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Anthony Low is surely right in urging students of modern African politics to probe deeper into African society and culture than they have been accustomed to do. In part because of the speed with which political events have unfolded during the past decade – making it difficult enough just to keep up with day-to-day events – and in part because of the disjunction between traditional socio-cultural groupings and modern political boundaries – making it easy to believe that the former are irrelevant to the latter – much recent writing on African affairs, even when "well informed", has been exceedingly superficial. Low's work on Buganda, including especially his sensitive study of Ganda-British relations during the early years of the Protectorate, stands as an admirable exception. Both in the earlier studies and in his present analysis of populism, twentieth-century Baganda are shown to act in ways, and out of sentiments, that are understandably related both to contemporary circumstances and to the Ganda past.

Is it quite certain that analysts of political forces in Africa are looking in all the right corners? We may perhaps recall that there have been critical lacunae before. After all African nationalism crept up unawares on a previous generation; and if, to take a wider example, one looks at studies of Indian politics before about 1950 there is hardly any analysis of the role of caste. It seems worthwhile, therefore, to go a-probing.