David Schoenbrun wins 2022 Bethwell A. Ogot Prize for “The Names of the Python: Belonging in East Africa, 900 to 1930”

David Schoenbrun, Professor of History at Northwestern, has been awarded the 2022 Bethwell A. Ogot Prize by the African Studies Association (ASA) for his book, The Names of the Python: Belonging in East Africa, 900 to 1930.

The Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize is awarded annually by the ASA to the best book on East African Studies and honors the distinguished Kenyan historian of the same name.

Names of the Python examines the origins of nationhood over the past thousand years in one region of East Africa. Schoenbrun highlights the region’s diverse forms of groupwork – the collaborative labor done by communities to constitute themselves as such. According to the publisher’s notes, the text “traces the roots of nationhood in the Ganda state. . .demonstrating that the earliest clans were based not on political identity or language but on shared investments, knowledges, and practices.” Driven by oral tradition (as is customary in Africanist historiography), Schoenbrun’s research is judiciously checked against historical linguistics and contemporary research.

“This book is a masterclass in the reconstruction of Africa’s deeper past. . . . No one working on Buganda can ignore this book, and all future work on the political, cultural, and social past of the region will need to take account of it. Schoenbrun has deepened and complicated our knowledge of how societies are formed, how belonging evolves, and how numerous layers of community are involved in it, especially once people move across longer distances and are no longer able to meet one another face-to-face.”

–The Journal of African History.

Schoenbrun’s primary research focus is African history before 1900, but he has worked with graduate students in all regions and periods of African history. Names of the Python joins his notable earlier works A Green Place, A Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender, and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15^th century, and The Historical Reconstruction of Great Lakes Bantu Cultural Vocabulary: Etymologies and Distributions.

Read more about Schoenbrun’s book.