A landmark book. It reminds us that the study of the distant African past need not involve a celebration of kings. In their lakeshore assemblies in spirit mediums' company, African commoners created networks of knowledge that were both cosmopolitan and multicultural. David Schoenbrun gives us republican history of ancient eastern Africa."" - Derek Peterson, University of Michigan ""This brilliant new book offers a deep history of the contingent processes of community over more than a millennium in East Africa. David Schoenbrun has produced a remarkably original non-teleological history of belonging, showing how people continually imagined and produced the very nature of society itself intellectually, morally, and metaphysically."" - Julie Livingston, New York University ""A classic for anyone interested in the long-term roots of group formation in Africa. Schoenbrun's mastery of linguistic, oral, ethnographic, and archaeological sources provides a deep and wide history of different forms of belonging, including ethnicity, for the Buganda state and its neighbors over the last thousand years.

"" - Jan Bender Shetler, Goshen College.