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 d...