The Baganda

Record summary

John Roscoe's The Baganda records religious specialists, spirit possession, divination, dreams, omens and healing practices in early twentieth-century Buganda. The book is useful for comparing altered-state reports with social roles, initiation, diagnosis and royal or clan institutions rather than isolating unusual experiences from their setting. Its descriptions preserve historical claims made by Baganda informants, but they are mediated by a missionary-trained colonial observer and may compress diverse practices into a single system. The lead is therefore best used alongside later Ugandan scholarship and archival criticism.