The Language of Flowers: Knowledge, Power and Ecology in Precolonial Bunyoro

Abstract

The absence of writing from indigenous sub-Saharan cultures has often been identified as one of the key elements that distinguished African societies from those of Europe and Asia. Literacy permits an extension of the range of human intercourse, increased bureaucratic and commercial complexity, and an enlargement and stabilization of political scale. Some scholars suggest that it also encourages a more abstract and detached way of thinking about present-day problems. Writing is, moreover, commonly assumed to transform people's understanding of the past. The evidence, therefore, that the kingdom of Bunyoro in western Uganda possessed an indigenous form of writing is potentially of great significance. In this paper I examine the limited evidence that such a method of communication did exist, before analyzing its function and importance. I will argue that the use of a coded language of flowers in Bunyoro requires a reassessment of how power was exercised in precolonial interlacustrine kingdoms, of the nature of environmental knowledge in hierarchical African societies, and of Bunyoro's place in the historiography of east Africa.It is especially interesting that the form of writing that developed in Bunyoro was based on a floral code, as the absence of both writing and flowers in African culture have been used by Jack Goody as evidence of African culture's separateness from that of “Eurasia.” Goody has written that African peoples generally did not make significant use of flowers in worship, gift-giving or decoration. He does “not know of any indigenous use of odours,” nor of plants playing a role in stories or myths. This is thought to be because of Africa's “simple” agriculture, “non-complex” societies and absence of a “culture of luxury.”