Benedicto Kagimu Mugumba Kiwanuka was Uganda's most controversial and disruptive politician of the 1950s and early 1960s, and the most important Catholic politician in twentieth-century Uganda. He was the country's first elected prime minister (1961–62), before he and his party were outflanked by opposition political alliances. Shortly after being released from prison for allegedly backing the assassination attempt of President Milton Obote, he served as the country's first Ugandan Chief Justice between 1971 and 1972, when members of Idi Amin's security apparatus murdered him.

Kiwanuka provided the most original, far-sighted political thinking in late colonial Uganda. The resuscitation of his career demonstrates the extent to which Ugandans have a heritage of politics that is more than people ‘eating’ power or the state, what Jean-François Bayart described as la politique du ventre. Kiwanuka's activism and intellectual history helps us understand in new ways how arguments about pluralism and democracy unfolded in late colonial Uganda. Ideas about ‘truth’ and ‘justice’ were foundational political and theological ideals that evoked regional ruptures and solidarities. Activists and organisers, operating in various regions of the country, intentionally underscored different aspects of these ideals to imagine representative possibilities in the postcolony. Cosmopolitan claims and local interests animated competing historical claims and charismatic competition that eventually led, not simply to the failure of the Democratic Party (DP), but to extrajudicial killing and civil war.

This book seeks to recover the power, possibilities, and pitfalls of Benedicto Kiwanuka's and DP's Catholic, liberal democratic nationalism in independence- era Uganda. Our project demonstrates the complicated ways in which ethnic, religious, and regional identities overlapped, co-existed, and collided, while also reinforcing the importance of local politics in DP's and Kiwanuka's struggle to ‘conceive the nation’.