Participant Info

First Name
Carol
Last Name
Summers
Country
United States
State
VA Virginia
Affiliation
University of Richmond
Website URL
Keywords
Uganda, Colonial Zimbabwe, Colonial Development in Africa, 1940s-1950s Political Activism, History of Education in Africa, History of Medicine in Colonial Africa
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

How do people try to make profound and lasting change? I study Africa–Colonial Zimbabwe and, more recently, Uganda. I work with archival sources. My focus has been on initiatives from the early to mid 20th century. These include imperial top down efforts to redesign people through schooling and segregation, or to shape them into new sorts of subjects, workers, and citizens through development policies, and political policing. My work also examines indigenous activists’ experiments with colonial identities, lobbying and informational techniques and mass mobilization around ethical and moral initiatives that defined new political identities.

Specific publications include two book on schooling  and segregation in colonial Zimbabwe, and a range of articles on political and social mobilization within Uganda–specifically Buganda–during the 1940s and 1950s. I have also written and currently teach on the history of public health initiatives in Africa and beyond, as well as on gender in African history.

Recent Publications

“Scandal and Mass Politics: Buganda’s 1941 Nnamasole Crisis” International Journal of African Historical Studies International Journal of African Historical Studies (2018)

“All the Kabaka’s Wives: Marital Claims in Buganda’s 1953-5 Kabaka Crisis” Journal of African History 58:1 (2017) 107-27

“Adolescence versus Politics: Metaphors in Late Colonial Uganda” Journal of the History of Ideas 78:1 (January 2017) 117-136

“Slander, Buzz and Spin: Telegrams, Politics and Global Communications in the Uganda Protectorate, 1945-9,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History  16:3 (Winter 2015).

“Local Critiques of Global Development: Patriotism and Power in Late Colonial Buganda,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 47:1 (2014)  21-35.

“Radical Rudeness: Ugandan Social Critiques during the 1940s” Journal of Social History  39:3 (2006) 741-770

“Grandfathers, Grandsons, Morality and Radical  Politics in Late Colonial Buganda”  International Journal of African Historical Studies 38:3 (2005) 427-447

“Uganda after World War II” Africa and World War II, Carolyn Brown and Judith Byfield, ed.s (Cambridge University Press, 2015) 480-498

“Education and Literacy in Modern Africa” Handbook of Modern African History Richard Reid, ed. (Oxford University Press, 2013) 329-337

“Youth, Elders and Metaphors of Political Change in Late Colonial Buganda” in Generations Past: Youth in East African History, Andrew Burton, and Helene Charton, ed.s (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010) 175-195

Colonial Lessons: Africans’ Education in Southern Rhodesia, 1918-1935 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002)

From Civilization to Segregation: Social Ideals and Social Control in Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1934 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1994)

Media Coverage
Country Focus
Uganda, Zimbabwe
Expertise by Geography
Africa
Expertise by Chronology
20th century
Expertise by Topic
Children & Youth, Colonialism, Government, Politics, World War II