnesses to draw the community into agreement. Credibility was determined less by scientific or written evidence than by the convergence of voices, the social positions of those who spoke, and the community’s willingness to recognize their claims. The voices preserved in these files – of litigants, witnesses, chiefs, and clerks – reveal that truth (amazima), justice (obwenkanya), and peace (emirembe) were pursued through dialogue, deliberation, and sometimes contested exchange, rather than through detached legal abstraction or reliance on textual evidence.The court records reveal more about the dynamics of legal process, social relations, and cultural values than about formal legal argument. They do not read like mechanical records of law; instead, they capture who spoke, what was said, and how those present interacted and responded to one another as events unfolded. Judgments seldom include formal legal reasoning; instead, the files document the sequence of the unfolding events, from the initial complaint, summons, witness testimonies, cross-examination, evidence and the verdict. For example, in an arson case involving a man named Kalibbala, witnesses described his threats and prior assaults on neighbors. Although no one directly saw him set the fire, the court convicted him on the strength of testimony about his words, conduct, and reputation. The judgment explicitly noted that “even though the person who burnt the houses was not seen, there is no doubt that the accused is the one who burnt them.”9 Thus, the Mengo records are not merely legal files; they are fragments of social history: evidence of how people argued, how they appealed to shared norms, and how they insisted that justice be responsive to their lived experiences. This version of legal culture – informal, dialogic and locally situated – is largely absent from the colonial state’s official archives. Yet it is these records that reveal how law and epistemology were closely connected.

Despite their historical value, these materials had been neglected and were in a state of advanced physical deterioration. These vernacular court records look nothing like the official documents and publications of the British appellate courts that most people associate with legal history. Instead, they are loose documents, handwritten in Luganda on poor-quality paper – many of them water-damaged, torn, or partly eaten by white ants. (See Figures 1–3)

Fig. 1–3: Mengo files, assorted photographs by the author. Figure 1: Handwritten Mengo court record in Luganda, showing dense and rushed clerical notes on poor-quality paper. Figure 2: Bundle of vernacular court records, many water-damaged, torn, and fragile from years of neglect. Figure 3: Box of Mengo court files, partly eaten by white ants and in advanced physical deterioration.

The Mengo files are difficult to both read and interpret – not only due to their physical fragility, but also because they are written in vernacular Luganda, often using idioms, proverbs, popular sayings and expressive forms that do not translate easily into the formal categories of colonial legal discourse. The handwriting is often dense, rushed and inconsistent because of the pace of oral testimony and the working practices of clerks with no formal legal training. Some documents in the files were written by litigants themselves; others were produced by clerks and chiefs who helped to mediate disputes. These were not files created with archival preservation in mind, nor were they intended to serve as legal precedent or be incorporated into formal case law. They were the by-product of encounters as they unfolded: messy, immediate records of oral complaints and testimonies hastily written down; decisions delivered on the spot; judgments shaped by consensus and the social dynamics of the people involved. Once the disputes were settled, the documents were folded into bundles, tied with ribbon, filed away and eventually forgotten, along with the legal culture, the people involved in these cases and the broader social context that had produced these documents.

Fig. 4–5: Mengo files, assorted photographs by the author. Figure 4: Bundle of Mengo court records tied with string, labeled “Buganda Kingdom.” Figure 5: Wooden shelves of the Mengo archive, stacked loosely with vernacular court files in advanced deterioration.

The survival of these records, even in their fragile state, allows us to reconsider how legal history is written and what counts as authoritative evidence. Their continued existence provides a rare window into the epistemic practices, negotiations, and voices that shaped law from the ground up. Although social and political historians have used legal sources to examine questions of gender, race, and class10, far less attention has been paid to the specific legal systems that generated these materials, the processes through which they were produced, and the epistemic assumptions that underpinned them. Buganda’s political institutions are often celebrated and studied, but the everyday workings of its native courts, the sites where disputes were resolved, credibility assessed, evidence weighed, and justice negotiated, remain under-examined. Too often, scholars have filtered these records through statutory law and appellate decisions, treating vernacular legal materials as mere evidence for custom or as deviations from formal legal doctrine, rather than recognizing them as archives of legal practice and epistemic reasoning.

Although native courts were established as instruments of social control and prioritized the maintenance of peace, chiefs exercised local authority only in the service of that peace, and when their actions disturbed it, they could themselves be called to account by the people in their communities. People were not simply the objects of control; the courts depended on them to arrest offenders, gather evidence, and provide information that shaped judgments. Their participation and perspectives informed the entire legal process, and the body of knowledge on which they drew constituted the substance of the law. Both the administration of justice and the content of the law relied heavily on their involvement. The Mbawadde case, along with many others in the Mengo archive, illustrates these dynamics: it shows how judgments were based on situated knowledge and reputation, how credibility was defined through social relationships, how rumor and hearsay could acquire evidentiary force, and how individuals’ credit and gossip networks served as mechanisms for evaluating testimony. These practices reveal a legal culture in which truth, authority, and justice were negotiated through social relationships rather than codified rules. To overlook them is to miss the courtroom as a space where knowledge was not merely recorded but actively made. To reconstruct African history through legal archives requires attention to these practices, doubts, and forms of reasoning. These court files are not only repositories of rulings but also sites of epistemological work, where African actors engaged in the production and contestation of knowledge about law, justice, and social order.


Sauda Nabukenya is a historian of modern Africa and the British Empire,  specializing in the histories of law, gender, race, class, property, and  labor relationships in colonial and postcolonial Uganda. She received  her PhD in History from the University  of Michigan, where her dissertation, In Pursuit of Justice, Right, and Peace: Ordinary Litigants and the Making of Uganda’s Legal Culture, ca. 1900–1970, examined  how ordinary people shaped legal practices and concepts of justice and  rights through  their engagement with colonial and customary courts. She is currently  Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Cultures, and Ideas at  Utah State University. Her research and teaching explore comparative  legal histories, with particular attention to  the intersections of law, society, and colonial governance in Africa  within a global historical frame.

ORCID iD: 0000-0003-1835-4790


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  1. Lukiiko per Mbawadde v. Kiwanuka and Mayanja, Criminal Case No. 15 of 1950, Principal Court of His Highness the Kabaka, Mengo. []
  2. Kiwanuka and Mayanja v. Lukiiko, Criminal Appeal No. 48 of 1950, Judicial Adviser’s Court, Buganda. []
  3. Henry Francis Morris and James S. Read, Indirect Rule and the Search for Justice: Essays in East African Legal History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972; Edwin Scott Haydon, Law and Justice in Buganda. London: Butterworths, 1960. []
  4. Henry Francis Morris, “Jurisdiction of The Buganda Courts and The Scope of Customary Law in Uganda,” Journal of African Law 9, no. 3 (1965), 154-161. []
  5. Martin Chanock. Law, Custom, and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. []
  6. Moore, Sally Falk. Social Facts and Fabrications: “Customary” Law on Kilimanjaro, 1880-1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. []
  7. “The Native Courts,” The Uganda Herald, March 9, 1928. []
  8. Lukiiko per Mbawadde v. Kiwanuka and Mayanja, Criminal Case No. 15 of 1950, Principal Court of His Highness the Kabaka, Mengo. []
  9. Kiyingi v. Kalibala, Criminal Case No. 221 of 1942, Principal Court of Buganda. []
  10. Holly Hanson. Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003; Holly Hanson. To Speak and Be Heard: Seeking Good Government in Uganda, ca. 1500–2015. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2021; Corrie Decker. The Age of Sex: Custom, Law, and Ritual in Twentieth-Century East Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2025. []

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Sauda Nabukenya (September 23, 2025). Court Cases as Epistemology: Reconstructing African History through Legal Archives. Geschichtstheorie am Werk. Retrieved November 15, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14q7a


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