Resourceful Kingdoms Customary Institutions, Contested Ownership, and Development in Africa

Resourceful Kingdoms investigates the struggle for control over Uganda’s emerging oil sector, centering on the Bunyoro Kingdom’s unsuccessful effort to secure ownership of resources discovered on its ancestral lands. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the book shows how the military-backed National Resistance Movement government consolidated authority over an estimated two billion barrels of oil, while Bunyoro communities experienced displacement, land loss, political tension, and significant environmental harm even before production began. The Bunyoro case reflects a wider pattern in which rural, resource-rich populations across Africa are marginalized as governments and multinational corporations convert natural resources into state-centered revenues. The book further explores how indigenous kingdoms might come to own resources and channel revenues toward sustainable, culturally grounded development. Through comparative case studies of Uganda’s powerful Buganda Kingdom and South Africa’s Bafokeng Kingdom-widely recognized for community-based mineral ownership and effective wealth management-Resourceful Kingdoms illustrates how traditional institutions can pair with corporate structures, private land ownership, and diversified investment strategies to strengthen community prosperity. From this analysis emerges strategic coexistence, a new framework that outlines how kingdoms can secure resource rights independent of shifting state policies or corporate social-responsibility initiatives. Presented as both a philosophy and a set of practical steps, strategic coexistence urges kingdoms to formalize land ownership, build strong indigenous governance systems, create community-owned corporations, reinvest resource revenues in long-term development, and transition away from dependence on extractive industries. Resourceful Kingdoms ultimately repositions African kingdoms as dynamic, contemporary governance institutions with significant potential to influence natural resource administration and advance community well-being.