Decolonising State & Society in Uganda: The Politics of Knowledge & Public Life (Eastern Africa Series, 56) 1847012973, 9781847012975

Citation preview

Eastern Africa Series DECOLONISING STATE AND SOCIETY IN UGANDA

Decolonising State and Society in Uganda The Politics of Knowledge and Public Life

EDITED BY KATHERINE BRUCE-LOCKHART, JONATHON L. EARLE, NAKANYIKE B. MUSISI AND EDGAR C. TAYLOR

James Currey is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB) www.jamescurrey.com and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue Rochester, NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com © Contributors, 2022 First published 2022 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-84701-297-5 (James Currey hardback) ISBN 978-1-80010-410-5 (James Currey ePDF) ISBN 978-1-80010-411-2 (James Currey ePUB) Cover image: Decolonization in Uganda by Rumanzi Canon Griffin. The image accentuates comprehension through a tattered but reachable past, making way for possibilities in a contested and unknown future.

Contents List of Illustrations

Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements

Introduction Edgar C. Taylor, Katherine Bruce-Lockhart, Jonathon L. Earle, and Nakanyike B. Musisi

vii

viii

xiii 1

PART I: FRAMING KNOWLEDGE

1. Decolonial Dilemmas and Burdened Epistemic Heritages in Names and Naming Among the Bakiga

Tushabe wa Tushabe

2. Poetic Violence? Intimate Understandings of Cattle Raiding in Karamoja David Eaton 3. Spirits of Difference: Religion, Healing, and Decolonisation in Acholi Letha Victor 4. Contested Freedoms: Human Rights, Decolonisation, and Political Agency in Postcolonial Uganda Lydia Boyd

5. The First White Man to See the Nile: Decolonising History Education in Uganda Ashley L. Greene

25 42 58 78 98

PART II: IMAGINING INSTITUTIONS

6. Militarism and the Dilemmas of Decolonising Knowledge in Uganda Moses Khisa

123

vi

Contents

7. Institutional Knowledge and the Ugandan Public Service: From Colonialism and Neocolonialism to the New Public Service Genevieve Enid Meyers

146

8. Local Knowledge and Knowledge of the ‘Locals’: The Political Ambivalence of Bureaucratic Knowledge in Uganda’s Villages 170 Florence Brisset-Foucault 9. Coloniality and Power in Uganda’s Archives Riley Linebaugh and Katherine Bruce-Lockhart

10. Higher Art Education and New Initiatives in Kampala: Potentials and Problems of Decolonising Knowledge Margaret Nagawa and Fiona Siegenthaler

197

222

PART III: MAKING PUBLICS

11. Repudiating a Liberal Framework for Political Accountability: The Politics of the Whole versus the Politics of the Party in Uganda in the 1940s 247 Holly Hanson 12. Decolonising Identity and Citizenship: Revisiting the Historicity of the Indian Question in Uganda Asiimwe B. Godfrey

13. Liberation Ethnology: District Decolonisation, State Knowledge Production, and the Neoliberal Revolution in Uganda Adrian Browne 14. Finding Ourselves, Seeing Ourselves: Nationalism and Reclaiming Colonial Spaces in Uganda Daniel Kalinaki and Rebecca Rwakabukoza

269

295 317

15. Rudeness/Incivility as Political Strategy: The Poetics and Politics of Stella Nyanzi’s Facebook Work Danson Sylvester Kahyana

334

Select Bibliography

357

Index 

397

Illustrations MAPS 0.1. Contemporary Map of Uganda

11.1. Map of Labour Strikes throughout Uganda, 1945

2

253

FIGURES 2.1. 8.1. 8.2. 8.3. 8.4. 8.5. 8.6.

The Pokot and their enemies, as depicted by an elder at Kunyao Bridge, Uganda-Kenya border, 2005

Old LC1 rubber stamps collected by the sub-county chief, Kabarole, May 2019 Resident identity card issued by Nakulabye Parish Local Council, Kampala, June 2018

Local Council 1 Residential Card, Nkrumah Zone, Kampala, June 2018 Identity card purchased at the market in Kabarole, 2016

Identity cards purchased at the market in Kabarole in 2016

Letter to the General Manager [occluded], Bank Uganda Limited, 13 August 2018, recommending someone who wants to open an account

52 183 186 186 187 188 189

Full credit details are provided in the captions to the images in the text. The editors, contributors and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and persons for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

Contributors Asiimwe B. Godfrey is an Associate Professor and former Head of the Department of History and Development Studies at Makerere University, Uganda. He has published in books and journals on several topics on Uganda. These include neoliberal reforms, corruption, liberal democracy and constitutionalism, Indian-Pakistanis in Uganda, household gender relations, Aid and development, and the ‘Buganda question’. Lydia Boyd is an Associate Professor of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is an anthropologist and the author of Preaching Prevention: Born-Again Christianity and the Moral Politics of AIDS in Uganda (Ohio University Press, 2015), and the co-editor of Legislating Gender and Sexuality in Africa: Human Rights, Society and the State (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020).

Florence Brisset-Foucault is a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, a Researcher at IMAf (Institut des mondes africains) in Paris, and a Junior Fellow at the Institut universitaire de France. She has worked on citizenship, media, and political imagination in Uganda and is the author of Talkative Polity: Radio, Domination and Citizenship in Uganda (Ohio University Press, 2019).

Adrian Browne recently completed a PhD in History at Durham University in the UK. His current research focuses on political education, decolonisation, and Africa’s Cold War in Britain. In the past he has worked on ethnicity, class, and colonial violence in Uganda’s northern Albertine Rift Valley. His articles have appeared in History in Africa, Journal of Eastern African Studies, and Journal of Critical African Studies. Katherine Bruce-Lockhart is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Waterloo and a faculty member at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. She is the author of Carceral Afterlives: Prisons, Detention, and Punishment in Postcolonial Uganda. Her research critically analyzes how the prison became a global institution, linking this to wider discussions about and movements for decolonisation and prison abolition.

Notes on Contributors

Jonathon L. Earle is the Marlene and David Grissom Professor of Social Studies at Centre College, in Danville, KY. He currently serves as a Senior Editor for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. His most recent book, Contesting Catholics: Benedicto Kiwanuka and the Birth of Postcolonial Uganda (James Currey, 2021, co-authored with J.J. Carney), explores the history of Catholic political thought in colonial Uganda. David Eaton is an associate professor of African and world history at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, MI. His research deals with cattle raiding along the Kenya-Uganda border as well as world history pedagogy. He is the author of World History through Case Studies: Historical Skills in Practice (Bloomsbury, 2019). Ashley L. Greene is Assistant Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College in Keene, NH. Her research focuses on the relationship between History education and statecraft in Uganda. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Peacebuilding and Development and in several edited volumes, including Historical Dialogue and the Prevention of Mass Atrocities (Routledge, 2020). She develops and teaches atrocity prevention curricula for policy makers in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Zambia, and the Central African Republic.

Holly Hanson is Professor Emeritus of History at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA. Her Uganda-focused research explores how dynamic patterns of exchange have been created, and then undermined, and what history suggests about how they might be rebuilt. She is the author of To Speak and Be Heard: Seeking Good Government in Uganda, ca. 1500 to 2015 (forthcoming from Ohio University Press), Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda (Heinemann, 2003), and numerous essays published in the USA and in East Africa. Danson Sylvester Kahyana is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature at Makerere University. He has edited Fire on the Mountain: Creative Work on the Obuhikira (2018) and co-edited As I Stood Dead Before the World: Creative Writing from Luzira (2018) and Discourse and Identities: Writing and Contemporary Eastern African Peripheral Subjectivities (2019). He is the President of PEN Uganda, a Member of the International Board of Trustees of PEN International, and a Fulbright Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the African Studies Centre, Michigan State University (2021).

Daniel Kalinaki is a journalist and has held various senior newsroom positions, including editing the Daily Monitor and The East African newspapers. He is the author of Kizza Besigye and Uganda’s Unfinished Revolution (Dominant Seven, 2014) and co-author of Open Secret: People Facing Up to AIDS in Uganda (ActionAid and Strategies for Hope, 2001).

ix

x

Notes on Contributors

Moses Khisa is Associate Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies at North Carolina State University. He is a columnist for the Daily Monitor and a research associate with the Centre for Basic Research, Kampala. He has published in Africa Development, Third World Quarterly, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, Civil Wars, Review of African Political Economy, African Studies Review, and Journal of Eastern African Studies, among other peer-­reviewed journals. He is co-editor of Rethinking Civil-Military Relations in Africa and Africa’s New Global Politics, both by Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2022.

Riley Linebaugh is a postdoctoral research associate at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz. She holds a PhD in history from Justus Liebig University, Giessen. Her research deals with the history and politics of colonial archives, particularly those related to the UK and East Africa. Her teaching, research, and public engagement are oriented around questions of restitution.

Genevieve Enid Meyers is Associate Professor of Political Science, Director of the Pre-Law Program, and Chair, Department of Political Science at University of Detroit Mercy, Detroit, MI. Her research focuses on comparative administrative reforms, decentralisation, democracy and democratisation, ethics in public service, and politics in Africa. Her work has been published in edited books and peer-reviewed journals. Nakanyike B. Musisi is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is a former Director of Makerere Institute of Social Research at Makerere University, Kampala. Her research interests are in gender, colonialism, missionary work in Uganda, social change, and education. Her articles have appeared in Signs: Journal of Culture and Society, Journal of African History, History in Africa, Gender and History and in various edited collections. Margaret Nagawa is a graduate student at Emory University focusing on contemporary African art. She is the author of ‘Conveying the Mallet: Barkcloth Renewal and Connectedness in Fred Mutebi’s Art Practice’, Critical Interventions 12:3 (2018).

Rebecca Rwakabukoza is a PhD candidate in History at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. Her research interests include gender history in Eastern Africa. She is the research lead for the Ugandan-based history podcast, Wulira! Fiona Siegenthaler is Africa curator at Linden-Museum Stuttgart and a Research Associate at the Universities of Basel and Johannesburg. She specialises in contemporary art, performance, and visual culture with a regional focus in urban Southern and East Africa. She is the author of Imageries of Johannesburg. Visual Arts and Spatial Practices in

Notes on Contributors

a Transforming City (University of Basel, 2017) and a co-editor of ‘Decolonial Processes in Swiss Academia and Cultural Institutions’, Tsantsa vol. 24 (2019).

Edgar C. Taylor is Lecturer in the Department of History, Archaeology and Heritage Studies at Makerere University. His research focuses on urban protest, social intimacy, and racial politics in twentieth-­century Uganda. He has written about generational, legal, and affective politics of decolonisation and racialised citizenship as well as histories of public archives in Uganda.

Tushabe wa Tushabe is a professor of American Ethnic Studies at Kansas State University. Tushabe’s research interests centre decolonial praxis and indigenous ways of knowing. Tushabe does not identify with a specific gender nor use gender pronouns.

Letha Victor is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she is also affiliated with the Africana Studies and Anthropology departments. Trained as an anthropologist, her research focuses on the intersections of trauma, ritual, spirituality, and ethics. She is currently writing an ethnography about ghostly vengeance and trauma in contemporary Acholi.

xi

Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank the participants at the ‘Emerging Approaches in Uganda Studies’ workshop held at University College London in 2016 and the participants in the ‘Uganda and the Decolonization of Knowledge’ panel series at the African Studies Association (ASA) Annual Meeting in Atlanta in 2018 for presenting their research and exchanging ideas about Uganda Studies past, present, and future. We are grateful for the comments of the anonymous reviewers, and to Canon Rumanzi for producing the wonderful cover art for this book. We would also like to thank the Balsillie School of International Affairs for providing funding towards publication costs, and Ivy Muriuki for her excellent copyediting work. Finally, thank you to Jaqueline Mitchell and the rest of the staff at James Currey/Boydell & Brewer for their support and guidance throughout this process.

Introduction EDGAR C. TAYLOR, KATHERINE BRUCE-LOCKHART, JONATHON L. EARLE AND NAKANYIKE B. MUSISI

Uganda has never been a static entity as its inscription in Map 0.1 suggests. Geographically, its borders have been recurring sources of conflict. British, Belgian, and German officials who sought to demarcate borders through heterogeneous communities frequently provoked hostility to their work and indifference to their creations.1 Separatist movements from the heart of Buganda to the hills of Bundibugyo have repeatedly challenged Uganda’s territorial boundaries.2 In 1976, Idi Amin asserted that Uganda’s borders extended into the plains of northwestern Kenya, and less than three years later his regime collapsed after he attempted to enforce a similar territorial claim on the area north of the Kagera River in Tanzania. 3 Since 2009, the governments of Uganda and Kenya have invoked the imprecise descriptions of colonial cartographers to justify threats of military intervention over the contested island of Migingo.4 In temporal terms, the origins of the Ugandan nation are vigorously debated among academic historians and popular audiences alike. A recent survey by Richard Reid traces 1 David Ngendo-Tshimba, ‘Transgressing Buyira: An Historical Inquiry into Violence Astride a Congo-Uganda Border’, PhD Thesis, Makerere University, 2020. See also: Julie MacArthur, Cartography and the Political Imagination: Mapping Community in Colonial Kenya (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2016), pp. 50–58. 2 Yahya Sseremba, The State and the Puzzle of Ethnicity: Rethinking Mass Violence in Uganda’s Rwenzori Region (Kampala: Makerere Institute of Social Research, 2021); Martin Doornbos, The Rwenzururu Movement in Uganda: Struggling for Recognition (London: Routledge, 2018); Derek R. Peterson, ‘The Work of Time in Western Uganda’, Citizenship Studies, 16 (2012), 961–77. 3 Al-Hajji Field Marshal Dr. Idi Amin Dada, The Shaping of Modern Uganda and Administrative Divisions: Documents 1900–76 (Entebbe: Government Printer, 1976). 4 Jacqueline Namukasa, ‘Territorial Conflicts in East Africa: Uganda-Kenya Contestation over Migingo Island’, PhD Thesis, Makerere University, 2022.

2

Introduction

Map 0.1 Contemporary map of Uganda (map drawn by Miles Irving).

the threads of Ugandan interconnections back many centuries. 5 Other foundational texts in Ugandan historiography emphasise that a weak national project only began in the late 1950s as a faltering Protectorate Government sought to shed responsibility for the divisions it had sown by transferring sovereignty to a centralised African-led state.6 The violence of colonialism destabilised space and time. Richard J. Reid, A History of Modern Uganda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 6 The former Makerere historian Godfrey Uzoigwe summed up the view: ‘Ugandan nationhood is, first and last, a creation of British imperialism… Divided, Uganda was ruled; and before Ugandans were made, Uganda was granted political sovereignty’. G.N. Uzoigwe (ed.), Uganda: The Dilemma of Nationhood (New York: NOK Publishers International, 1982), p. xii. 5

Introduction

The name ‘Uganda’ itself elicits controversy over the persistence of colonial sovereignty. A corruption of ‘Buganda’ (the kingdom through which British imperialists and their Baganda allies attempted to establish their control over the wider territory), ‘Uganda’ was a cause for concern among many throughout the country in the years before independence. ‘The name “Uganda” [is] a source of continuous annoyance to the non-Baganda people’, John Kamarumba told a constitutional commission in 1959.7 Two years earlier, the Legislative Councillor and future Vice President John Babiiha set down a motion demanding ‘the Government to consider changing the name of the Protectorate now from Uganda to Kiira, the local name of the River Nile, which is of such great importance to, and is so closely associated with the life of, all the people of the country’.8 Ordinary Ugandans wrote letters to the press proposing numerous alternative names, including ‘Rwenzoria’ (after the Western mountain range), ‘Banimate’ (incorporating the ‘three racial groups in the so-called Uganda, namely Hamites, Bantu and Nilotic’), ‘Kitara’ (after the precolonial ‘ruling power’ Bunyoro-Kitara), and ‘Nvea’ (an altered acronym for the new geographic names ‘Nilia, Elgonia, Rwenzoria and Equatoria’).9 Born out of contested conditions, Uganda was not granted the right to define itself in scholarly imaginations.10 Thanks to the imperial fantasies of Winston Churchill, racist Western fascination with Idi Amin’s ostentatious personality, and international culture wars over homosexuality, Uganda has at various times been an object for the projection of global understandings of colonialism, decolonisation, and human rights. In 1988, Holger Hansen and Michael Twaddle noted, ‘Uganda has come to symbolize Third World disaster in its direst form’.11 Many Ugandan scholars reinforced this grim vision, referring to Uganda’s ‘crisis of confidence’, its ‘unfulfilled hopes’, and its ‘roots of instability’ in ‘imperialism and fascism’.12 Such assessments helped to perpetuate 7 Uganda National Archives (UNA) Confidential box 95 file CONST 7/5, ‘Constitutional Committee Memorandum No: 26’, n.d. [1959]. 8 UNA Confidential box 46 file C8388, ‘Motion (To be moved by the Hon. J.K. Babiiha)’, n.d. [June 1957], [7a]. 9 Uganda Argus letters-to-the-editor in UNA Confidential box 46 file C8388 [1-6]. 10 We are particularly grateful to Holly Hanson, Pamela Khanakwa, and Christopher Muhoozi for helping us with this point. 11 Hölger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle, ‘Introduction’, in Hölger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle (eds) Uganda Now: Between Decay and Development (London: James Currey, 1988), p. 1. 12 A.M. Kirunda Kivejinja, Uganda: The Crisis of Confidence, second print (Petaling Jaya: Excel Vision Education, 1995); Phares Mukasa Mutibwa, Uganda Since Independence: A Story of Unfulfilled Hopes (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992); Samwiri Rubaraza Karugire, Roots of Instability in Uganda, 3rd edn (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2003); Mahmood Mamdani, Imperialism

3

4

Introduction

an old question in Ugandan scholarship: how to forge unity from a divided polity that British colonialism had implanted with conflict and then discarded? The foundations of Ugandan historiography reinforced Uganda’s provincialism, as an unformed aspiration in the waiting room of history.13 As the National Resistance Movement (NRM) projected efforts to re-forge social order, bureaucratic rationality, and economic development after 1986, the urgent question facing Ugandans and scholars of Uganda was one of cohesion. Was it possible to imagine ‘Uganda’ except as an interrupted future? How could more unitary, inspirational ideas of Uganda be actualised? Thirty-six years later, this volume suggests that the terrain of debate has changed significantly. Shifting social and political conditions in Uganda have compelled scholars to restructure older questions, while rethinking the spaces from which they are interrogated. Rather than questioning the possibility of national unity, the contributors wrestle with how Ugandans have mobilised forms of knowledge and social solidarity in what are often tense relationships with state power and ethno-national imaginations. As an extension of neoliberal governmentality, the Ugandan state has entrenched and commercialised differences borne out of the colonial situation in order to tamp down separatist ambitions, co-opt sectarian entrepreneurs, and promote investment.14 While Uganda remains a dependent player in global capitalism, its very existence is no longer as urgent a subject of analysis as it was a generation ago.15 On one hand, the Ugandan state is a powerful regional force, and its internal mechanisms of control appear to be flexible, if increasingly coercive and arbitrary.16 On the other hand, its means of securing and measuring consent are often productive of contained conflict, and corrosive toward a range of institutional and social fields, even as they accommodate debate and limited expressions of dissent.17 When and Fascism in Uganda (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1983). 13 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 14 Jörg Wiegratz, Giuliano Martiniello and Elisa Greco, Uganda: The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation (London: Zed Books, 2018); Derek R. Peterson ‘Introduction: Heritage Management in Colonial and Contemporary Africa’, in The Politics of Heritage in Africa: Economies, Histories, and Infrastructures, Derek R. Peterson, Kodzo Gavua and Ciraj Rassool (eds) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 15 P. Godfrey Okoth, Manuel Muranga and Ernesto Okello Ogwang (eds), Uganda: A Century of Existence (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1995). 16 Rebecca Tapscott, Arbitrary States: Social Control and Modern Authoritarianism in Museveni’s Uganda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Aili Mari Tripp, Museveni’s Uganda: Paradoxes of Power in a Hybrid Regime (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2010). 17 Holly Hanson in this volume; J. Oloka-Onyango and Josephine Ahikire (eds), Controlling Consent: Uganda’s 2016 elections (Trenton, NJ: Africa World

Introduction

security agents brutalised the opposition politician Kizza Besigye in front of Ugandan and foreign journalists in 2011, provoking unrest in Kampala, the cover of the Daily Monitor simply read, ‘Oh Uganda!’ The headline was a sardonic invocation of the country’s national anthem ‘Oh Uganda, Land of Beauty’ at once invoking its violent, divisive past while simultaneously indexing a sense of a common national predicament.18 Layers of collective memory and disruption enabled such a national sentiment whose interpretation could not have been taken for granted during the upheavals of previous decades. This volume looks beyond Uganda’s enduringly ‘nervous state’ to interrogate the multiple sources and possibilities of ‘decolonisation’ or ‘decoloniality’ where precise meaning is often obscured.19 While many Ugandans aspire to an ‘elsewhere’ beyond what is immediately imaginable, the term ‘decolonisation’ does not dominate public debate in Uganda as it has in South Africa in recent years. This is partly a reflection of the longer histories of political and institutional decolonisation that Uganda and most African countries have experienced.20 For many Ugandans today, the guiding imperative is to pursue forms of knowledge that offer ways out of the impasse between coercive state power and violent histories of sectarianism, all under the often unacknowledged shadows of imperial durabilities and neoliberal ruptures.21 Some seek to recover equitable forms of assent from precolonial histories of reciprocity.22 Others pursue radical forms of dissent in novel public spheres.23 Movements toward the decolonisation of knowledge Press, 2017); Florence Brisset-Foucault, Talkative Polity: Radio, Domination, and Citizenship in Uganda (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019). 18 ‘Oh Uganda!’ Daily Monitor 28 April 2011, p. 1. The ironic use of the Luganda phrase ‘Uganda Zaabu’ (‘Uganda is Golden’) captures a related element of Michael Herzfeld’s notion of ‘cultural intimacy … the familiarity with the bases of power that may at one moment assure the disenfranchised a degree of creative irreverence and at the next moment reinforce the effectiveness of intimidation’. Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the National-State, Second Edition (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 3. On satire in Ugandan social commentary, see: Jimmy Spire Ssentongo, What I Saw When I Died (Kampala: Makerere University Press, 2021); Jimmy Spire Ssentongo, Spire ’20: Uncomfortable Laughter (Kampala, 2021). 19 On nervousness, anxiety and the state in Africa, see Nancy Rose Hunt, A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Andrea Mariko Grant and Yolana Pringle (eds), Anxiety in and about Africa: Multidisciplinary Perspectives and Approaches (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2021). 20 Prasenjit Duara, Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then (London: Routledge, 2004). 21 Anne Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 22 Holly Hanson in this volume. 23 Danson Kahyana in this volume.

5

6

Introduction

and power in Uganda have not aimed toward a single spatial or temporal horizon. They have been far more refractory. Decolonisation has remained as diverse as the projects these movements seek to unravel. Our original invitation asked the contributors to this volume to consider ‘how have discussions around decolonisation shaped your field of study?’ Each has thoughtfully engaged this question, but in doing so, many worked around or declined to use the term. Such generative acts of refusal point to what Audra Simpson refers to as the ‘deeply unequal scene of articulation’ in which the ‘playing field for interpretation’ is weighted unevenly.24 Rather than adopt prefigured subjectivities and categories waiting for local content, the authors and the people about whom they write have often attempted to embrace what Musisi has described as a hermeneutic of refusal, whereby actors use novel modes of address and new languages with which to reframe social, political, and institutional life.25 In keeping with this approach, we have come to think about terms such as ‘Uganda Studies’ and ‘decolonisation’ in more critical and complex ways, both as intellectual fields and as institutionalised discourses. This volume approaches such nomenclatures as terms of power to be interrogated and contextualised in order to understand the forms of power that they reproduce. Through this analysis, histories of institutional and public life are reframed, and conceptions of Uganda are contested anew. We hope that it supports shifting networks and emergent hubs of knowledge beyond the rigid gatekeeping that has shaped so much of area studies.26 This introductory chapter situates these contestations in a broader historical context and examines how previous scholarship has been entangled with or sought to challenge colonial ways of knowing.

Contested Histories of Public Life

In different ways, Ugandans have continuously reimagined the relationship between knowledge and institutional power in colonial and postcolonial public and private life. Makerere University (formerly Makerere College and Makerere University College) has exemplified the contradictions of these dynamics since its founding a century ago. Its students and faculty have produced knowledge and reproduced hierAudra Simpson, ‘Consent’s Revenge’, Cultural Anthropology, 31 (2016), 328. Nakanyike Musisi, ‘The Performative Concept of Refusal’, unpublished paper, Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, 2018. 26 Timothy Burke, ‘Academia: The Trouble with Kinship’, Eight By Seven, 10 February 2022, https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/academia-the-troublewith-kinship [accessed 2 March 2022]. 24 25

Introduction

archies in the service of colonial institutions while also challenging the political and epistemic foundations on which they were based. 27 The university also served as a transnational site of enculturation for many of the region’s future leaders and many of the academics who have shaped the study of East Africa’s public life since the 1950s. Yet Makerere as a site for inculcating colonial consciousness or for decolonising knowledge was situated in multiple fields of knowledge politics. State institutions and the academy have never been far apart in the public life of Uganda or anywhere else.28 Under colonial rule, the pursuit of new forms of knowledge and authority drove many Ugandan elites to travel throughout the world and adapt colonial education to new political and social projects. The British colonial officers whom they encountered in Uganda were themselves products of an educational system that emphasised the priorities and replication of political and economic class. 29 By 1892, the Oxford University Appointments Committee was created to streamline the recruitment of future colonial officers. 30 Recruitment efforts soon started at Cambridge. The principal director of colonial recruitment was Ralph D. Furse, who maintained a close relationship with Oxford recruitment, and Margery Perham, who developed Oxford’s special courses for colonial officials. 31 Applicants for the colonial service completed a rigorous process for recruitment prior to the First World War, which included letters of recommendation, the completion of long forms that gauged one’s father’s economic status, athletic achievements, and educational performance in elite boarding schools. 32 Programmes Carol Sicherman, Becoming an African University: Makerere 1922–2020 (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2005); Frederick Kamuhanda Byaruhanga, Student Power in Africa’s Higher Education: A Case of Makerere University (New York: Routledge, 2006). At the time of writing, A.B.K. Kasozi is preparing a book on student activism at Makerere in the 1950s, which promises to add new insight into these dynamics. 28 Khisa in this volume; Musisi, ‘The Performative Concept of Refusal’; Mahmood Mamdani, ‘The African University’, London Review of Books 40:19 (19 July 2018); J. Oloka-Onyango, Politics, Democratization and Academia in Uganda: The Case of Makerere University (Ottawa: Daraja Press, 2021); Andrea Kronstad Felde, Tor Halvorsen, Anja Myrtveit and Reidar Øygard, Democracy and the Discourse on Relevance Within the Academic Profession at Makerere University (Cape Town: African Minds, 2021). 29 David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (London: Penguin, 2002). 30 Robert Heussler, Yesterday’s Rulers: The Making of the British Colonial Service (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1963), pp. 12–13. 31 Brian Harrison, ‘Politics’, in Trevor Henry Aston (eds), The History of the University of Oxford. Volume VIII: The Twentieth Century, 8 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 377–412 (p. 377). 32 Heussler, Yesterday’s Rulers, pp. 17–18. 27

7

8

Introduction

throughout the British academy were recast to meet the services of an expanding empire by gatekeeping the transmission of generational authority to represent and reproduce colonial White supremacy. 33 Throughout the twentieth century, numerous Ugandan students frequented the corridors of Oxbridge, whose education was ostensibly designed to produce future civic leaders. Colonial governments provided scholarships to fund Oxbridge education, but they could not control how so-called colonial subjects reworked their lessons to animate student and labour union strikes both in Britain and at home. 34 Nor could colonial governments control how international education shaped the national and vernacular presses in Uganda. A long list of late colonial and postcolonial intellectuals attended British universities. Among others, Kabaka (King) Edward Muteesa II of Buganda attended Magdalene College, Cambridge; Abubakar Mayanja, King’s College, Cambridge; Prince Stephen Karamagi of Tooro, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge; Okot p’Bitek studied at Bristol, Aberystwyth, and Oxford; and Princess Elizabeth Bagaaya of Tooro at Girton College, Cambridge. They often translated and redirected their course work into Ugandan debates about legitimate power and uncertain futures. 35 The intellectual horizons and decolonising activist work that Ugandans pursued were never confined to a narrow path between protectorate and metropole. The work of decolonisation required acting across the bounded geography and linear time of colonialism by simultaneously reaching for past inspiration and future possibilities. 36 Often inspired by the contentious politics of ethnic patriotism, many Ugandans in the 1950s and 1960s looked to the past in search of useful histories for a postcolonial society. 37 Academics, too, increasingly saw historical and ethnographic studies, whether in Makerere’s ‘History of Uganda’ project or the East African Institute of Social Research, as integral to forging new social and political orders. Others worked deliberately 33 John M. MacKenzie, ‘Empire and Metropolitan Culture’, in Andrew Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), III, pp. 270–93, pp. 282–90. 34 Marc Matera, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). 35 For example, Benedicto Kiwanuka’s private papers show how he used his courses on constitutional law in London to question the legitimacy of Protestant land holdings in southern and central Uganda. See: Jonathon L. Earle and J.J. Carney, Contesting Catholics: Benedicto Kiwanuka and the Birth of Modern Uganda (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2021). 36 Ismay Milford, Gerard McCann, Emma Hunter and Daniel Branch, ‘Another World? East Africa, Decolonisation, and the Global History of the Mid-­ Twentieth Century’, Journal of African History 62:3 (2021), 394–410. 37 Jonathon L. Earle, Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire: Political Thought and Historical Imagination in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Introduction

to imagine alternative decolonial arenas. The 1962 African Writers Conference in Kampala, like Transition magazine founded in 1961 by the young Ugandan writer and activist Rajat Neogy, offered Kampala as a space from which to imagine African literature, art, and politics delinked from colonialism. 38 Young men and women also pursued studies on both sides of the ‘Iron Curtain’ and in newly liberated centres of anti­colonial organisation such as Egypt, India, and Ghana. Many saw Uganda at the forefront of global movements against racism and neocolonialism, a posture that postcolonial leaders earnestly adopted through the 1960s and 1970s. 39 While they found considerable support back home, they also encountered scepticism among individuals who had contracted colonialism in the service of diverse projects. Chiefs, religious notables, and professionals working inside and outside of state institutions offered radically different visions of how institutional knowledge was to be reoriented in an era of political independence under a centralised state.40 Over the ensuing decades, the sense of entanglement between institution-­building and public life in Uganda frayed. Historians have attributed this to the diverse political histories of the region, within which precolonial southern and western kingdoms and northern and 38 Mahmood Mamdani, ‘Between the Public Intellectual and the Scholar: Decolonization and Some Post-Independence Initiatives in African Higher Education’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 17: 1 (2016), 68–83; Peter Benson, Black Orpheus, Transition, and Modern Cultural Awakening in Africa, part II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Gerard McCann, ‘Rajat Neogy (1938–95)’, Another World? East Africa and the Global 1960s, https://globaleastafrica.org/ global-lives/rajat-neogy. 39 Yoga Adhola, UPC and National-Democratic Liberation in Uganda (Bloomington: Xlibris, 2015); Edgar C. Taylor, ‘Affective Registers of Postcolonial Crisis: The Kampala Tank Hill party’, Africa, 89 (2019), 541–61. 40 For the complicated calculations of chiefs and ‘local intellectuals’, see Patrick Otim, ‘Local Intellectuals: Lacito Okech and the Production of Knowledge in Colonial Acholiland’, History in Africa, 45 (2018), 275–305; Patrick Otim, ‘The Fate of a Transitional Chief in Colonial Acholiland: Iburaim Lutanyamoi Awich, 1850s–1946’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 55: 1 (2021), 57–77. On Catholic leaders and the political sphere, see: Earle and Carney, Contesting Catholics; J.J. Carney, For God and My Country: Catholic Leadership in Modern Uganda (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2020); Carol Summers, ‘Catholic Action and Ugandan Radicalism: Political Activism in Buganda, 1930–1950’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 39 (2009), 60–90. On government workers, see Marissa Mika, Africanizing Oncology: Creativity, Crisis, and Cancer in Uganda (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2021); Yolana Pringle, Psychiatry and Decolonisation in Uganda (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Katherine Bruce-Lockhart, Carceral Afterlives: Prisons, Detention, and Punishment in Postcolonial Uganda (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2022); Edgar C. Taylor, ‘Risk and Labour in the Archives: Archival Futures from Uganda’, Africa 91: 4 (2021), 532–52.

9

10

Introduction

eastern republican communities offered drastically different visions of political normalcy and social mobility.41 Political scientists have also pointed to the increasing militarisation of the state and the hardships that accompanied successive government responses to the country’s position in an unequal global economy.42 The violence of Protectorate rule, from racial hierarchies to regional underdevelopment to the coercion of daily governance, inhibited efforts to forge democratic public spheres or to adapt forms of reciprocal obligation.43 The hopes that accompanied the transfer of sovereignty to Ugandan leaders soon gave way to recognition of the enduring challenges of colonialism. The Ugandan army’s attack on the Kabaka’s palace at Mengo and the subsequent abolition of the five kingdoms reflected the violence that accompanied nation-building projects across the formerly colonised world.44 Likewise, efforts to redress colonial racial injustice by Africanising commerce and the civil service undermined efforts to forge non-racial citizenship binding Africans and Asians to the new nation.45 Postcolonial politics have generated competing interpretive lenses. Despite the work of women activists to transcend colonial divides, the decolonising postures of Milton Obote and Idi Amin heralded the expansion of hyper-masculine militarism.46 Amin’s military regime in Earle and Carney, Contesting Catholics, Introduction. Tapscott, Arbitrary States; Joshua B. Rubongoya, Regime Hegemony in Museveni’s Uganda: Pax Musevenica (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Nelson Kasfir, ‘Guerrillas and Civilian Participation: The National Resistance Army in Uganda, 1981–86’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 43 (2005), 271–96. 43 Holly Hanson in this volume; Holly Elisabeth Hanson, To Speak and Be Heard: Seeking Good Government in Uganda, ca. 1500–2015 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2022); Apollo N. Makubuya, Protection, Patronage, or Plunder? British Machinations and (B)uganda’s Struggle for Independence (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2018). 44 The Kabaka of Buganda, Desecration of My Kingdom (London: Constable and Co., 1967); ABK Kasozi, The Bitter Bread of Exile: The Financial Problems of Sir Edward Muteesa II During his Final Exile, 1966–1969 (Kampala: Progressive Publishing House, 2013). 45 Asiimwe B. Godfrey in this volume; Genevieve Meyers in this volume; B. Godfrey Asiimwe, ‘Migrations and Identity of Indian-Pakistani Minorities in Uganda’ in Michel Adam (ed.), Indian Africa: Minorities of Indian-Pakistani Origin in Eastern Africa (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki Na Nyota Publishers, 2015), pp. 315–48; Anneeth Kaur Hundle, ‘Insecurities of Expulsion: Emergent Citizenship Formations and Political Practices in Postcolonial Uganda’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 39:1 (2019), 8–23; Edgar C. Taylor, ‘Claiming Kabale: Racial Thought and Urban Governance in Uganda’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 7: 1 (2013), 143–63; Michael Twaddle, Expulsion of a Minority: Essays on Ugandan Asians (London: Athlone Press, 1975). 46 Alicia Decker, In Idi Amin’s Shadow: Women, Gender, and Militarism in 41

42

Introduction

particular presented itself as a decolonising force. Dismissing stilted intellectual debate in favour of a rhetorical appeal to ‘action’, Amin used the language and performance of authenticity in an effort to transcend postcolonial Uganda’s complicated social history and institutional politics.47 In these efforts, he found considerable international support as an anticolonial crusader even as others regarded him as an embarrassing opportunist who set back principled work against racism and neocolonialism.48 For some, Tanzania’s 1979 invasion marked a principled commitment to human rights, while others saw it as an attack on national sovereignty that enabled the resurgence of internal sectarianism and external economic predation.49 More recently, many younger Ugandans with no direct memory of the 1970s have articulated nostalgia for an era of perceived economic nationalism under Amin. 50 Likewise, the subsequent Obote II years saw violence and economic shocks that inhibited academic work but still produce no widespread popular or scholarly consensus. The resolution of the “Bush War” of 1981 to 1986 provides a unifying narrative for the National Resistance Movement but often obscures the complexities of that conflict and the experiences of those who endured it. 51 Even more than the Amin years, it remains a dangerous flashpoint in popular memory. Following the NRM’s seizure of power thirty-six years ago, its leaders have continuously called for the knowledge produced by academic and civil society institutions to serve a narrow conception of national development. 52 Uganda (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014); Aili Mari Tripp, Women & Politics in Uganda (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2000); Benjamin Twagira, ‘“The Men Have Come”: Gender and Militarisation in Kampala, 1966– 86’, Gender & History, 28:3 (2016), 813–32; Mark Leopold, Idi Amin: The Story of Africa’s Icon of Evil (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). 47 Derek R. Peterson and Edgar C. Taylor, ‘Rethinking the State in Idi Amin’s Uganda: The Politics of Exhortation’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 7:1 (2013), 58–82. 48 Horace Campbell, Four Essays on Neo-Colonialism in Uganda: The Barbarity of Idi Amin (Toronto: Afro-Carib Publications, 1975), Peter Woodward, ‘Ambiguous Amin’, African Affairs, 77:307 (April 1978), 153–64. 49 George Roberts, ‘The Uganda-Tanzania War, the Fall of Idi Amin, and the Failure of African Diplomacy, 1978–1979’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 8: 4 (2014), 692–709. On public debates in the aftermath of the Uganda-Tanzania War, see Hypotheses (2021–22), ‘Uganda’s Past, Ugandan Futures: Debates over Government, Equality and Justice 1979–1980’, https://uganda1979.hypotheses.org [accessed 16 June 2022]. 50 Anneeth Kaur Hundle, ‘1970s Uganda: Past, Present, Future’, Journal of Asian and African Studies 53: 3 (2018), 455–75; Taylor and Peterson, ‘Rethinking the State’, 63; C.C. Sembuya, The Other Side of Idi Amin Dada (Kampala: Set Holdings, 2009). 51 William Pike, Combatants: A Memoir of the Bush War and the Press in Uganda (Wroclaw: self published, 2019). 52 Moses Khisa in this volume.

11

12

Introduction

Scholarly, literary, and artistic reflections on Uganda’s institutional, intellectual, and social spheres have continued throughout the country’s postcolonial history, but they found a sense of renewed energy in the late 1980s and 1990s. A series of conferences and edited collections organised by Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle opened a set of conversations across academic disciplines about how scholars might study and re-engage with Uganda’s political, social, and institutional life. 53 Historians such as Samwiri Karugire, T.V. Sathyamurthy, Phares Mutibwa, and Abdu Kasozi built on earlier work by Ramkrishna Mukherjee, Tarsis Kabwegyere, Mahmood Mamdani, Jan Jelmert Jørgensen, and Dani Nabudere to provide inclusive national histories while generally abandoning their predecessors’ use of dependency theory. 54 Anthropologists such as Susan Whyte and Christine Obbo not only mined earlier fieldwork but also began to assess how social practices, institutions, and networks of knowledge transmission had adapted or changed during the intervening years. 55 Social scientists such as Hansen, Ali Mazrui, and Nelson Kasfir turned from explaining the consolidation of military power to analysing the contested resurgence of civil society and civilian governance.56 Novelists and playwrights such 53 Hölger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle, Uganda Now: Between Decay and Development (London: James Currey, 1988); Hansen and Twaddle, Changing Uganda: The Dilemma of Structural Adjustment & Revolutionary Change (London: James Currey, 1991); Hansen and Twaddle, From Chaos to Order: The Politics of Constitution-Making in Uganda (London: James Currey, 1995); Holger B. Hansen and Michael Twaddle (eds), Developing Uganda (Oxford: James Currey, 1998). 54 Samwiri Rubaraza Karugire, A Political History of Uganda (Nairobi: Heinemann Educational Books, 1980); Karugire, Roots of Instability in Uganda; T.V. Sathyamurthy, The Political Development of Uganda: 1900–1986 (Aldershot, UK: Gower, 1986); Phares Mukasa Mutibwa, Uganda Since Independence: A Story of Unfulfilled Hopes (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992); A.B.K. Kasozi, The Social Origins of Violence in Uganda: 1964–1985 (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1994); Ramkrishna Mukherjee, The Problem of Uganda: A Study in Acculturation, (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1956); Tarsis B. Kabwegyere, The Politics of State Formation and Destruction in Uganda, revised and expanded (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1995 [1974]); Mahmood Mamdani, Politics and Class Formation in Uganda (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976); Mamdani, Imperialism and Fascism in Uganda (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1983); Jan Jelmert Jørgensen, Uganda: A Modern History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981); D. Wadada Nabudere, Imperialism and Revolution in Uganda (London: Onyx Press, 1981). 55 Susan Reynolds Whyte, Questioning Misfortune: The Pragmatics of Uncertainty in Eastern Uganda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Christine Obbo, African Women: Their Struggle for Economic Independence (London: Zed Press, 1980); Christine Obbo, ‘Healing, Cultural Fundamentalism and Syncretism in Buganda’, Africa 66: 2 (1996), 183–201. 56 Ali A. Mazrui, Soldiers and Kinsmen in Uganda: The Making of a Military Ethnocracy (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1975); Ali Mazrui, Ali A. Mazrui,

Introduction

as John Ruganda, Austen Bukenya, Rose Mbowa, and Peter Nazareth found rich, if often deeply troubling, inspiration during the 1970s and 1980s, after which they continued to grapple with legacies of personal and artistic displacement. 57 Artists also took advantage of relative political stability to forge new (and reimagine old) spaces from which to produce and display work both within and outside Uganda. 58 Moreover, young scholars and artists in recent decades, with little first-hand experience of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, have made important interventions that have reshaped their fields, opening radically new directions for subsequent work. 59 However, the celebrated revitalisation of scholarly and artistic energy since the 1980s has been uneven and is itself part of contested political narratives. Much of the work mentioned above remained preoccupied with the violence of recent decades and offered little inspirational content or edifying lessons from the stories of Uganda’s political institutions, social traditions, or intellectual histories. War, mass displacement, and economic challenges have not only devastated much of the country since the 1980s, but they have also reinforced conceptual exclusions. Most notably, they have helped produce ‘the north’ as a zone often understood as simultaneously marginal to national imaginaries while at the forefront of a depoliticised global regime of refugee management and restorative justice.60 Another enduring legacy of colonial violence and postcolonial governance has been Karamoja’s position outside of national imaginations, thus transforming the region into a ‘Privatization Versus the Market: Cultural Contradictions in Structural Adjustment’, in Hansen and Twaddle Changing Uganda, 1991; Hölger Bernt Hansen, Ethnicity and Military Rule in Uganda (Uppsala: The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1977); Hansen and Twaddle, Developing Uganda; Nelson Kasfir, The Shrinking Political Arena: Participation and Ethnicity in African Politics, with a Case Study of Uganda (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); Nelson Kasfir, ‘“No-Party Democracy” in Uganda’, Journal of Democracy 9:2 (1998). 57 Rose Mbowa, ‘Theatre for Development: Empowering Ugandans to Transform their Condition’, in Hansen and Twaddle (eds) Developing Uganda. 58 Andrea Stultiens, Kaddu Wasswa John and Arthur C. Kisitu, The Kaddu Waswa Archive: A Visual Biography (Rotterdam: Post Editions, 2010). The commercialisation of the arts under neoliberalism has also constrained and redirected artistic energies. David Pier, The Branded Arena: Ugandan Music in the Marketing Era (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 59 For artistic interventions, see the broader work of 32° East and the Ugandan Arts Trust, https://ugandanartstrust.org [accessed 5 March 2022]. 60 Adam Branch, Displacing Human Rights: War and Intervention in Northern Uganda (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Sverker Finnström, Living with Bad Surroundings: War, History, and Everyday Moments in Northern Uganda (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

13

14

Introduction

site of arbitrary violence.61 In national politics as in national historiography, the uneven stability of southern Uganda since the mid-1980s has reinscribed harmful divisions between centres and margins. Historians of Buganda have tried to address these exclusions by centring stories of commoners, women, Muslims, healers, immigrants, and others who were usually described as marginal since the 1900 Agreement between British agents and Protestant Baganda officials.62 However, historians in particular have found it difficult to decentre Buganda in a national frame.63 The most insightful analyses that connect Uganda’s colonial and postcolonial pasts with the post-1986 present have emphasised the organisational autonomy of women’s activism.64 Multiple generations of feminist scholars have demonstrated women’s unique contributions to unravelling patriarchal colonial power.65 Amid Ugandan national history writing dominated both by male scholars and by male-­centred narratives that often overlook female-centred forms of power and agency, scholars such as Sylvia Tamale, Aili Mari Tripp, Grace Bantebya Kyomuhendo, and Christine Obbo have published monographs that cut across temporal and regional boundaries to illuminate how women’s political and economic agency unsettles entrenched forms of colonial institutional and epistemological power.66 In recent years, David Eaton in this volume. Works that complicate Uganda’s Christian historiography include: George W. Kanyeihamba, Reflections on the Muslim Leadership Question in Uganda (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1998); A.B.K. Kasozi, The Spread of Islam in Uganda (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1986); Arye Oded, Islam in Uganda: Islamization through a Centralized State in Pre-Colonial Africa (Tel Aviv University, Israel: Israel Universities Press, 1974). 63 Reid recently concluded, ‘the big southern polities do dominate the historical record, and it is certainly difficult to prevent them from doing so in a national context’: Richard J. Reid, A History of Modern Uganda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. vii (emphasis in original). 64 Aili Mari Tripp, ‘Women’s Mobilization in Uganda: Nonracial Ideologies in European-African-Asian Encounters, 1945–1962’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 34: 3 (2001), 543–64. 65 Sylvia Tamale, Decolonization and Afro-Feminism (Ottawa: Daraja Press, 2020); Anneeth Kaur Hundle, ‘Postcolonial Patriarchal Nativism, Domestic Violence and Transnational Feminist Research in Contemporary Uganda’, Feminist Review, 121: 1 (2019), 27–52; Nakanyike Musisi, ‘Gender and Sexuality in African History: A Personal Reflection’, Journal of African History, 55: 3 (November 2014), 303–15; Decker, In Idi Amin’s Shadow; Jean Allman, Susan Geiger, and Nakanyike Musisi (eds.), Women in African Colonial Histories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). See also the numerous works published by Stella Nyanzi, whose work is discussed by Danson Kahyana in this volume. 66 Sylvia Tamale, When Hens Begin to Crow: Gender and Parliamentary Politics in Uganda (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999); Tripp, Women & Politics 61

62

Introduction

autobiographies of prominent Ugandan women have also disrupted the linear, partisan narratives that often dominate male-authored popular history. Rhoda Kalema’s memoir, for example, complicates partisan histories of the NRM by underscoring moments of personal and political loss under each of Uganda’s postcolonial governments up to the present.67 Autobiographies by Miria Matembe, Joyce Mpanga, and Janet Museveni reflect divergent political backgrounds, but they each illuminate the integral work of women activists in contesting colonial violence and inequality while advocating for women’s rights.68 Academic research within Uganda has accelerated dramatically over the past three decades even as the gulf between Ugandan scholars based at Ugandan institutions and scholars based in the Global North has remained. Moreover, social scientists increasingly point, not to distant legacies of war, but to contemporary neoliberal economics to explain this divergence.69 Ugandans continue to animate and remake what ‘Uganda’ means even as Ugandan history and public life are shaped on uneven ground.70 The chapters in this volume stand less as a celebration of a growing national subfield and more as a provocation for Ugandan and non-Ugandan scholars to find novel connections across the geographic, thematic, disciplinary, and institutional grooves through which so much academic knowledge usually flows.

Background to the Book

At the outset, this volume emerged in recognition of the reality that an unprecedented number of scholars across disciplinary and regional fields were engaged in Uganda-focused research. This expansion of scholarly output is the result of many factors, including the improved in Uganda; Grace Bantebya Kyomuhendo and Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Women, Work and Domestic Virtue in Uganda 1900–2003 (Oxford: James Currey, 2006); Obbo, African Women. 67 Rhoda Kalema, My Life is but a Weaving: An Autobiography (Nairobi: Moran Publishers, 2021), pp. 90–200. 68 Miria R.K. Matembe, Miria Matembe: Gender, Politics, and Constitution Making in Uganda (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2002); Miria R.K. Matembe, The Struggle for Freedom & Democracy Betrayed: Memoirs of Miria Matembe as an Insider in Museveni’s Government (Kampala, 2019); Joyce R. Mpanga, ‘It’s a Pity She’s Not a Boy!’ (Kampala, 2019); Janet Kataaha Museveni, My Life’s Journey (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2011). See also: Alice Drito, Unveiling the Female Faces in Labour Union Politics in Uganda (2018). 69 Wiegratz et. al., Uganda: The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation; Mahmood Mamdani, Scholars in the Marketplace: The Dilemma of Neo-Liberal Reform at Makerere University 1989–2005 (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2007). 70 Rebecca Rwakabukoza and Daniel Kalinaki in this volume.

15

16

Introduction

accessibility of archival sources and a political environment in Uganda that is more conducive to certain forms of academic research than in the past – although, as is discussed in the book, constraints and risks continue to restrict and censor scholarly work, especially within Ugandan institutions.71 Our initial goal was to encourage conversations across sub-fields about how research on Uganda has changed in recent years. Bruce-Lockhart and Earle, along with Marissa Mika, convened a workshop on ‘Emerging Approaches in Uganda Studies’ at University College London (UCL) in 2016. Subsequently, all four editors organised a four-part panel series entitled ‘Uganda and the Decolonization of Knowledge’ at the African Studies Association (ASA) Annual Meeting in Atlanta in 2018. It is partly the structural limits of such occasions that have inspired the questions that this volume addresses. The process of organising the gatherings in London and Atlanta prompted discussions among the editors, participants, and other colleagues about issues of equity and exclusion within the academy. This project partly reflects some of those issues. Three of the four editors are White, and three of the four are based at North American universities.72 Holding events in Global North cities created many obstacles – such as prohibitively high travel costs and visa restrictions – for some Uganda-­based scholars to participate.73 Moreover, despite recent initiatives, the resources and professional incentives of institutions such as UCL and the ASA continue to reward the production of scholarly knowledge about the Global South in the Global North. We began planning an event in Kampala but encountered funding and scheduling problems before the COVID-19 pandemic halted most international travel. Virtual workshops hosted by the Makerere Department of History, Archaeology and Heritage Studies filled some of this gap during Uganda’s two-year lockdown in 2020 and 2021. However, a physical meeting in Uganda among all contributors, led by Ugandan colleagues in Ugandan universities, remains a central goal for future collaborations growing out of this project. Despite the flourishing of scholarship about Uganda, Ugandan scholars continue to face structural barriers to research and to framing academic debates from Global North institutions. At a practical level, See Khisa in this volume; Kahyana in this volume. On the capitalisation of ‘White’, see Nell Irvin Painter, ‘Why “White” should be Capitalized, Too’, Washington Post, 22 July 2020, www.washingtonpost. com/opinions/2020/07/22/why-white-should-be-capitalized; Jean Allman, ‘#HerskovitsMustFall? A Meditation on Whiteness, African Studies, and the Unfinished Business of 1968’, African Studies Review, 62: 3 (2019), 6–39. 73 For a discussion on these barriers, as well as on the appropriation of decolonisation discourse, see: Haythem Guesmi, ‘The gentrification of African studies’, Africa is a Country, 22 December 2018, https://africasacountry. com/2018/12/the-gentrification-of-african-studies. 71

72

Introduction

heavy teaching and administrative loads, limited funding opportunities, and exclusion from the formal and informal networks at top journals and presses all contribute. Meanwhile, bureaucratic structures globally and within Ugandan institutions continue to privilege such publication networks above Africa-based journals.74 The Ugandan state’s disregard for government archives, securitisation of research infrastructure, and commercialisation of research authorisation – all reworked legacies of colonial governance – also contribute to inequalities of access and opportunity.75 As we write in this introduction, the long-term effects of COVID-19 lockdowns are unclear, but they appear likely to worsen the situation. As disparities between wealthy and less wealthy institutions in the Global North grow wider, those who retain research budgets for travel to the Global South are able to pursue their work while insulated from Uganda’s contentious institutional life. In an effort to protect their independence, research enclaves within and outside Uganda may become more structurally autonomous from Ugandan universities where the humanities and social sciences are financially impoverished, dependant on donor whims, and subject to state control.76 These dynamics illustrate a wider dilemma for those who seek to anchor academic debates in Uganda’s public life or to build scholarly knowledge from Ugandan institutions. Structural inequality does not imply passivity. Despite structural challenges, Ugandan scholars and universities have created and are sustaining vibrant intellectual communities. Numerous workshops and seminar groups within Makerere, at Uganda Martyrs University’s African Studies Centre, and in non-university settings such as the Uganda Society, for example, have become important centres of intellectual debate. Despite the problems of donor dependency, funding that primarily comes from European and American foundations has expanded doctoral programmes and research resources for faculty in many of Uganda’s universities in recent years. Although structural adjustment can incentivise the enclaving of research hubs, there are also more avenues than ever for intellectual and institutional collaborations that span geographic boundaries, with the possibilities of 74 Jimmy Spire Ssentongo, ‘“Which Journal is That?” Politics of Academic Promotion in Uganda and the Predicament of African Publication Outlets’, Critical African Studies, 12: 3 (2020), 283–301. 75 Riley Linebaugh and Katherine Bruce-Lockhart in this volume; Taylor, ‘Risk and Labour in the Archives’; Derek R. Peterson, ‘The Politics of Archives in Uganda’, in Thomas Spear (ed.) Oxford Research Encyclopedias: African History (Oxford University Press, 2021). https://oxfordre.com/africanhistory/view/ 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277734-e-982 [accessed 28 July 2022]. 76 Moses Khisa in this volume; Felde et al., Democracy and the Discourse of Relevance.

17

18

Introduction

reinforcing or challenging global hierarchies.77 Working in institutions that have been devastated by neoliberal economic models and restricted by their colonial foundations, Ugandan scholars in Ugandan universities are simultaneously critiquing the perpetuation of these conditions and producing publications that shape the direction of debates across sub-fields.78 Our work on this book has been informed by both recent and longstanding movements within Uganda to challenge colonialism, racism, and White supremacy in public life. In their chapter, Daniel Kalinaki and Rebecca Rwakabukoza describe growing pressure to rename streets and other sites that celebrate colonial figures in Uganda’s public spaces.79 Such contemporary decolonising efforts follow a much longer regional history. During the 1970s President Idi Amin, like President Mobutu Sese Seko in neighbouring Zaïre, set out to revise the colonial nomenclatures of public space. Before Amin and Mobutu, youth activists unsettled the ambitions of aspiring nationalist rulers by publicising enduring forms of White supremacy after independence and demanding material and symbolic justice. 80 Contestations over names and place have very long histories in Central and Eastern Africa, dating to the sixteenth century when communities, priests, and state builders engaged in extensive debates about land, authority, and labour. 81 The violent imposition of colonial terms as markers of colonial sovereignty distorted the methods through which communities balanced competing interests and claims to epistemic power. In June 2020, the lawyer Apollo Makubuya launched a public petition that directly linked the need to discard colonial place names in Uganda with wider global protests for racial justice: ‘We believe that the removal of visible vestiges of a colonial hegemony from public spaces is a crucial part of a process 77 On the inequalities of North-South academic collaboration, see: Elizabeth Tilley and Marc Kalina, ‘“My Flight Arrives at 5 am, Can You Pick Me Up?”: The Gatekeeping Burden of the African Academic’, Journal of African Cultural Studies 33:4 (2021), 538–48. 78 The work of the Makerere University journal Mawazo is part of this initiative. Over the past three years, the Uganda Studies Group of the African Studies Association has also hosted online lectures to underscore the work of Ugandan scholars globally. 79 Kalinaki and Rwakabukoza, this volume. 80 Akiki Mujaju, ‘The Demise of UPCYL and the Rise of NUYO in Uganda’, African Review, 3:2 (1973), pp 291–307; Taylor, ‘Affective Registers of Postcolonial Crisis’. 81 Jean-Pierre Chrétien, The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History, trans. by Scott Straus (New York: Zone Books, 2003), pp. 85–138. David L. Schoenbrun shows how languages of power developed prior to the sixth century, A Green Place, a Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender, and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th Century (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998), pp. 91–122.

Introduction

of decolonisation and ending an era of domination and impunity. Events following the ugly killing of George Floyd in the USA demonstrate the urgency to address all forms of injustice and discrimination everywhere’. 82 As Makubuya’s petition emphasises, activism within Uganda has long been in conversation with global movements around decolonisation. At the time of the UCL workshop in 2016, students at nearby SOAS were demanding that the university decolonise the curriculum, a demand that they connected to the #RhodesMustFall movement that students at the University of Cape Town had started two years earlier.83 These movements, and the longer histories of resistance and refusal upon which they are grounded, have informed the direction of this volume. It focuses specifically on how Ugandans have driven contests over knowledge production in public life through activism and epistemic innovation. The chapters focus not only on moments of dramatic rupture but also on slower, quotidian processes of reworking and refusing colonial knowledge and institutions. As Sylvia Tamale has recently argued: ‘Undoing the legacies of colonialism will involve complex, methodical and creative approaches that will span centuries’.84 In this collection, we consider how these systems have operated within Uganda and Uganda-focused scholarship, and how the communities who constitute Uganda’s publics – past and present – have engaged with and confronted them.

Organisation of the Book

This volume brings together nineteen contributors from the Global South and Global North to engage with issues of decolonisation, knowledge, and public life in Uganda. The editors have departed from the model of previous research collaborations focused on Uganda, which 82 Parliament subsequently tabled the petition, and (at the time of writing) Kampala City Council Authority and Mbarara City Council have each inaugurated plans to rename streets. Apollo Makubuya, ‘Petition to Decolonise and Rename Streets in Kampala and other Landmarks in Uganda’, Change.org, www.change.org/p/president-museveni-petition-to-decolonise-and-renamestreets-in-kampala-and-other-landmarks-in-uganda; Amos Ngwomoya, ‘City authority okays plan to rename streets, roads’, Daily Monitor (23 December 2021); ‘Mbarara to rename 400 city roads and buildings’, The Independent (17 October 2021). 83 ‘About’, Decolonising SOAS, https://blogs.soas.ac.uk/decolonisingsoas/ about [accessed 15 June 2022]; Roseanne Chantiluke, Brian Kwoba and Athinangamso Nkopo (eds.), Rhodes Must Fall: The Struggle to Decolonise the Racist Heart of Empire (London: Zed Books, 2018). 84 Tamale, Decolonization and Afro-Feminism, p. 19.

19

20

Introduction

have often been cloistered in regional and disciplinary terms. The contributors include media professionals and scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Their chapters begin from a variety of geographic and conceptual positions from which they situate the production of knowledge in Uganda in wider debates over decolonisation. The book is organised into three Parts: ‘Framing Knowledge’, ‘Imagining Institutions’, and ‘Making Publics’. Part I, ‘Framing Knowledge’, examines how knowledge has been created, mobilised, and contested in varying Ugandan contexts. The authors each consider how colonial frames are reproduced within scholarship, institutions, and public life while also pointing to alternate spheres of knowledge production. Tushabe wa Tushabe’s chapter discusses the politics of language and gender in relation to Bakiga naming practices. Positioning names as an ‘archive of knowledge, memory, and a sense of community’, Tushabe provides a deeply personal examination of how indigenous, colonial, and Christian names have shaped Bakiga identity. David Eaton’s chapter examines how Karamoja has been marginalised by the state and scholars alike. Through an exploration of Neil Whitehead’s work on the ‘poetics of violence’, Eaton scrutinises how scholars’ framing of cattle raiding violence in either primordialist or instrumental terms diverges from the embodied forms through which Karimojong understand and describe violence. Letha Victor’s chapter demonstrates how studies of spiritual life and healing among Acholi communities have erased complex lived experiences and ways of knowing. Calls to decolonise knowledge in this context, she argues, are too frequently focused on restoring an ‘authentic’ Acholi culture and, in the process, end up re­ifying colonial logics. Lydia Boyd’s chapter analyses how Ugandan governments and activists have conceptualised and used ‘human rights’ discourse in postcolonial Uganda, intertwining it with questions of state building, citizenship, and morality. She questions narratives that situate human rights solely as a product of Western liberalism, demonstrating how Ugandan actors have imagined, reworked, and used this concept in pursuit of new political forms. Finally, Ashley Greene’s chapter discusses efforts to ‘decolonise’ secondary-school History curricula in post-independence Uganda. She demonstrates how contests over the teaching of History have been connected to wider debates about Uganda’s national identity and the politics of representing the past. Part II, ‘Imagining Institutions’, explores how state and cultural institutions establish authority and control knowledge. Several chapters focus on the state directly. Moses Khisa’s chapter demonstrates how the building of state institutions in Uganda has long been associated with the moral economies of military force. He argues that the NRM has turned to ruling strategies akin to the colonial state, allowing militarism and authoritarianism to hamper academic freedom and critical scholarship. Once militarised governments seized the state, though,

Introduction

the task remained to administer local bureaucracies while managing regional hierarchies and clientelist relationships – themes analysed in chapters by Genevieve Meyers and Florence Brisset-Foucault. Meyers’ chapter historicises public administration in Uganda across what she periodises as the colonial, post-independence, neocolonial, and neoliberal periods. Drawing on this history, she imagines means by which Uganda’s present public service can be remade on a foundation of what she terms ‘indigenous values’. Turning to the more intimate space of village-­level politics, Brisset-Foucault’s chapter examines how local state agents generate bureaucratised forms of knowledge about their constituents. She recognises these actors as key ‘producers of knowledge’ whose paperwork not only makes the contours of local identity more legible within the wider state bureaucracy, but also represents creative and autonomous modes of knowledge production. Riley Linebaugh and Katherine Bruce-Lockhart’s chapter also foregrounds the politics of documents, tracing the coloniality of Uganda’s archival collections and examining how this might be disrupted. They illuminate how both colonial and postcolonial governments have sought to manage and at times erase institutional knowledge, as well as the work of archivists, activists, artists, and scholars to unsettle colonial power dynamics. Margaret Nagawa and Fiona Siegenthaler’s chapter focuses on the aesthetic realm, examining how educational and cultural institutions involved in the visual arts have been shaped by forces of neoliberalism and neocolonialism. They show how artists critique and decolonise dominant aesthetic and institutional structures while simultaneously working within them and, in the process, challenging binary categories and imagining new futures. Part III, ‘Making Publics’, examines the creation of publics and the dynamics of assent and dissent. All of the contributors discuss ways that the state has sought to manage and control publics, often through coercive means. Holly Hanson’s chapter traces the long history of assent within Eastern Africa, focusing in particular on how Baganda mobilised politically in the 1940s. She illuminates how older notions of reciprocity and accountability within governance were at odds with a colonial political order based on conflict. Her chapter challenges scholars to interrogate the sources and epistemologies that render the latter dominant in scholarship that valorises liberal ideals of dissent. Asiimwe B. Godfrey’s chapter historicises the ‘Indian Question’, showing how Uganda’s colonial and postcolonial governments struggled to manage the racial frameworks within which social and economic capital operated. As Asiimwe maintains, ‘Africans associated the colonial project with the two “foreign races” of Indians and Whites and thus, struggled against all of them until independence in 1962’. In a similar vein, Adrian Browne’s chapter explores how the NRM has become an ‘ethnological’ state, creating ethnic identities in ways that draw upon both colonial

21

22

Introduction

and anticolonial imaginaries. The chapter introduces the idea of ‘liberation ethnology’ to illustrate how anticolonial rhetoric has been taken up by state and non-state actors in local ethno-political struggles in ways that affirm prevailing epistemologies and political-economic orders. Daniel Kalinaki and Rebecca Rwakabukoza’s chapter examines the contested terrain of public memory in postcolonial Uganda. It illuminates how both Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni have used the naming of national spaces to assert politicised narratives of national identity in ways that have resisted, but also been entangled with, colonial naming practices. Danson Kahyana’s chapter looks at how older forms of dissent have been mobilised in digital spaces, which, he argues, are important sites of performance, political participation, and power struggles. Kahyana focuses specifically on Stella Nyanzi’s Facebook work, analysing her language and tracing how the government has sought to punish and silence her through coercive means. Together, the chapters that follow offer windows into the possibilities that Ugandans have pursued to contest and remake knowledge and public life toward a more just future.

PART I FRAMING KNOWLEDGE

1 Decolonial Dilemmas and Burdened Epistemic Heritages in Names and Naming Among the Bakiga TUSHABE WA TUSHABE

Names comprise an archive of knowledge, memory, and a sense of community expressed through language. Language is a window through which one comes to understand the structures of a culture’s philosophy and value system, and the histories of relations that give meaning to things, behaviours, gestures, and names. In this chapter, I am interested in the contemporary meanings of names and meanings among the Bakiga of south-western Uganda. Because I have witnessed structures of colonial and Christian erasures and legacies in my family, I am motivated to set on this analysis as an intellectual and spiritual journey of healing – the negations and disavowals, the dissonance, the brokenness and woundedness – at the intersection of indigenous knowledge and colonial and Christian legacies in my family. I give attention to names and their meanings in Bakiga culture to understand how and why the indigenous spiritual aspect accorded to names and meanings has been shaped by colonial and Christian legacies. Names among the Bakiga evoke the cosmological grounding through which communities give significance to relations, inter-­ subjective experiences, epistemic assumptions, historical struggle, and place.1 Language’s position in names and naming is critical as language animates a particular cultural cultivation of self in family and community. The underpinning of this analysis is rooted in the sense that people in their familial and communal locales generate and absorb teachings and meanings, and enact practices informed by histories experienced in their continuities and discontinuities, as families or communities. Understanding name meanings enacted through language within a culture can illuminate one’s family tree and insights about heroic people and heroic acts, or tragic events in a family’s history, and might reveal health and political trajectories. Thus, names act as a repository of knowledge creation methodologies. Like many indigenous communities around the world, the Bakiga of south-western Uganda take 1 John S. Mbiti, Introduction to African Religion, 2nd edn (Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1975), p. 28.

26

Part I: Framing Knowledge

names and their meanings very seriously. Names are central to their history, culture, wellbeing, community, and language. Language is critical to knowledge creation for the Bakiga, therefore, it is important to analyse how their language, Rukiga, has continued or discontinued to be a source of indigenous knowledge creation in names and naming, and how these dynamics shape their lives. Thus, I proceed on the premise that Rukiga language has shifted from indigenous to colonial meaning-making through names and naming as a result of colonial and Christian influence in Bakigaland.2 Although Bakiga still speak Rukiga and name themselves with Kiga names, I argue that there has been a gradual epistemological shift and, because of this shift, indigenous names no longer carry indigenous meanings, familial or community histories. The shift in episteme demonstrates colonial and Christian meanings in indigenous names, which means that Rukiga language is nowadays spoken colonially. It prioritises Christian promise of heaven and enacts colonial erasures of indigenous memory through names and meanings, thereby making colonial and Christian names the channel of recognised or acceptable memory. This shift with its erasures is evident in my family and community. The reality of colonialism and Christianity among the Bakiga reorganised indigenous name-language configurations and produced parallel epistemic significances to relations of self in community, and of the indigenous history, including how people think about the past and future. My focus on name meanings highlights two important points: (1) name meanings describe an archive of knowledge and cultural memory that shape a sense of self in family and community through practices of remembering and forgetting; and (2) continued decolonial praxis can afford us healing as we engage a simultaneous critical analysis of indigenous knowledges that have survived or been erased, and our understandings of the relationship between indigenous knowledges and colonialism and Christianity. While this is an academic endeavour, it is also a personal and political struggle. I begin from the familiar to narrate my political and personal journey of healing and decolonial praxis. In telling my story, I attempt to simultaneously expose, as well as understand, the politics of spirituality, and, in the words of Jeannette Marie Mageo, of ‘personhood, cultural identity and meaning, for real people in real places’. 3 From my family and community, I analyse examples of names and meanings that typify practices of hope in heaven while erasing indigPaul Ngorogoza, Kigezi and Its People (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1968). Jeannette Marie Mageo ‘On Memory Genres: Tendencies in Cultural Remembering’, in Jeannette Marie Mageo (ed.), Cultural Memory: Reconfiguring History and Identity in the Postcolonial Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001), p. 1. 2 3

Decolonial Dilemmas and Epistemic Heritages in Names and Naming

enous memory and subjectivity. The process of this analysis is both an opening of Christian and colonial wounds imprinted on my family’s memory, and healing through a decolonial praxis – ‘a way of thinking, knowing, being, and doing’ – that remembers and heals me from defining terms of abandoning myself.4 In his study of Bakiga philosophy and traditional religions, Turyahikayo-­Rugyema noted that Christianity required converts to abandon themselves and the familiar into the new values that represented ‘cultures that see’.5 By marking indigenous cultures ‘primitive’, ‘barbaric’, ‘pagan’, and ‘animistic’, colonial power and Christian teachings enforced processes of self-abandonment from darkness to light.6 ‘Seeing the light’ became a notion to proclaim one’s faith and a euphemism for the fear and shame of one’s cultural practices animated by Christian interpretations of indigenous peoples and their cultures. ‘Seeing the light’ is a Christian appeal whose perception of indigenous cultural practices was powerfully illustrated during my time in Kanungu District when I was doing research with women for another project. I witnessed a woman approach another woman about some herbal medicine to treat her epileptic child. Overcome by fear that fellow Christians would rebuke her and read her knowledge and use of herbal medicine as ‘paganism’, the woman who had been approached for the herbal medicine immediately responded to the distressed mother, ‘ahaaa, nyowe ndi ow’omushana, eby’omwirima nkabirugaho’, meaning she had ‘seen the light; I do not do things of darkness anymore’. This incident reveals the depth to which the Christian colonial message of ‘seeing the light’ has been absorbed and internalised. A simple mention of herbal medicine is immediately associated with ‘paganism’, dismissed, and dubbed a practice of darkness that stimulates active forgetting. The forgetting of indigenous culture, epistemology, and language through names among the Bakiga also pervades matters of health because language is the basis for epistemic structures. Those seen walking the forest harvesting herbs become easy suspects of doing things of darkness. Besides walking forests, Bakiga visited rivers, water sources, waterfalls, mountains, stayed up to watch the moon, found a good view of bright and colourful rays of sunrise and sunset, went to hilltops to watch the rainbow – or give the rainbow uninterrupted space to drink water, as my grandmother would advise us children. Bakiga visited all 4 Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), p. 17. 5 Benoni Turyahikayo-Rugyema, Philosophy and Traditional Religions of the Bakiga in South West Uganda (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1983). 6 See especially Mbiti, Introduction to African Religion, p. 19; E. Bolaji Idowu, African Traditional Religion: A Definition (New York: Orbis Books, 1975), p. 147.

27

28

Part I: Framing Knowledge

these and other beings of Nature, not because of interest in tourism or exploration to subdue them, but rather as journeys of co-existence and healing, to reconnect and communicate with the cosmologies. This is knowledge one learned as a child from elders and by participating in indigenous rituals and practices, and by understanding their meanings and significance in community. Some of these journeys were seasonal, for a cause, spontaneous, or abrupt, communal or individual, with different age groups or a mix of age groups. Whatever the occasion, the journeys in the forest or to the mountain and hilltops, to the rivers and waterfalls, were journeys that played a big part in completing a full cycle of cosmological connection. The Bakiga believe, as do many indigenous communities of the world, that all Nature’s elements provide ‘us with a sense of nourishment, empowerment, and recognition’.7 With a limit to this philosophy since colonisation, families have witnessed shifts in language that evoke indigenous philosophy of the cosmological relations. It is sad to acknowledge that some may not even be aware of the dramatic shifts in language and name meanings within their own families, especially younger generations, due to the fact that indigenous history may no longer be regarded as useful resource of knowledge creation for a particular person, family, or community. Recent research by Shane Doyle among the Banyoro of Western Uganda observed a similar shift in perceptions of death and meanings in names as a result of colonial legacies and devotion to Christian notions of ‘seeing the light’. One of Doyle’s interviewees asserted, ‘I cannot give my child a name such as Kabwimukya (grief will come again), Bonabana (all are children [child was born with defect]), Gafabusa (waste of energy) which are bad’.8 What Doyle reveals is that these names denote a shift from embedded philosophical and cultural epistemes that explain deterrents and causes of death to the new acquired Christian subjectivity that seems to provide hope in case of infertility and death. To escape from traditional spirits and perhaps eliminate death and infertility the Nyoro, according to Doyle, adopted a Christian ethos in names and started naming their children in gratitude to a Christian God through names such as Mbabazi (God’s grace).9 Doyle observes that before Christianity, the Nyoro believed death to be malicious but after conversion to Christianity they found ways to not only control but to escape death, not in a literal sense, but rather perceptively.10 In this 7 Malidoma Patrice Somé, The Healing Wisdom of Africa: Finding Life Purpose Through Ritual, and Community (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putman, 1998), p. 299. 8 Somé, The Healing Wisdom of Africa, p. 371. 9 Shane Doyle, ‘“The Child of Death”: Personal Names and Parental Attitudes towards Mortality in Bunyoro, Western Uganda, 1900–2005’. Journal of African History, 49 (2008), 376. 10 Doyle, ‘“The Child of Death”’, p. 376.

Decolonial Dilemmas and Epistemic Heritages in Names and Naming

shift, indigenous names and their meanings are forgotten and Christian names are remembered. Practices of remembering and forgetting are evident in my immediate family. My family was Catholic. Karabamu, my father’s father was not. On many occasions, my father called to memory in conversation, prayer, and offering of Mass all family members who went into Spirit (the afterlife). Not once did he include Karabamu who went into Spirit unchristened. My father did not reference Karabamu by name in any practice of memory that happened in my family. That is why I deliberately call him by his name, Karabamu. Remembering Karabamu by name re-members him to my family, remakes Karabamu a member of our family and part of our history and memory. To re-member Karabamu brings healing to my colonised fragmented body, history, and family. Remembering Karabamu is my attempt to understand the politics of spirituality, to reclaim indigenous knowledge, language, and names in my family. Karabamu fought in the anticolonial wars of Ntokibiri (1914) and Nyindo (1915–19) in Kigezi region and refused to convert to Christianity. Raised to embrace the memory of our ancestors, as my grandmother, mother, and aunts in my family did, it did not seem right to me to not remember Karabamu, my grandfather, to forget him as though he never lived and never was a member of our family. The multiple dynamics of forgetting enacted by my father and of remembering Karabamu enacted by my grandmother, mother and aunts, and of remembering all Christian family members who had gone into Spirit made it clear to me at an early age that something was not right. I was six when I asked my grandmother regarding Karabamu’s whereabouts. But I did not delve into deeper understandings of these dynamics until I was doing research for my doctoral dissertation in 2006. From indigenous knowledge creation, Bakiga believe that those who have gone into Spirit are not gone from us in totality; they only transition to a different form of being, which enables them to remain part of our community and of the cosmologies. In that sense, those who have gone into Spirit must be included in community and family practices of remembrance and celebration. This is why, in a conversation with my father, I asked him why he never talks about his father or offers Mass for him as he does other members of our family who have gone into Spirit. After what seemed like an eternity of silence, my father told me, ‘[T]iheine onyijusyaga’, ‘no one ever reminds me’. I understood my father’s answer because many years prior, my grandmother had told me that Karabamu rejected Christianity and decided ‘kuguma mwitaka ryabo’, ‘to stay in their soil’.11 Karabamu’s choice to stay in his soil was 11 My grandmother deliberately used the plural ryabo, ‘their’, to teach me the indigenous relation to land, and to distinguish it from the new term ekibira or

29

30

Part I: Framing Knowledge

a great source of pride and identity for him and for me as I embarked on this decolonial journey through remembering him. A non-Christian as a form of resistance, Karabamu could not be remembered. Remembering him conjures up notions of heaven or hell at which Karabamu has no chance. He simply does not exist. Since my father died before I could ask him more about his relationship with his father, I have no opportunity to know how he grappled with the reality of forgetting Karabamu. From where I am standing, my father’s response carries shame and guilt for distancing himself and perceiving the memory of his father as sinful, and a break-away from God. That no one reminded my father shifts the blame onto an unnamed other person (or multiple persons). Maybe he did not believe his answer or want me to see his woundedness. It was no one’s responsibility to remind him of his own father. After all, he had remembered others with no difficulty. As a good Christian convert, he had a duty to forget ‘pagan’ spirituality. Remembering Karabamu would have meant that my father open his eyes, senses, emotions, mind, and heart to Karabamu’s memory and presence in Spirit and Nature. Then he would teach his children about Karabamu and urge them to remember him and to pass on this knowledge to future generations. Theorising the significance of emotional remembrance and knowing of our ancestors as recognition of their presence, Malidoma Patrice Somé reminds us that listening to the voice of our own emotions is the start to a communing of a people. Listening to our emotions allows us to know our emotional self, and affords us the ability to balance our emotional, intellectual, and spiritual wellbeing with Nature. The cultivation and awareness of this balance opens up for an active connectedness with the spirits. Somé elaborates, [T]o be active in this world, however, spirits need to enlist our cooperation and help. In order to crack open something in yourself, to allow you to be aware of the presence of ancestor’s spirits, you have to walk into nature with your emotional self, not with your intellectual self.12

Somé is not applying the Cartesian dichotomy of the self – separation of body and mind. What Somé means by ‘walk into nature with your

ekishaka, which refer to land as an economic property or commodity for individual ownership and exchange for money. In the Kiga sense, a mention of the word eitaka evokes community and the cosmologies. For those who still embrace this relation to soil, appreciate the sense that your people’s voices and Spirits are there with you in the soil, as community. In fact, some families adhere to this sense of soil as community and do not sell their soil to anybody at all, no matter how much they are strapped for cash. Selling community soil seems as though you are selling your ancestors, throwing them away from your life. That said, the ‘civilised’ families would sell land like any other commodity with the goal of making profit. 12 Somé, The Healing Wisdom of Africa, p. 54.

Decolonial Dilemmas and Epistemic Heritages in Names and Naming

emotional self, not with your intellectual self’, is that when an indigenous person is in the presence of Nature, it is not a project, or a goal to be accomplished. Rather, it is a process of communing with the ancestors, with the cosmologies, with Nature as a journey of reunion and healing. This type of interaction necessitates that ears must hear, eyes must see, nose must smell, body must feel, and the sojourner’s entire being must be humbled to commune with the cosmologies in Nature. While my father’s remembrance of Karabamu would have acknowledged Karabamu’s immortality, such acknowledgement would have come at a greater cost to him and his anticipated life in heaven. Of the cultural beliefs integrated into Christianity in the last thirty-five years as demonstrated by scholars of African Christianity, remembering ‘un-christianed’ souls was not part of what my father was taught or understood. In my father’s practice of his Christian faith, there was no way Karabamu was going to fit in the ethos of the God of the Bible. The idea of immortality among the Bakiga is realised in bearing children, rituals of remembering, such as name and naming, and more. Life after death in Okuzimu (the world below), as Turyahikayo-Rwigyema asserts, springs back to community on earth where its presence is felt, known again with other cosmological energies.13 For this process to happen, the people in community must actively remember the person. This life that springs back in community on earth intricately positions the person gone into Spirit within the interactions between the world above (Eiguru, not heaven) and life on earth (Ensi). There is a sense of free mobility between worlds, which communicates experience of death as transition. Indeed, the Bakiga also seriously regard borders imposed by the inevitability of death. Death takes away the physical active life on earth; however, the borders are negotiable with the cultivation of the belief in immortality through remembering rituals. The three worlds are bordered and permeated by energies that move back and forth in the material and immaterial living and knowing. These energies are themselves energies of healing wounds of loss of life on earth, loss of history, and healing of pain, broken friendships, and bad thoughts about another. Remembering, thus, is an element with which to defeat the inevitability of death. My father’s forgetting of Karabamu makes Karabamu mortal and a being that never existed. In the decolonial praxis through which I grapple with my father’s forgetting is what Somé describes as ‘a diaspora of a struggling self adrift in the vast sea of anonymity’.14 This diasporic self rests on modern identities that are couched in nationalist authenticity that assume colonial 13 Turyahikayo-Rugyema, Philosophy and Traditional Religions of the Bakiga, p. 73. 14 Somé, The Healing Wisdom of Africa, p. 5.

31

32

Part I: Framing Knowledge

and Christian legacies as emitwarize yeitu, our (African) traditions. To remember makes whole the broken parts of our spirit, mind and body because ‘ritual, communally designed, helps the individual remember his or her purpose, and such remembering brings healing both to the individual and the community’.15 My father’s forgetting rendered the family broken, distanced, wounded, and unhealed. For my father to mention the name Karabamu even without acknowledging that it is his father would have removed Karabamu from the land of anonymity. However, this was impossible for my father to do because he did not remember the language of ritual that inaugurates or invites communing with cosmological energies in an indigenous way. The activities and rituals of remembering Abraham, Moses, and the saints, for example, are enacted and acknowledged by a language of his new spirituality, which simultaneously institutes a language of forgetting indigenous spirituality. My father could not remember Karabamu, because in Bakiga indigenous episteme, life after death does not go to heaven; it joins the world of Spirit and returns to Nature and the community on earth through ritual. To use language of ‘heaven’ after death is a direct rejection of indigenous philosophy of life, which includes death as an experience of transition into Spirit and back to Nature and community. A person with colonised histories in Africa who has obtained formal education, converted to Christianity or Islam, or interacted with inherited colonial institutions has ‘learned that indigenous rituals in Africa are devilish and inspired by Satan’.16 Although historically it was never a straightforward matter, individuals like my father who fully accepted the colonial interpretation of African cultures see, in similar ways, that African indigenous rituals are devilish. For example, while studying Bakiga culture, May Edel was interested in the meaning of the new moon and omuganura – the season of eating a new harvest, especially of millet. To her surprise, not even some of the most educated Bakiga were willing to give a philosophical explanation of the presence or absence of or the relationship between certain cosmologies, for fear of being read as pagan. She explains: The absence of cosmological interest leaves this gesture [of the relationship between the moon and new harvest] much of a puzzle. Not even the most philosophically minded of my Chiga friends could so

Somé, The Healing Wisdom of Africa, p. 36. Somé, The Healing Wisdom of Africa, p. 7. See also Linda Tuhiwai Smith regarding colonialism and Christianity in her indigenous community of Maori: Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (New York: Zed Books Ltd., 1999); and Ngũ(N wa Thiong’o regarding colonial education and language of the Gīkūyū, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Kampala: East African Publishers Ltd., 2005); Turyahikayo-Rugyema, Philosophy and Traditional Religions of the Bakiga. 15 16

Decolonial Dilemmas and Epistemic Heritages in Names and Naming

much as guess at its significance, either as to what might be expected from it or as to the relation of the moon to other spirit forces.17

It is further puzzling that philosophers would avoid offering a philosophical explanation. However, one can only infer that Edel’s questions may have been laden with colonial interpretations of cultural practices and values, because to see African cultures through the colonial lens motivates a distance from them. Thus, to understand the effects of colonisation and Christianisation on Bakiga culture, we cannot conclude that Bakiga, in general, have no knowledge of cosmologies, even among philosophers. Rather, we need to be more open to understanding the survival of indigenous knowledge which offer us a method for decolonial praxis and scrutinising what colonialism has done to them. What we must appreciate about Edel’s revelation is that while it is true that Bakiga philosophy never involved the notion of Satan or Satanism, having been taught that indigenous practices are indeed Satanic, and having accepted Christian teachings, even a philosopher who has not travelled the journey of decolonisation will shamelessly avoid confronting the colonial ‘Truth’. Such a philosopher cannot see that the concept of Satan is essentially a European import and will continue to identify indigenous spirituality as Satanic, equating this identification with the Christian Satan.18 For the convert, the shift from indigenous religion to Christianity impels a forgetting and an erasure of indigenous language and meanings inscribed in indigenous names. This process of forgetting and erasing, from memory, indigenous language and name meanings also enacts a shift from re-authoring the past, to authoring the present and the future based on episteme of ‘cultures that see’. The colonial and Christian practices of forgetting indigenous cultures invite us to become detached from any feeling of loss and knowledge of it as having ever happened or still happening at all. Because the new language and meanings embedded in new names distance themselves from indigenous pasts, either in terms of its loss or in reflections of its continuity, they embody a loss of that past in the absence of its telling. The absence of, or the shift in, the dynamic erases certain epistemologies and introduces other epistemologies that shape the search of meaning, a sense of self, and its place in community. The absence or shift can be recognised in the focal point embedded in the meanings of indigenous and Christian names. Some people may not experience the loss, either because these epistemologies were hidden from them, or they have worked very hard to forget them. In 17 May M. Edel, The Chiga of Uganda, 2nd edn (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1996), p. 161. 18 Turyahikayo-Rugyema, Philosophy and Traditional Religions of the Bakiga, p. 140.

33

34

Part I: Framing Knowledge

either case, we do not get a sense of loss, but we can know that, within the context of forgetting, the search of meaning through that loss becomes irrelevant. The comfort in the irrelevance of the loss is what keeps us trapped in colonial epistemologies of our cultures, histories, languages, and ourselves through shifts in our names, which affects our epistemic systems.

Name, Meanings, and Future-Heaven Oriented Episteme

Another example of forgetting in my family relates to my maternal uncle. He was named Mazig’embwa at the name-giving ritual, three days after he was born in 1902. Mazig’embwa means ‘dog faeces’. I got to know about this name in 1985 when my uncle gave testimony during his birthday celebration before a huge congregation of Christians, and men and women of God, about the presence of the light in his life. This was not the typical crowd for birthday celebrations; the parish priest with whom they were friends was also celebrating his birthday. And since Mass is the highest offering of Catholics, the two friends took advantage of Sunday Mass to celebrate with fellow believers. Indigenous names among the Bakiga are repositories of history – memory, knowledge, joy, or sadness. Mazig’embwa followed a long line of eight stillbirths, miscarriages, and early childhood deaths. His parents observed indigenous spirituality; they believed in communing with their ancestors who had gone into Spirit and receiving an insight about tragedy in the family through the journey of healing. Now to understand the significance of the name, we have to ask some existential question: why would parents who experienced consecutive child-losses name their precious child dog faeces? To answer this question, we must elaborate the philosophical understanding of community and what maintains community, since, among the Bakiga, people thrive through interconnectedness of relationalities. In African cultures, birth and death are two interrelated experiences of a person’s journey of life in community.19 One’s birth, though directly experienced by the mother, is a communal and not an individual experience. That means a child’s birth begins in community. The experience of birth reawakens, within the community, a collective interest in itself through the newly born. That is, when you are born, the village takes a closer look at its own dynamics to figure out where you fit. In the same way, death spurs the village to take a collective interest in what it has lost, why death has occurred and what it means, because the village has lost one of its important members, and therefore death also is an occasion for collective ritual. 20

19

20

Somé, The Healing Wisdom of Africa, p. 310. Somé, The Healing Wisdom of Africa, p. 310.

Decolonial Dilemmas and Epistemic Heritages in Names and Naming

In this context, then, Mazig’embwa articulates the emotional self of the community because, through emotional articulation of the self, community members commit to be present to themselves and to one another through experiences of birth or death. And ‘when emotion is missing’, Somé says, ‘usually we are missing as well, unable to be fully present either to ourselves or to one another’21 Mazig’embwa creates space in community for the history archived in it. It expands beyond unanswerable questions to the possibilities abundant in life. In many African cultures, death is a result of some occurrence – death is caused, even when it results from an accident. According to Mbiti, the people of Rwanda, who are scattered brothers, sisters, and cousins of the Bakiga, believed death appeared in a kind of a spirit, which will take someone away due to a disorder within the community.22 In the two communities – Rwandese and Bakiga – it is important to know the cause of death by scrutinising all possible causes, and through communication of community members with the Spirit in a language accessible and intelligible to both the people and the world of ancestors. This is not difficult to do or to understand, since those who have gone into Spirit were and are still members of the cosmological community. One example here is Mazig’embwa. In the name Mazig’embwa, the sense is that the spirit will not want a stinky, smelly, ugly human being. While the Spirit did not tell the community exactly what needed to happen, the child’s name in this case operates as a channel of communication with the ancestors. Going further, the name Mazig’embwa serves as an archive of a family’s tragic experience over many years. In this archive, we come to know what happened, when, how, and to whom. We also come to know the community present during the time, what was going on politically, in public health, and in spiritual development of the community. All things interconnected come to knowledge, archived in the name. According to my uncle’s narrative at the birthday celebration, his ‘parents were of darkness; they still believed in indigenous ways’. When Mazig’embwa converted to Catholicism, he changed his name to Mugambagye – one who speaks well – and left the old ways behind. In Mugambagye, one who speaks well is not necessarily about the person who bears the name or anyone in the family, but rather extends to and gravitates toward the God of Abraham and of the Bible. The name bearer is only a vessel of articulation of the good God who saves lives, who speaks well. In that sense, Mugambagye severs relations with Mazig’embwa and its indigenous ways of knowing. The shift from Mazig’embwa to Mugambagye discards one history and authors a new one. Therefore, Mazig’embwa erased as a name removes any possible referent point for the family’s archive of its history and memory. 21

22

Somé, The Healing Wisdom of Africa, p. 310. Mbiti, Introduction to African Religion, pp. 116–17.

35

36

Part I: Framing Knowledge

Those not familiar with the history inscribed in a name would be curious to know what the name means upon hearing it. Christian names, on the other hand, do not readily prompt curiosity as indigenous names do. In my experience, I have not heard people ask, ‘what is the meaning of or the history behind James or Teopista?’. Christian names invoke God’s image, which is well known to Christians; they carry no particular Bakiga cultural histories. Similar names that are expressed colonially in Rukiga include Akampurira, He heard me; Tumusiime, let’s thank Him; Tumukunde, let’s love Him; Byamukama/ Kyomukama/ Komukama/ Kamukama, of or belonging to the Lord; Twikirize/ Tukamwikiriza/ Tukeikiriza/ Kwikiriza, we accepted Him; Muhangi/ Komuhangi/ Kyomuhangi/ Byomuhangi/ Owomuhangi, of God, belonging to God the Creator: these will not attract one’s curiosity. All these names are in Rukiga language, but they are not indigenous. The names express no indigenous cosmologies as we saw in Mazig’embwa, but rather they tell us about a Christian God. Mbiti’s research across Africa also exposes similar shifts in many cultures. Among the Baganda in central Uganda, for example, Mbiti observes that the name Muwanga means ‘the one who puts things in order’.23 But since indigenous peoples in Africa did not believe in a singular universal god, Muwanga cannot be assumed to be the same for Bakiga. Beside Rukiga names that express the colonial and Christian shift in indigenous language and meaning, a person might have a Western name, which automatically embodies the notion of God in heaven and the colonial memory of the ‘cultures that see’ ‘the light’ through the saints. Such names might be Akampurira Joseph (‘He heard me’ followed by a saint name, Joseph), Kyomuhangi James, Byamukama Anthony, Kyomukama Carolina, Twikirize Angela, and so on. What we have in the two names is a total erasure of indigenous cultures and episteme as they speak of God and the saints, and not the history or memory of family as it was in indigenous relations. You will also find people with only Western names. One’s full name could be John Jacques, Davidson Paul or Paul Davidson, Jamie Allen, Mark Edward, George Lucas, Mary Margaret, Mary Goretti, Bruno Onesmus, Thomas JeanJacques, and more. These names act as an archive of the missionisation of indigenous cultures and are closed to indigenous epistemologies and cultural practices. Erasures are clear in the notion and knowledges of heaven. Christian names and their memory are embodiments of hope in heaven. Their memory erases memory of indigenous histories in names and naming. Christian missionaries did not spread their religion in Bakiga region simply by virtue of its appeal. Having had British colonial administration pave the way, Christian missionaries ‘used a combination of 23

Mbiti, Introduction to African Religion, p. 28.

Decolonial Dilemmas and Epistemic Heritages in Names and Naming

material gifts and missionary preaching to win over the masses’.24 Churches, hospitals, schools, and roads were constructed, but their construction also meant that people were dislocated and forcibly resettled from their land. These infrastructures were built after enormous bloodshed and psychological terror during anticolonial wars. The British administration responded to people’s resistance with public hangings and imprisonment. Paul Ngorogoza notes that the first hanging as punishment to ever occur in the history of Bakiga people was in 1923.25 People were prohibited from practising their cultures, spiritually or religiously, philosophically or morally, in language or in interpersonal relations. For example, institutions such as churches, hospitals, and schools were not simply symbols, but rather establishments where people’s minds were trained to gravitate toward Western culture and colonial goals, including religious and moral training of the unquestioning and uncritical mind. For example, Turyahikayo-Rugyema notes that Bible ‘teachings were based on the ideals of submission and humility [as] embodied by the Sermon on the Mount’, and exemplified in ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth’ (Matthew 5:5). 26 Other teachings included respect for the priest who ‘incarnated the very image of God on Earth’ and replaces indigenous elders.27 To become a member of either the Catholic or Protestant group, as Turyahikayo-Rugyema explains, one had to forsake his or her indigenous name and assume a Christian name, which took precedence. Accordingly, ‘[A]s soon as one acquired the new name, his own original surname sank almost into oblivion since it was associated with paganism’.28 Names became one of the ways by which Christianity penetrated African cultures to impose practices of forgetting indigenous sense of community, which includes ancestors, one’s, language, self, while remembering instead only Christian saints and rituals. Christian converts may not know the meaning or the history of their Christian name, but they are instructed to celebrate the feast of the saint after whom they are named. As a result, names of Christian converts reflect themes of ‘salvation and redemption’ taking a notable distance from indigenous philosophies of life and death.29 24 Turyahikayo-Rugyema, Philosophy and Traditional Religions of the Bakiga, p. 136. 25 Ngorogoza, Kigezi and Its People, p. 68. 26 Turyahikayo-Rugyema, Philosophy and Traditional Religions of the Bakiga, p. 136. 27 Turyahikayo-Rugyema, Philosophy and Traditional Religions of the Bakiga, p. 136. 28 Turyahikayo-Rugyema, Philosophy and Traditional Religions of the Bakiga, p. 138. 29 Turyahikayo-Rugyema, Philosophy and Traditional Religions of the Bakiga, p. 138.

37

38

Part I: Framing Knowledge

Indigenous Relations to Cosmologies are Critical to Decolonial Journeys

Benoni Turyahikayo-Rugyema illuminates the philosophical and epistemological relation between Nature and death among the Bakiga. According to Turyahikayo-Rugyema, Nature or Ensi (the earth and all living things), Eiguru (the Sky, Sun, and Water), and Okuzimu (the world below), are sources of life and knowledge. These cosmological beings participate in the cycle of life and, by virtue of being a part of this life cycle, they are immortal – since the cycle is continuous, never ending. 30 As Turyahikayo-Rugyema further elaborates, the Bakiga’s sense of immortal life was kept alive through the active interactions of human beings with the cycle of cosmological relations: Eiguru where the Energies of creation dwell, Ensi where the terrestrial plane and all living mortal creatures live, and the Okuzimu home of those who have gone into Spirit. 31 Although the burial home of the lifeless body is underground, the concepts of ‘the world above’ and ‘the world below’ do not refer to particular physical space where the dwellers of that space are fixed. Rather, while spatially those places seem to be separate, they are spiritually interactive with each other and with the world on earth where living human beings carry on their daily activities. It is on earth that Nature becomes the centre of spiritual growth and renewal through the interaction of the three spaces in the cycle of life. This interactive relation disallows the separateness of spaces, and it informs the forward-looking of a spiritual journey to the next status in life (i.e. life with ancestors after death). Since for the Bakiga, ‘life exists here [Okuzimu] in the spiritual and religious sense, there is life after death as personified by the living-dead’. 32 To see them as active and life-giving in community, those who have gone into Spirit are lived and experienced in communal spiritual sensibilities enacted in practices of remembering through rituals – of healing, birth, marriage, naming, passage, reconciliation, ceremony, harvest, and sowing, rain, death, renewal of humankind, and more. The forgetting of Karabamu and erasure of Mazig’embwa from my family’s memory demonstrate inherited burdened epistemologies as lived in family which impede my family from remembering Karabamu and Mazig’embwa as part of the family and its history. 30 Turyahikayo-Rugyema, Philosophy and Traditional Religions of the Bakiga, p. 73. 31 Turyahikayo-Rugyema, Philosophy and Traditional Religions of the Bakiga, p. 73. 32 Turyahikayo-Rugyema, Philosophy and Traditional Religions of the Bakiga, p. 73.

Decolonial Dilemmas and Epistemic Heritages in Names and Naming

To cultivate one’s indigenous spiritual life, which is an aspect of decolonial praxis, a person learns to keep active communication with other spiritual worlds by interacting with the cosmological energies accessible in language, names, friendship, and ritual as practices of remembering. Remembering Karabamu, has been a painful yet healing and a bringing-together of colonially alienated and fragmented pieces of my family’s history and my place in it. These decolonial practices have been and continue to be a part of rituals that maintain balance in life. Understanding one’s place within cosmological relations has been for me a way to see how the presence and practice of Christian religion pervades aspects of Bakiga life. Examining the shift in names and their meanings on people’s relations to self and community, whether those shifts pertain to the names of the living or those gone into Spirit, has helped me cultivate those parts of the Bakiga from which I learned to dissociate and of which I was taught to forget through shame, punishment, and the promise of life in heaven. 33 And, even though religion in indigenous African cultures pervades relations with the cosmologies and is affected by ‘aspects of the [colonial] heritage, it belongs to each people within which it has evolved’. 34 Thus, decolonial praxis cannot take a uniform formula for all peoples with colonised and enslaved histories even though all of them share in the loss or distortions of their indigenous religion, names, language, and pertinent memories. Similarly, those with colonising and enslaving histories must embark on the responsibility to decolonise themselves from the imperative to maintain a dependent relationship with former colonised and enslaved, and engage with the decolonial process honestly and aggressively.

Conclusion

What is important to see here is how indigenous encounters with Christian missionaries and colonisers culminated the legacy of the politics of difference, whereby institutions of Bakiga indigenous spiritual 33 For example, in primary school, our teachers punished us with whips and lashes for speaking our language on school premises. Punishment was effective in teaching us that our language does not create knowledge or belong in the space of the ‘civilised’, and that we ought to be ashamed of it. Almost every formally educated African with whom I have shared my experience has expressed a similar conditioning. In Decolonizing the Mind, p. 11, Ngũp. wa Thiong’o elaborates thus: ‘in Kenya, English became more than a language, it was the language, and all the others had to bow to it in deference’. If caught speaking Gīkūyū, ‘the culprit was given corporal punishment – three to five strokes of care on bare buttocks – or was made to carry a metal plate around the neck with inscriptions such as I AM STUPID or I AM A DONKEY’. 34 Mbiti, Introduction to African Religion, p. 14.

39

40

Part I: Framing Knowledge

practices were seen as ‘other’. ‘Otherness’ is continually constructed in language, religion, and social practices of erasures and silences. By examining them, we can forge decolonial processes of healing, affirmative knowledge creation, and self-determination. We could come to a point where indigenous gods and goddesses are not othered and the gods of Christianity and Islam as universal. The othering of indigenous religious communities as ‘cults’ rather than seeing them as assemblies or communities, the othering of their state of advancement as being ‘primitive’ could all be transformed when we create sustainable processes of decolonial praxis and healing. Until I decided to decentre colonial knowledge of myself as a human being and a member of the Bakiga community, I was very much ashamed of my being. I read literature about Bakiga and I would have difficulty seeing or finding the very Bakiga I knew in relation to the Bakiga I was reading about. My grandmother, aunts, and mother had taught me to see my humanity in an affirming way, but that is not what I learned in school. By telling me about Karabamu, my grandmother, aunts, and mother gave me the courage to travel decolonial paths within the education system that taught me to distance myself from who I was. 35 Edel explains the encounter with this phenomenon. The British banned the practice of indigenous religious aspects of the Bakiga and ‘[t]he result is that no one dares to wear the most ordinary charms; ghost huts have disappeared; diviners are no longer openly consulted; and religious and magical practitioners have laid aside their spirit “horns” – though they may continue to cherish and even to feed them in private’. 36 When my father claimed that no one ever reminded him to re-member his father, he did not welcome the idea of talking about him. His response to me was a powerful acknowledgement of active forgetting and of shame. His transference of the responsibility to remember foreclosed further discussion of the subject matter. My father was an educated man and active Catholic who demonstrated to me in that brief conversation an assumed oblivion to his cultivated forgetting. Edel’s description of what she sees, or does not see, fits within the framework of what my father may have understood Christian teachings required of him – to not accommodate African ancestors and divinities in his Catholic faith. Edel is sympathetic as she sees What I learned at school about Africans was in conflict with what my grandmother, aunts, and mother were teaching me about our cultures. Sometimes, I thought the Africans I read about lived somewhere else or in another time. Linda Tuhiwai Smith reiterates this notion in not seeing yourself in what is about you: ‘reading and interpretation present problems when we do not see ourselves in the text. There are problems too when we do see ourselves but can barely recognize ourselves through the representation’: Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, p. 35. 36 Edel, The Chiga of Uganda, p. 12. 35

Decolonial Dilemmas and Epistemic Heritages in Names and Naming

people’s retreat from their ways as doing things in private or in secrecy. For those who have lived the wounds of colonialism and seek the good in indigenous knowledge, like the mother of an epileptic child discussed earlier, can be seen as resisting colonial and Christian erasures of indigenous epistemic systems. That is endurance. Moreover, it is paradoxical that when Christians worship in the privacy of their church or pray in their quiet of their bedroom it is not seen as secrecy, yet when indigenous people go to the privacy of their shrine, it is immediately seen as secrecy. The colonised, those with subjugated histories, cannot assert themselves in meaningful ways when they entertain fear of being misinterpreted or of claiming their knowledges, however marginalised. Our knowledges must be first to lift ourselves out of colonial depths of self-erasure into decolonial possibilities of being and knowing through our languages and name systems, and relationalities to cosmologies.

41

2 Poetic Violence? Intimate Understandings of Cattle Raiding in Karamoja DAVID EATON

This chapter stems from two random encounters. In 2003 I travelled to Kenya for the first time, and, during a trek across the Cherangani Hills, I witnessed the ongoing impact of cattle raiding. Cattle raiding essentially involves stealing other people’s livestock, sometimes by force and sometimes by stealth. Like all forms of theft, it can have a multitude of specific causes. In this case, a handful of minor thefts took place on the border between two ethnic groups, the Marakwet and the Pokot, during February 2001. In the absence of a police response, Pokot raiders attacked Murkutwo location a month later, killing fifty-three people. By 2003 the Kenya Police, Administration Police, Kenyan Army, General Service Unit, and Anti-Stock Theft Unit all had camps across the highlands in an effort to prevent a recurrence of the violence.1 This was the genesis for my doctoral research, which examined the history of cattle raiding involving the Pokot. Originally, I focused on the rampant theft in the highland areas of Western Kenya, but when I met my future research collaborator Andrew Juma, he revealed that raiding remained a far bigger issue in the lowlands along the Kenya-Uganda border. As a result, we began doing interviews in Karamoja, north-east Uganda. We were able to record roughly 250 interviews with people involved in cattle raiding, some in the distant past and others more recently. This became the basis for my dissertation, which was completed in 2008. The second encounter was with Neil Whitehead. I met him at a 2011 seminar in Kalamazoo through the intervention of Mustafa Mirzeler. Whitehead was an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-­ Madison, and also served as the editor of the Duke University Press series on violence. After his impassioned talk on the cannibal war-­ machine and the new world order, we spent some time discussing whether my research on Karamoja would be suitable for that series. His suggestions made me reflect on my own research process and the way Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC), Raiding Democracy (Nairobi: KHRC, 2001).

1

Poetic Violence? Intimate Understandings of Cattle Raiding in Karamoja

scholars studied the region more generally. However, he passed away soon after, and my manuscript project fell by the wayside. In this chapter, I aim to explore some of Whitehead’s theoretical contributions to the study of violence, and how, if I had been aware of them earlier, they might have improved aspects of my own research on cattle raiding in Karamoja. His efforts to delve deeply into local meanings of violence while still acknowledging the structural origins of marginalisation reflected something I had unconsciously tried to do, but by becoming bogged down in the specifics of the latter, the former remained incomplete. There are two additional themes that orient my argument: the decolonisation of knowledge and intimacy. I will briefly describe how the decolonisation of knowledge in and on Karamoja remains incomplete, and then move on to address how intimate understandings of cattle raiding, or what Neil Whitehead calls the ‘poetics’ of violence, may offer a path forward.

Decolonising Karamoja

Karamoja in many ways remained as marginal to independent Uganda as it was while a British colony. This marginality not only manifested itself in poor service delivery and the brutal behaviour of armed forces in the region, but also in scholarly circles, where Karamoja was rarely included as more than an aside in Ugandan historical narratives. The editors of this volume argue that an ‘enduring legacy of colonial violence and postcolonial governance has been Karamoja’s position outside of national imaginaries, thus transforming the region into a site of arbitrary violence’. On this we are in close agreement, and it is worth exploring the history of Karamoja’s marginalisation for a moment. Karamoja’s isolation was born during the colonial era. The British nominally conquered the region in 1911, but did not begin any civil administration until 1921. They appointed a number of chiefs, but few sought to challenge the established authority of elders who remained firmly in control of decisions relating to cattle and the subsistence resources they produced. There were exceptions. Achia was appointed chief of Nabilatuk location in Karamoja during 1921, and sought to prevent men from taking their cattle to dry-season grazing areas as the British asked. Two years later he was dead, stabbed to death by a large number of herders. A British police party arrived a few weeks later, took statements and eventually hung three people for the murder.2 However, once this demonstration of power had been completed the British 2 James Barber, ‘The Karamoja District of Uganda’, Journal of African History 3.1 (1962), 116.

43

44

Part I: Framing Knowledge

decided ‘to leave them [the Karimojong] to their own customs, as far as possible, and under their own chiefs. Anything else is certainly uneconomic’. 3 While the rest of Uganda would deal with the tumult created by mission schools, cash crop production, and forced labour, Karamoja was made a closed district. Outsiders generally could not go there, and herders were not supposed to leave. The latter point was of crucial importance. As agro-pastoralists, mobility across long distances was essential to their way of life. This was a problem for administrators, who, beginning in the early 1900s, used colonial boundaries to try to ‘pin the pastoralists to the ground’.4 The best dry-season grazing lands, especially the highlands around Kitale, Western Kenya, were placed under the control of White settlers who expelled the African residents and their animals. Those expelled included the Pokot, who attempted to make good their losses by encroaching into grazing areas along the southern and eastern borders of Karamoja. The result was increased competition for the remaining pastures, more frequent stock thefts, and the impoverishment of Karamoja’s residents who became much more vulnerable to ecological disasters. The British blamed this destitution on the herders themselves, and they used development funds in the 1940s and 1950s to push agriculture as a viable alternative. Given the enormous variability of rainfall in the area, this only made the situation worse. 5 A 1951 Annual Report reveals the impact of these programmes:

The elders are intensely interested in anything, such as water supplies, inoculations or grazing rights, that affects their cattle but our preoccupation with roads, education, public works and such other means towards what we consider as progress [including pushing agriculture] arouse no enthusiasm amongst them and, therefore, little amongst any section of the people.6

The growing alienation from an intrusive but unhelpful government, combined with increasing ecological damage, led to a gradual uptick in cattle raiding violence. This was particularly true across the international borders separating Karamoja from Kenya and Sudan, where police co-operation was limited. Nevertheless, the general consensus among the British was that cattle raiding was the result of the backwardness of pastoralists. In their eyes, the obvious poverty in Karamoja was the fault of the res-

Barber, ‘The Karamoja District of Uganda’, 119. Mahmood Mamdani, P.M.B. Kasoma and A.B. Katende, ‘Karamoja: Ecology and History’, CBR Working Paper #22 (1992), 25. 5 Neville Dyson-Hudson, Karimojong Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 42–43. 6 Quoted in James Barber, Imperial Frontier (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1968), 215. 3 4

Poetic Violence? Intimate Understandings of Cattle Raiding in Karamoja

idents themselves. This perspective was rapidly absorbed by postcolonial Uganda’s nascent political elite. The Bataringaya Report, commissioned in 1961 to determine the direction of future policy in Karamoja, observed that the Karimojong view of cattle was ‘a most complicated theo-socio-psycho-economic hybrid altogether incomprehensible to an outsider’.7 Fortified by supernatural blessings from ‘tribal soothsayers’ known as ngimurok (pl., emuron, sing.), the authors’ argued that cattle raiders had ‘the same psychological conditioning as that of the ancient Islam soldier going to a jihad or of the Japanese suicide squads during the war’.8 Claiming that ‘the only force which [the Karimojong] will respect is that superior to their own’, the report recommended deploying the army in a year-long campaign to punish raiders, confiscate weapons, and inspire ‘holy terror’ in the people.9 After the British-led King’s African Rifles (KAR) killed scores of Pian Karimojong under suspicious circumstances in May 1962, Obote’s parliamentary supporters offered congratulations to the military, saying that ‘their duty is harsh, it lies in hard places … they deserve our thanks and our trust’.10 After independence, over half of the entire Ugandan army (a total of three thousand men) was based in Karamoja. Thanks to a variety of punitive legislation, including the 1965 Administration of Justice (Karamoja) Act, residents of the region bore the burden of proof if accused of aiding and abetting cattle raiding. Military leaders based there, especially during the Idi Amin period, effectively acted as warlords trying to seize cattle from the marginalised Karimojong. It should come as no surprise that when the armoury at Moroto was left unlocked by fleeing Ugandan soldiers in 1979, the guns within were immediately seized by neighbouring herders. Despite persistent stereotypes that the Karimojong were prone to violence due to their irrational love of cattle, scholars from the Centre for Basic Research (CBR) in Kampala began the process of shifting the academic debate. In a series of five papers published in the early 1990s, they argued that the state was responsible for impoverishing the region through restrictive boundaries and development priorities that ignored the value of pastoral production. They focused on frequent ecological crises and clashes with the state that ‘eroded the basis of community regulation on [pastoral] resources. The stage was set for individual households arriving at individual survival strategies in each case making sense from a point of view individual and short term’.11 7 Government of Uganda (henceforth GoU), Report of the Karamoja (Bataringaya) Security Committee (Entebbe: Government Press, 1961), 3. 8 GoU, Report of the Karamoja (Bataringaya) Security Committee, 4. 9 GoU, Report of the Karamoja (Bataringaya) Security Committee, 9, 15–16. 10 Untitled memo quoting Mr Nadiope, CO 822 2788, Colonial Office Files (Kew, UK: National Archive, 1963). 11 Mamdani et al., ‘Karamoja: Ecology and History’, 37.

45

46

Part I: Framing Knowledge

Cattle raids were thus transformed, and what had previously been a way ‘to alleviate communal hardship [was] thwarted and replaced by private gain’.12 To Charles Ocan and other members of the CBR, ‘the most important attribute now is military might guided by commercial abilities. A combination of state malfeasance and individual greed transformed raiding “from a quasi-cultural practice into one with criminal intent, conducted with highly sophisticated weapons”.’13 The CBR authors challenged the widely held belief that poverty in Karamoja was brought about by the Karimojong’s own practices, particularly the persistence of pastoralism. Through their working papers, the CBR authors shaped contemporary academic discourse on many aspects of the crisis in Karamoja. In particular, they were focused on material drivers for cattle raids, and this remains an integral part of academic research in the region. This research, which I would label broadly as ‘instrumental’, was and is extremely important. By mapping out the material causes of Karamoja’s problems and the state’s involvement in this process, new approaches might be able to bring a halt to the continuing scourge of cattle raids. Perhaps by incorporating non-state actors, including NGO, churches and missionaries, the situation could be improved.

The Poetics of Violence

But is this really ‘decolonising’ knowledge? Is it enough to sketch out instrumental explanations for cattle raiding violence in a place like Karamoja? Most academic and NGO literature on the region focuses on which causal factors policy makers should prioritise, including resource scarcity, generational conflict, ethnic hatred, commercialisation, and small arms proliferation. Reading these same debates over and over quickly becomes tedious. I believed and still believe that we will never identify a ‘magic bullet’, or a single crucial factor that must be addressed to prevent future raids, and my earliest publications expressed a deep scepticism about the way governments, academics, and NGOs analysed violence in the region.14 During my fieldwork I became fascinated by the ways that cattle raiding was ‘performed’, and when I returned to Amudat District in 12 Charles Ocan, ‘Pastoral Crisis and Social Change in Karamoja’, in M. Mamdani and J. Oloka-Onyango (eds), Uganda: Studies in Living Conditions, Popular Movements, and Constitutionalism, (Kampala: Centre for Basic Research, 1994), 140. 13 Charles Ocan quoted in J. Oloka-Onyango, G. Zie and Frank Muhereza, Pastoralism, Crisis, and Transformation in Uganda (Kampala: Centre for Basic Research, 1993), 12. 14 D. Eaton, ‘The Business of Peace,’ African Affairs 107 (2008): 89–110.

Poetic Violence? Intimate Understandings of Cattle Raiding in Karamoja

2008 I discovered two elements I had missed in my earlier interviews. The first was that many Pokot herders composed ‘raiding songs’ to boast about their exploits or to serve as a record of past events (as do the Karimong herders). Thanks to the efforts of Andrew Juma, I was able to record several of these haunting but opaque songs. The second was that many Pokot believed that spiritual figures, whether laibon, emuron, werkoy, orkioyot or otherwise, were complicit in coordinating raids across ethnic lines. These two subjects were at the heart of my final piece of fieldwork in 2010. Inadvertently, I was describing two aspects of what Whitehead labelled ‘the poetics of violence’. In Dark Shamans, Whitehead writes, ‘the term “poetic”… suggests that the meaning of violent death cannot be entirely understood by reference to biological origins, sociological functions, or material and ecological necessities but must also be appreciated as a fundamental and complex cultural expression’. 15 Studying the culturally specific dynamics of violence had been a common part of colonial ethnography, usually to demonise the colonial Other or to help guide administrative responses. Whitehead writes that the shift towards more instrumental explanations has led to a similar problem: For lack of a culturally informed framework for interpretation, many violent contexts appear to us as frighteningly enigmatic … However, close ethnographic engagement with such situations strongly suggests that attention to the cultural meaning of violence, not just the violent act itself, is key to advancing understanding. The performance of violence, how it is enacted according to cultural codes, is therefore as relevant to understanding as is the appreciation of its sociopolitical consequences and causes.16

Focusing on the ‘poetics’ of violence runs the risk of being ‘pornographic’, or prurient. An example of this can be found in the Bataringaya Report, which includes the following section on ritual scarification:

If the raider kills any of his interceptors and/or pursuers, he becomes a hero! Special ceremony is made for him and special marks are made on his upper arms and chest – marks as highly esteemed by the Karamojong as a V.C. by an English soldier! Needless to say, such men are not only greatly respected by their fellow tribesmen but are also considered most eligible suitors by the young ladies of the tribe.17

This type of writing is now recognised as deeply problematic, and academics seek to avoid cultural essentialism by focusing on material causes for violence. But, as Whitehead observes, there is a

15 Neil Whitehead, Dark Shamans (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 2. 16 Whitehead, Dark Shamans, 191. 17 GoU, Report of the Karamoja (Bataringaya) Security Committee, 4.

47

48

Part I: Framing Knowledge

counter-danger that by refusing to engage with the ‘fleshy detail of violent acts, we remove them from the very context that makes them meaningful to others, if not ourselves’.18 So how do we gain insight into the meanings of cattle raiding violence to the residents of Karamoja? In 2010 Andrew Juma and I recorded a large number of raiding songs at Lopedot in Amudat District. He had been active in the area for years as a veterinarian, and this was the basis for his relationship with local herders. It was particularly helpful that he was well known for providing discreet check-ups, something essential for raiders whose recently acquired livestock carried novel pathogens and were often in poor health. This work also required that he learn the Tepeth language, a skill which enabled him to better comprehend these songs than someone only fluent in either the Pokot or Karimojong languages.19 These songs were then transcribed by Juma in consultation with the performers. The accompanying lyrics are provided, although I suspect they are incomplete. Juma was hired more for his connections in the region than his skills as a linguist, and these songs present numerous difficulties for the translator. The language spoken is nominally Pokot, a Kalenjin tongue, but a significant number of Karimojong, Turkana, 20 and Tepeth words are also present. 1. A tia keyorenyi kote Longoria aparam anga kudong Chemchal

First you went to take Longoria the bull, I kill another to remain at Chemchal 1: You went to take this bull 2: You went to take my cows 3: Remain in the bush 4: Remain in the river

2. Torem oh yangaye ikiyaru ariamu ngimo opera x2 (I close door of person) I kill [Torem?] oh very right, I get them asleep x2 1: I close the door of a person 2: I [kill?] mother, father, and all children

3. Tomunyo (chilimudong x2) ikiremo kia Loris ngaki

I kill and decorate the ears for Loris (a bull) x2 1: I was with Nakoriting x2, Selemoi x2, Cheptuwow x2

Neil Whitehead, ‘Introduction’, in Neil Whitehead (ed.), Violence (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2004), 11. 19 The Tepeth are a Kuliak people who predated the arrival of the Karimojong in the region. They live in three mountains in Karamoja: Mount Moroto (which straddles the Kenya-Uganda border), Mount Napak to the west, and Mount Kadam in the south. 20 The Turkana are closely related to the Karimojong, and are located in northwest Kenya, north of the Pokot, and to the east of Karamoja. 18

Poetic Violence? Intimate Understandings of Cattle Raiding in Karamoja

4. Tonyara nadim Amungi lokol edoingo nyerile nyamoni edongo nyekile moding tonyara

I call my beautiful girlfriend and kill to sleep in Chemchal and I decorate the ears for Lokal (yellow cow) 1: I call her with white teeth 2: I call [bralt? Transcription error] girl in the bush 3: I call mother to Chepigh 4: I return the cows for my father, brother

5. Ompo poriot aparan klok kame otomunyo amunyi Lingakori x2

When we were fighting I killed him, his mother cries, I kill Lingakori the person 1: Father cries all day and night 2: Sisters cry all day and night 3: Brothers cry all day and night

6. Abila ngitome Ingan kapei aye yewo aye woye ikinyaritai engole I kill enemies, six of them (it is beautiful x2) I call for an oxen with a white head (it is beautiful x2) 1: We went the way of Lopiding 2: Our group planned in Akore

7. [No Pokot/Karimojong language lyrics provided] I kill (during Turkana raids) and decorated the ears for oxen [of?] my friend Longarikaye What are Turkana saying and they are the problem. 1: We were with Selemoi x2 2: We were with Ngorokomoi x2 3: We were with Nakoriling x2

8. Awosi nyedia kerengwa losiya enye kiriam naro ngatuny amunyi Lokwangole

We were with the son of Lokeregwa, Losiya, fighting at Narongatuny I decorate ears for white head 1: We were with a tall person 2: We were with a Black person 3: We were with the son of a Black person

9. Kinamanu poriot ongutio aparam ondeny x2 amunyi Lorara

The fight caught me alone. I killed two x2. I killed Lorara 1: If my friend was there, our raid would have killed many 2: If my father were there, we would have killed four 3: If the whole group was there, all our enemies would have been finished

10. Ikiremokia Louma pani to munyo longara imudanga nye kajore otomunyo

We were with Louma as I kill Longara, my group killed enemy truly 1: We were with Pedes 2: We were with Apayang 3: We were with Kolimuk

49

50

Part I: Framing Knowledge

Two scholars helped guide my understandings of these songs. The first was Elizabeth Tonkin. In Narrating Our Pasts, she argues that ‘pastness’, which encompasses both the past and its representations, is a resource used by individuals to shape their identities. I suspect that these songs can also be interpreted along these lines. While some may recount real events, they are also an opportunity for raiders and performers to craft images (and memories) of themselves. The second was Mustafa Mirzeler. In Remembering Nayeche and the Gray Bull Engiro, he suggests that oral tradition ‘constitutes a process by which past memories of events are dialogically reorganized between the storytellers and their audiences’.21 While these songs are not nearly as complex as the Nayeche tradition, by drawing on ‘pastness’ they offer an opportunity to constitute and debate relationships with other peoples or states. At times this may be explicit, but it may also be discursive. The one common thread linking these ten disparate songs is that they describe killing.22 In many cases this was a communal endeavour, with participants in a successful raid named in the song. Places passed along the way root the lyrics in specific sites on the map, contributing to what Mirzeler calls ‘the rhythm and patterns of past memories and histories embodied in the landscape’.23 Victims and bulls are also mentioned, suggesting a high degree of intimacy between those attacking and those defending themselves. But the obvious boasting, the presence of toxic forms of masculinity, and the glorification of death all speak to similar themes addressed by scholars of rap music like Tricia Rose.24 The defiance towards the state and the sense that one’s toughness is constantly under scrutiny both appear relevant in this context, and point to how a lack of policing demands alternative forms of security. More specific meanings are elusive, primarily because of the complex linguistic skills needed to comprehend the lyrics. The second song is an excellent example. ‘Torem oh yangaye ikiyaru ariamu ngimo opera’ is a phrase that is spoken by a Pokot speaker, but utilises a combination of Karimojong/Turkana words and Tepeth pronunciation. Juma believed that ‘Torem’ was the name of someone killed in a raid, but this is not a common name in the region. Perhaps it is a name that derives from the Tepeth/Ik verb ‘torem’, which means to brew or to do something forcefully. It is more likely that it means doing something forcefully in context, but this would make sense only if it was being used in Tepeth since it lacks the action prefixes common in the Karimojong Mustafa Mirzeler, Remembering Nayeche and the Gray Bull Engiro (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 17. 22 The eigth song only discusses killing obliquely through notching the ears of a cow. Interview #232, Lopedot, 13 June 2010. 23 Mirzeler, Remembering Nayeche, 161. 24 Tricia Rose, Black Noise (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994). 21

Poetic Violence? Intimate Understandings of Cattle Raiding in Karamoja

and Turkana languages. My informants translated the phrase ‘yangaye ikiyaru’ as closing a door, but this is a deeply layered statement. First, ‘ikiyaru’ is a reference to finishing easy but unpleasant work, which in a song like this might mean killing an enemy. The root word for this term is ‘akipor’, a verb used to describe striking or scratching someone. That double-meaning is likely an evocation of the mass of thorn branches rolled into the entry to an enclosure at night. While this in theory protects cattle from predators, it also makes it very difficult for anyone inside to leave if raiders suddenly appear. ‘Ngimoe’ means enemies, and ‘opera’ is likely a Tepeth reinterpretation of a Turkana or Karimojong word meaning to sleep. In this context, the phrase might be interpreted as follows: ‘the enemy is cornered while sleeping in his enclosure, he can’t escape through the door, and he is going to be killed’.25 All this ignores the performative elements of these songs, which were gathered from a renowned soloist at our request and recorded for posterity. This may have shaped decisions about which songs were performed or which elements were emphasised during the recording session.26 I suspect that the participants desired to present to me, as an outsider, an image of the Pokot as a united and ferocious community. This was a common thread across many of our interviews. The sand drawing in Figure 2.1 was created for my benefit just north of Kunyao (a Kenyan village located between Kacheliba – West Pokot, Kenya – and Amudat). The small central circle represented the Pokot, and the larger circle their enemies. Beset on all sides by people with good reason to hate them, only communal loyalty and a willingness to retaliate when provoked could stave off annihilation. The elder who designed it mentioned that the government was doing nothing to help them, but ‘maybe a muzungu [white person, referring to Dave Eaton] can assist us’. 27 The songs may reflect a similar theme. Strength through unity is clearly present in the ninth song, but the complicity of many non-­ performers in the violence described throughout the lyrics may represent an effort to project (or even constitute) this idea less explicitly. The challenges inherent in collecting and interpreting these songs should not be underestimated. Numerous other songs came up during the interviews I held in 2010. One example focuses on Loita, a bull owned by Pokot herders who was famous for his beauty: Men singing: Kiriaminarin’gamia hmmmm mh kiriaminarin’gamia yekwaumia Loita.

25 Personal communication, Mustafa Mirzeler, 4 February 2019. Special thanks for his assistance in translating and interpreting these songs. 26 Karin Barber, I Could Speak until Tomorrow (London: Edinburgh University Press, 1991). 27 Interview #003, Kunyao Bridge, 14 October 2005.

51

52

Part I: Framing Knowledge

Figure 2.1 The Pokot and their enemies, as depicted by an elder at Kunyao Bridge, Uganda-Kenya border, 2005 (picture by David Eaton).

Solo: Nyamuma lomwaiya to tumwoja makaya.

All sing: Ratakimia nyaikoro Lomita kiriaminarin’gamia hmmmm mh kiriaminarin’gamia yekwaumia Loita.

Solo: Lotumokimia makanya, ratakishia narikoto naita kiriaminarin’ngamia Hmmmm-mm kiriaminarin’gamia yekwaurwa Loita.28

The translation was not given in a word-for-word sense, but explained as follows: the Pokot can never give up Loita to the Karimojong, and even if Loita is raided, they will pursue immediately so the Karimojong never get the satisfaction of killing and eating it. ‘Even if it means dying, people prefer to die … it acted as a caretaker of other animals … it is very beautiful and people look at it as a cinema/idol’. My research collaborator then noted ‘because if the Karimojong wins that bull [it] would bring problems because the Karimojong would laugh at you that they have won a beautiful bull. Where [we]re you?’.29 In this context, Loita seems to serve as a symbolic representation of the security of the Pokot. Protecting this bull is a communal endeavour, one that requires both constant vigilance and a willingness to retaliate if struck. 28 29

Interview #226, Orolowo, 9 June 2010.. Interview #226, Orolowo, 9 June 2010.

Poetic Violence? Intimate Understandings of Cattle Raiding in Karamoja

Another example comes from the same interview. This song is sung by the kaiworok, or braves, as they return from a successful raid of the Karimojong: All sing: Onyoru werinyo, onyoru werinyo kurong’u yee owetan rata Hmmmmm-mm haya onyorumontonyo. Solo: Montonyo, onyoru werinyo kurong’u yee owetan rata Hmmmm-mh Solo: (Werinyo), onyoru werinyo

Solo: (Werinyo), onyoru werinyo kurong’u yee owetan rata.30

In the celebration, these noble warriors distributed cattle to their relatives, especially those who had been raided in the past. Perhaps here we see echoes of nostalgia for a time when cattle raiding was a communal endeavour. Perhaps that ideal still exists today, but remains concealed beneath frustration at stock thefts committed by conflict entrepreneurs I call ‘traders’. 31 The extent of community control over raiding is hotly contested by everyone involved. On the one hand, police claim that entire communities are united against them, and that all residents share a degree of complicity in any theft or raid that passed through their territory. On the other, many community leaders (especially elders) argue that it is impossible for them to exert any control over young men armed to the teeth with automatic weapons, and that the community is thus scapegoated for the crimes of a tiny minority. One last song comes from an interview with two skilled raiders. The lyrics read as follows: Mengit nye nakorope chona untinikalokan yatoyikwanangoria kaliwo ares ares kumilomi kumiwolete mengit nakoleka chona utinikakoloka yatayikwa yatupaa kaliwe kakalewee mengit nye nersinyang chona… Sirmoi sirumoi kumiwolomi mengit nye nakoropi choina atini ka kalewa.

A rough translation, offered by the performer, reads as follows:

I can take my cattle anywhere. So long as I have my G3 in my hand I don’t worry about anything, my chief is my gun. I don’t see big and small, all are minute before me. Ares ares are the ammunition tied around the vest so the gun doesn’t care about your ammunition, you have yours and he believes in his too. 32

The perception of personal autonomy linked to possessing a gun is strikingly demonstrated in this song, and helps one understand why disarmament campaigns have been so unsuccessful in the region. The second aspect of my research that seemed to benefit from Whitehead’s approach stemmed from a single interview in Kacheliba in 30 31

32

Interview #226, Orolowo, 9 June 2010. D. Eaton, ‘The Rise of the “Traider”’, Nomadic Peoples 14.2 (2010), 106–22. Interview #227, Kunyao, 9 June 2010.

53

54

Part I: Framing Knowledge

2008. I have since lost the tape, but I did write a synopsis of the interview immediately after it was recorded. It included an astonishing assessment of the spiritual landscape of cattle raiding. The informant, who my research collaborator claimed was a prophet, described two key figures involved in raids. The first was the kapolok, who uses herbs, the tossing of shoes, and other rituals to provide Pokot raiders with supernatural protection during a raid. The second was the werkoy. 33 The informant believed that werkoy direct raiders according to visions or dreams, but he also noted that if young men did not show appropriate respect for their elders, the werkoy might lead them into ambushes. A 1998–99 Pokot raid of the Turkana ended in disaster when a flash flood wiped them out. The informant claimed this was the work of the werkoy, who was disappointed that the young men had raided despite their disapproval. Getting the werkoy to sign off on a raid is a long and tortuous task involving copious amounts of alcohol and livestock. 34 Even if these gifts are offered the werkoy often delay for an extended period of time, something my research assistant speculated might allow them to physically scout the route the raiders will take. This brought him to the final, crucial point of the interview – that the werkoy and ngimurok (prophets among the Karimojong and Turkana) communicate with one another across ethnic lines via dreams. 35 I had never heard anything like this in my initial two years of research, and when I returned in 2010, I asked numerous people about this possibility. They generally supported the prophet’s account. First, ‘kapolok’ were confirmed as crucial supernatural allies to raiders. In Orolowo (West Pokot, Kenya), a group of elders told us ‘a kapolok mixes his drugs and moves round the warriors sprinkling on them all-round blessing. From there they would go to raid. When they reach the point of raiding they would find [old men who were] insane or in a deep sleep, so the warriors would comfortably drive home cattle and when they reach home, the first thing they would do is to give out cattle to the [kapolok] as a reward’. 36 The kapolok offer a variety of sacrifices for the warriors, including slaughtering animals (provided by the warriors) and smearing them with chime from those animals’ intestines. With respect to the werkoy and their inter-ethnic ties, this group of elders made a fascinating statement: Respondent A: ‘Werkoyon’. That one dreams while asleep and the following day he would call people and tell them that yesterday I

Werkoy is a common Kalenjin term used to describe this type of prophet among the Pokot, but others include orkoiyot or werkoyon. Laibon, originally a Maasai term, is also used. 34 This was mentioned in Interview #016, Lokitalauyan, 18 October 2005. 35 Interview notes, Kacheliba, 2008. 36 Interview #226, Orolowo, 9 June 2010. 33

Poetic Violence? Intimate Understandings of Cattle Raiding in Karamoja

saw things in a place like Turkana and I saw a black cow, a white cow, brown, khaki, white with a lot of black spots. So go and bring those cattle; while you go, you would cross a river that looks like this, later you would come across a hill, then from there you would find a brown man looking after his cattle and that man has one eye. Drive those cows home, I have been given. Juma: Who gave him [the cows]?

Respondent A: The person whom when he dreamed, he dreamed too in a different place. He is another laibon in the tribe that is raided. They would go as described through the river, then the hill; from there they would meet the described animals. After reaching home they would give him four cows then the rest are shared between the warriors. In Pokot he is called ‘werkoyon’ and ‘prophet’ in English. 37

The general role of the werkoy was confirmed in other interviews as well. They communicated via dreams, using supernatural powers. But they did not just sanction raids, they also protected their community from others who wished to raid them. In one interview, two young men noted that ‘nobody knows who made [werkoy] to be that intelligent, but he can tell that the Karimojong are coming from a far place. When we come tomorrow, we will find their footsteps all over the compound but no livestock go with them. He was first made by God. He is supernatural, he dreams like any other person in sleep … borrowing the other prophets’ cows’. 38 In Orwa (near the border with Turkana County in Kenya) the elders we spoke to claimed that the office of laibon (which is used synonymously with werkoy and seems to have the same meaning here) has entered a terminal decline. One noted Those days when they used to exist, they blessed raiders who came for blessings before they attempt a raid and if by bad luck one of the raiders die, the relatives will come after the old man claiming he was the one who bewitched their son to be killed and he will be in charge of the loss. So to avoid that many old men have rejected the offer of being blessers. 39

Another informant suggested that some laibon had been corrupted by greed, seeking profits from raids at the expense of the community. While this was presented as a problem during the interview, at least some young men were clearly encouraging this by plying laibon with gifts in order to receive their support.40 37 Interview #226, Orolowo, 9 June 2010; see also Interview #236, Kapsitwet, 17 June 2010 – ‘he just dreams and instructs people forward’. 38 Interview #228, Kasitet, 10 June 2010. 39 Interview #233, Orwa, 15 June 2010. 40 Interview #230, Amukuriat, 10 June 2010.

55

56

Part I: Framing Knowledge

Songs and the supernatural intersected in an interview we did with two former raiders. When describing a raid on Kaputir (in Turkana District in Kenya) the raiders recalled two songs composed to commemorate the occasion. The first read: ‘Lomunya lotepachiling’aki tomonyo ngocolo ikochiwa’. It means ‘I killed a Turkana in a river when we met’. The full song recalls returning home and cutting a notch in the ear of his favourite bull to signify this important moment – as the informant recalled – to distinguish them from those who haven’t killed. When anyone sees such marks on bulls they know that the bull belongs to a man who has killed someone. Once a man kills a man, he is given a name like Raimaile, Kong’ole.41

This 1998 raid was a dreadful defeat for the Pokot, who stumbled onto Turkana homeguards while returning home. This led to them being cornered by a river in flood, and the informant indicated that as many as sixty raiders died in the fighting. He blamed the defeat on a supernatural clash between laibons:

The laibon collided in exchanging words through dreams. One said go and bring my cattle, the Pokot one refused, then a son of the Pokot laibon insisted and requested the other tribe’s laibon give him cattle. When they accepted the older [Pokot] laibon became furious, ‘why has a young laibon decided to do this?’ – so he decided to drive people to death and that is why they were killed.42

Needless to say, this story is far more vivid than sterile narratives that might link this raid to a drought event going on at the same time. But what does it signify? I would argue the core narrative here revolves around the ongoing challenge of the community’s relationship to raiding violence, a relationship that is constantly in flux particularly due to encroachment from the neoliberal state. But this question of whether the werkoy/emuron/laibon communicate in the physical world is a vexing one. In the past, I would have wanted a concrete answer to this question. But on this perhaps I can also borrow from the writing of Neil Whitehead, who later in his career became an advocate for ethnography embracing the concept of the ‘posthuman’. In Human No More, he and Michael Wesch argue that ecstatic experience through ritual and shamanism is an excellent example of how the human/non-human boundary has been routinely transgressed in the past. Studying the activities of the ‘posthuman’ Ngimurok might require us to abandon Malinowskian forms of analysis/fieldwork in favour of new methodologies. 41

42

Interview #227, Kunyao, 9 June 2010; song starts at 27:00. Interview #227, Kunyao, 9 June 2010.

Poetic Violence? Intimate Understandings of Cattle Raiding in Karamoja

Conclusion

The production of useful information on Karamoja inevitably leads to narratives that prioritise certain ways of seeing, ways that favour the state and its NGO allies. My initial research, guided as it was by an archival focus, ended up falling into this trap. Colonial officers understood cattle raiding as almost a ‘codified system of revenge’, and they felt Western legal codes represented a form of progress.43 While I rejected this logic, at times I ended up inadvertently mimicking the colonial voices that shape the archival record. In an effort to be relevant, my doctorate ended up tepidly backing policies that governments in colonial and postcolonial Uganda would have found quite amenable – in particular, a desire for more effective policing and an end to the cycles of violence. Whitehead argued that if states could weaponise ethnography, perhaps this discipline was not as liberal as many ethnographers believed.44 Researchers in Karamoja are certainly aware of this issue, but I think it is possible that inadvertently, through our material focus, we have become complicit in the continuing colonisation of knowledge in Karamoja. As a result, raiding and violence are artificially isolated from one another in a way that is not true for people living in the region. Understanding cattle raiding violence through the eyes of the residents of Karamoja is extremely complex, and risks glorifying atrocities that many find abhorrent. But engaging with the poetics, or ‘fleshy details’ of this violence need not preclude apportioning blame to the colonial and neoliberal state building that I think we all, in one form or another, believe is responsible for the persistence of conflict in the region. Whitehead and Finnström, in the introduction to Neil’s final publication, wrote that good ethnography ‘builds subjectivities that may, by being entailed in the field situation, be more and more useless to the project of colonial knowing’.45 This, to me, represents a key step towards the decolonisation of knowledge and an admirable future goal for researchers in Karamoja.

43 This closely resembles state interpretations of kanaimá, a form of assault sorcery practiced in Guyana. See Whitehead, Dark Shamans, 45. 44 Neil Whitehead, ‘Are We There Yet?’ in. Neil Whitehead and Michael Wesch (eds), Human No More (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2012), 218. 45 Neil Whitehead and Sverker Finnström, ‘Introduction: Virtual War and Magical Death’, in.Neil Whitehead and Sverker Finnström (eds), Virtual War and Magical Death, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 13.

57

3 Spirits of Difference: Religion, Healing, and Decolonisation in Acholi LETHA VICTOR

‘I don’t like prayers that go all night’, Lamunu said in frustration. It was late July of 2014 and we were gathered in her son Okot’s sitting room in Gulu town, discussing a problem that no one was quite sure what to do about.1 Jennifer, the niece of Lamunu’s late husband, was acting manically and unpredictably, and it was not the first time she had done so. Despite living on the knife’s edge of poverty, she had quit her job cleaning the house of an English businessman and a Swiss NGO worker, as well as her job cooking for an Indian family in the same compound. She stated that she refused to be employed any longer by people who were not Christian, and that there were evil spirits in that housing complex. After she called repeatedly to inform me that we needed to speak about ‘demons’ – a word she uttered in English rather than Acholi – I met with Jennifer in Okot’s home. Okot, who grew up with Jennifer and was raised in the same Roman Catholic Church that she now vocally rejected, was distraught by her appearance and her behaviour. She was gaunt and looked tense. Holding two Bibles (one printed in English and one in Acholi Luo), she had flipped through them while we sat and talked, and insisted that I read out loud from the English one. While she did not pause to interpret the text or tell us of its relevance, Jennifer did tell us that God 1 With the exception of public figures, this piece uses pseudonyms in order to protect the identities of those described. Though I have changed some identifying features of my interlocutors, they represent real people and not composite characters. The evidence used in this chapter comes from 15 months of field research (2013–14 and 2019) approved by the University of Toronto Social Sciences, Humanities and Education Research Ethics Board (protocol reference #30041), the University of North Carolina at Charlotte Office of Research Compliance (IRB study 19-0071), and the Ugandan National Council for Science and Technology (references SS3293 and SS316ES). While it retained town status during the time of research, Gulu was declared a city in 2020. Hereafter, mentions to ‘Gulu’ in the text refer to the municipality proper, while references to the larger Gulu District are specified.

Spirits of Difference: Religion, Healing, and Decolonisation in Acholi

had been sending her messages. She wanted us to be happy for her; to know that she had been delivered. A woman she had met at Christ Church, a parish in the Anglican diocese, had urged her to set most of her religious literature on fire. The Jehovah’s Witness pamphlets, the children’s Bible, the devotional guides from Holy Rosary (her home congregation): they all had to go up in flames, and Jennifer had willingly lit the match. The woman from Christ Church had told her that those things had all come from dano te pii, the people who go underwater to make nice things in the service of Satan. Now, Okot and his mother were musing over what should be done about Jennifer. Other family members suspected that her newfound religious fervour had its basis in mental illness rather than divine inspiration. ‘She is not well’, Okot agreed, but her insistence on attending allnight charismatic prayer services was not helping. Lamunu was wary of those she suspected to be ‘pretend’ ‘born again’ Christians, capitalising on its social benefits without sincere faith. Though in her youth she had also prayed against the presence of demons and dangerous spirits, to Lamunu, Jennifer’s problems were less about invisible beings and more about the stresses of life in a modern town. Okot, an aficionado of Indigenous ritual practices and the grandson of a well-respected Acholi herbalist, was equally convinced that Jennifer’s problem was psychological. This was in contrast to the family opinion about their Uncle Patrick, a follower of a new religious movement named New Jerusalem Tabernacle Ministries (also called Meltar), whom they understood not to have ‘wind in his head’ (wiiye obale, a euphemism for madness), but to act as though he did.

Impolitic Difference

At different times and contexts, the individual members of Lamunu’s family have affected passion, ambivalence, conviction, and uncertainty in their religious lived experiences. This is not unusual in a place like Gulu, where the marketplace of cosmology is always bustling: with Christianities (in the plural), Islam, tic Acoli (Acholi ritual work), ajwaki (spirit mediums, diviners, or ‘witch doctors’), and new religious movements and medicines.2 These sometimes clash, but often act in concert. Here, the boundaries of religions and medicines – as public institutions – are in perpetual flux. How to produce public knowledge about this complexity, however, is a question consequential to more than academic curiosity. Ugandans’ 2 The letter ‘c’ in the Acholi Luo language (written as ‘Acoli’) is pronounced ‘ch’ as in ‘check’.

59

60

Part I: Framing Knowledge

understandings of these institutions are embedded within personal and collective experiences with regimes of colonial and postcolonial hegemony. Labouring to interpret and create knowledge about religions and medicines is thus fraught with larger debates about justice and the equitable distribution of power. These issues are not unique to Acholi, to Uganda, or to Africa, and there is much to be shared between localities. Nevertheless, in the global scale of decolonial conversation, examinations of ‘local knowledge’ risk being reduced to mere taxonomies of difference – an ironically colonial activity. At the 2018 meeting for the African Studies Association (in Atlanta, USA), for example, a self-identified Acholi scholar raised his hand to speak at the end of a panel presentation, and the question he asked unleashed a passionate rebuke from two other audience members. We had just concluded the last of four consecutive panels about decolonising knowledge in (and about) Uganda. As part of this final grouping, which broadly explored issues related to medical knowledge and healing, I and the other panellists from Uganda, Canada, and the United States were called upon by our aforementioned colleague to address what he regarded to be the most controversial aspect of our panel. Most of us presenting, he noted, had included ‘witch doctors’ in our research. How did we distinguish genuine healers and spirit mediums from fraudulent witch doctors? And how was our work addressing the problem of spiritual and medical charlatanry in Uganda, rather than promoting it? This was not an unusual question, nor was it one with which the panellists were unfamiliar. I responded simply, acknowledging that the issue of religious and medical authenticity was a deep and valid concern of my Ugandan interlocutors (not to mention others), but that as an ethnographer I regard it as my role to examine and interpret truth claims in sociocultural and political context, not to authorise or debunk them. In short, I considered the question to be evidence in itself of one of the many ways that people everywhere worry about religiosity, medicine, truth, and power: the modern episteme within which we all operate. The other panellists weighed in with insightful responses of their own, and the microphone was passed to the next audience member. But how can we possibly speak about decolonising knowledge in Uganda, the next person asked, if we do not share the cosmology of our research participants? How could we claim to be justice-seekers in solidarity with Ugandans if we do nothing but extract their knowledge for our own edification? A third audience member chimed in while nodding in agreement, and admonished the Acholi man for using the term ‘witch doctor’. You should know, the person said, that such a word is pejorative and colonial, and in fact before colonialism, it was the African ‘witch doctors’ who were the respected religious authorities of their communities, and they were known to heal witchcraft and find witches, not

Spirits of Difference: Religion, Healing, and Decolonisation in Acholi

be witches themselves. 3 The message was clear: the panellists and the original questioner were either epistemological imperialists, or ignorant and culturally inauthentic victims of empire. Attending to ‘the local’ without fetishising it is the task of scholarship. As such, this chapter offers a reflection, provoked by the commonality of exchanges such as the one just described, about what the decolonisation of knowledge or anticolonial knowledge might look in the case of religiosity and medicine in Uganda, both broadly construed. It takes the lived experiences of people in the Acholi sub-region as evidence that contextualises and complicates the questions of cosmological and medico-religious authenticity recorded above, and of the use of representations of difference in decolonisation projects. Drawing primarily upon ethnographic research conducted since 2008 in Acholi, I take a person-centred approach by exploring the experiences of Lamunu’s family, whose members primarily reside in the town of Gulu.4 In considering the backdrop of postcolonial (and ostensibly religious) violence that dominated Acholi life from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, I trace moments in which family members have responded to individual, social, and political afflictions (illness, ghostly hauntings, poverty, and war) in varied and often competing ways. At some instances their actions might be mapped on to Roman Catholic practice (Charismatic and traditional), at others Indigenous Acholi ritual, some to millennialist movements, still others to non-denominational Charismatic Pentecostal or biomedical domains. 5 Above all, their lived 3 The moniker ‘witch doctor’ was long-ago appropriated by African anglophones, who put the label to work in ordinary speech that does not always align with the pejorative use of the term elsewhere. 4 Person-centred ethnography considers research subjects not as ‘informants’ who might reveal the characteristics and inner-workings of a society (through structured interviews or surveys, for example), but as interlocutors whose individual lived experiences are examined in relation to broader cultural and linguistic patterns. Interlocution denotes conversation, and thus acknowledges the relationship between researcher and subject that produces knowledge. This method was pioneered by psychological anthropologist Robert I. Levy. See: Douglas W. Hollan, ‘Setting a New Standard: The Person-Centered Interviewing and Observation of Robert I. Levy’, Ethos 33.4 (2005), 459–66; Robert I. Levy and Douglas W. Hollan, ‘Person-Centered Interviewing and Observation’, in H.R. Bernard (ed.), Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 1998), pp. 333–64. 5 Following the 1986 civil war in which the National Resistance Army/ Movement claimed victory and established Yoweri K. Museveni as President, a series of armed rebel movements based in Northern Uganda began to contest what they regarded to be the NRM’s illegitimate hold on state power. The Holy Spirit Mobile Forces and their eventual successor, the Lord’s Resistance Army, claimed to operate under the dictates of powerful spirit forces that communicated through bodily possession. Both groups marshalled religious rhetoric

61

62

Part I: Framing Knowledge

experiences are of the contemporary world: they are mediated not just by the forces of empire, nor by tradition or its invention, but equally by local/global concerns and individual creative capacities. Scholarship invested in the thick descriptions of people and place is one kind of intervention that complicates debates about decolonisation in and about Acholi. In doing so, my aim is to counter the types of conversations about postcolonial justice that re-inscribe imperialist logics; the type of representations that efface the complexity and diversity of people’s relationships to religious institutions and to the global imaginaries of class, cosmopolitanism, modernity, and knowledge in which they are entwined. Romanticising or overstating some types of difference (for example, ‘traditional’ rituals) and occluding that which is unpalatable to liberal sensibilities (for example, Pentecostalism), I argue, is performed at the expense of actual postcolonial ‘locals’ like Lamunu and her family. Decolonising scholarship about religion and healing in Uganda does not then mean a search for/recreation of a singularly imagined authenticity. Acts to decolonise scholarship are those that foreground the practical task of proliferating Acholi and Ugandan voices in the academy and enabling colonised people to transform it from within. These acts address the material conditions that limit formal educational opportunities for Ugandans, and challenge the racist visa regimes that restrict the movement of Black bodies into the academic spaces of the metropole, but also engage with existing African scholarship with which we might disagree. In the absence of such collective action, the complicated lived experiences of people like Lamunu and her family are muted by the very act of this chapter, however well-­i ntentioned, that mediates colonised voices for a scholarly audience.

Religiosity in Acholi and the Metropole

The 2014 national census of Uganda offers a partial picture of the type of religious marketplace characteristic of postcolonial Africa. Thirty-nine per cent of census-takers in Uganda identified as Roman Catholic; 32 per cent as congregants of the Church of Uganda (part of the Anglican Communion); 13.6 per cent as Muslim; 11 per cent as born again (also called balokole in Luganda), Pentecostal, or Evangelical; and to morally justify armed conflict. See Heike Behrend, Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits: War in Northern Uganda, 1985–97 (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1999); Sverker Finnström, ‘Wars of the Past and Wars of the Present: The Lord’s Resistance Movement/Army in Uganda’, Africa 76.2 (2006), 200–220; and Christopher Dolan, Social Torture: The Case of Northern Uganda, 1986–2006 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009).

Spirits of Difference: Religion, Healing, and Decolonisation in Acholi

the remaining 4.4 per cent of respondents claimed one of eleven other recognised religions or none at all.6 According to the same data set, 0.1 per cent of Ugandans self-identify as adherents of ‘traditional religion’. The decline in traditional religious affiliation marks a tenfold decrease since 2002, and since that time the number of Christian Pentecostals or born again adherents has doubled.7 Even though the Uganda Bureau of Statistics does not disaggregate statistics on religious affiliation by region, Northern Uganda is a stronghold of the Catholic Church, with some estimates putting the number of Catholic-identified residents at 70 per cent of the population.8 This flat statistical picture belies the texture, temporality, enthusiasm, and ambivalence with which contemporary Ugandans understand and experience those aspects of life glossed by the term ‘religious’ – a term that carries enormous intellectual assumptions about the organisation of human and extra-human life, in particular the attempt to apply an ill-fitting Judeo-Christian template onto too broad a field. The conviction held by European colonisers was that in order to qualify as a ‘religion’ a set of practices must include a High God, a theology, cosmologies and doctrines, privatised and declarative belief, a metaphysical supernatural/natural distinction, and other qualities particular to post-Reformation Christianity.9 Christian missionaries either declared that Africans had no religion at all, or invented (intentionally or unintentionally) high creator gods when there were none. In encountering Acholi and other Nilotic languages, missionaries and ethnologists translated the diffuse category of spiritual force or being, jok, into ‘God’.10 As Pan-Africanism flourished in the mid-twentieth century, a number of African philosophers, theologians, and other intellectuals countered the suggestion that, outside of pockets of Eastern Christianity and Islam,11 no real Indigenous religious forms could be found on the 6 ‘The National Population and Housing Census 2014 – Main Report’ (Kampala: Uganda Bureau of Statistics, 2016), pp. 73. 7 Ibid., pp. 19. 8 Henni Alava, ‘Homosexuality, the Holy Family and a Failed Mass Wedding in Catholic Northern Uganda’, Critical African Studies 9.1 (2017), 32–51 (p. 36). 9 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Cf. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 10 Okot p’Bitek, Decolonizing African Religions: A Short History of African Religions in Western Scholarship (New York: Diasporic Africa Press, 2011); Godfrey Lienhardt, ‘“High Gods” among some Nilotic Peoples’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 28:1 (1997), 40–49. 11 No small part in this was the common (and still persistent) argument that Africa north of the Sahel is not ‘true’Africa, and that the last two millennia of Christianity in Egypt and Ethiopia, and the last twelve-hundred years of Sunni Islam on the Swahili coast, are somehow anomalous.

63

64

Part I: Framing Knowledge

continent.12 In turn, other scholars have noted that rituals, practices, and philosophies common to ‘traditional religion’ are in fact incommensurable with both colonial and postcolonial discourses on religion. For instance, anthropologists and philosophers have variously noted that norms born out of European intellectual categories, and cultural nationalist appropriations of them, lie at the core of the aforementioned religious delineations.13 And yet the concept of ‘African Traditional Religion’ holds steadfast in both political and intellectual imaginations in Uganda and elsewhere. At the same time, one should not place too much emphasis on the epistemological effects of imperial ambitions. David Chidester’s Empire of Religion offers a compelling historical study of how the comparative study of religion came to be; contending that the nineteenth-century production of social scientific knowledge about ‘religion’ was produced by Indigenous actors and colonial intermediaries as well as metropolitan scholars. This theory of triple mediation, supported by extensive evidence in the case of Zulu and British encounters in South Africa and Great Britain, suggests that anthropological attentions to the reification of religion have not given sufficient weight to the agency of Africans themselves in creating religious categories. ‘Under colonial conditions, religious categories were not simply discovered or purely invented by outside observers’, Chidester writes: ‘They emerged through complex interrelations, negotiations, and mediations between alien and indigenous intellectuals’.14 I would add that the work of culture is not only that of Indigenous elites, but of all people. There is no unified agreement on religion, even among ‘locals’. It is for all of these reasons that I make use of the word ‘religiosity’, not to refer to zealous or especially pious practices, but to encompass the ritual liturgies of spirit mediumship, divination, ancestor propitiation, clan ritual, and the like within the same category as Christianity 12 For this see e.g. John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (London: Heinemann, 1990 [1969]); E. Bolaji Idowu, African Traditional Religion: A Definition (London: SCM Press, 1973); p’Bitek, Decolonizing African Religions. 13 See e.g. Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); Rosalind Shaw, ‘The Invention of “African Traditional Religion”’, Religion 20 (1990), 339–53; Malcolm Ruel, Belief, Ritual and the Securing of Life: Reflexive Essays on a Bantu Religion (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Birgit Meyer, Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999); Matthew Engelke, A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Michael Lambek, ‘Provincializing God? Provocations from an Anthropology of Religion’, in Hent de Vries (ed.), Religion: Beyond a Concept (New York, Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 120–38. 14 David Chidester, Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 18.

Spirits of Difference: Religion, Healing, and Decolonisation in Acholi

and Islam – which are considered ‘religion proper’ in Acholi and exclusively referred to as dini (from the Arabic). This is certainly an artificial conflation, and one with which not all Acholi will readily agree. Asking whether spirit mediumship is medicine or religion, for example, is a question for which there can be no definitive answer. Nonetheless, the idea of ‘religiosity’ serves a practical purpose when it comes to understanding how Acholi people understand, interact with, and position themselves in relation to non-human or post-human entities such as God, spirits, ghosts, ancestors, and other disembodied forces. It is within this conceptual environment that Lamunu, her son Okot, her brother Patrick, and their relative Jennifer manoeuvre their lives. I first became acquainted with the family in 2013, when I started to regularly visit their modest restaurant in Gulu. Okot began tutoring me in the Acholi Luo language, and it was through our many conversations, visits, and interviews over the next year that I gleaned different aspects of their lives. Although these representations are necessarily partial, they offer insight into the intricate tapestry of religious lived experience in the postcolony. Below, I consider how their stories and approaches to religiosity and healing are linked to wider socio-­h istorical narratives in Acholi.

Lamunu: Healing through Roman Catholicism

Born shortly after Uganda gained its independence from Britain in 1962, Lamunu was birthed by a junior wife to a prominent rwot (chief) in a village in Lamwo. Her father had been a member of the King’s African Rifles (Keya, in Acholi), the multi-battalion regiment that took its recruits from across the British colonies of East Africa. As a veteran of the Second World War, in Lamunu’s estimation this placed him in the venerable position of being ‘a member of the British Empire’. She recalls his involvement in the institutional order of the Protectorate as a source of pride, but is equally pleased that he was summoned south by the postcolonial government to serve as a military instructor. Though it was his intelligence that distinguished him, it was eventually also his downfall. After Idi Amin took power in 1971 and began purging Acholi and Lango soldiers from the armed forces, Lamunu’s father was no longer esteemed by those in power. ‘Bright people’, Lamunu remembers being told, ‘can easily take over the government’. He was murdered on the orders of Amin, and his family was never able to recover his body so as to place among the bones of his ancestors. As the young daughter of a junior wife in a polygynous family and patrilineage, Lamunu found herself in a socially and economically precarious position. It was within a Roman Catholic education and attendant practice that she found hope. ‘I found I like religion because it can give you

65

66

Part I: Framing Knowledge

discipline in your ways of life’, she said, reflecting on how she excelled at the boarding school for girls she entered in the early 1980s. ‘It was a very good school. They taught the students to love each other, not to go for witchcraft, and that they should study hard. And that’s what I did’. That Lamunu found herself becoming religious at school is not surprising. The first Christian missions in Acholi made their most significant incursions into Acholi life in the domain of reading and writing. Even though kutoria (Arabic-speaking ivory and slave traders) had introduced Islam to Northern Uganda from the mid- to the late-­ nineteenth century, the Muslim influence did not approach the level of impact made by later British Anglican and Italian Catholic missions in Acholi. The new concept of religion (dini), as a discrete category of life, was first associated by Acholi not primarily as the domain of ‘belief in the supernatural’, but as the realm of books and economic opportunity. Keith Russell, a former Bishop of the Anglican Church of Uganda, assessed what enthusiasm there was for Christianity in Acholi in the first half of the twentieth century as a desire not for salvation, but for equal opportunity in the Empire.15 By 1903 the Church Missionary Society (CMS) had entered Buganda and Bunyoro, but not Acholi. Rwot Awich, the head of the royal Payira clan, summoned the CMS’s Reverend Lloyd to Acholi in order to teach him about Christianity through reading and writing. Lloyd complied by establishing a mission station (with a school) at Keyo, inviting each rwot to come with two of his sons.16 For these Acholi, the Indigenous rituals and practices that today might be classed as ‘religious’ – the propitiation of spirit forces, care for deceased ancestors, mediumship and divination, shrine construction and maintenance, animal sacrifice, and more – were not dini. There was no obvious incongruity between entering the ot kwan (house of reading) and the ot pa ajwaka (house of a spirit medium). The ot lega (house of prayer) was not understood by these new Bible-readers to exist in contradiction to the abila (the shrine). Though this briefly peaceful co-existence of ritual authorities did not last (a point to which I will return), one of several notable features of this process is that formal education became indelibly associated with Christian evangelism. This introduced a new practical discipline towards relations (or non-relations) with unseen forces (be they understood as spirits, gods, deities, demons, angels, ancestors, ghosts, witches, or more), but it did not eliminate non-Christian entities from the landscape. During the time Lamunu boarded at a Comboni-founded Roman Catholic school for girls, for instance, she would sometimes be J. Keith Russell, Men Without God? A Study of the Impact of the Christian Message in the North of Uganda (London: The Highway Press, 1966). 16 Reuben S. Anywar, ‘The Life of Rwot Iburaim Awich’, The Uganda Journal 12:1 (1948), 72–86 (p. 76). 15

Spirits of Difference: Religion, Healing, and Decolonisation in Acholi

woken in the night by other girls in the dorm who shouted that they were seeing ‘devils’. Even though her language choice was unambiguous (the English word ‘devils’), in Lamunu’s interpretation the empirical status of the entities was less certain. Lamunu would listen from her bunk bed as the headmistress and the teachers would come and try to calm the girls, insisting that they had what was called hysteria: problems of the imagination. Other girls were convinced the issue did not emanate from their minds, but were in reality tipu dano (the shadows, souls, or shades of dead people).17 What mattered less than the label was one’s actions, Lamunu argued. ‘Myself, I didn’t experience it’, she said of the disturbances. This was ‘because I was a very strong Catholic by that time, and most mornings and afternoons I prayed’. Though there were many possible paths for these girls to follow (the intervention of a physician, of an ajwaka, or of some other ritual specialist), in Lamunu’s opinion the only relief they felt was when their peers prayed over them. Like many Acholi children, past and present, Lamunu’s most stressful problem was not the question of which liturgical authority would direct her education, but who would pay for it. Her mother was unable to pay for the entirety of the school fees, a dilemma in part the result of the economic stresses of the 1980 to 1986 Bush War and its aftermath.18 Lamunu decided it was time to find a boyfriend who might help her financially, and she met a young cilil (rebel) soldier and soon married him. Though she quickly became pregnant and was unable to continue with her schooling, she remained committed to ensuring that their children would be educated. Tired of following her husband into the bush to cook for other rebels and fearing for their young family’s future, Lamunu convinced her husband to abandon the movement. While he waited for her signal, she successfully negotiated his safe passage out of the wilderness and into a position with the new government’s army. From the relative safety of Gulu’s 4th Division barracks, Lamunu began to take in the children of her relatives from across Acholi. Jennifer was one of these children. She was born in the late 1980s in what is now Amuru District, and as a young child was relocated, along with the rest of her village, to the Internally Displaced Person’s Camp 17 Throughout, I use the word ‘shadow’ or ‘spirit’ (rather than ‘soul’) to approximate the meaning of ‘tipu’. Though soul is an accepted translation, it is generally associated with a Christian understanding of the afterlife. 18 After the National Resistance Army (NRA)’s defeat of Tito Okello’s Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA) in January 1986, the NRA carried out reprisal attacks against ex-UNLA soldiers in Acholi: real and suspected cilil (rebels). As one of her brothers had been a UNLA soldier, these new government forces attacked Lamunu’s home in the village to loot and destroy farming equipment and other assets. The NRA soldiers killed those brothers that they found at home that day.

67

68

Part I: Framing Knowledge

at Amuru trading centre. Her father had three wives, one of whom was her biological mother and the sister of Lamunu’s husband (Okot’s father). Lamunu described him as abusive and wild; a drunkard who only paid attention to his favourite wife and her children. When the rebels attacked the camp around 1999, massacred an unknown number of residents, and abducted many of Jennifer’s age-mates to serve as soldiers and rebel wives, Lamunu intervened. She approached Jennifer’s parents and said, ‘look, your kids can’t live here. Let me take Jennifer and Agnes [her younger sister], and I’ll bring them to school in town. I might fail, but I’ll try’. Even when her husband suddenly passed away, Lamunu was unwavering in her decision. Jennifer and Agnes had not had the same educational opportunities as the ‘town kids’, but Lamunu worked hard to put them all the way through from Primary 1 to Senior 3. Lamunu praised Jennifer for being hard working, but she saw an independent streak in her that was problematic. When she was in S2, she took off one night and came home in the morning. ‘I was so angry’, Lamunu said, and when she demanded to know where she had been, Jennifer replied that she had been at all-night prayers. ‘Girls of today, the reason they get problems is that they refuse to listen to old people’, Lamunu complained. Though Okot and his siblings would continue further with their education, Jennifer’s parents were satisfied with the level she had reached and told her caretaker that the time had come for Jennifer to get a man, get married, and bring money for them. Lamunu fundamentally disagreed, but to her chagrin, Jennifer took up with a young teacher who was, in Lamunu’s estimation, a ‘pretend’ born again Christian. Jennifer moved with him to his village, despite Lamunu’s protests. ‘Were you studying to stay dumb in the village? To dig?’ she asked. ‘A student should not be having a “friend”!’ Though she wanted that man and his family to pay kasuru bet (bride wealth) or at least a fine for the loss of Jennifer from her household, Jennifer came back on her own within three days, having realised that the man and his family were fooling her into being their cook and cleaner. But Jennifer was not the only family member for whom Lamunu worried. In return for babysitting Okot, Lamunu was also sending her young sister, Monica, to the same Catholic secondary school where she had been educated. Monica complained of ghosts and demons attacking her at night in the school dormitory, and one day she had a heart attack and died. She immediately visited Lamunu and other family members as a ghost. The first encounter with the spectre put Lamunu in hospital, and she was counselled by her living siblings to be wary of the power of spirits. Lamunu reflected, ‘I don’t think she knew she was coming to kill me’. She followed their advice – the same as that she had given to her sister before her death – and devoted herself to prayer, making sure she was physically close to the Catholic Church at all times.

Spirits of Difference: Religion, Healing, and Decolonisation in Acholi

Okot: Healing through Acholi Ritual

Okot was not yet ten years old when the shade of his dead aunt sat next to him on his mother’s sofa. After his father had died, when she was still alive his aunt had been his primary caregiver, assisting Lamunu with childcare and housekeeping responsibilities at their small home in Gulu. As the war between the Government of Uganda and the Lakwena rebels (pl. Lukwena; later known as the Lord’s Resistance Army) raged in fits and starts, Lamunu took in the orphaned children of her brothers and other young relatives from the increasingly dangerous countryside. In order to keep the household afloat and the school fees paid for the eleven children, she engaged in whatever petty trade or business opportunities she could, and was rarely home. Okot and his aunt were thus especially close, and the apparition rattled him. But as he grew older, he was no longer satisfied to care for his dead family members solely through prayer. Before he was twenty, he had already taken part in the burials of a sister, his father, a brother, a step-mother, an aunt, and several other relatives.19 When Okot’s siblings and father had died during the war, it was impossible for their living relatives to transport their remains for a proper burial in the ancestral village in Amuru. Nonetheless, the family took care to arrange for a temporary burial place in town, and remained close to the corpses in the first days after death so that their tipu (shadows) did not wander too far and get lost. After the war, when it was finally possible to transport the bones home (a process known as dwogo cogo paco), during the disinterment the different family members were treated with some distinction relative to their ages and genders. Okot assisted the elderly men of the family to slaughter a female sheep for the female relatives, and a male goat with horns for the males. Along with sprinkles of alcohol, offerings of meat were made to the dead. This tic Acoli, or Acholi ritual work, was part of the ongoing practices taken to ensure the happy rest of the deceased, lest they return to haunt the living. Shortly after our first meeting, Okot’s paternal grandmother died. Though she was a well-respected lami yat (herbal healer), like her daughter-in-law she was a staunch Catholic, and she had refused to allow ritual sacrifices to be made at her burial. As her protégé in matters of healing, Okot was careful to respect this demand, and noted that 19 For reasons of space I cannot detail how kinship (and kinship terms) are reckoned in Acholi, but note that polygyny is common (Okot’s father had several wives, hence having a ‘step-mother’), relatedness is a broadly interpreted (biological relatedness is only part of kinship), and descent is traced through the patriline.

69

70

Part I: Framing Knowledge

transporting her body home to the village was simply respectful. In this aspect, matters of religion (but not ritual) were irrelevant. Before dini like Catholicism were part of Acholi society, people’s ritual practices and materials were focused on filial devotion to the dead and the maintenance of relationships with non-human spirit forces known as jok (pl. jogi). Clan elders, ritual specialists called ateke, and spirit mediums, healers, and diviners called ajwaka (pl. ajwaki) each claimed domains of authority over these activities. It was when the Anglican Church Missionary Society inadvertently interfered with clan ritual that the aforementioned relationship between missionaries and their new Acholi converts began to unravel. Rev. Lloyd and his comrades abandoned the Keyo Hill Mission (near present-day Gulu city) in 1908, citing issues with frequent lightning, as well as an uptick in Acholi hostility towards Europeans.20 While the effects of the political and economic encroachment of the British Empire should not be understated, according to Russell the newfound Acholi resistance also owed something to an ill-fated experiment with a phonograph and a cinematograph. Lloyd and the other missionaries gathered the people at the mission to listen to their own songs and watch a recording of their own dances. The crowd understood, instead, that Lloyd had captured the shadows of the people featured in the recordings, and that he would take the shadows back to Britain, and he would or had already killed them. Mako tipu, the act of capturing the shadow of another person, is a hostile attack that can be launched – and reversed – by an ajwaka. In the ensuing chaos of the cinematograph display, rwodi (chiefs) began to destroy books and forbid reading, while one man reportedly shot dead his own son (previously sent with pride to the mission school) rather than allow the ‘poison’ of Christian learning to continue in Acholi.21 The CMS did not return to Acholi until after the Lamogi Rebellion (1911–12), during which men like Okot’s paternal grandfather took up arms against the British Protectorate and were bitterly defeated.22 Thereafter, Anglicanism, along with Roman Catholicism, became firmly entrenched in Acholi. Anywar, ‘The Life of Rwot Iburaim Awich’, p. 77. Russell, Men Without God? pp. 23–24. 22 When the British Protectorate issued an ordinance requiring the registration of all firearms, it was unevenly applied across the Northern Province. The Lamogi clan and their neighbours took up arms against British officers stationed in the area when officers targeted them for a mass disarmament campaign but left other Acholi areas undisturbed. Already angered by policies that conscripted Acholi labour, the loss of firearms was considered untenable by the Lamogi. After a month of sporadic fighting, the British had killed nearly one hundred Lamogi fighters and taken over a thousand of them prisoner. Lamogi’s Rwot Onung was deposed and exiled. See A.B. Adimola, ‘The Lamogi Rebellion 1911–12’, The Uganda Journal 18.2 (1954), 166–77. 20 21

Spirits of Difference: Religion, Healing, and Decolonisation in Acholi

The fear of poison was not solely centred upon the threat of foreign knowledge. Pre-Christian understandings of jogi spirit beings held that they were neither ontologically good nor evil, but rather as capable of capriciousness as corporeal beings. As persons who have been chosen by spirits to mediate between material and immaterial realms, ajwaki harness the spirits’ power and embody their moral ambiguity. They have the power to heal and to kill and are consequently figures of suspicion and distrust as much as fascination and admiration.23 Once entrusted with the responsibility to administer trial by ordeal, today ajwaki may be contracted to kill or poison enemies as well as heal those who have been poisoned or bewitched. While many rites of jogi and ancestor propitiation were (and are) carried out by male elders, in the colonial era the frantic propagation of mostly female ajwaki threatened this ritual dominance throughout Northern Uganda.24 Foreign free jogi, untethered to geographic and clan localities, began infiltrating Acholi in tandem with the infiltration of Arab slave traders, British officers, British and Italian missionaries, and the increased national and international migration of Acholi people for military and labour service. These spirits of difference resulted in cults of affliction outside the traditional ritual orthodoxy, proliferating ajwaki that specialised in countering, domesticating, and harnessing the power of profound alterity. In this way, we may think of contemporary Acholi ajwaki as the embodiment of colonial knowledge – a source of both danger and potential – rather than the representatives of precolonial esoterism. Above all other desires, Okot is a seeker of knowledge of all sorts. Like his mother, his formal educational opportunities in childhood were limited by the material realities of wartime and by the premature death of his father. Lamunu nonetheless succeeded in paying his school fees through secondary school, and he registered at Gulu University to study economics. Like many Ugandan students, however, Okot has frequently had his academic hopes dashed by situations beyond his control: cancelled exams, unpaid and underpaid faculty and staff, bureaucratic delays, and related strikes. When Okot was accepted to an innovative new institute specialising in Pan-African thought, he was once again disappointed by term- and year-long delays: the deaths of faculty, the embezzlement of operating funds, and other unexplained Heike Behrend, ‘Power to Heal, Power to Kill: Spirit Possession and War in Northern Uganda (1986–1994)’, in Heike Behrend and Ute Luig (eds), Spirit Possession: Modernity and Power in Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), pp. 20–33. 24 Okot p’Bitek, Religion of the Central Luo (Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1971), pp. 106–19; Behrend, Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits; Aidan Southall, ‘Spirit Possession and Mediumship among the Alur’, in John Beattie and John Middleton (eds), Spirit Mediumship and Society in Africa (London: Routledge, 1969), pp. 232–73. 23

71

72

Part I: Framing Knowledge

interruptions. Young Ugandans are inundated with public messaging that they must create their own opportunities and embrace neoliberal entrepreneurialism. Emulating the familiar logic of piecemeal NGO funding, Okot has funded his own knowledge acquisition and production by applying for grants to support his own initiatives on Indigenous plant knowledge, and by working as a research assistant and interpreter to a steady stream of researchers in the region. It is therefore for a variety of reasons that Okot has happily been paid to accompany me on repeated visits to various ajwaki in Gulu, and to visits with medical and religious specialists of many stripes. Meeting on a day in July 2019 at the new central market near his mother’s restaurant, Okot was as eager as I to visit the booths filled with traditional yat (medicine) and gagi (divination objects used by ajwaki). He asked as many questions as I did, trying to remember all the knowledge his grandmother had imparted to him before she died. Though Okot and Lamunu distinguish between ajwaki and herbalists like Okot’s grandmother, the roles are often conflated in English. When we returned from the market, this ambiguity was on full display when Lamunu asked, concerned, if I ‘believe in witchcraft’. Her concern was not just intellectual, but rooted in her experiences with the destructive force of her own brother’s prophetic healing.

Patrick: Healing through New Prophetic Power

Patrick was equally impacted by their father’s violent death in the early 1970s. By virtue of his gender, his educational opportunities were somewhat more expansive than Lamunu’s, and an uncle quickly sponsored his attendance at school in a district that neighboured Kampala. He would not take long in the classroom, however. Where there were devils at Lamunu’s school, Patrick dreamed of being ‘entered by an angel’ who granted him the power of prophecy and healing. When he began to tell people that God’s judgement was imminent, rumours spread that he was suffering from madness, and he was sent back to Lamwo. His home people took him to someone Patrick described as a ‘witch doctor’. She beat her drums and tried many other things to chase the spirit from his body, yet she was ‘defeated’ by the spirit’s power. The spirit spoke a warning to the witch doctor: if you try to bother me again, you will die. Patrick ran away to Kitgum’s Abayo hills, a place he describes as having descended directly from Heaven. But he was pursued by family members who tied him up and forcibly returned him to the witch doctor. He kicked her drum until it made an audible ‘crack’ and five days later, she died. Finally accepting his power – or the power that his body was mediating – his family left him free to roam in the wilderness. After a year, he recalls, he accompanied the Bishop of Gulu

Spirits of Difference: Religion, Healing, and Decolonisation in Acholi

to the Vatican and had a private meeting with the Pope, who sent him back to Uganda with blessed water. By the early 1980s, Patrick claims, he began to actively heal people with the papally blessed water as well as blessed water and pebbles from the Abayo hills. People were, and are, ignoring the good word of God, he says, and witch doctors only care about money now. But God heard the tears of widows and orphans, sent the spirit, and that was how Patrick was able to heal them. He would treat infertile women with holy water and rocks, and they would produce children. He would treat the mentally disturbed with holy water and rocks, and they would regain mental clarity. He would treat people haunted by cen (the ghosts of those who were killed violently) with holy water and rocks, and they would be at peace. The 1980s were a time of violent upheaval throughout Uganda, but this upheaval did not end at the close of the 1980–86 Bush War. Cen became endemic as demobilised Acholi soldiers returned north from the battlefields of Luweero, polluted by the ritually impure deaths with which they were connected.25 Coinciding with the onset of the HIV/AIDS crisis, in the immediate post-civil war era the body politic was beset by an uptick in suspected sorcery, rampant and contagious ghostly vengeance, and renewed violence. Perceived as ‘internal strangers’ in their home Acholi communities, veterans were blamed for the AIDS epidemic as well as for the NRA’s reprisals, but these youthful soldiers refused to acquiesce to the traditional authority of elders and allow themselves to be ritually cleansed.26 Acholi was in cosmological crisis. Lakwena, a spirit who possessed the body of a woman called Alice Auma, offered a solution to the crisis.27 Alice was a fishmonger from Kitgum who had proved unable to bear children, which severely limited her social standing and economic security. Though raised in the (Anglican) Church of Uganda, she converted to Catholicism shortly before becoming possessed, and found new language and purpose in this turn of events. This new spirit, and those who followed him, distinguished Cen does not merely affect persons who directly participate in killing. Vengeful ghosts attack anyone who might witness a killing or otherwise ‘bad’ death, or fail to take proper care of human remains. Most relevantly, however, cen is inheritable, and will assault the children and grandchildren of the person who first contracted it. Cen causes sickness, frightening visions, extensive misfortune, madness, and death. For more information see Letha Victor, ‘Ghostly Vengeance: Spiritual Pollution, Time, and Other Uncertainties in Acholi’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 2018). 26 Behrend, Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits. 27 The word ‘lakwena’ literally means ‘messenger’ in Acholi Luo. In Luo versions of the Bible, ‘lakwena’ is the term used for either apostles or the being called an ‘angel’ in English. 25

73

74

Part I: Framing Knowledge

himself from amoral free jogi and self-identified as a tipu maleng: a pure, clean, or holy shadow (soul/spirit/ghost). The Acholi Luo translation of the Christian Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit is Tipu Maleng, and this language was adopted by mediums who also referred to themselves as prophets rather than ajwaki. Lakwena was a deceased Italian soldier and though he initially demanded that Alice use her powers to heal, he eventually directed her to lead an army. The intent was to capture state power in Kampala and usher in Heaven on Earth: a new Acholi society; Christian, pure, and free of witchcraft and cen. Alice promised the return of Jesus Christ, and successfully recruited disaffected Acholi soldiers into the Holy Spirit Mobile Forces (HSMF), along with a hierarchy of 140,000 other spirits from at home and abroad who spoke exclusively through her.28 Some spirits headed military operations while others were responsible for healing the wounded and ill, and the living soldiers were required to follow the Christian behavioural dictates of Lakwena lest they be punished in battle. Armed with magical stones for grenades and anointed with shea oil, the soldiers were also assisted by certain animals (especially snakes), insects, bodies of water, mountains, and rocks.29 They were defeated by the National Resistance Army near Jinja in 1987, where Lakwena abandoned Alice. She died in 2007, exiled in Kenya. Alice’s father, Severino Lukoya, was a former catechist in the Church of Uganda. Though he claimed to have been told directly by God that one of his children had been chosen to cleanse Acholi of sin, and accompanied Alice to the bush while she communed with all manner of creation, Lakwena did not permit him to join the HSMF. Nonetheless, Severino claimed to host Lakwena and several other high-ranking spirits after Alice’s defeat, and from Kitgum he established ritual centres for prayer, healing, and anti-witchcraft and anti-ajwaka purification. 30 At the same time, a young man called Joseph Kony also claimed to be host to Lakwena. Like Alice, Severino, and his followers, Kony was host not only to local spirits and to Christian ones, but foreign and Islamic spirits as well. His origin story varies, but indelibly contains familiar elements: a parent who experienced an other-worldly encounter about him, spirit possession that caused him to be ill in childhood, his eventual empowerment by those spiritual powers, material connections to major hills, rocks, and water sources, and the ability to heal. 31 Where Alice’s military activities were short-lived, however, what eventually Behrend, ‘Power to Heal, Power to Kill’, p. 25. Behrend, Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits. 30 Behrend, ibid. 31 Letha Victor, ‘Death Does Not Rot: Women of the Lord’s Resistance Army’ (unpublished master’s thesis, McGill University, 2011), pp. 64–69. 28 29

Spirits of Difference: Religion, Healing, and Decolonisation in Acholi

became Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) engaged in a conflict in Northern Uganda that lasted over twenty years and resulted in unprecedented levels of human suffering in the north and across Uganda’s northern borders. Patrick’s fantastical story, although truncated above, shares elements with the spiritual biographies of Alice Auma, her father Severino Lukoya, and Joseph Kony that point to ongoing social concerns about the relationship between religious ethics and the alleviation – or aggravation – of human suffering. Though Patrick is coy about his role in the LRA, his family members report that he served as a catechist, and that he was eventually granted legal amnesty upon his return to civilian life. By the time Patrick and I met in February of 2014, he was heavily involved as a healer-prophet in Severino Lukoya’s New Jerusalem Tabernacle Ministries in Gulu, sometimes called Meltar. By now a nonagenarian, Severino employs both the Bible and the Qu’ran in the worship and healing services of Meltar. He has been arrested multiple times over the last dozen years for holding illegal prayers or constructing illegal shrines, and several people have died after Meltar’s spiritual healing interventions. Three months after we first met, Aswa regional police and the Gulu District local government worked together to deregister the church after a woman died during spiritual healing at a Meltar worship centre. Severino and Patrick were steadfast, and argued that the accusations that they were fomenting rebellion or killing people were false, based on jealousy and a refusal to accept the word of God. ‘Uganda’s motto is “For God and My Country”, but Ugandan leaders have long forgotten about God’, Severino told Okot shortly after his arrest. He continued: The end has come in Acholiland; the beginning also started in Acholiland. God first stepped on Earth in Acholiland. God has become human now. Two messengers of God also stepped down on Earth from heaven in Acholiland. These messengers were Alice Lakwena (The Eye Opener) and Joseph Kony (The Dust Cleaner).

Though his words were cryptic, Severino has at times claimed to be God, and he was perhaps making this divine claim once more. Irrespective of this point, Severino went on to argue that it is not Lakwena who has caused widespread human suffering in Acholi, but his imperfect human soldiers who have preferred to shed blood rather than pray. They did not obey the Ten Commandments, he said, and so the Holy Spirit abandoned them. God is punishing people for their sins through Joseph Kony, cleaning away the ‘dust’ of witchcraft and sin. 32 ‘Can 32 ‘Society must read Matthew 24’, Severino added. In this book of the Christian gospel, Jesus predicts the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and

75

76

Part I: Framing Knowledge

a spirit be arrested?’ Severino asked of Kony. ‘America and the ICC should rethink their strategy’. 33 The district officials who have tried to take away Severino’s operating certificates are born again Christians who, in his telling, do not understand the word of God. Despite her suspicion of some born again Christians, however, Lamunu quarrelled with her brother and sided with the position of the District. ‘Those of Severino are bad people’, she told me in in 2019. ‘Those are the people who were killing people in the war. Their religion is isolating people’. She refused to be around Patrick until he gave up his healing with Meltar, and though Lamunu reports he has done so, he does not socialise with the family.

Decolonial Paradox, Anticolonial Irony

At the time of writing, Jennifer has returned to her paternal village in Amuru with, to the chagrin of Lamunu, a new-born baby with no clear father. No one in the family had a satisfactory solution to her earlier illness – whether it was organic, psychological, or metaphysical – and Jennifer has continued in her devotion to born again Christianity as her demons have returned episodically. None of them is quite sure ‘how will we recognise a good doctor when we see one?’ Perhaps decolonising knowledge in Acholi is not about finding an answer to that question, but acknowledging the lived experiences behind it. In the stories of Lamunu, Okot, Patrick, Jennifer, and more, I have shown that religiosity is a nexus through which the illnesses and wounds that affect individual bodies, and the body politic, might be healed. But it is also a weapon used to create new wounds, and religiosity is thus inherently a category of contention. In these stories, the goal of fulfilment comes not from a retreat into imagined tradition, but in ongoing engagements with the world that push the boundaries of those individual body-selves and the body politic. That not all beings have bodies, and that some bodies contain multitudes, are facts taken for granted in Acholi. At the same time, the desire for belonging extends beyond narrow ethnic boundaries and into the promise of Ugandan citizenship, the hope of the borderless body of Christ, and the possibilities engendered by an educated and cosmopolitan body politic. Recognising that this work of becoming might be in conflict with the secular postcodescribes the apocalyptic tribulation that will befall humanity before the ultimate triumph of the Kingdom of God. 33 The International Criminal Court conducted its first investigations in Northern Uganda and issued warrants for the arrests of Joseph Kony and four other LRA commanders. The United States is not a signatory to the ICC’s Rome Statute, but it has previously sent troops to search for Kony in South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Spirits of Difference: Religion, Healing, and Decolonisation in Acholi

lonial politics of the academy is one part of the massive task of decolonising knowledge about Ugandans. But it is equally true that the positivist orientations favoured in African social science and humanities scholarship are anathema to the hegemonic research forms of the Global North. That an Acholi scholar should question a Canadian one about whether or not witch doctors are charlatans had a room full of metropolitan academics tut in horror. Of Zimbabwean scholarship, Diana Jeater writes that resource inequities alone do not account for the marginalised status of African voices about Africa, but that it is the hegemonic ‘research standards’ of the metropole that more insidiously (and intentionally) mute African scholarship. Jeater provokes: ‘“postcolonized” knowledge is not necessarily “not-neo-colonial” knowledge’. 34 In the field of religion, this is why it is useful to say that there is no such thing as a singular cosmology in Acholi. To characterise the complex, fluid, and vibrant experiences and attitudes of contemporary Acholi as either ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’, ‘Indigenous’ or ‘colonised’ is to traffic in ironic and ultimately harmful essentialisms. They are ironic because they are often wielded by persons from the metropole (broadly speaking) who are engaged in globalised anticolonial projects that are blind to emplaced particularities. These particularities include the presence of African-educated scholars who value, and produce, the type of positivist social science not uncommonly understood by metropolitan scholars to be culturally insensitive and epistemologically narrow. They are harmful because they deny Acholi people the texture and depth of their full humanity, contradictions and all. A decolonisation project that aims to restore the authenticity of Acholi ‘culture’ and expunge the traces of the coloniser is thus not only an impossibility, it is a neocolonial paradox. In this spirit of difference, I thus conclude with the words of Gulu’s own Okot p’Bitek. His words are possessed by oree, a rhetorical quality in Acholi that engenders playful ironies and incites boisterous reaction. He asks: But will the African deities survive the revolutions in science and philosophy which have killed the Christian God? I doubt it. Christianity has declined because the Christian God used to fill gaps in science, or deal with life at the point at which things got beyond human explanation or control. This has now been dismissed as intellectual laziness or superstition. The Christian God has become intellectually superfluous and, moreover, the metaphysical statements about him do not make sense to modern man. 35

34 Diana Jeater, ‘Academic Standards or Academic Imperialism? Zimbabwean perceptions of hegemonic power in the global construction of knowledge’, African Studies Review 61.2 (2018), 8–27 (p. 25). 35 p’Bitek, Decolonizing African Religions, pp. 53.

77

4 Contested Freedoms: Human Rights, Decolonisation, and Political Agency in Postcolonial Uganda LYDIA BOYD

Several recent influential histories of human rights have argued that rights-based humanitarian practice experienced what might be characterised as a ‘global turn’ in the late twentieth century. Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia and Randall Williams’s The Divided World forward the argument that human rights transformed in recent decades into a distinctly internationalist force, one that operates beyond, and is legitimated by actors external to, the state.1 These authors argue that human rights are in the present period distinguished as a movement that stands above and as a counterpoint to the rights of states, and which mobilises and operates at the extra-state realm. Randall Williams writes in The Divided World that there is an ‘oppositional relation between two major postwar political forms, human rights and decolonization’. 2 Far from a tool of anticolonial struggle, these Western scholars advance that human rights has functioned as something else, an idea that has worked to strengthen forms of neo-imperial power, especially by aligning with neoliberal projects of market expansion that have emphasised individual rights over collective self-­determination, and exacerbated global inequality. This chapter reconsiders this reading of modern human rights history, highlighting the sometimes contradictory relationship of human rights to state power in Uganda. More than simply the purview of transnational, extra-state actors, rights work and rights language have featured prominently at different moments in Uganda’s postcolonial history. Notably, this chapter traces the ways Ugandans have utilised human rights discourse, created and deployed legal rights-based frameworks, and used human rights as a tool with which to imagine new kinds of political relationships and forms of state and civil society 1 Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in Histories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Randall Williams, The Divided World: Human Rights and Its Violence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 2 Williams, The Divided World, xxi.

Human Rights, Decolonisation, and Political Agency in Postcolonial Uganda

power. By tracing the ways human rights has emerged as an idea and a practice from the 1960s onwards, this chapter seeks to re-evaluate the kinds of political agency that rights-based models provide, and the ways rights-based political projects have shaped, and been shaped by, forces of decolonisation as well as by Ugandan forms of political agency. These have been projects that have used rights as tools of state building, and to forward arguments about what a just state and moral citizen should be. African activists, intellectuals, and politicians have been central to these projects, working to redefine the ways rights discourse can assert moral relations between citizens, and between the state and its subjects. The purpose of this chapter, then, is twofold. First, it is to examine how rights-based arguments and practices in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have been a key part of African statecraft: a prominent tool used by both activists and state politicians to debate the terms of citizenship and good governance in the postcolonial era. If the dominant narrative within human rights history has been that the practice of human rights in the late twentieth century plays out in a largely apolitical, extra-state realm, dominated by the ascendant forces of transnational governmentality, this chapter seeks to reassess this view, and to understand the diverse ways that rights discourse shapes political subjectivity, agency, and statecraft itself. 3 Secondly this chapter seeks to better understand the ways that African actors, long portrayed as the passive recipients of human rights work, have and continue to play key roles in shaping the idea of human rights. In this sense this chapter takes up the topic of decolonisation as more than a single moment marked by newfound political sovereignty, but rather as an ideological process whereby Ugandans grapple with issues of identity, subjectivity, and the moral questions surrounding assessments of good governance. Debates over human rights and its applications are an important component of these struggles. Rights-based projects have been a tool of decolonisation because they have been deployed by Ugandans to make diverse arguments about the forms of political power considered just and desirable. These Ugandan arguments complicate a view that characterises human rights as part of a straightforward project of Western liberalism, one that situates egalitarianism and personal ‘freedom’ as cornerstones of a moral democratic nation-state.4 The following exploration of Ugandan rights discourse 3 For recent histories of human rights that foreground its transnational nature see: Williams, The Divided World; Moyn, The Last Utopia; and StefanLudwig Hoffman, ‘Human Rights and History’, Past & Present 232 (2016), 279–310. 4 For a comparative perspective in Tanzania see Emma Hunter, ‘Languages of Freedom in Decolonising Africa’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 27 (2017), 253–69 (p. 254).

79

80

Part I: Framing Knowledge

exposes how the work of decolonisation is not simply an action in the negative – the casting off of colonial rule – but an active, positive effort to make and imagine new forms of political authority. More than the replication of a Western discourse that posits the moral good produced through the pursuit of equality and freedom, rights debates in postcolonial Uganda have exposed a more pluralistic set of ideals – ones that hinge on the moral value of hierarchy, difference, and obligation, in addition to individual freedom – to debate the terms of good governance. 5 Human rights have thus been an important aspect of what ‘decolonisation’ has been and how it has happened: ‘rights’ and their meaning and application are at the centre of the ways Ugandans, in different ways and at different moments, have debated citizenship. In this chapter I explore three such moments of debate: the publication of ‘The Common Man’s Charter’ in 1969, in which Milton Obote sought to outline his party’s political philosophy during a period of political upheaval; the ratification of Uganda’s third constitution in the 1990s under President Yoweri Museveni, which inscribed new frameworks for gender-based rights; and the present-day claims made by women’s rights and reproductive rights activists about the ‘right to health’, using this as a platform with which to resist the increasingly autocratic nature of the Museveni regime. These three examples are chosen not because they provide a necessarily comprehensive or complete picture of rights-based debates in postcolonial Uganda, but because they are illustrative of the diverse ways that rights discourse and practice have entered into the political and social realm in Uganda in the latter half of the twentieth century. They have also been chosen because they help demonstrate the ways that rights-talk has evolved over time in Uganda, taken up by different kinds of actors to make a range of arguments about the state and its obligations and ideal forms. Human rights is not a static tool, nor is it monolithic in its form and political application. These three examples offer snapshots of particular historical moments, helping to provide a sense of how human rights has unfolded at the state level in Uganda, but also in response to changes in global governance and in reference to the rise of an expansive international human rights apparatus from the 1970s onwards. 5 These were questions that concerned the rights of men relative to women, of families towards children, and the rights of patriarchs to control the labour that ran the colonial economy. See, for instance, Carol Summer, ‘Whips and Women: Forcing Change in Eastern Uganda during the 1920s’, paper presented at the ‘Development and Change in East Africa’ seminar, University of Nairobi, Kenya, July 2000, p. 7; Derek R. Petersen, Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent, c. 1935–1972 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 281.

Human Rights, Decolonisation, and Political Agency in Postcolonial Uganda

Pan-Africanist and Anti-Feudalist: Obote’s 1969 Common Man’s Charter

In October of 1969, President Milton Obote signed into law a document titled ‘The Common Man’s Charter’, which had first been introduced at a 1968 conference of his Uganda People’s Congress party.6 This was a period of political upheaval and transition in Uganda. In 1966 Obote had suspended Uganda’s first constitution, ratified in 1962 following independence from Britain, and soon after had forced Kabaka Muteesa from the presidency and denounced the federal style of government which had given the powerful south-central region of Buganda a degree of autonomy within the country. The UPC had, up until this point, little ideological coherence. First supporting and then opposing an alliance with the Buganda-centric Kabaka Yekka party, the political machinations of Obote seemed shaped mostly by a desire to secure political power. But The Common Man’s Charter was clearly an effort to assert a political ideology that would be associated with Obote and the UPC more broadly. Scholars have typically described the Charter, and UPC’s ‘Move to the Left’ agenda of which the Charter was a part, as socialist, echoing the political projects of Obote’s contemporaries in other parts of the continent, perhaps most notably Julius Nyerere in neighbouring Tanzania. But perhaps more than anything else, the Charter reveals an explicit effort to apply what was increasingly a global language of rights and ‘equality’ to a distinctly African political debate, on terms that were neither Western nor internationalist, but specifically Ugandan. The first half of the document focuses on establishing the superiority of a republican form of democracy over what is termed ‘feudalism’, or what in practice had been a federal style of government that had provided for regional autonomy and which had bolstered the political influence of the Baganda in the years after independence. Obote echoes the rights-centric language of the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and its precursors in the delineation of human and civil rights, the American Bill of Rights and French Rights of Man, to outline a particular vision for democratic rule: Uganda is now a Republic. We hold it as the inalienable right of the people that they must be masters of their own destiny and not servants of this or that man; that they must, as citizens of an Independent Republic, express their views as freely as possible within the

6 Tertit Aasland, ‘On the Move to the Left in Uganda 1969–1971: The Common Man’s Charter Dissemination and Attitude’, Research Report No. 26, The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1974, p. 9.

81

82

Part I: Framing Knowledge

laws of their country, made, not in separate Parliaments,7 but in one Parliament in which the people as a whole have an equal say through their representatives. 8

In other sections, the document lists the aims of the party, which include protecting citizens against discrimination based on ‘race, colour, sect, or religion’, to provide for ‘freedom of consciousness, of expression’ and to provide for the ‘life, liberty and security of the person’.9 Rights discourse, which had been taken up in the 1940s and 1950s by social and political movements in Africa and Asia to fight colonial rule, is here deployed in an effort at building the postcolonial state: what kind of government shall ensure our rights and freedoms, and what form will these rights take?10 In this sense, The Common Man’s Charter complicates recent readings of global human rights history that posit that the 1960s and 1970s were decades of transition when an extra-state internationalist human rights apparatus began to take shape with the founding of NGOs like Amnesty International, an organisation that took decidedly apolitical,

7 The reference to multiple parliaments is a targeted criticism of Buganda’s special status within independent Uganda until 1966, a status which gave considerable autonomy and political authority to Buganda’s own parliament (the Lukiiko) which had been authorised to appoint Ganda representatives to the national parliament rather than allow for their direct election by citizens. 8 J.H. Mittelman, Ideology and Politics in Uganda: From Obote to Amin (London: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 274. The entire text of The Common Man’s Charter is reprinted in Mittelman, pp. 271–83. 9 Mittelman, Ideology and Politics in Uganda, p. 272. It should be noted that, despite the language of the Charter, Obote was responsible for fostering ethnic division as much as anyone else. There is some irony in the fact that this document, so democratic in theme and focused on values that celebrated the equality of social sects and races, was introduced during the last years before Idi Amin ousted Obote from power, years characterised by state violence and the arrest and extra-judicial killing of political opponents, especially those associated with the Ganda ethnic group. 10 This application of human rights discourse to the problems associated with the struggle for independence was seen in the language of Obote’s contemporaries in Asia and Africa. Rights discourse was a central, though often overlooked, aspect of the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia, a meeting that was foundational to the coalescence of the postcolonial world as a political entity, and where human rights was a key part of debates over the nature of sovereignty and freedom from foreign domination. Roland Burke, ‘“The Compelling Dialogue of Freedom”: Human Rights at the Bandung Conference’, Human Rights Quarterly 28 (2006), 947–65. See also Meredith Terretta, ‘From Below and to the Left? Human Rights and Liberation Politics in Africa’s Postcolonial Age’, Journal of World History 24 (2013), 389–416; Gene Zubovich, ‘For Human Rights Abroad, Against Jim Crow at Home: The Political Mobilization of American Ecumenical Protestants in the World War II Era’, Journal of American History 105 (2018), 267–90.

Human Rights, Decolonisation, and Political Agency in Postcolonial Uganda

and even expressly imperialistic, stances towards movements for decolonisation.11 The 1960s and 1970s saw the increasing influence of a global non-governmental realm, largely funded by Western political powers, that applied rights-based language to a moral project focused less on issues of state building and collective justice, and more on issues of individual liberty. And yet, The Common Man’s Charter makes clear that while the rise of a global human rights apparatus may have taken shape during these years, rights discourse also continued to provide an important tool for African politicians and intellectuals to grapple with questions of sovereignty and governance. Notably, the language of The Common Man’s Charter reveals an effort to wrest rights discourse away from a predominately Western plane, and to assert it in an African context. This is especially seen in the adoption of the Swahili word ‘Uhuru’ to describe freedom. Section 7 of the Charter states, ‘Republicanism in Uganda, just like the political independence of Uganda, is now a reality, but the demand and struggle for Uhuru has no end. This is part of life and part of the inalienable right of man’.12 The repeated use of the Uhuru in the document – a term echoed in the work of other independence-era African politicians – signalled a broader intellectual effort to imagine the terms of both political independence and the scope of a new African internationalism as something other than the reproduction of Western political discourse.13 The Charter, and the Move to the Left of which it was a part, were, by Obote’s own assessment, ‘Uganda’s contribution to the “African revolution”’.14 In English language newspaper coverage during the week of the Charter’s introduction, which coincided with Uganda’s seventh anniversary of independence, the term ‘Uhuru’ was used often to stand for ‘independence’ itself, and was deployed in defence of the Charter’s arguments for economic solidarity. One headline blared ‘Ugandans control Uganda, that’s what Uhuru means’, as the author argued in support of Obote’s emphasis on an economy ‘for all’ and not the few.15 In a letter to the editor in the weeks following the Charter’s introduction, a writer suggests that true ‘equality’ will only come from forging a new path, independent of both Western capitalist and communist powers, and in line with Obote’s ‘move to the left’.16 Williams, The Divided World. Mittleman, Ideology and Politics in Uganda, p. 273. 13 Harri Englund, Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 2. 14 Mittelman, Ideology and Politics in Uganda, 120. 15 Uganda Argus, 11 October 1969, p. 1. See also Uganda Argus headline: ‘Uhuru events begin today’, 3 October 1969, p. 1. 16 Uganda Argus, 24 October, 1969, p. 4, Letter signed Don Joseph Matangimama. 11

12

83

84

Part I: Framing Knowledge

In his 1974 study of Obote’s Move to the Left campaign, the political scientist Tertit Aasland reinforces the idea that Obote viewed The Common Man’s Charter as an effort to forward his own intellectual philosophy of governance, a position that explicitly broke away from the competing global spheres of communist and capitalist influence. He quotes Obote rebutting claims that the Move to the Left was a Marxist or Communist project: ‘Socialism in Peking was different from socialism in Moscow. The type of socialism Uganda wanted did not have a “head office” in Africa or outside it. The head office of Uganda socialism was in the UPC headquarters’.17 In no uncertain terms, Obote sought to claim authorship of his ideology and position it as beholden to no other sphere of political influence. Obote’s Charter reflects a purposeful effort to claim and refashion rights-talk for the postcolonial Ugandan state. Like the late colonial intellectuals and politicians whom Jon Earle has studied, the early independence period was marked by political discourse that sought to assert familiarity with both Western political norms that dominated the international realm as well as local models for political authority. As Earle writes of the decades preceding the Charter’s introduction, ‘to engineer social legitimacy in Buganda’s colonial kingdom, it was necessary for intellectuals to demonstrate the skill to read and adapt global intellectual histories alongside vernacular historiographies and precolonial traditions of power’.18 In the Charter we see a similar project taken up by Obote, who moves freely between an emerging Pan-­ Africanist-socialist discourse and a Western human rights framework. In the end, Obote’s political project had only scant relation to the state’s actions on the ground during the late 1960s. The document was introduced during a period of what Cohen and Parson call ‘political “de-compression” or immobilism’ in Uganda.19 Between 1966, the year of UPC’s ‘revolution’, when Obote’s party sent Kabaka Muteesa into exile, and 1970, the final year of Obote’s first term in power, the state sought to undermine democratic rule and stifle political participation in the country. This was achieved in part through the detention of political opponents and the introduction of the army into the political arena. 20 The Common Man’s Charter was met with cynicism by many Ugandans and was likely ignored by many others who lacked access to the document, or the means to read or understand it due to its publication in Aasland, ‘On the Move to the Left in Uganda’, 42. Jonathon L. Earle, Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 37. 19 D.L. Cohen and J. Parson, ‘The Uganda Peoples Congress Branch and Constituency Elections of 1970’, Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies, 11(1973), 46–66 (p. 48). 20 Irving G. Gershenberg, ‘Slouching towards Socialism: Obote’s Uganda’, African Studies Review 15 (1972), 79–9, (p. 94). 17

18

Human Rights, Decolonisation, and Political Agency in Postcolonial Uganda

English.21 Nonetheless, as a document outlining a leader’s political philosophy, The Common Man’s Charter reveals the way that rights discourse operated beyond a strictly apolitical humanitarian realm in the late 1960s and 1970s. It became a tool with which to think and imagine new possibilities for African statehood, a set of ideals that drew from and transformed existing models for rights-based political agency. The end of Obote’s first term as president was marked by the rise to power of Idi Amin.22 While the 1970s in Uganda are best known for the brutality of Amin’s military rule and the economic instability his policies engendered, this decade was also marked by the rise of international institutions devoted to human rights practice, and the expanding importance of such institutions on the continent. In fact, in 1979, as Amin was forced from power by the Tanzanian army, Julius Nyerere justified his country’s intervention on the grounds of Amin’s dismal human rights record.23 That same year the Organization of African Unity (OAU) began drafting the African Charter on People’s and Human Rights. The Charter contributed to a growing internationalist framework that emphasised human rights as a tool for protecting individual freedoms from the unjust abuse of state powers. By the late 1980s and early 1990s a number of African states – including Uganda, as well as Namibia and South Africa – included the language of human rights in new constitutions being written during this period. As I discuss in the next two sections, the adoption of the language of human rights was not necessarily a wholesale embrace of the internationalist human rights framework during this period. Rather human rights became an increasingly important term that helped shape the debate over the nature of good governance and the obligations of citizenship among Ugandans from the 1980s onwards. Aasland, ‘On the Move to the Left in Uganda’, pp. 18–19. Aasland’s paper provides a useful contemporaneous study of the circulation of The Common Man’s Charter among the Ugandan population, tracking its print circulation and media coverage, and providing a window onto the ways the general population received the document. While the debates over the Charter were reported on by English language publications like the Uganda Argus, Aasland notes that media coverage of the Charter was likely strikingly uneven across the country. The Charter was translated into six vernacular languages, but circulation of these printed copies was limited. Additionally, radio coverage (the medium most likely to reach rural audiences) was not universal in the country in 1970, and television even less so. His study highlights the importance of understanding the reach of political discourses like Uhuru or human rights, and, potentially, the variable impact and meaning attributed to rights discourse, particularly between rural and urban populations. 22 Obote again served as President of Uganda from 1980 to 1985. 23 Olusola Ojo and Amadu Sesay, ‘The O.A.U. and Human Rights: Prospects for the 1980s and Beyond’, Human Rights Quarterly 8 (1986), 89–103 (p. 93). 21

85

86

Part I: Framing Knowledge

The 1995 Constitution and the Ugandan Women’s Rights Movement

If the late 1960s was a period that saw the contraction of civil society and the repression of democratic participation in Uganda, the 1990s was a period of new opportunities for political engagement. Yoweri Museveni’s successful civil war had come to a conclusion in 1986 when his army seized control of Kampala. In the years following, there was an explicit effort to reimagine the political sphere and the tools of governance, a project that was probably best encapsulated by the National Resistance Movement’s (NRM) support of a new national constitution, which was adopted in 1995 after a six-year process of negotiation and debate. Museveni’s NRM, like the UPC before it, adopted a political stance that used broadly democratic and individual rights-based language to argue for the political transformations it promised: ‘The NRM believes that it is the inalienable right of all peoples to determine the manner of that government … Constitutions imposed on the people by guise, wile or force cannot be the basis of stable and peaceful governance of men’.24 The debates leading up to and following the drafting of the 1995 Constitution are notable for revealing the competing orientations to human rights language that were dominant in the public sphere by the 1990s in Uganda. On the one hand, the 1995 Constitution represented the embrace of rights-based frameworks for delineating the relationship between the state and its citizens, enshrining ‘human rights’ and ‘women’s rights’ into political discourse and legal practice, and providing new frameworks for civil society groups to advocate for individual liberties and autonomy within state-based structures. On the other hand, legislative debates during this period revealed the contested nature of these new frameworks, especially when extended to the realm of gender. As has been seen in similar debates over issues like marriage and family law reform elsewhere on the continent, human and women’s rights became new kinds of political tools during this decade but were also open to powerful lines of critique that characterised individual rights as threats to other forms of political authority rooted in relationships of gender and kin-based interdependence.25 In part because of the contested nature of rights-based reforms during this period, human 24 National Resistance Movement, Towards a Free and Democratic Uganda: The Basic Principles and Policies of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) (NRM: Kampala, 1987), p. 4. 25 Emily Burrill, ‘Legislating Marriage in Postcolonial Mali: A History of the Present’, in Lydia Boyd and Emily Burrill (eds), Legislating Gender and Sexuality in Africa: Human Rights, Society and the State, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), pp. 25–41.

Human Rights, Decolonisation, and Political Agency in Postcolonial Uganda

rights discourse and practice during the 1990s cannot be described as a purely progressive, liberalising, or democratising trend. As I note at the end of this section, this period of rapid reform, and the adaptation of an emergent internationalist emphasis on human rights, can be read as a new political tool for activists and other independent citizens in Uganda, but also as a means for the state to assert its own authority in new ways. Human rights, as at other periods of postcolonial history, was a contested idea that worked to create new, as well as reassert old, forms of political power. In December of 1988, the assembly of a Constitutional Commission was authorized to consider proposals to enact a new constitution. 26 The process was unusually comprehensive in its effort to gather input from ordinary Ugandans. Local councils submitted over ten thousand memoranda to the Commission, seminars were held in every local district to inform and receive feedback from the public, and individuals and groups submitted several thousand additional memoranda and reports detailing views and opinions pertaining to the constitution and constitution writing process. 27 Perhaps the greatest achievement of the Commission was soliciting and generating the participation of Ugandan women. Women overcame structural constraints on their participation by organising through grassroots groups that sought to educate and provide outreach to women in particular. 28 Aili Mari Tripp notes that ‘the level of involvement of women in the process was unprecedented in Africa and perhaps worldwide’. 29 Critics have pointed out that this level of civic involvement did not necessarily result in the Commission responding to the concerns of Ugandan citizens – that is, the process was clearly overseen and managed by the NRM, which selectively responded to and incorporated the feedback it received. 30 Tripp also notes that the Commission spanned years marked by the contraction of the Ugandan political sphere, as Museveni consolidated his hold on power and eliminated non-NRM loyalists from the cabinet and key political positions. 31 Nonetheless, the 1995 Constitution is 26 Oliver Furley and James Katalikawe, ‘Constitutional Reform in Uganda: The New Approach’, African Affairs 96 (1997), 243–60 (p. 246). 27 Aili Mari Tripp, ‘The Politics of Constitution Making in Uganda’, in Laurel E. Miller (ed.), Framing the State in Times of Transition: Case Studies in Constitution Making (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2010), pp.158–175 (p.163). 28 Anne Marie Goetz, ‘Women in Politics & Gender Equity in Policy: South Africa & Uganda’, Review of African Political Economy 25 (1998), 241–62 (p. 245). 29 Tripp, ‘The Politics of Constitution Making in Uganda’, p. 163. 30 Tripp, ‘The Politics of Constitution Making in Uganda’, p. 163; Furley and Katalikawe, ‘Constitutional Reform in Uganda’. 31 Tripp, ‘The Politics of Constitution Making in Uganda’, 159.

87

88

Part I: Framing Knowledge

notable for including provisions that expanded the rights of women in the postcolonial period and promoted their participation in national and local governance. 32 It adopts an explicit human rights framework to do so. The 1995 Constitution mandates that each district have a woman representative to Parliament, a position known as Women’s MP. Women also may stand for open seats in Parliament and are guaranteed onethird of seats in local government councils. The Constitution also includes the stipulation that ‘[t]he State shall recognise the significant role that women play in society’. 33 Chapter Four of the Constitution delineates the rights of all citizens, including their ‘human rights and freedoms’, the right to ‘freedom from discrimination’ and ‘freedom of conscience’, and a separate section lists the specific rights accorded to women, including a provision promising affirmative action for women ‘for the purpose of redressing the imbalances created by history, tradition or custom’. 34 The movement for women’s and human rights during the 1990s and 2000s was transformative for women in Uganda, but not always in ways that were predictable. These decades saw the growth of women’s rights projects, but also a more vocal debate over the consequences and meaning of gender-based rights within Ugandan communities and at the state level. While ‘women’s rights’ and ‘human rights’ were inserted into the 1995 Constitution, key legislative efforts backed by the Ugandan women’s movement – amendments to the 1998 Land Act and the effort to pass the 2009 Marriage and Divorce Bill – failed to gain traction during these years. In the case of the Land Act, the women’s movement had sought to include an amendment to the Bill 32 Several historians of Uganda, and in fact of Africa more generally, make the point that the colonial and independence periods were years when African women’s political power and modes of political agency narrowed, as precolonial forms of women’s influence and gendered hierarchy were largely dismantled in favour of Western modes of governance that favoured male participation and leadership (Jean Allman, Susan Geiger and Nakanyike Musisi, ‘Women in African Colonial Histories: An Introduction’, in Women in African Colonial Histories (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), 1–18; Holly Hanson, Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003); Nakanyike Musisi, ‘Women, ‘Elite Polygyny’, and Buganda State Formation’, Signs 16 (1991), 757–86). From this perspective the innovations Museveni’s NRM introduces only rectify conditions of diminished power rather than introduce the concept of women’s political authority for the first time. 33 ‘National Objective XV’, Constitution of the Republic of Uganda, 1995, www.ilo.org/dyn/natlex/docs/ELECTRONIC/44038/90491/F206329993/ UGA44038.pdf. 34 ‘Chapter Four’, Constitution of the Republic of Uganda, 1995, https://ulii.org/ ug/legislation/consolidated-act/0.

Human Rights, Decolonisation, and Political Agency in Postcolonial Uganda

that extended joint ownership rights of family property to women. The Marriage and Divorce Bill sought to reform family law to ensure that women would have certain rights within marriage, including rights to family property and child custody, as well as protections against marital rape. The failures of these efforts highlight how human rights circulates alongside other, competing, models for political authority. In the constitution itself, a section on human rights explicitly delineates a ‘right to culture’, a pointed acknowledgement of a popular demand for customary forms of political legitimacy that are often oriented towards relationships of inequality and interdependence rather than notions of individual equality. 35 As I will describe, in the instances of the Land Act and Marriage and Divorce Bill ‘women’s rights’ is a project characterised by its detractors as out of step with Ugandan models for a just society, and a threat to the relationships of gendered and kin-based interdependence that have long been essential for the moral reproduction of society; these arguments framed gender-based rights as being in opposition to ‘cultural’ modes of authority. In his study of political debates preceding the ratification of the 1995 constitution and the restoration of the Buganda kingship in 1993, Mikael Karlström describes how rural Ganda defined and spoke about ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ – terms that were being widely discussed in relation to the wave of political reforms in this period. 36 He points out that most of his interviewees did not define democracy in terms of the ‘freedom’ of the people to be equals. Rather, most of his interviewees emphasise the ways ‘ddembe lya buntu’ – democracy – was achieved through the just rule of those in authority. Just rule, in this sense, is rule where a degree of ‘civility’ and ‘peace’ is achieved through the fair treatment of subjects by those with power and status. According to his interlocutors, rather than equality, it is a just hierarchy – indicated by the responsiveness of rulers to subjects – that preserves the moral order of society. This description of the meaning attributed to ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ during the 1990s reveals competing versions of what kinds of ‘rights’ were believed to ensure moral forms of governance and social relations: a global discourse that emphasised the equality of all citizens or a local discourse that valued forms of political agency and moral authority vested in the inequality and interdependence of different categories of persons within society. The resistance to both the Land Act amendment and the Marriage and Divorce Bill seems to have been animated by the tension between these two interpretations of rights 35 Mikael Karlström, ‘The Cultural Kingdom in Buganda: Popular Royalism and the Restoration of the Buganda Kingship’ (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1999), p. 309. 36 Karlström, ‘The Cultural Kingdom in Buganda’, 1999.

89

90

Part I: Framing Knowledge

and political justice. In both cases, opponents of the bills characterised ‘women’s rights’ as an affront to social hierarchies and kin relations that were necessary for the reproduction of society. Several objections to the shared-property clause in the Land Act were raised during debate, including the idea that if passed women would abuse their rights to property, and would engage in ‘serial monogamy’ as a way of amassing land. 37 The amendment was dropped at the last moment from the final version of the Bill, an omission that was viewed by many as a sign that Museveni had failed to support the clause. 38 The idea that women’s rights, and specifically women’s equality with men in the eyes of the state, could set a dangerous precedent was again seen in debate over the more recent 2009 Marriage and Divorce Bill, a piece of legislation which has been revised and debated in various forms since 1964. Marital property rights again proved controversial in this Bill, especially a provision that would extend such rights within informal marriages (often called ‘cohabitation’ in Uganda). In this case, as was seen with the Land Act, shared property rights were characterised as a means of undermining marriage itself, a tool that women would deploy to extract resources from men in order to facilitate women’s financial (and social) independence. One religious leader jokingly referred to the Bill as a ‘marriage-to-divorce’ bill, claiming that women would use marriage as a means to purposely defraud men. 39 The arguments against these bills reveal a broader distrust with models for political and social agency rooted in individual rights. Rightsbased marriage would be weak, prone to failure, and even morally unsound according to opponents. This was a sentiment echoed in my own interviews with young urban Ugandan men and women during this same decade. In these discussions, which focused on sexuality and marriage, both women and men referred to the moral superiority and desirability of traditional bride-wealth marriages over marriages overseen only by the Christian church – ‘ring marriages’, so called because of the modern Christian practice of exchanging rings and giving verbal consent, ‘I do’, to seal the marital bond.40 Bride-wealth marriages, marked by a traditional exchange between a groom’s and bride’s family, make your partner ‘known’ to your kin, one woman told me, an integration of the relationship into a broader network of interdependence Shelia Kawamara-Mishambi and Irene Ovonji-Odida, ‘The “Lost Clause”: The Campaign to Advance Women’s Property Rights in the Uganda 1998 Land Act’, in, Anne-Marie Goetz and Shireen Hassim (eds), No Shortcuts to Power: African Women in Politics and Policy Making (London: Zed Books, 2003), pp. 160–87 (p. 161). 38 Kawamara-Mishambi and Ovonji-Odida, ‘The “Lost Clause”’, p. 160. 39 Lydia Boyd, ‘Ugandan Born-Again Christians and the Moral Politics of Gender Equality’, Journal of Religion in Africa 44 (2014), 333–54 (p. 350). 40 Boyd, ‘Ugandan Born-Again Christians’. 37

Human Rights, Decolonisation, and Political Agency in Postcolonial Uganda

and obligation that by extension made the marital bond stronger and more sound, from her perspective.41 For both women and men, ‘human rights’ sought to promote an ideal of equality and independence that was only one way (and not always the ideal way) of thinking about social agency, justice, and moral behaviour at the turn of the century. These criticisms of rights and perspectives on gender relations were informed by a broader economic and political context that helped to shape contemporary attitudes about women’s and men’s roles and obligations. Increasing levels of economic inequality, urban migration, and youth unemployment had disrupted family life in ways that eroded the social authority and sense of upward mobility experienced by younger men in particular. By the 1990s marriage was often delayed due to financial insecurity, and both men and women, even highly educated graduates, experienced high rates of unemployment. Young people, but especially young men, questioned the proliferation of global discourses of personal empowerment – perhaps especially the neoliberal promise of the free market, but also the expansion of rights-based claims – that co-existed with conditions that were personally disempowering. The 1990s was also marked by dramatic political changes that had reshaped the role of ethnic identity relative to the state. In 1993, Museveni had allowed for the restoration of Uganda’s precolonial kingdoms as cultural institutions, a reversal of the state’s position that such ethnic institutions were politically divisive. The new influence of human rights models thus competed in the political arena with a renewed royalist populism that celebrated social hierarchy and ‘traditional’ values. Neo-traditionalist discourse became during this decade an alternative tool with which to reimagine and debate the moral shape of governance.42 The opposition to both the Land Act and Marriage and Divorce bills highlights the ways that rights have often been framed as threats to models of social hierarchy and interdependence – here, in particular, patriarchal kin networks – that have long been alternative models for social security, mobility, and moral authority in Uganda. More than a simple case of ‘rights versus culture’ the objections to these bills point to the ways that resistance to women’s rights reforms during this period were shaped by sweeping social changes, including increasing anxiety about economic conditions and the shifting political calculus of ethnic identity, that gave rise to alternative claims about what constituted good governance. 43 Interview: 26 year-old woman, Kampala, Uganda 16 June 2011. For traditional discourse as political tool, see David Pier, ‘Song for a King’s Exile: Royalism and Popular Music in Postcolonial Uganda’, Popular Music and Society 40 (2017), 5–21; Karlström, ‘The Cultural Kingdom in Buganda’, 1999. 43 Such debates are not new. The adoption of a variety of traditionalist arguments have been deployed since the early colonial era to criticise social, 41

42

91

92

Part I: Framing Knowledge

Perhaps the biggest irony of Museveni’s embrace of human rights discourse was the ways it often worked to mask how he consolidated his hold on political power during these years, deflecting as it did the international community’s attention from other, less democratic, actions and policy decisions being made by party leadership. What better way to highlight the promotion of democracy, and gain the critical support of Western donors, Sylvia Tamale has pointedly asked, than to appear to be ‘pro-woman’?44 This criticism highlights how human rights emerged as a powerful tool of influence on the part of donor states which sought to shape the local politics of donor-dependent states. For Museveni, as Tamale points out, this influence could run both ways, as his perceived status as a democratic reformer and adopter of human rights was translated into access to donor funds that could bolster his hold on power at the state level.45 Human rights, rather than a global force that operated beyond and as a checkpoint against the state, was, from another perspective, a means for the state to become more of a centralised, hierarchical power. In the next section, I examine the ways rights-based claims against the state have recently been deployed successfully by civil society activists, often because these claims seek to assert the ways that ‘rights’ may help to preserve, rather than hinder, a sense of moral obligation between citizens, and between leaders and their constituents.

A Right to Health: Women’s Reproductive Rights as a Critique of State Power

The 1995 constitution includes a clause that acknowledges the role of civil society in the pursuit and protection of human rights in Uganda: ‘The State shall guarantee and respect the independence of nongovernmental organisations which protect and promote human rights’.46 economic, and political changes often associated with the dominance of Western power. The Bataka Union, a social movement that emerged in the 1920s, described themselves as ‘spokesmen for an authentic culture’ and sought to protect ancestral claims to land from a new class of Baganda elite associated with the Anglican church and colonial leaders (Hanson, Landed Obligation, pp.216–26). Like later criticisms of rights-based reforms, ‘traditional culture’ is deployed strategically to make pointed political arguments that often make claims to a higher moral authority (see Petersen, Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival). 44 Sylvia Tamale, When Hens Begin to Crow: Gender and Parliamentary Politics in Uganda (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 17. 45 See also: Mwenda, Andrew M., and Roger Tangri. ‘Patronage politics, donor reforms, and regime consolidation in Uganda.’ African Affairs 104 (2005), 449–67. 46 ‘Article V.2’, Constitution of the Republic of Uganda, 1995, https://ulii.org/ ug/legislation/consolidated-act/0.

Human Rights, Decolonisation, and Political Agency in Postcolonial Uganda

This language is notable for the ways it positions human rights as the purview of civil society rather than the state itself. As I have noted, human rights as a political ideal has been at times co-opted by the early NRM regime, a tool to gain leverage with international allies and used to brand the government as justly democratic and deserving of aid. In this sense, human rights has been positioned not as a counterpoint to state power, but as a means for the state to consolidate and strengthen its authority. But in the 2010s human rights has also become an increasingly important tool of civil society, used to criticise and attempt to reform the state in Uganda. These have been efforts spearheaded by Ugandan activists who have sought to deploy and utilise human rights discourse and legal instruments in order to reform the actions of the state from the community level upwards. In Uganda, human rights groups have focused in recent years on the ‘right to health’ as a key frame with which to address broader concerns about good governance and the state’s obligations to its citizens. Maternal health in particular has proved to be a potent topic leveraged to expose broader concerns about the Ugandan state. The Centre for Health, Human Rights, and Development (CEHURD) is one non-­ governmental organisation based in Uganda that has become a prominent defender of maternal health. The organisation engages in what it calls ‘strategic litigation’, training local community members to identify issues with health services provision that have the potential to become legal suits against the state. In one high-profile case, CEHURD sued the Ugandan government’s highest-level referral hospital, Mulago, on behalf of a couple who had been told that the hospital had lost the body of their newborn daughter, who had apparently died just after birth.47 In this instance, the ineptitude of a government institution – one that was supposed to provide the highest and most complex level of medical care in the country – became the focus of the case, which CEHURD ultimately won. The court found that the hospital’s negligence violated the parents’ right to health and their right to access information. In another high-profile case, CEHURD sued the government on behalf of the families of two women who had died in childbirth at government hospitals.48 In this case, CEHURD argued that the non-provision of 47 CEHURD and Michael Mubangizi and Jennifer Musimenta v. Mulago Referral Hospital (2013). Mulago was defended by lawyers from the office of Uganda’s attorney general. 48 The women who had died in childbirth were Sylvia Nalubowa, in 2009 at Mityana hospital, and Jennifer Anguko, in 2010 at Arua hospital. In 2015 CEHURD won a Supreme Court ruling that overturned a decision by the Constitutional Court to dismiss the initial case. The judgement determined that the original case concerned the violation of the mothers’ health rights and women’s rights and was thus the purview of the Constitutional Court. The Constitutional Court had initially ruled that the case was ‘political’ in nature, and not an appropriate concern for the court (CEHURD blog: www.cehurd.

93

94

Part I: Framing Knowledge

maternal health care by the state was a violation of the mothers’ constitutional rights, including their right to life, their right to health, and their women’s rights.49 This case highlights abysmal maternal morbidity and mortality rates in Uganda and emphasises the indifference of state institutions to ensure quality care, an obligation CEHURD argues is a right of citizenship enshrined in the Ugandan constitution. 50 The success of CEHURD’s strategy demonstrates the ways rights-frameworks can be deployed by local actors to engage the state, forwarding a platform for reform. More than a nebulous set of global ideals, human rights and other rights-based frameworks have become important tools to advocate for political change in Uganda on terms that are rooted in older models of moral political authority as well as new ones. At the local level, CEHURD’s Community Health Advocates training programme recruits’ local community members who are trained not only to identify gross violations of citizens’ right to health, but who also to serve as liaisons with district health officials, and who become advocates for the community’s right to government resources. In a community training session that I attended in June 2018, the community advocates focused mostly on how to interact with government leaders and the stakeholders CEHURD called ‘Champions of Change’ for their ability to transform the kinds of medical resources to which a community has access. In these non-legislative forums, the goals of the organisation are to use the right to health as a mode of asking, and demanding, on behalf of community members. Like the hierarchical relationship between leaders and citizens described by Karlström in his research on democratic reform in Buganda, in this situation rights become tools not to enforce equality and freedom, but to demand the responsiveness and responsibility of the state towards those dependent on it: its citizens. That CEHURD’s most successful right-to-health cases have concerned maternal health is not coincidental. In CEHURD’s arguments supporting their case, political critique takes on an explicit moral weight, and their argument evokes an older moral framework for political hierarchy. Unlike the kinds of right to health lawsuits that João Biehl has described as proliferating in Brazil – where individual citizens sue the government for access to expensive pharmaceuticals, exacerbating the problem of unequal access to scarce health resources – lawsuits in Uganda like CEHURD’s seem tailored to expose systemic failures of org/2015/11/judgement-supreme-court-orders-the-constitutional-court-tohear-maternal-health-cases [accessed 8 February 2022]. 49 Republic of Uganda, ‘Constitutional Appeal No. 01 of 2013; Centre For Health, Human Rights and Development and Prof. Ben Twinomugisha, Rhoda Kukkiriza, Inziku Valente v. The Attorney General. Judgement of Dr. Kisaakye, Supreme Court of Uganda’, pp. 2–3. 50 Republic of Uganda, ‘Constitutional Appeal No. 01 of 2013’, p. 3.

Human Rights, Decolonisation, and Political Agency in Postcolonial Uganda

the state towards its citizens. 51 The power of the government, and its responsibility to use such power wisely, is emphasised and individual cases are forwarded to advocate not only for particular individuals, but rather to expose problems of gross ineptitude and negligence on the part of the state. Framing women as a special class of citizens enhances this argument by characterising women as being in particular need of the state’s protection. This requires that CEHURD emphasise hierarchies of social difference and inequality as morally and socially important relationships, key aspects of the way political authority is maintained and properly executed. For instance, in their petition to Uganda’s Supreme Court, CEHURD argues that the government must take into account women’s ‘unique status and their natural maternal function in society’. 52 Rather than emphasise women’s right to independence or autonomy over health decisions, women are positioned in the complaint as fulfilling a special social duty, one that demands state attention, resources, and protection. The government is compelled, according to this argument, to be responsive to this class of persons. Here the dependence of citizens – rather than their freedom, or independence – is used to make demands on, and criticise, the state. This is a different application of rights-based rhetoric than might be seen in a Western context, where an individual’s autonomy is the ultimate means for self-actualisation. Instead, CEHURD positions their cases, which are about individual infractions (particular cases of maternal neglect), as violations of broader sets of rights that order the relationship between citizens, or in this case classes of citizens (women), and the state. Here the state’s moral duty to protect and care for citizens becomes the focus of a rightsbased petition. This brief example of one of the ways rights-based claims function within the Ugandan political sphere today highlights how human rights are circulated and deployed in multiple ways in Uganda. More than simply an extra-state force allied with a Western political-­ economic domain, human rights is a tool taken up by Ugandan activists to make certain kinds of demands on the state, demands that often draw on older, local models for political authority and action as often as they do international and cosmopolitan ones. This is one of the ways the women’s movement has sought success in forwarding its platform in the face of resistance from other sectors of society that view women’s and reproductive rights as existing in conflict with cultural rights and moral norms. Human rights, in both local and political 51 See also João Biehl, ‘The Judicialization of Biopolitics: Claiming the Right to Pharmaceuticals in Brazilian Courts’, American Ethnologist 40 (2013), 419–36. 52 Republic of Uganda, ‘Constitutional Appeal No. 01 of 2013’, p. 8.

95

96

Part I: Framing Knowledge

discourse, is reframed by CEHURD and other groups as being something more than a foreign, global force. It is instead positioned as part of and an extension to local modes of petition and moral authority.

Conclusion: Human Rights, the State, and Citizenship in the Postcolonial Era

In recent decades, human rights has been analysed as a broadly global project, one disconnected from the state and even in opposition to state forms of political authority. 53 Several scholars of Uganda have similarly noted the ways human rights has often functioned in postcolonial Uganda as a force that has emboldened the Museveni regime, and worked to deflect Western criticism of the Ugandan state. 54 Rather than a tool of democratisation, these scholars highlight how a global human rights apparatus has helped to consolidate power in centralised, often non-democratic, state forms. This work has raised important questions about the impact of global human rights projects, highlighting how such projects have morphed over the last half century from important tools of anticolonial struggle to products of a new imperialistic global world order. 55 My own interest in human rights pivots from the impact of a late-twentieth-century global human rights regime to a concern with the meaning and practice of rights-based political arguments and actions within Uganda itself. The examples explored here reveal a range of engagements with rights-based discourse, often deployed in ways that have explicitly sought to take up questions of good governance. What form should the state take? What kinds of leaders are deemed morally legitimate? Human rights, in these instances, have been tools used by Ugandan citizens to engage with these questions, and to forward arguments about the nature of justice and the obligations of citizenship. Human rights, more than an external force that has shaped the political debates of the postcolonial area, has instead been used in ways that open up, rather than close off, consideration of multiple forms of political agency and models for civil society-state interactions. Not limited to a concern with the expansion of individual rights, the three cases examined here reveal a broader set of debates over what such rights might actually entail, and the kinds of relationships rights Moyn, The Last Utopia; Williams, The Divided World. Susan Dicklitch and Doreen Lwanga, ‘The Politics of Being Non-Political: Human Rights Organizations and the Creation of a Positive Human Rights Culture in Uganda’, Human Rights Quarterly, 25 (2003), 482–509; Tripp, ‘The Politics of Constitution Making in Uganda’. 55 Terretta, ‘From Below and to the Left?’ 53

54

Human Rights, Decolonisation, and Political Agency in Postcolonial Uganda

engender. As Emma Hunter has written, regarding twentieth-century Tanzania, ‘neither clear nor unambiguous, the rights and duties of the people in relation to their rulers … has more often been contested and argued over than assumed’.56 Similarly, rights-based frameworks in the second half of the twentieth century have been used and transformed by Ugandan activists as modes of decolonisation, in that such debates have sought to shape the terms of postcolonial governance. More than simply a casting off of human rights as un-Ugandan, or an embrace of human rights as a universal good, rights-talk has provided the means to remake forms of state power and citizenship in the postcolonial period, engaging directly with the problems that colonisation seeded in African societies: debates over the moral and political shape of relationships between the state and its people, consideration of the forms of political power that are moral and worth preserving, and efforts to both exert and rein in the powers of the state. This reading of rights-based work allows for a deeper and more nuanced consideration of human rights practice, especially the ways the moral frameworks deployed by local rights activists may draw on and complicate those used in the West. Human rights becomes an idea that is contested, used to think with, and debated in ways that are productive, and integral to Ugandan understandings of the state and the experience of good governance. In this way, these debates uncover a broader engagement with decolonisation as an ongoing project, taken up by a diverse array of actors, to consider politics through the framework of moral action and obligation.

56 Emma Hunter, ‘Dutiful Subjects, Patriotic Citizens and the Concept of “Good Citizenship” in Twentieth-Century Tanzania’, The Historical Journal, 56 (2013), 257–77 (p. 258).

97

5 The First White Man to See the Nile: Decolonising History Education in Uganda ASHLEY L. GREENE

In 1973, officials from the Ministry of Education gathered to discuss reforms of Uganda’s education system. ‘[I]n subjects like history, geography and so forth’, said one official,

the syllabus must be orientated; instead of saying Speke ‘discovered’ the source of the Nile we are now saying he was the first white man to see it … This is the development in the curriculum, we have got alternatives.1

The comment, which elicited laughter from those present, reflected ongoing efforts to shake loose the curriculum’s British colonial moorings. It also exposed the challenges of harnessing such a project for the needs of a diverse and fragmented population. Progress toward Pan-­ African curricula that reclaimed African ownership of the past masked a chronic lack of agreement about Uganda’s own history. Ethnic and religious tensions nourished by colonial rule plagued the politics of the new nation. In its first ten years of independence, Uganda grappled with threats of secession, saw the suspension of its constitution, experienced a military coup, spent years under a state of emergency, and suffered the forced abolition of its traditional kingdoms. 2 With stakes in the present high, curricular reformers shied away from controversial pieces of the country’s past. In the years to come, Uganda’s history would comprise a small fraction of regional and topical Histories of Africa. From 1992 to 2007, in national examinations for a secondary-­ school course on African Nationalism, no exam featured more than one question on Uganda’s history, and four exams lacked questions about Uganda altogether. 3 While Speke’s exploits were put in proper perspective, the creation of a national narrative stagnated. 1 Uganda National Archive (UNA)/Ministry of Education/‘Oral Evidence’, Box 28, p. 7. 2 For a history of Uganda’s independence period, see Richard J. Reid, A History of Modern Uganda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 3 Uganda National Examination Board (UNEB), UACE ARTS 1992–2007 (Kampala: UNEB, 2007).

The First White Man to See the Nile: Decolonising History Education in Uganda

In this chapter, I explore the decolonisation of Uganda’s secondary-­ school History curricula for what it can tell us about the relationship between History, education and state building, and the politics of postcolonial narrative. I show that secondary schools have operated simultaneously as spaces of decolonisation and spaces in which the development of a national narrative stagnated. At the heart of this tension are debates over national identity and politicisation of the past. Beginning with Obote’s first tenure in power (1962 to 1971), I weigh rhetorical commitments to curricular change against the controversies that littered the reform process with political landmines and pushed elites toward a Pan-African rather than national narrative. I then turn to the work of the East Africa Examinations Council (1967 to 1979), analysing the long-term consequences of Uganda’s most active period of curricular reform. In the final section, I discuss several reasons for the stagnation of reforms, including institutional weakness caused by periods of instability and the decline of History as a subject. I argue that Pan-Africanism provided meaningful results in the effort to develop a decolonised historical narrative, while at the same time allowing Uganda’s political leaders to avoid addressing the divisive past that imperialism left behind.

Decolonising Education

Education was at the forefront of decolonisation in Uganda. The school system the British bequeathed to the nation cut deep fault lines between religious and ethnic communities. Protestant and Catholic missionary societies, responsible for the brunt of educational work in the early years of the Uganda Protectorate, entrenched religious and denominational divides by building schools almost exclusively for their respective converts.4 The colonial government, which established a Department of Education in 1925, worked largely through the missionaries, augmenting their efforts with grants-in-aid. This partnership skewed access to education in favour of the Protectorate’s Christian population. Communities that practised indigenous beliefs or Islam were restricted to a limited number of government-run schools and to private schools, which operated with fewer resources. Muslim children also had access to Koranic schools, which taught Arabic-based literacy but did not offer academic curricula similar to those offered by mission schools. Although the number of schools available to Muslims increased with the founding of the Uganda Muslim Education Association in 1948, Muslims’ educational opportunities continued to lag behind those of 4 See Brian Holmes (ed.), Educational Policy and the Mission Schools: Case Studies from the British Empire (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967).

99

100

Part I: Framing Knowledge

their Protestant and Catholic counterparts.5 In 1960, two years prior to independence, missionary societies maintained control of twenty of the Protectorate’s twenty-eight secondary schools.6 Its educational infrastructure also exacerbated regional disparities. Continuing a trend begun by missionary societies at the turn of the twentieth century, colonial administrators concentrated educational development within the Kingdom of Buganda. From 1922 to 1950, Baganda made up over 50 per cent of students entering Makerere College and held three-fourths of the top civil service jobs.7 For non-Baganda, including Uganda’s first Prime Minister, Milton Obote, addressing the inequalities inherent in the education system was crucial to moving forward as an integrated nation-state. Decolonising education was also an intellectual project. African elites blamed colonial schooling for alienating young people from their cultural heritages and leaving them with a sense of mental inferiority. ‘It is the negation of Uganda’s identity’, Obote stated, ‘for our schools and institutions of learning to produce citizens who will deny, reject and despise their own origin and culture, their own character and way of life’.8 According to nationalist thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, effective decolonisation required an urgent rehabilitation of the precolonial past. ‘Reclaiming the past does not only rehabilitate or justify the promise of a national culture’ he wrote, ‘It triggers a change of fundamental importance in the colonized’s psycho-affective equilibrium’.9 Individually and through collaborative efforts, leaders of the new states in Africa sought to reorient education to restore pride in the continent’s past. As a professor from the Upper Volta put it at the 1961 Conference of African States, Africa needed a ‘cultural renaissance’.10 5 J.C. Ssekamwa, History and Development of Education in Uganda (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1997), p. 143. 6 Ibid., p. 125. 7 I follow Roland Hindmarsh’s usage of the Luganda language, where Buganda refers to the territory of the Kingdom, Baganda refers to the Ganda people, and Muganda refers to one person: Roland Hindmarsh, ‘Uganda’, in David G. Scanlon (ed.), Church, State, and Education in Africa (New York: Teachers College Press, 1966). See Crawford M. Young, ‘The Obote Revolution’, Africa Report XI:6 (1966), 13; and James H. Mittelman, Ideology and Politics: From Obote to Amin (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 62–65. 8 Makerere/Africana Collection/AF PSF 329.96761 U333/ Milton Obote, Policy Proposals for Uganda’s Educational Needs, 19 August 1969, p. 11. 9 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Richard Philcox transl. (New York: Grove Press, 2004), p. 148. 10 UNESCO, Outline of a plan for African Educational Development: Conference of African States on the Development of Education in Africa, Addis Ababa, 15–25 May 1961, p. 60.

The First White Man to See the Nile: Decolonising History Education in Uganda

Three months after independence, Obote established the Castle Education Commission to evaluate the content and structure of Ugandan education. The ensuing 1963 Education Act, in addition to ending the religious and racial segregation of schools, emphasised the need to reform classroom content. Viewed as an intellectual weapon in the colonial arsenal, History curricula came under particular scrutiny. Obote claimed that the British had succeeded beyond expectation in using History to create loyal colonial subjects. Speaking at the inauguration of Makerere University (as a university in its own right, autonomous from the University of East Africa) in 1970, he railed against colonial narratives for corrupting the minds of African youth:

Students were happy when the British defeated the Germans for the possession of Kenya and Uganda. They were elated to learn that the British defeated the French for the possession of India and North America. Worst of all, the majority, I suppose, of young Africans in the British colonies, learnt to be bitterly annoyed that the thirteen American colonies rebelled against the British in revolutionary wars, defeated them and gained Independence … The mental attitudes acquired from those lessons must be erased.11

Despite Obote’s vocal support for reform, efforts to decolonise History education met with only partial success. Finding a narrative suitable for a diverse and fractured population proved difficult and, ultimately, undesirable for nation-building. While steps were taken toward the development of a regional, Pan-African curriculum, the creation of a shared national narrative stagnated amid fierce disagreement about Uganda’s past and political future.

Decolonising History Curricula

The task of revising colonial curricula faced a number of obstacles, chief among them the political nature of historical writing. Africans in the Uganda Protectorate had long been interpreting and writing about the past in order to advance contemporary political arguments.12 In the early 1900s, they produced pamphlets, books, and journals tackling issues from land distribution to adultery.13 These ‘homespun 11 UNA/Office of the President (non-confidential), Box 8, Milton Obote, Speech by H.E. the President, Dr. A. Milton Obote, Chancellor of Makerere University, Kampala, on the Occasion of the Inauguration of the University, 8 October 1970, p. 6. 12 For a continent-wide treatment of African intellectuals and local histories, see Toyin Falola, Nationalism and African Intellectuals (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2001). 13 A number of these documents have been reproduced and contextualised

101

102

Part I: Framing Knowledge

historians’ used the past to excite moral reforms, to legitimate kings, and to challenge colonial rule.14 For the most part, they wrote from partisan vantage points, creating historiographies intended to bring readerships and political communities into being. The resulting histories, and the patriotic polities they supported, presented a blatant challenge to the national consciousness Obote hoped to create. Some of the best-documented examples of political History writing come from the Kingdom of Buganda.15 From the outset of Buganda-­ British relations, formalised in the Uganda Agreement of 1900, Ganda elites asserted their status as ‘sovereign allies’ of the British.16 They supported their claims by producing written accounts of Buganda’s past in which they emphasised sovereignty and civilisation as the British understood them. As historian Richard Reid writes, Ganda writers described ‘“great statehood, cultural and political dominance, and military prowess”; the Histories of an enlightened people, “worthy – and the British certainly agreed – of privileged status within the protectorate”’.17 Sir Apolo Kaggwa, a Protestant Katikiiro (Prime Minister) of Buganda from 1889 to 1925 and one of the kingdom’s most influential writers, published five volumes of historical and ethnographic work between 1901 and 1921. Volumes such as Basekabaka be Buganda (The Kings of Buganda) and Empisa za Baganda (The Customs of the Baganda) garnered wide readerships and were recognised as authoritative texts on Ganda history.18 But, aside from chronicling the lineages of a kingdom, Kaggwa’s histories served a political purpose, justifying, as Benjamin Ray notes, ‘the exceptional degree of political autonomy the Baganda in D.A. Low (ed.), The Mind of Buganda: Documents in the Modern History of an African Kingdom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); and J.A. Rowe, ‘Myth, Memoir and Moral Admonition: Luganda Historical Writing, 1893–1969, Uganda Journal 33:1 (1969). 14 Derek Peterson and Giacomo Macola, ‘Introduction: Homespun Historiography and the Academic Profession’ in Derek Peterson and Giacomo Macola (eds), Recasting the Past: Historical Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), pp. 5–8. 15 The writings of King Tito Winyi and John Nyakatura of the Bunyoro Kingdom are another example. See J.W. Nyakatura, Anatomy of an Africa Kingdom: A History of Bunyoro-Kitara, ed. G.N. Uzoigwe (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1973). 16 B. Ray, Myth, Ritual, and Kingship in Buganda (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 22. 17 Richard Reid, ‘Ghosts in the Academy: Historians and Historical Consciousness in the Making of Modern Uganda’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 56:2 (2014), 351–80 (p. 355). 18 Kaggwa published Basekabaka be Buganda in 1901 and Empisa za Baganda in 1907. Other works included Engero za Baganda (Folktales of the Baganda) and Ebika bya Baganda (The Clans of the Baganda). Ray, Myth, Ritual, and Kingship in Uganda, pp. 22–27.

The First White Man to See the Nile: Decolonising History Education in Uganda

claimed’ by describing an established and institutionally complex kingship. Ganda elites marshalled these histories as evidence of the kingdom’s sovereignty in their dealings with British administrators.19 In a letter to Uganda Governor Andrew Cohen in 1953, Kabaka Mutesa II stated, It is hardly necessary to remind Your Excellency that from history we learn that the Kingdom of Buganda was a self-governing Sovereign State, and record at the time of the advent of Europeans, almost 100 years ago, testifies to this that they found Buganda an established kingdom, independent, and with its own dependencies. 20

When the British deported Mutesa II later that year for protesting the idea of an East Africa federation and demanding secession, the Uganda Bookshop reprinted the third edition of Basekabaka be Buganda.21 Copies sold out within five years.22 The histories written by Ganda historians were central to contestations over power and to Buganda’s tireless efforts to maintain its dominant position in the Protectorate. As Reid states: ‘Historical work was not simply the outcome of political power, but was causal in its expansion and consolidation’. 23 Far from losing their importance at the moment of independence, patriotic political histories acquired a new salience as Buganda and other polities fought for the right to exist as sovereign entities. In the lead up to independence, Buganda’s parliament, the Lukiiko, sent a memorandum to the British informing them of the kingdom’s determination to become ‘a Separate autonomous State’.24 Here again they drew on the past to bolster their claim. ‘As far back as imagination can stretch’, they argued, ‘the Baganda have had a system of an organized form of government consisting of The King, a Parliament and a Prime Minister’.25 By attributing a British-style constitution to the kingdom, legislators made an obvious appeal to their readers’ sensibilities. The memorandum recounted and emphasised Buganda’s agency in inviting British missionaries and in aiding Britain militarily in its scuffles with Bunyoro. Although Buganda was unsuccessful in its bid for Historical writing was also important in Buganda’s internal politics, with clan histories produced as evidence of particular lineages’ claims to the monarchy, land, and spiritual abilities. See Reid, ‘Ghosts in the Academy’; Holly Hanson, Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003); and Neil Kodesh, Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010). 20 Kabaka Mutesa II to Sir Andrew Cohen, 6 August 1953, reproduced in Low, The Mind of Buganda, p. 163. 21 Mutesa II was deported to England in November, 1953 and returned from this first exile in 1955. 22 Rowe, ‘Myth, Memoir and Moral Admonition’, p. 21. 23 Reid, ‘Ghosts in the Academy’, p. 356. 24 The Lukiiko Memorandum, 1960, in Low, The Mind of Buganda, p. 200. 25 Ibid., p. 201. 19

103

104

Part I: Framing Knowledge

independence and soon shifted its focus to the achievement of a federal constitution, home-produced histories remained salient to Ganda nationalists’ pursuits of power and position, unwanted chapters in Obote’s envisioned story of a united Uganda. Meanwhile, new narratives were being put to nationalist purposes in the west by the Baamba and Bakonjo peoples. On 15 August 1962, less than two months before independence, Baamba and Bakonjo leadership wrote to Obote declaring the existence of the Rwenzururu state and asserting its independence from the Kingdom of Tooro.26 The movement received its impetus from the intellectual and political work of the Bakonzo Life History Research Association, founded by Samwiri Bukombi in 1954. The letter’s authors cited a history of conflict with Tooro as well as the cultural and linguistic distinctiveness of Baamba and Bakonjo as evidence of their case. When the dispute became violent in 1963, Obote sent the Uganda Rifles to Tooro’s defence. The following year, the self-declared Rwenzururu Kingdom, led by Bukombi’s son, Isaya Mukirane, for his interference, banned Oboto from visiting their territory.27 As with Buganda, the fusion of politics and historical writing worked at cross purposes with the search for a usable national past. Homespun histories and the secessionist movements they helped fuel partly explain why Obote’s intended reforms of History curricula never came to fruition. On a practical level, the Ministry of Education faced the problem of finding texts with a ‘national’ outlook. Books associated with colonial courses, written almost exclusively by British authors, were disparaged for presenting the history of Europeans in Africa. But there were few alternatives. In the context of competing ‘ethnic patriotisms’, much of the historical work achieved by Ugandans was associated with the ostensibly evil twins of tribalism and sectarianism.28 Speaking to the Current Affairs Club of St. Mary’s College, Kisubi, President Obote said he had once been ‘told by an eminent foreign historian who visited Uganda in 1961, that history books on Uganda do not contain the history of a people but a collection of dates and names’. 29 ‘Our books’, he complained, ‘mainly dealt with the activities and the 26 See Derek R. Peterson, ‘States of Mind: Political History and the Rwenzururu Kingdom in Western Uganda’, in Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola (eds), Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009). 27 The rift was formally put to rest in 1982, when the then king of Rwenzururu, Charles Wesley Mumbere, became a private citizen of Uganda. 28 See Derek R. Peterson, Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent, c. 1935–1972 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 29 Makerere/AF PsF 329.96761 U333/Milton Obote, Speech to the Current Affairs Club of St. Mary’s College, Kisubi, by H.E. the President Dr. A. Milton Obote, 15 March 1969, pp. 36–37.

The First White Man to See the Nile: Decolonising History Education in Uganda

idiosyncrasies of rulers of this or that tribe. … but this is not … the stuff and substance of national issues’. 30 Obote was stuck with two unsatisfactory narratives. On the one hand, using European texts risked portraying Uganda as a product of colonial initiative. On the other hand, the political nature of local histories undermined the idea of a united population. Neither were suitable for nation-building. Even if the government commissioned new texts, the challenge of finding a narrative that would inspire feelings of national consciousness among Ugandans was formidable, not least because conflicting interpretations of the past were playing an active role in the political disputes of the present. Particularly crucial was the ‘lost counties’ dispute. The quarrel stretched back to 1893, when the British and the Buganda Kingdom joined forces in a war against the kingdom of Bunyoro. When Bunyoro was defeated, the British awarded Buganda nearly a quarter of the kingdom’s territory. 31 Despite frequent clashes over the ‘lost counties’, which Bunyoro never stopped trying to reclaim, the British failed to resolve the issue before handing over power. When the ‘lost counties’ voted to leave Buganda in a November 1964 referendum, the result caused widespread protest in Buganda and increased tensions between Buganda and the central government. In 1966, Obote suspended the constitution and removed Kabaka Mutesa II from the presidency. Fearing armed insurrection, he launched a military assault on the Kabaka’s palace (Lubiri) at Mengo. Although the Kabaka escaped to exile in Britain, more than 100 people perished in the attack. 32 The following year, Obote abolished traditional kingdoms and consolidated power in the executive presidency, selecting himself for the job. He ruled under a state of emergency until his overthrow in 1971. The 1966 crisis halted Obote’s plans for curricular reform. It also compounded the challenge of finding a suitable national narrative. It seems that, by 1969, Obote had abandoned this quest, convinced that Uganda’s past had little to offer new nation. In a speech addressing policies for educational development, Obote said it could not be denied that

the majority of our citizens are still closer to the tribe than to the nation we are building … Although it is possible that our writers will discover important land-marks in our history around which national consciousness can be built, we must accept that as of now we have not yet established many. 33

Ibid., pp. 37–38. D.A. Low and R. Cranford Pratt, Buganda and British Overrule 1900–1955: Two Studies (London, New York, and Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1960). 32 T.P. Ofcansky, Uganda: Tarnished Pearl of Africa (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003), p. 41. 33 Obote, Policy Proposals for Uganda’s Educational Needs, p. 8–9. 30 31

105

106

Part I: Framing Knowledge

On the contrary, the deep past, Uganda’s colonial history, and Obote’s self-proclaimed presidency were riddled with controversies. The discipline of History – and indeed the past itself – had become a source of frustration and potential danger to the nation’s legitimacy. From 1969 to 1970, Obote spoke repeatedly about the dangers of living in the past and the need for a new history. To the students of Nabumali High School, he called for national consciousness:

We must have this One Uganda; we must have this One People; we must have this One Parliament, so that the youth of Uganda of today and tomorrow will see Uganda as a whole … We must begin to have our own history. 34

Speaking to the Current Affairs Club of St. Mary’s College, Obote blamed the state of emergency on backward-looking citizens who longed to return to ‘the world of our grandfathers’. 35 When Uganda became independent, he stated, some ‘trained their eyes not to the future but backwards to 1900 … they thought that Independence had opened the door for various areas of Uganda to be carved up as domains of this or that individual’. 36 Obote made his sentiments particularly clear when addressing the students of King’s College Budo, a traditionally Protestant school with a reputation of catering to Ganda elite: ‘If it is true that any one of you is thinking of the past rather than of the future, then that particular student is not fitted to be at the Budo of today’. The simple question is, Obote continued, ‘can you answer convincingly the greatest examination question which Uganda is setting for Budo, namely, are you in and with Uganda in our march forward to one united, peaceful and prosperous Republic?’37 Obote’s new history of Uganda was to be found not in the past, but in the future. 38

A Pan-African Alternative: The East African Examinations Council

While Obote struggled to find a usable national narrative in Uganda’s past, a compelling alternative emerged in the form of Pan-Africanism. 34 UNA/Office of the President (non-confidential) Box 8/11 Milton Obote, Address by H.E. The President, Dr. A. Milton Obote, to the Students of Nabumali High School, 16 June 1970, pp. 1–2. 35 Obote, Speech to the Current Affairs Club of St. Mary’s College, p. 40. 36 Ibid., p. 41. 37 Makerere/Africana Collection/AF PSP 329.96761 U333/ Milton Obote, Speech by his Excellency the President on the Occasion of Speech Day at Budo, 27 March 1969, p. 8. 38 Ashley L. Greene, ‘Creating a Nation Without a Past: Teaching National History in Uganda’s Secondary Schools’, in Jim Williams and Michelle Bellino (eds), (Re)Constructing Memory: Education, Identity and Conflict (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2016), p. 116.

The First White Man to See the Nile: Decolonising History Education in Uganda

Born in the nineteenth century from the injustices of imperialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and nurtured by intellectuals in the diaspora, Pan-Africanism had, by the 1960s, become a platform for anti­ colonial activists across much of the continent. 39 The idea of a common African culture and the belief that the success of new states depended on racial solidarity against neocolonial forces were staples of nationalist discourse among post-independence leaders.40 Pan-African thinking was particularly evident in the realm of education. Fanon urged scholars to work towards an African rather than national culture. ‘The colonized intellectual who decides to combat these colonialist lies does so on a continental scale’, he wrote. ‘The culture which has been retrieved from the past to be displayed in all its splendour is not his national culture’.41 In the early 1960s, many African intellectuals seemed to share Fanon’s convictions. At conferences on the development of education, they spoke of African values, African metaphysics, and African sociology. Heads of state developed agendas to advance education on a continental scale and proposed regional blueprints for the overhaul of colonial curricula. Africanising the curricula, they believed, would play a crucial role in Africa’s struggle for independence. At the 1961 Conference of Africa States – held in Addis Ababa and attended by delegates from thirty-five states and territories – professor Joseph Ki-Zerbo of the Upper Volta made a forceful case for the significance of curricular revision.42 He argued that reforms undertaken at the dawn of independence would have powerful implications for Africans’ economic, social, and political futures: ‘for the African of 1980 will be exactly what he has been made by the curricula drawn up in 1961. The type of man who will govern Africa tomorrow is potentially contained in the curricula of education today’.43 Ki-Zerbo believed that replacing colonial curricula was an essential step toward achieving ‘cultural decolonization’. In History, he urged the inclusion of oral testimony; in Science, the study of local soils and plants. ‘The ground-nut rather than the sweet pea should be taken to illustrate papilionaceous plants’, he said. The foundation of curricular reform could be nothing less than a ‘specifically African culture’.44 Two years later, at the 1963 Summit Conference of Independent African States, leaders from thirty-two countries pledged to promote the development of African civilisation through educational reform With the exception of North Africa. See Crawford Young, The Postcolonial State in Africa: Fifty Years of Independence, 1960–2010 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), pp. 293–95. 40 Ibid., p. 5. 41 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 149–50. 42 UNESCO, Outline of a plan for African Educational Development. 43 Ibid., p. 55. 44 Ibid., pp. 55–57. 39

107

108

Part I: Framing Knowledge

and exchange. Obote, representing the youngest state to join in independence, delivered two speeches at the conference, including the closing address. Leaders needed to work together, he argued, in order to engage Africa’s youth in the ongoing process of ‘translating political freedom into social and economical freedom’. ‘We all know the humiliation suffered by our people under foreign rule and influence’, he stated. ‘We have got to learn each other’s language and way of living and we must catch the future citizens of Africa’.45 The conference presaged significant co-operation in curricular development. In addition to drafting the Charter of the Organization of African Unity, which boasted an Educational and Cultural Commission, the participants established The Educational Scientific and Cultural Council for African and Malagasy States.46 They also established regional institutes and universities, including the University of East Africa (UEA), which included the then Makerere College. Although some initiatives were short-lived – the UEA agreement collapsed in 1970 – the summit demonstrated a willingness to think beyond the borders inherited from colonial regimes. It also presaged collaborative educational work that produced tangible curricular reforms. The East African Examinations Council (EAEC), established in 1967 by Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, was one such effort.47 The EAEC was likely inspired by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), which the British created in 1952.48 Formed after independence, however, the EAEC took on a distinctly African-centred orientation. Its primary purpose was to localise two examinations set by the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate (UCLES); the first determined students’ progression from Ordinary or O-level to the final two years of secondary school, known as Advanced or A-level. The second determined entry into university. Between 1967 and 1974, the EAEC and UCLES offered a certificate for O- and A-level students, working jointly to develop syllabi and administer exams. Regional curricular bodies known as International Syllabus Panels carried out the 45 British Library/Summit CIAS/GEN/INF/15/Proceedings of the Summit Conference of Independence African States, Volume 1, Section 2, Addis Ababa, May 1963, p. 4. 46 Article XX, Organization of African Unity Charter, https://au.int/sites/ default/files/treaties/7759-file-oau_charter_1963.pdf [accessed 31 March 2020]. 47 For a discussion of the EAEC’s formation see John Cameron, The Development of Education in East Africa (New York: Teachers College Press, 1970), chapter 10. 48 For a comparative analysis of the WAEC and the EAEC, see Mark Bray, ‘Examinations Councils and Geopolitical Change: Commonality, Diversity, and Lessons from Experience’, International Journal of Educational Development 18:6 (1998), 473–86.

The First White Man to See the Nile: Decolonising History Education in Uganda

EAEC’s work. The panels were organised by subject and comprised nine members, three from each state. During its twelve-year existence (the partnership collapsed in 1979) the EAEC worked to replace British syllabi with courses on various regions of Africa. For O-level, which constituted the first four years of secondary school, the council developed ‘History of East Africa (c. 1000 to Present Day)’.49 The course covered precolonial trade networks, the history of the Great Lakes region before Africa’s partition, the expansion of the slave trade in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and encounters that occurred as various groups pushed for territorial expansion.50 A collection of examinations spanning 1970 to 2004 show the shift from a colonial to Pan-African history. British syllabi recounting the story of Europeans in Africa were set aside for courses emphasising African agency. For example, a 1970 exam for ‘History of East Africa (c. 1000 to Present Day)’, asked: ‘In what ways did the peoples and rulers of any one East African country react to the establishment of European colonial rule between 1885 and 1914?’. 51 Another question asked students to outline the main obstacles to the achievement of independence and explain how Africans overcame them. The second paper developed for O-level was ‘History of Africa Outside East Africa (c. 1000 to Present Day)’. It contained three sections: West Africa South of the Sahara, Central Africa, and South Africa; the EAEC added a fourth section on North Africa in 1979. In A-level, ‘Theory of Government and Constitutional Development and Practice in East Africa’ replaced a course on constitutional practice in the British Commonwealth. Reflective of the Pan-African zeitgeist of the moment, the EAEC also developed a course on ‘African Nationalism’. The course covered anticolonial revolutions in Egypt, Zanzibar, and Algeria, the rise of the Pan-African movement, and decolonisation processes across the continent. It also grappled with pressing post-­ independence dilemmas including civil wars, secessionist movements, and military coups. First piloted in Uganda at St. Peter’s College Tororo, ‘African Nationalism’ – known now as ‘Africa: National Movements and the New States’ – became (and remains today) one of the most popular History classes in Ugandan secondary schools. Despite its eventual collapse (discussed in more detail below), the EAEC accomplished significant gains toward decolonising educational content. Eurocentric approaches to the past were reoriented; students 49 Maryhill High School, Mbarara/Joint Examination for the East Africa Certificate of Education and School Certificate, Paper 1: History of East Africa (c. 1,000 to Present Day), 17 November 1970. 50 These details come from examinations found in a storage cabinet at Mayhill High School in Mbarara. 51 Mayhill High School, Mbarara/Joint Examination for the EAEC, History of East Africa (c. 1,000 to Present Day) 17 November 1970; emphasis in the original.

109

110

Part I: Framing Knowledge

were encouraged to think of colonial rule as an event with which Africans actively engaged and to which they responded. For Uganda, the curricular legacy of the EAEC is hard to overstate. EAEC syllabi provided a safe rendition of the past that united learners around Pan-African and anticolonial sentiments, allowing the search for a national narrative to be quietly abandoned. The EAEC’s significance also lies in the longevity of its reforms. By the late 1970s, Uganda was facing internal crises of monumental proportions. As institutions faltered and leaders faced urgent political and economic challenges, curricular revisions came to a stop. The courses and examinations developed by the EAEC would remain relevant to Ugandan students for decades.

Institutional Crisis and the Decline of History

The work of the East African Examinations Council represented the pinnacle of curricular reform in Uganda. When the council dissolved in 1979, Uganda had few curricular alternatives. State-led violence and instability caused new initiatives to flounder. As nation-building gave way to regime survival, elites became hostile toward History and critical analysis of the past. The partially completed overhaul of History curricula was abandoned. Obote’s overthrow in 1971 and the instability experienced under Idi Amin put severe pressure on Uganda’s education system. Amin’s economic war on foreigners and the subsequent departure of British expatriate teachers left schools understaffed. Factory closures caused by a lack of skilled labour and hyperinflation made it difficult to obtain supplies. Enrolments plummeted, with some students lured away by the promise of black-market trade while others stayed home to avoid the dangers of military roadblocks and dormitory raids, the latter particularly dangerous for female students. In his study of schools in Western Uganda’s Kabarole district during this period, John Paige notes that ‘given such overwhelming difficulties and the widespread breakdown of institutional infrastructure in Uganda, it is clearly a wonder that schools survived at all’. 52 Government institutions were similarly affected. In 1973, efforts to establish a curriculum centre, begun years earlier but postponed for lack of funds, came to fruition in the creation of the National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC). The NCDC convened conferences on educational structure and appointed panels of teachers to evaluate subjects. But it suffered alongside other institutions, and struggled to implement the EAEC curriculum. Even prior to Amin’s coup, EAEC courses were taught unevenly. Examinations from Maryhill Secondary 52 John Rhodes Paige, Preserving Order amid Chaos: The Survival of Schools in Uganda, 1971–1986 (New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000), pp. 44–45.

The First White Man to See the Nile: Decolonising History Education in Uganda

School in Mbarara indicate that some schools had adopted the new syllabi as early as 1970. Others continued to offer classes developed by the British, occasionally renamed to sound less blatantly colonial. A course titled ‘Opening up of Tropical Africa’ changed to ‘The Partition of Africa’, and finally, in 1973, to ‘Tropical Africa’. In his 1973 study of Uganda’s curriculum, Peter Muyanda-Mutebi claimed ‘there was no syllabus in Ugandan secondary schools that could be described as African History’. 53 Lack of capacity made it difficult for the NCDC to rectify such discrepancies. Inspectors were unable to reach schools in rural areas. The schools they could reach appeared to be offering different courses, each doing its best to cope with the loss of trained teachers. Amid these challenges, new syllabi were unevenly distributed. Most schools outside Kampala lacked the resources needed to implement them anyway. After touring fifty secondary schools in 1974, the NCDC concluded: ‘our secondary schools could not be said to be pursuing a uniform curriculum’.54 When administered, external examinations such as the joint Cambridge-EAEC certificate yielded despairingly poor results. This was the breaking point for the EAEC, which Tanzania had abandoned in 1971. If Uganda were to agree to examination standards demanded by Kenya, few Ugandan students would pass – a politically and economically untenable prospect. 55 Hopes for an interconnected economic and education system were further dampened by the dissolution of the East African Community in 1977. As economic views diverged, geopolitical tensions escalated, and Uganda’s domestic situation worsened, Pan-African aspirations gave way to the immediate demands of national interest. In 1979, Kenya withdrew from the EAEC and formed its own examinations council. When a joint Tanzanian and pro-Obote force toppled Idi Amin that same year, most of the NCDC’s activities had stopped for lack of funds and staff. As the turmoil of Amin’s regime gave way to new conflicts, Uganda’s curriculum centre was unable to marshal the resources needed to design new History courses. Even if it had been able, the political will for such reform was non-existent. By this time the discipline of History, and the Arts in general, were at odds with the priorities of Uganda’s leaders. Convinced that the past held little value for nation-building, they directed education toward economic development. 53 Peter Muyanda-Mutebi, ‘The History Curricula for Uganda Secondary Schools, 1940–1970: A General Evaluative Study’, PhD dissertation (University of California Los Angeles, 1973), p. 130. 54 NCDC/Annual Report 1974/Makerere/Africana Collection/G. EAU N5 (058)1, p. 15. 55 Bray, ‘Examinations Councils and Geopolitical Change’.

111

112

Part I: Framing Knowledge

Tailoring education to meet economic development needs was not a new concept. In 1925, a joint educational commission created by the London Colonial Office and missionary societies reported its surprise that for ‘a country with unusually fertile soil [Uganda has] made practically no provision for agricultural education’. 56 In line with the commission’s recommendations, the British Education Department expanded agricultural and technical training and established farm schools. At the 1961 Addis Ababa conference, African delegates also emphasised the importance of vocational education, acknowledging that postcolonial states needed ‘to build up the skilled manpower essential for accelerating economic development’.57 They suggested that secondary schools undertake accelerated, short-term emergency courses in technical and vocational training. 58 Neither body, however, was ready to sacrifice the lessons taught by the humanities. The commission identified character development as the first and most important objective of education, which they felt was best taught by subjects like religion and History. Conference attendees viewed the Arts as essential to the Africanisation of curricula and the safeguarding of cultural heritage. In their development plan, they sought ‘a balanced programme cultivating the nobler attributes of man and contributing to rapid growth in the social and economic spheres of African life’. 59 The question of education’s purpose in a developing country resurfaced during Obote’s first presidency. As part of an ambitious fifteen-­ year development plan, Obote promised to double Ugandans’ per capita income by expanding and modernising the economy.60 He based his plan on the rapid expansion of the manufacturing industry and agricultural sector. He also promised to improve the country’s infrastructure through better roads, railways, telecommunications, and airport facilities as well as a new hydro-electric station on the Nile. Plans were made to build twenty-two hospitals in rural areas, with trained African staff to run them. Obote needed engineers, doctors, veterinarians, agricultural experts, and trained labourers. In 1966, the reorganised Ministry of Economic Development and Planning published its Second Five-Year Plan for 1966–1971. The plan shifted the balance between enrolments in the Arts and the Sciences, hitherto roughly equal, by mandating that 60 per cent of students proceeding African Education Commission, Education in East Africa (New York and London: Phelps-Stokes Fund; Edinburgh House Press, 1925), p. 162. 57 UNESCO, Outline of a plan for African Educational Development, p. 5. 58 Ibid., p. 24. 59 Ibid., p. 12 60 Makerere/Africana Collection/Milton Obote, ‘Preface by His Excellency Dr. A. Milton Obote President of Uganda’ in Uganda’s Second Five-Year Plan 1966– 1971, p. i. 56

The First White Man to See the Nile: Decolonising History Education in Uganda

to the final two years of secondary school take Science subjects.61 In 1968 Obote announced his ‘move to the left’.62 The following year, in a speech titled ‘Policy Proposals for Uganda’s Educational Needs’ – the same speech in which he bemoaned Uganda’s lack of historical landmarks for national consciousness – Obote stressed that education should benefit society more than individuals. Education was a societal investment, he argued, and some disciplines yielded better returns than others. Whereas doctors or engineers could start their own businesses, students who studied ‘non-professional’ subjects were likely to end up as ‘refugees in their own country’, unemployed and kin-less in urban cities.63 Citing the fact that the government spent 28 per cent of its annual budget on education, Obote said: ‘The fact which bothers me and I think many, is whether we are likely to receive from this investment the type of man and woman who will be able to advance national interests’.64 While Obote’s call to direct education toward subjects that would boost the economy served a utilitarian purpose, it also ran parallel to his conviction that History was unhelpful, even dangerous, to social and political unification. ‘We seem to realise the importance of meeting our manpower requirements’, he stated, ‘but we do not seem to be seriously concerned about … the attitudes of the manpower we are producing’.65 Under Amin, Uganda moved towards the ‘aggressive, authoritarian developmentalism’,66 to use Reid’s phrase, that continues to dominate political thinking. Education that did not contribute to growing GDP rates was considered a waste of time and resources. To reduce the number of unemployed graduates, Amin reversed Obote’s policy of secondary-­school expansion and discouraged the study of History and Liberal Arts. At his installation as chancellor of Makerere University in 1971, Amin stated:

I must emphasize that the Government cannot stand by and watch our scarce resources being spent on irrelevant courses and research programmes all in the name of academic freedom … The Government has an interest and, indeed, a duty to say for example that at a particular period of time in our country’s development more engineers than historians shall be trained at Makerere.67

61 Uganda’s Second Five-Year Plan 1966–1971, p. 139.expansoinr three dary schoolsda Education Department and they-school curricula within the protectorate.ce. protectorate ands ar 62 See Kenneth Ingham, Obote: A Political Biography (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); and J.H. Mittelman, Ideology and Politics in Uganda: From Obote to Amin (London: Cornell University Press, 1975). 63 Obote, Policy Proposals for Uganda’s Educational Needs, p. 6. 64 Ibid., p. 3. 65 Ibid., p. 15. 66 Reid, ‘Ghosts in the Academy’, p. 352. 67 Makerere/Africana Collection/AF PSF 329.96761 M54/Idi Amin, Speech by

113

114

Part I: Framing Knowledge

While the past stood in the way of national consciousness, History stood in the way of national development. The succession of political transitions that followed Amin’s toppling in 1979, Obote’s volatile second presidency (1980–85), and the civil war that brought Yoweri Museveni and the National Resistance Movement to power in 1986 offered few unifying narratives to a population already traumatised by state repression. Since taking office, Museveni has discouraged meaningful engagement with the past. Three months after his inauguration, Museveni established the Uganda Commission of Inquiry into Violations of Human Rights (CIVHR) to investigate atrocities committed between 1962 and 1986. The Commission languished for nine years in the absence of political support and faced sharp criticism for having a mandate that excluded crimes committed by the National Resistance Army. The Commission’s report, finally completed in 1994, was poorly circulated and not widely read.68 Many in Uganda were likely preoccupied with fresh atrocities being committed on both sides of a counter-­ insurgency war. By 1989, the insurgency known as the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) encompassed much of Northern and parts of Eastern Uganda. Civilian populations caught in the crossfire suffered atrocities at the hands of the LRA as well as abuses by the military. The government at times denied and at other times made excuses for these atrocities, steadfastly declaring members of the Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF) (known before 1995 as the National Resistance Army) exempt from prosecution.69 While the LRA no longer pose an active threat to Museveni, his unwillingness to confront UPDF crimes has deepened feelings of mistrust in areas affected by counter-insurgency operations and heightened the salience of ethnic patriotisms.70 Dogged by reports of human rights violations and a general reputation for impinging on civil liberties, Museveni has urged Ugandans to put their conflict history behind them. Leading the nation in prayer in 2012, the President asked forgiveness for a host of wrongs committed over the country’s 50 years of independence.71 Alongside sins of pride, his Excellency the President, on the Occasion of his Installation as Chancellor of Makerere University Kampala, 9 October 1971, p. 4. 68 Joanna R. Quinn, ‘Constraints: The Un-Doing of the Ugandan Truth Commission’, Human Rights Quarterly 26:2 (2004), 401–27. 69 Human Rights Watch, ‘Uprooted and Forgotten: Impunity and Human Rights Abuses in Northern Uganda’, 17:12 (2005). 70 Reflected in presentations and conversations between the author and citizens from Teso at the 2017 Institute for African Transitional Justice, held in Soroti, Uganda. 71 See Aili Mari Tripp, Museveni’s Uganda: Paradoxes of Power in A Hybrid Regime (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2010).

The First White Man to See the Nile: Decolonising History Education in Uganda

witchcraft, sexual immorality, and laziness, Museveni asked God’s forgiveness ‘for sins of shedding innocent blood … for sins of injustice, oppression and exploitation; sins of rebellion, insubordination, strife and conflict’. In his opening words, Museveni said: ‘I stand here today to close the evil past’.72 As Reid notes, ‘Museveni sought to entomb history, pay due respects, and move onwards’.73 Like his predecessors, Museveni’s desire to escape entanglements with the past has gone hand in hand with the disparagement of subjects like History. At the 2014 launch of Ndejje University’s science laboratory, he rebuked Humanities students for failing to contribute to national development: ‘You ask these arts students what they can solve and they tell you, “for us we only think”’.74 Reminiscent of Idi Amin’s address to Makerere in 1971, Museveni’s remarks show a blatant disdain for courses deemed irrelevant to Uganda’s economic priorities. Among policy makers at the 2017 Addis Ababa Tana Forum on Security in Africa, he critiqued early leaders for their naïve privileging of education over immediate development needs. The idea ‘that if you educate your people, everything will be okay’ contributed to the mistakes of the 1960s, he stated. ‘This fragmented vision is incorrect; if you educate people but you don’t have infrastructure … where will they work?’75 While his comments could be viewed as merely practical, they reveal a wariness of education that is not closely tied to the government’s development agenda. While Museveni has side-lined History as a discipline, he remains interested in historical revision. His published memoir and collection of speeches both contain narratives situating his National Resistance Movement (NRM) (and the war that brought it to power) as the answer to the quagmires birthed by colonialism and nurtured by his political predecessors.76 More relevant for Uganda’s young people, he has turned his penchant for writing toward an extracurricular secondary-school programme known as patriotism clubs. Museveni launched patriotism clubs in 2009 as part of a nationwide programme to ‘inculcate [the] norms and values of patriotism in students and youth in all secondary schools’.77 The clubs, found in ‘For the Sins of Uganda I repent – Museveni’, New Vision (18 October 2012). Richard Reid, ‘States of Anxiety: History and Nation in Modern Africa’, Past and Present 229 (2015), 246. 74 D. Wandera, ‘Arts Courses are Useless – Museveni’, Daily Monitor (27 April, 2014); retrieved from www.monitor.co.ug. 75 Frederic Musisi, ‘Museveni: Education Not Key to Solving Africa’s Problems’, Daily Monitor (24 April, 2017). 76 Yoweri K. Museveni, Sowing the Mustard Seed: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in Uganda (London: Macmillan, 1997); Yoweri K. Museveni, What is Africa’s Problem? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 77 The Secretariat for Patriotism Clubs Office of the President (hereafter SPC), 72

73

115

116

Part I: Framing Knowledge

government and private schools throughout the country, are overseen by the National Patriotism Corps – Uganda (NPCU), housed within the Office of the President. Patriotism clubs combine classroom content with military training and community service. Students march in parades on national holidays, learn how to disassemble and reassemble a firearm, clean neighbouring streets, and compete in patriotism essay competitions. While few take issue with the clubs’ community service activities, their academic content, and the government’s intent behind the extracurricular initiative, is far more controversial The patriotism club textbook, first published in 2010, presents the NRM’s perspective on topics including Uganda’s history, democracy, Pan-Africanism, and neocolonialism. The preface hails the book as ‘a basic foundation for ideological development for students in secondary schools’, and a teaching aid for those charged with ‘inculcating norms and values of patriotism’ to youth.78 By far the longest chapter, comprising 50 of the book’s 105 pages, is chapter four: ‘History of Uganda’.79 Unlike in school curricula, where fragments of Uganda’s past are interspersed among the histories of other African countries, here Uganda’s history is the focus, beginning with precolonial societies and ending with the National Resistance Movement. The text crafts a single-voice narrative in which selective remembering and broad-brush forgetting are used to promote feelings of patriotism synonymous with support for Museveni’s political party.80 While Uganda’s post-independence history up to 1986 is summarised in fewer than three pages, the story of the NRM sprawls across fourteen pages. The civil war that brought the regime to power is presented as a popular platform for ‘a nationwide liberation struggle’ against the injustice and exploitation of neocolonial forces. 81 By framing the takeover by the National Resistance Army (NRA) as a people’s war against foreign domination, rather than fellow Ugandans, the authors differentiate Museveni’s military victory from the coups of his predecessors, granting it the legitimacy typically gained through democratic elections. Museveni, referred to as ‘Chief Patriot’, penned the book’s forward and final chapter. Critics note the fact that the structure and curriculum for patriotism clubs were developed outside traditional review bodies like the Revised Guidelines for Patriotism Clubs in Secondary and Other Post Primary Institutions (Kampala: SPC, 2011). 78 SPC, Development of Patriotism in Schools: A Guide Text Book (Kampala: SPC, 2010), p. 5. 79 Ibid. 80 See Ashley L. Greene, ‘Dialogue in the Trenches: Confronting Political Narratives in Secondary Schools’, in Elezar Barkan, Constantin Goschler and James Waller (eds), Historical Dialogue and the Prevention of Mass Atrocities (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2020). 81 SPC, Development of Patriotism in Schools, pp. 80–81.

The First White Man to See the Nile: Decolonising History Education in Uganda

National Curriculum Development Centre. They fear that Museveni is using patriotism clubs to secure the minds, hearts, and votes of the upcoming generation, while militarising a young population groomed to see the country’s future as dependent on the success of the NRM party. Although club leaders insist that military training is essential for national defence, those who recall that many of Uganda’s wars have been fought against internal enemies are unsettled by the combination of military training and political messaging.82 Meanwhile, the government’s openly hostile stance toward History as a school subject has stilted secondary-school curriculum reform. Forty years after its demise, EAEC syllabi continue to form the bulk of Uganda’s History curriculum. The NRM’s shadow looms especially large over coverage of Uganda’s post-independence history. ‘History of East Africa (c.1000 to the present day)’, which students take over the course of their first three years, is the only History course taken by all secondary-school students. The class has been retitled ‘The History of East Africa from c.1000 to Independence’, preventing the need to update the syllabus and delve into the muddy events of Uganda’s post-­ independence history.83 As a senior officer from the Uganda National Examination Board explained: Ugandan history is not fished out as Ugandan history. Because we do believe that at that level it’s too early to specialise. They actually do Ugandan history when they go to university. That’s what I was telling you, that we have the African perspective, we have the East African perspective, that’s within the secondary school system. 84

Rather than engage with a contentious national narrative, the government has continued to emphasise a Pan-African perspective that locates unity in the shared colonial experiences of the continent. ‘The History of Africa Outside East Africa’ is now three separate syllabi: ‘The History of West Africa from c.1000 to Independence’, ‘The History of Central Africa from c.1000 to Independence’, and ‘The History of Southern Africa c.1000 to Independence’. Students take one of these courses in their fourth and final year of O-level, depending on which class their school offers. For those who complete their education after O-level or who go on to specialise in the Sciences for the final two years of A-level, their exposure to Uganda’s history ends with the exit of colonial powers. Greene, ‘Dialogue in the Trenches’. National Curriculum Development Centre, The Republic of Uganda Ministry of Education and Sports History Teaching Syllabus Uganda Certificate of Education Senior 1–4 (Kyambogo, Kampala: National Curriculum Development Centre, 2008). 84 Interview with author, Kampala, 16 September 2014, DM620022, transcript. 82

83

117

118

Decolonising State and Society in Uganda

In the A-level course ‘Africa: National Movements and the New States’ (African Nationalism), only three of the forty-four sub-topics that pertain specifically to Uganda. Together, the three sub-topics – ‘Nationalism in Uganda (1945–1962)’, ‘The Civil War in Uganda (1980– 1986)’, and ‘The Military Coup in Uganda 1971’– cover only seven years of Uganda’s post-independence history.85 Authors of textbooks and student examination guides tiptoe around contentious topics. For example, despite the fact that ‘The Civil War in Uganda (1980–1986)’ is listed as a sub-topic in the formal curriculum, a third edition textbook published in 2014 makes no reference to Uganda in its chapter on civil wars in Africa, instead featuring case studies on Chad, Sudan, Angola, and Mozambique.86 In the section on ‘Nationalism in Uganda’, which covers up to the time of publication, a noticeable gap exists between the end of Idi Amin’s rule in 1979 and the next section – ‘THE NRM RULE’. This section begins with two short sentences encapsulating the NRM’s rise to power in1986. They read: ‘The National Resistance Movement came in with great determination to carry out political, economic and social transformation. While still in the bush, the NRA top brass had come up with a ten-point programme upon which it has based its transformations’.87 The remainder of the section includes the NRM’s 10-Point Programme and a list of 21 achievements of NRM governance. While a review question ‘Examine the causes and effects of the civil war in Uganda’ – pays lip service to the formal curriculum, the actual events of the conflict and its aftermath are shrouded in silence. 88 As mentioned at the start of the chapter, the relatively few questions on Uganda in national examinations – no more than one question per exam from 1992 to 2007, with four exams lacking a question about Uganda entirely – validates textbook writers’ decisions to steer clear of these difficult topics.89 Rather than leave the unresolved past in the hands of History teachers, Museveni has chosen to broach these events within the bounds of the patriotism clubs, where conversations are steered in a pro-NRM direction.90

UNEB, U.A.C.E. ARTS: History, Economics, IRE & CRE (Kampala: UNEB, 2013). 86 Nsamba Gonzaga Baker, Modern African Nationalism 1935 to Present: National Movements & the New States (Kampala: publisher unlisted, 2014). 87 Ibid., 171. 88 Ibid., 173. 89 Uganda National Examination Board, UACE ARTS 1992–2007 (Kampala: UNEB, 2007). 90 Greene, ‘Dialogue in the Trenches’. 85

The First White Man to See the Nile: Decolonising History Education in Uganda

Conclusion

Decolonising History education remains an unfinished project in Uganda. At the moment of independence, elites saw opportunities to harness curricular reform for the purpose of nation-building. The historical writing produced by Ugandans, however, reflected a different reality, one of competing ethnic patriotisms, varied experiences of colonial rule, and diverging visions for Uganda’s political future. As past contestations broke into the present, elites disillusioned with the promise of History education searched for suitable alternatives to the blatantly colonial courses left by the British. Pan-African curricula developed by the East African Examinations Council represented both the pinnacle of Uganda’s reforms and the death knell for serious attempts to address the nation’s past within its education system. History classrooms became simultaneously places of decolonisation and national stagnation. Anticolonial sentiment and the humour to be found by recasting Speke as the first White man to see the Nile provided rare patches of common ground for a country that agreed on little else. Similarly, the authoritarian developmentalism that has characterised recent regimes masks continued concern over patriotic histories and the potentially damaging effects that History education could have on those in power. Museveni, while critical of History as a discipline, remains interested in historical revision. The emergence of patriotism clubs reflects a government actively interested in using historical narratives to disseminate political ideologies to Ugandan youth. In using an extracurricular programme controlled by the President’s Office and the military, Museveni has bypassed traditional curricular channels and the National Curriculum Development Centre, giving him control of the narrative. While contestations over Uganda’s past are moving outside the classroom, battles over history and the politics of knowledge are far from over.

119

PART II IMAGINING INSTITUTIONS

6 Militarism and the Dilemmas of Decolonising Knowledge in Uganda MOSES KHISA

The African colonial state was founded on militarism, a feature carried forward by the postcolonial state. The threat of coercion and use of overt violence mediated (and continues to mediate) relations between rulers and the ruled.1 Almost without exception, the implantation of the European colonial state in the African continent was underpinned by external interests rather than the aspirations and desires of the colonised peoples. Colonialism was a project disguised as civilisational but which in reality sought to meet the material and imperial interests of European colonial powers and their citizens.2 This meant that the threat and use of force was crucial, indeed necessary, in pursuing colonial interests in the continent. The forcible manner of foisting colonial authority on the colonised peoples necessitated the deployment of coercion, often blunt, brutal, and to chilling effect. 3 To exert control and achieve effective occupation of the colonised peoples necessitated the exercise of brute force because it was impossible to secure hegemony without coercion. While the ruling classes in 1 See Amii Omara-Otunnu, Politics and the Military in Uganda, 1890–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987); Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); Timothy H. Parsons, The 1964 Army Mutinies and the Making of Modern East Africa (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); Richard J. Reid, A History of Modern Africa: 1800 to the Present (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). 2 The external nature of the African state, and indeed the national-state project, as an alien creature actualised through outright imposition, has been the subject of a huge corpus of Africanist scholarship that need not be rehashed here. See, for example, Young 1994; Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston, MA and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998). 3 Arguably, the most extreme form of this happened in the so-called Congo Free State, for long the personal real estate of King Leopold of Belgium, as documented by Hochschild 1998.

124

Part II: Imagining Institutions

the West established political control through ‘hegemony’, in the sense suggested by Antonio Gramsci – that is, dominance through consent; by contrast, colonial conquest and colonial rule in much of the Global South was non-hegemonic. It was fundamentally coercive and anchored on, and sustained largely through, the might of force.4 That is, the colonial state did not assimilate civil society in the manner that the European state did. This had grave implications for state-society relations. 5 The military machinery was the fulcrum of the African colonial state. This was because European colonial administrators had to deal with often inhospitable and relentlessly restive colonial subjects. Thus, the military was set up as a tool of internal coercion and control, not as a force against external aggression and provision of national security.6 This meant that the military, not so much the police, performed law and order tasks.7 Mahmood Mamdani summarised the crux of the problem as the ‘native question’ – the dilemma of successfully imposing alien rule by a tiny minority of foreigners on a majority of rebellious natives.8 In dealing with the native question, colonial authorities adopted two overlapping strategies. First, for the most part, they resorted to outside, mercenary-like soldiers with no relationship or affinity to the local population, or they often turned to ‘marginal’ ethnic groups or so-called warrior tribes, ‘regarded as less sophisticated and thus more naturally obedient’.9 This was to ensure that the military – the nucleus and fulcrum of colonial administration – executed authoritative commands without sensitivity to local social relations and familial considerations.10 Second, colonial authorities propagated an unfamiliarity culture between European administrators, on the one hand, and the military and the local population, on the other. Because it was critical that colonial policies and programmes be executed thoroughly, it was necessary to entrench a system of arm’s-length relationship between White administrators and the armed forces and lower-level staff (African or Asian) to assure a functional principal-agent relationship. That is, a system of hierarchy and command built on firm demarcation and distance between colonial administrators (whites) and soldiers and lower-level staff (non-whites) 4 Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 5 Ibid., p. xii. 6 Reid 2009, p. 319. 7 I am grateful to Joe Oloka-Onyango for underscoring this point in an interview, Kampala, 10 March 2019. 8 Mamdani 1996. 9 Reid 2009, p. 320. 10 Omara-Otunnu 1987; Joe Oloka-Onyango, ‘Police Powers, Human Rights and the State in Kenya and Uganda: A Comparative Analysis’, Third World Legal Studies, 9 (1990), 1–36.

Militarism and the Dilemmas of Decolonising Knowledge in Uganda

was necessary to propagate White racial superiority so as to execute colonial policies and sustain alien rule.11 This militaristic and largely unaccountable nature of the colonial state became an important legacy and a key feature of the postcolonial state. In the specific case of Uganda, it is the argument of this chapter that since independence the pre-eminence of militarism has inhibited the deepening of a tradition of independent and critical scholarship. To illustrate this point, I will draw on the attitudes of the current government towards higher education, particularly with regard to Uganda’s premier research university – Makerere – as a key site of knowledge production, and the dynamics of local publishing. Militarism here refers to the subordination of societal processes, institutions, and agendas to the objectives of the military and the use of military means for upward socio-economic mobility, accession to political power and survival of social groups.12 Under militarism, the military is both a source and symbol of power. In the years following independence in 1962, militarism took a particularly insidious tenor, and since 1986 Uganda has had the contradictory co-existence of a neoliberal economic order along with the persistence of an illiberal political regime, a combined commitment to free market orthodoxy and durability of authoritarianism anchored in militarism and coercion. In the past three decades, Uganda has had but only a flirting experience with civilian democratic politics despite attempts at ‘broad-based’ government in the early years of Museveni’s rule. In public debates and general national political discourse, the National Resistance Movement (NRM) ideologues and apparatchiks maintained a rhetorical embrace of openness, accountability, and critical scrutiny in the spirit of Museveni’s 1986 promise of a fundamental change. However, in the main, the NRM regime at its core was, and remains, a military outfit draped in civilian garb. As Omara-Otunnu aptly observed, the former rebel National Resistance Army (NRA), and by extension the NRM ruling party, ‘derives its power from the barrel of the gun and not the ballot’.13 Thus, whenever Museveni faces serious challenges to his power, the regime’s civilian democratic pretensions get cast aside. Whenever compelled to, Museveni quite overtly reminds the public that the ultimate source of his power is the military, the bullet not the ballot. Invariably, the country has experienced state-instigated limitations on scholarship, which necessarily obstruct pursuing critical questions against the status quo, including questioning the use and abuse of Omara-Otunnu 1987, p. 8. Amii Omara-Otunnu, ‘The Currency of Militarism in Uganda’, in Eboe Hutchful and Abdoulaye Bathily (eds), The Military and Militarism in Africa (Dakar: CODESRIA, 1998), pp. 339–428 (p. 403). 13 Ibid., p. 419. 11

12

125

126

Part II: Imagining Institutions

state power. Short of democratising the state and demilitarising political engagement, pursuing critical scholarship and decolonising knowledge production remain largely elusive if distant ideals in Uganda. The rest of this chapter proceeds in three sections. In the next section, I broadly conceptualise the link between academic freedom and the project of decolonising knowledge. The second section places the current state of affairs in historical perspective from the time of Uganda’s independence in 1962. The penultimate section takes up an analysis of the fate of Makerere University and the state of local publishing both of which help to illuminate the dilemmas and contours of critical scholarship in Uganda. The chapter ends with a brief conclusion underscoring the limits of decolonising knowledge production in an environment of pervasive militarism.

Decolonising Knowledge and Speaking Truth to Power

The nature of the colonial state and the society that the state policed and perpetuated invariably called for ‘decolonising’ postcolonial Africa. This remains a critical and ongoing intellectual, cultural, and political agenda. An important aspect of the project of decolonising is the question of knowledge production about the continent and its people – a subject that has attracted a great deal of scholarly work.14 To decolonise was and remains a multifaceted project with a mosaic of moving parts. What does it mean to decolonise knowledge considering the specific nature of the African state as a colonially inherited coercive tool? Decolonisation must entail the reassertion of subjectivity and reclamation of independence of thought as a sine qua non for other emancipatory and liberation agendas. Without cultivating a culture of independent scholarship, free thought and intellectual exchanges, it is difficult to realise other aspects of the decolonising agenda writ large. To decolonise knowledge production and scholarly pursuits necessarily requires an environment that both allows but also enhances the civic virtues of free discourse and unfettered deliberation from which different projects and undertakings are possible. Yet, the very essence of the African colonial state, past and present, heavily constrains the flourishing of free thought and critical deliberation because colonial rule and the state it established, which has persisted, was a forceful 14 For example, NgũFo wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986); Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Manufacturing African Studies and Crises (Dakar: CODESRIA, 1997); Thandika Mkandawire (ed.), African Intellectuals: Rethinking Politics, Language, Gender, and Development (Dakar and London: CODESRIA and Zed Books, 2005); Jonathan D. Jansen (ed.), Decolonisation in Universities: The Politics of Knowledge. (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2019).

Militarism and the Dilemmas of Decolonising Knowledge in Uganda

imposition on a subject population that had no rights of citizenship. The great part of decolonisation and genuine independence, therefore, had to include the undoing of the colonially created atmosphere that constricted citizens’ civic spaces and undermined intellectual vitality. For this to happen, there had to be democratisation of the state and the demilitarisation of civil society. In much of Africa, however, this was never achieved at independence, neither has it to date. The African citizen intellectual has yet to fully realise the space and standing that is necessary for the free flourishing of scholarship. In Representations of the Intellectual, Edward Said made a case for an ‘armature’ public intellectual, an outsider who can courageously disturb the status quo and speak truth to power unconstrained by professional and disciplinary standards.15 Speaking truth to power means the scholar is unencumbered, can directly confront the major socio-­ political questions of the day, make a ruthless criticism of everything existing, ‘ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be’.16 In practice, the voice of the intellectual has to be one that makes the case for peace and justice, for fairness and equal opportunity, prudence and probity. The intellectual has to question orthodoxy and challenge structures of privilege and dominance. Speaking to the issues of the day means the public intellectual has to be a keen observer of actually existing socio-economic conditions and can accordingly provide substantive scholarly intervention. This means not being walled-off in the ivory tower, rather it requires having an active presence in at least some aspects of the rough and tumble of the social and political world, a conscious and critical immersion in community movements and popular politics.17 This is only possible in an environment that allows for the fullness of critical intellectual engagement with crucial questions of the day. In the immediate post-independent Africa, primarily the 1960s, the core issue was framed as one of the public intellectual versus the scholar, the former supposedly committed to national liberation and the national-­state project, the latter ostensibly concerned with scholarly productivity and professional excellence. Mahmood Mamdani summarised it, if in a rather stylised and binary manner, as a divide between relevance and excellence, the former assigned to the public Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Random House, 1994). 16 Karl Marx, ‘Letters from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher: Marx to Ruge’ (Cologne, 1843), www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/ letters/43_05.htm [accessed 9 July 2022]. 17 Zeleza 1997, p. 22. 15

127

128

Part II: Imagining Institutions

intellectual and the latter attributed to the scholar.18 Yet drawing a line between relevancy and excellence is a trifle superfluous, for scholarly relevance has to be anchored in some form of excellence, in the fidelity that the scholar pays to a minimum set of rules of professionalism even when defying orthodoxy or questioning the status quo and attempting to break out of disciplinary straitjackets. In the same vein, we cannot define scholarly excellence strictly in terms of academic standards without relevance to society. The point is not to seek one against the other, it is to marry the two. It is not a question of either or, as there is scarcely any inherent contradiction between excelling as a scholar and being relevant to the social world. The public intellectual is one only because he or she has the scholarly grounding and foundation upon which to speak to issues of social significance. Scholarly excellence in turn reflects public engagement through critical but measured intellectual intervention that is not mere populist pandering. This, to my understanding, is the crux of responsible citizenship expected of a scholar.19 It is the remit of the citizen intellectual, one who is especially needed across Africa, a continent still grappling with endemic social and political problems, condemned to the margins by structures of global power, capitalism, and domination. One way to understand the myriad post-independence crises that have afflicted the African continent is through the place and role of the African scholar and the challenge of knowledge production. In the main, Africa’s socio-economic and political dilemmas cannot be divorced from the quest for decolonising knowledge. If the continent still wrestles with the crisis of national identity and state legitimacy, the scholar confronts the precarious balance between material survival and professional success, the trade-off between free intellectual expression and personal preservation, between existence and excellence. Here, it is instructive to analyse the relationship between the state and the scholar, for the nature of the former has implications for the activities and actions of the latter. In turn, what the latter does or does not do can impinge upon the evolution of the former. To get to grips with this relationship, we have to understand the overarching nature of the African state and the implications for knowledge production. 18 Mahmood Mamdani, ‘Between the Public Intellectual and the Scholar: Decolonization and Some Post-Independence Initiatives in African Higher Education’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 17 (2016), 68–83; Mahmood Mamdani, ‘Decolonising Universities’, in Jonathan D. Jansen (ed.), Decolonisation in Universities: The Politics of Knowledge (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2019), pp. 15–28. 19 Joseph Ki-Zerbo, ‘African Intellectuals, Nationalism, and Pan-Africanism: A Testimony’, in Thandika Mkandawire (ed.), African Intellectuals: Rethinking Politics, Language, Gender, and Development (Dakar and London: CODESRIA and Zed Books), pp. 78–93 (p. 81).

Militarism and the Dilemmas of Decolonising Knowledge in Uganda

Coloniality, Militarism and Continuity: Uganda in Historical Perspective

The notion of ‘coloniality of power’, among other things, underlines the discursive but often violent and hegemonic consequences of Eurocentrism, capitalist accumulation and racialised global social relations that are integral to the modern world.20 This system took shape on a markedly global scale in the ‘New World’ via the tri-continental (Africa, Europe, and the Americas) integration and syndicated circuits of primitive accumulation at the start of the modern period, which in due course penetrated and brought most of the world under its sway, often violently, culminating in two World Wars. The continuation of imperial ambitions and processes of capitalist accumulation in the postcolonial world, intensified by the acceleration of globalisation, had grave implications for how the world outside of Europe and North America has been conceptualised, theorised, and studied. The central leitmotif was, for example, to view Africa through the European template – Eurocentrism – and for countries of the global periphery to be presented as working towards catching up with the core West – modernisation.21 This was as much in debates on development as the pursuit of ideas and knowledge production. What is often neglected in many of the debates on knowledge production in Africa is the central nervous system of the colonial and postcolonial state: the military and militarism. If Eurocentrism places Africa in a Euro-American epistemological straitjacket, militarism necessarily inhibits meaningful scholarly engagement with the everyday questions of power, plunder, and pillaging situated at the centre of Africa’s socio-economic milieu. Colonialism was not just about material conquest but also non-­ material subjugation – cultural and intellectual violence, the distortion of African social ethos, folklore, and belief systems as well as the systematic construction of the native as an inferior, slavish subject. The ‘invention of Africa’, as Mudimbe has argued, went beyond physical and cartographic demarcations to include epistemological colonialism that imposed standardised Western frames of studying Africa.22 This tenor of the colonial state that combined material conquest and non-material control received continuity and adaptation in the postcolonial regime of power. 20 Anibal Quijano, ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America’, Nepantla, No.3 (2000), 533–80 (p.537). 21 Amin Samir, Eurocentrism: Modernity, Religion and Democracy, A critique of Eurocentrism and Culturalism (New York: Monthly Press Review, 2009). 22 Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).

129

130

Part II: Imagining Institutions

In the decades following independence, nascent radical African scholarship sought to break with Eurocentrism and the strictures of the postcolonial state, as part of Africa’s broader struggle for liberation from the jaws of imperialism. Within this radical frame, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o notably suggested ‘decolonizing the mind’ and pursuing knowledge production through use of African languages.23 Within broader Pan-­A frican parlance, the dominant scholarly frontier and institutional site of inquiry tended to be located in a Marxian tradition and the University of Dar es Salaam, respectively, for not just African scholar-activists but also Afro-Caribbean thinkers like Walter Rodney and Horace Campbell. Until his passing in 2018, Samir Amin had been by far the longest-surviving and most consistent Marxist scholar committed to the project of emancipatory and revolutionary scholarship. In addition to the University of Dar es Salaam, the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) was (and remains), the leading continent-wide site for radical and Pan-­ African scholarship committed to countering Eurocentrism. CODESRIA has striven to provide the space, the resources and the inspiration to debate issues of public interest and policy for the African continent. 24 The initial Marxist-inspired focus of CODESRIA inevitably took it down the path of partiality to political economy – something that scholars belonging to the ‘cultural turn’ took issue with. But CODESRIA’s bias towards Marxian historiography and political economy is understandable considering the organisation’s founding in 1973 at the height of the Cold War and the pre-eminence of a socialist ideological bent across Africa. At any rate, contrary to suggestions that posit a distinct boundary between political, economic, and epistemological decolonisation, the last was intricately bound up with the nationalist agenda of political liberation and economic emancipation.25 The general trend during the first and second generations of African intellectuals, inside and outside the university, and the scholarly programmes they espoused, had a heavy bias towards the national-state project.26 Here, the scholar tended to work from within the framework of the alluring denunciations of colonialism and the easily identifiable external target for attack – imperialism. At the outset, the target for attack and criticism was easy and unproblematic. For the most part, the relationship between the scholar and the state was equally unproblematic, as long wa Thiong’o 1986. Mamdani 2016, p. 78. 25 Michael Neocosmos, ‘Thinking Political Emancipation and the Social Sciences in Africa: Some Critical Reflections’, Africa Development 39 (2014), 125–58. 26 Zeleza 1997, p. 26. 23

24

Militarism and the Dilemmas of Decolonising Knowledge in Uganda

as the former directed the analytical gaze at a distant and external target for criticism and did not focus on the internal political and social questions of the day. As Thandika Mkandawire aptly pointed out, ‘it was safer to talk about such entities as the “centre” and the “periphery” without incurring the wrath of any particular potentate’.27 This was to change with time as it became inevitable that the independent-minded scholar and public-spirited intellectual would have to turn and direct the aperture of critical inquiry on the new holders of state power after political independence. While the early post-independence consensus centred on popular nationalism and the national project in which the intelligentsia played an active role, the subsequent shift went toward confronting authoritarian nationalism.28 In Uganda, this shift spawned a conflict between the state, on one hand, and scholars and commentators using the forum of Transition magazine, on the other. The latter soon ran afoul of Milton Obote’s regime that had taken the tack of autocratic rule within the first five years of independence. Before long, the editor of Transition, Rajat Neogy, and the lawyer and young politician, Abu Mayanja, who wrote for the magazine, were incarcerated, a development that was only but one in a turn for the worst.29 Pressed to comment on the arrest of the two, President Obote reportedly observed that ‘the Ugandan government is not blind to the activities of intellectuals, feudalists, landlords, and confusing agents’. 30 The scornful reference to intellectuals as ‘confusing agents’ is something that keen observers of current Uganda politics will find familiar – President Yoweri Museveni has cavalierly used the phrase quite often. In the event, by the time Obote was overthrown by the military in 1971, the actions of security agencies and the military apparatus, directed at critics and opponents of the government, had wrought a deterioration of the civic sphere and undercut intellectual vitality. The net impact was the erosion of the space for intellectual ferment and critical scholarship, and ultimately the shrinkage of the political arena. 31 This trajectory of a chequered intellectual landscape and political turbulence, which branched off soon after independence, affected not just

Mkandawire 2005, p. 3. Neocosmos 2014, p. 132. 29 Henry Bienen, ‘Kenya and Uganda: When does Dissent Become Sedition’? Africa Report 14 (1969), 13, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1304056292 [accessed 29 August 2019]. 30 Ibid., 14. 31 Nelson Kasfir, The Shrinking Political Arena: Participation and Ethnicity in African Politics, with a Case Study of Uganda (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 27

28

131

132

Part II: Imagining Institutions

the civic and political landscape but also, perhaps more insidiously, the country’s wider intellectual landscape. 32 The breakdown of Uganda’s independence ‘political settlement’ and the clearing of the ‘road to autocracy’ had grave implications for scholarship and knowledge production. 33 Either one was unequivocally aligned with the nationalist project, which became little more than the use of sycophancy in pursuit of personal power and narrow group interests, or one was an enemy of the state seen as engaged in treason and therefore had to be incarcerated if they did not flee the country. The latter fate befell intrepid intellectuals of the time like Dani Nabudere, whose criticisms of Obote’s creeping authoritarianism put him at loggerheads with the regime and ended him in prison. Recourse to militarism was a signature feature that underpinned Obote’s descent into authoritarianism, which firmly re-established and cemented a tradition of militarism that the country is yet to exorcise and whose legacies inform the current political system. The downward spiral that deepened in 1966 quickly gave way to the military fascism of Idi Amin, during which time intellectual life and political association suffered stupendous assaults. At the centre of it was and remains militarism and the oversized reliance on the use of force as the source of state power rather than the democratic will of the people, a trend that accelerated when Obote ruefully dragged the military into an otherwise civilian political duel within his Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) party between 1964 and 1966. 34 When a faction led by party Secretary General, Grace Stuart Ibingira, challenged Obote over issues that were constitutional and political in nature, coupled with heightened intransigence from the Buganda Kingdom under Kabaka (King) Edward Mutesa II, Obote fell back on the coercive arsenal of the state to beat back his opponents. 35 This path of militarism has proved difficult to reverse, displaying continuity from Obote to Museveni. 36 Dan M. Mudoola, Religion, Ethnicity and Politics in Uganda (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1996). 33 I borrow the phrase ‘road to autocracy’ from Crawford Young, The Post­ colonial State in Africa: Fifty Years of Independence, 1960–2010 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), p. 122. 34 Otunnu 1998, p. 405; Juma A. Okuku, ‘Ethnicity, State Power and the Democratization Process in Uganda’, Discussion Paper 17 (Uppsala: Nordic African Institute, 2002), p. 19 35 Samwiri Karugire, The Roots of Instability in Uganda (Kampala: The New Vision Printing and Publishing Corporation, 1988); Phares Mutibwa, The Buganda Factor in Uganda Politics (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2008). 36 For a recent comprehensive treatment of the period from Milton Obote’s rule to Museveni’s, see Richard Reid, A History of Modern Uganda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), especially chapter 3. For broader analyses of continuities in Uganda’s political history, see Phares Mutibwa, Uganda since Independence: A Story of Unfulfilled Hopes (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 32

Militarism and the Dilemmas of Decolonising Knowledge in Uganda

The military had somewhat placed itself beyond reproach with the 1964 East African army mutinies (simultaneously in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda) and the ‘Nakulabye incident’ when soldiers of the Special Forces shot civilians but went largely unpunished. 37 Thus, with the brewing political crisis in the UPC and in Parliament, individuals in the military hierarchy were only too happy to be called on and get deployed in a political quarrel and power struggle, further cementing the military’s pre-eminent role in national politics. 38 The period from May 1966 – which marked the climax of the fallout between the central government and the government of the Buganda Kingdom – to January 1971, the overthrow of the Obote government, was a very uneasy one for Uganda as the ‘the country had a civilian administration which employed military methods and means to implement whatever policies they chose’. 39 In the aftermath of the 1966 crisis, Uganda became a one-party state, but as one perceptive scholar noted, ‘going by what was happening in the UPC by this time, it makes a lot of sense to conclude that it [the UPC] was also in the process of abolishing itself’.40 The UPC, and indeed the country, never recovered from this pushback against the power of the party and political persuasion in favour of resorting to militarism and state-instigated violence. Dragging the military into the realm of otherwise civilian political contestations had the net impact of eroding the relative democracy and pluralism that had taken shape between 1962 and 1966.41 Obote came to rely so much on the coercive arsenal of the state as he tightened his grip on power, the party generally side-lined. From 1964 onwards, his creeping authoritarianism cemented a notorious and corrosive role for the military as he increasingly relied on coercion and not persuasion. What is more, at war with the people of Buganda whose monarch he hounded into exile, Obote had set himself and the country up for a tragic descent. Before long, ironically, the very military on which he so much depended to maintain a grip on power overthrew him in January 1971, inaugurating Idi Amin’s military rule. The most pronounced and profound strand of militarism in post-­ independence Uganda was during the Idi Amin era, 1971–79. From the time of Amin’s takeover, ‘the slide toward a culture of militarism 1992); A.B.K. Kasozi, Social Origins of Violence in Uganda, 1964–1985 (Montreal & Kingstone: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994). 37 Mutibwa 2008, pp.71–72. 38 Reid 2017, p. 67. 39 Samwiri R. Karugire, A Political History of Uganda (Nairobi and London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1980), p. 197. 40 Expedit Ddungu, ‘Some Constitutional Dimensions of Military Politics in Uganda’, Working Paper No. 41 (Kampala: Centre for Basic Research, 1994), p. 13. 41 Okuku 2002, p. 20.

133

134

Part II: Imagining Institutions

became as dramatic as it was tragic’.42 Amin’s was a full-blown fascist, military regime, which eradicated the value of free civic political engagement, eliminated the practice of organised politics as the basis for political competition and debased the culture of intellectual discourse. It was not just organised political competition and activities of political parties that were outlawed: politics as an everyday vocation was altogether practically abolished. Ugandan exiles assisted by the Tanzania military overthrew Amin in April 1979,43 but factional struggles were rife among the armed forces that constituted the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA), the armed wing of the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF), a coalition of exiles that met at Moshi, Tanzania to plan the ouster of Amin.44 At the Moshi Conference, Yoweri Museveni, leader of one of the armed groups, the Front for National Salvation (Fronasa), apparently insisted on having the conference and the entire plan of ousting Amin built around the different fighting groups and their military strengths.45 In other words, Museveni pushed for the military approach, not civilian politics, as the organising principle for ousting Amin but also for managing the country in the aftermath. It was an argument of confronting militarism with militarism, reproducing a mode of politics that dated back to the colonial state. Little wonder that following Amin’s overthrow, there was a palpable absence of properly structured and issue-based politics against the backdrop of a decade of fascist rule. Everything was about flexing the military muscle. The brief return to party politics in 1980 was most inopportune, in an environment polluted with militarism and a politically fluid atmosphere. It is instructive that in the period between Amin’s ousting and the holding of general elections in December 1980 – a period of less than two years – Uganda had three different governments. The last government, courtesy of a disguised military coup on 12 May 1980, went by a rather ominous name – the ‘Military Commission’ – and was in charge of organising the 1980 election. Even more ominous was the fact that two of the three parties contesting the elections, Milton Obote’s UPC and Yoweri Museveni’s Uganda Patriotic Movement, both controlled and commanded their own armies – the Kikosi Maalum and the Fronasa, respectively. It was these two personalised militaries that supposedly constituted the national army – the UNLA. In reality, however, there was no national army to speak of, one to act as a neutral player between political groups contesting for power. Little wonder, therefore, that Otunnu 1998, p. 406. Reid 2017, p. 70. 44 Dani W. Nabudere, ‘The New Military Dictators in Uganda’, unpublished paper (1980). 45 Ibid., p. 6. 42

43

Militarism and the Dilemmas of Decolonising Knowledge in Uganda

the candidate for the perennially pacifist Democratic Party (DP), Paul Ssemogerere, was infamously chided for not having his ‘Generals’, a charge that was to be replayed at the next general elections more than a decade later in 1996. In any event, the 1980 election was widely viewed as rigged, handing Yoweri Museveni the justification to launch a five-year guerrilla campaign whose culmination was the onset of a military government in January 1986, coming on the heels of the earlier military coup in July 1985.46 Thus, from independence to 1986 through to the present, force and violence constituted the core instruments of governance and control in Uganda.47 It has been one form of militarism after another. A combination of the structure of politics and the nature of the state, on the one hand, and the idiosyncratic predispositions of successive rulers, on the other, has worked to perpetuate a mode of exercising power anchored in militarism. The militarism of the colonial state was embraced by Milton Obote following independence, deepened under Idi Amin and became firmly entrenched by Museveni. Under Museveni’s regime, on several occasions brute military force has been put on display, often directed at intimidating civilian actors and undercutting civilian institutional processes as happened with the military siege on the High Court in Kampala on 16 November 2005 and most recently with the invasion of Parliament at the height of heated debate over removal of the presidential age-limit provision from the constitution.48 Elections are ‘won’ not so much due to policy persuasion as through the use of force and finance. A study of the 2016 elections summed up the state of affairs as ‘controlling consent’, underscoring the manner in which the consent of the governed is manipulated and secured through coercion.49 Although there has been less resort to extreme brutality and the macabre use of coercion that defined the more diabolical regimes of Idi Amin and Milton Obote, Museveni’s regime where the state and the ruling party are fused and folded into one is anchored in the projection of military might. Ultimately, there is defaulting to the use of force whenever the rulers believe their hold onto power is threatened or when they perceive that critical commentaries have gone too far in exposing the nakedness of power. The state brutality that characterised the run up Reid 2017, pp. 73–74. Joshua B. Rubongoya, Regime Hegemony in Museveni’s Uganda: Pax Musevenica (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 56. 48 Rubongoya 2007, p. 195; for the latter incident, see The Observer, ‘I Planned Raid on Parliament – Police Boss Kayihura’ (28 September 2017), https:// observer.ug/news/headlines/55153-i-planned-raid-on-parliament-igp-kayihura [accessed 30 September 2019]. 49 Joe Oloka-Onyango and Josephine Ahikire (eds), Controlling Consent: Uganda’s 2016 Elections (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2017). 46 47

135

136

Part II: Imagining Institutions

to the January 2021 elections and the aftermath further, the runaway torture of citizens at the hands of security actors all magnify the extent of the problem. It is in this environment of militarism and coercion that the scholar and the state have to operate, co-operate, co-exist and contend. The situation at the country’s premier university sheds light on the state of affairs, to which I turn next.

Makerere University and the Dilemmas of Local Publishing 50 Makerere University Challenges

The state of Makerere University, Uganda’s premier university, can help situate the conundrum of knowledge production in an environment of militarism. Makerere helps to illuminate the dilemmas of critical scholarship in the context of a national political system built on militarism and in a country with a long history of political violence, rule by the gun rather than civic contestation over ideas and principles. Debates on the political economy of scholarship and knowledge production in Africa tend to focus on the economics of the academy, the financial constraints that scholars face and the resource limitations confronting universities, especially following the austerity policies of the 1980s. There is no gainsaying the severity and magnitude of this problem. In many African countries, economic opportunities are limited given that private sectors are too paltry and cannot generate sufficient openings and opportunities from which non-economic sectors like academia can benefit. Therefore, for many scholars the temptation to ‘moonlight’ and find additional income outside of the university is very high. Unfortunately, what is a real problem of resource constraints and the struggle to compliment meagre salaries through consulting is labelled with a big brush stroke of a ‘consultancy culture’ that supposedly explains the dearth of serious scholarly productivity. 51 The reality is more complex than a simple binary between consultancy and scholarship. For starters, research and knowledge production are seldom a priority for African governments, especially those that have an authoritarian texture even as they fleetingly espouse the virtues of democracy, which they narrowly define in terms of conducting elections that are for the most part dubious. This means funding research is not part of national budgeting priorities and long-term planning. Better remuneration for university faculty and investing 50 This section draws in part on multiple interviews and informal conversations with senior scholars at Makerere at different times between 2017 and 2020. 51 Mahmood Mamdani, ‘The Importance of Research in a University’, MISR Working Paper No. 3 (Kampala: Makerere Institute of Social Research, 2011).

Militarism and the Dilemmas of Decolonising Knowledge in Uganda

in development funding are not considered budgeting priorities for national socio-­economic transformation. This was for long Museveni’s and NRM’s attitude towards Makerere University, the country’s oldest and largest institution of higher education. According to data from the Directorate of Research and Graduate Training at Makerere University, in the fiscal year 2017/2018, for example, the Government of Uganda budgeted approximately US $6 million for research for Makerere compared with US $40 million committed by the Swedish Government over a five-year period, 2005–10, averaging $8 million every year. Between 2000 and 2012, the Government of Norway provided close to $40 million in research funding, averaging more than $3 million per year. Figures from the Government of Uganda are unavailable for that period but they are likely to be far less than the $6 million quoted above for the year 2017/2018. In 2019, the government committed to a new stream of funding called Research Innovations Fund (RIF) with explicit emphasis on ‘high impact Research and Innovations that inform national development priorities’. 52 Overall though, Makerere, and other Ugandan universities, have for the most part been heavily dependent on donor-funded research projects, with external donors funding most of the critical research. 53 The government’s poor record of funding research has to be situated in the context of the neoliberal creed embraced by the NRM and Museveni, which threw university education into the unchartered waters of trying to extract money from private and fee-paying students under market-driven curricula. The series of reforms undertaken at the behest of the World Bank from 1987 did not fundamentally transform the role of the university as an engine of knowledge production through research and innovation; rather the focus was on ‘increasing access by more students and making the universities pay for their education’. 54 The framework for reforms came from the World Bank’s prescribed policy of defining higher education as a luxury, and the prioritising of elementary education while side-lining university training. This thinking inevitably pushed scholars into the marketplace, with the need to ‘innovate’ in order to survive. 55 52 See Makerere University, ‘The Research Innovation Fund’ https://rif.mak. ac.ug/about-rif [accessed 25 March 2021]. 53 A.B.K. Kasozi and Mahmood Mamdani, ‘MISR Views on the National Discussion of Makerere’, Working Paper No. 29 (Kampala: Makerere Institute for Social Research, 2016), p. 10. 54 A.B.K. Kasozi, ‘The Impact of Governance on Research in Ugandan Universities’, MISR Working Paper No. 31 (Kampala: Makerere Institute of Social Research, 2017), p. 7. 55 Mahmood Mamdani, Scholars in the Marketplace: The Dilemmas of Neo-­ Liberal Reforms at Makerere University, 1989–2005 (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2007).

137

138

Part II: Imagining Institutions

Within the context of a system of militarism, this also meant that scholars had to tread carefully in soliciting consultancies in the private sector but especially from government ministries and agencies, considering that in Uganda’s rather minuscule private sector, the government remains the biggest source of business including opportunities for consulting by scholars. In this marketplace of soliciting research funding and consultancy, one has to avoid openly taking positions that are critical of, or contradict, the thinking of the rulers and the extant political establishment. The case of one faculty member at Makerere University is instructive.56 After completing his doctorate in the mid-2000s, he applied for a research grant from a donor-funded research programme channelled through the University’s Directorate of Research and Graduate Training. To get his proposal accepted and considered for funding, he was required to collaborate with a colleague in a different department. When he sent a draft of the proposal to a prospective collaborator, the latter was unequivocal on what kind of research he would be willing to associate with: he would not be party to a project that sought to analyse Uganda’s patronage-based political system. To do so, he told the colleague who had sought his partnership in no uncertain terms, would mean losing out on the big-money consultancies he often got from government ministries, primarily the Ministry of Finance. The proposal in question was about implications of the neo-patrimonial nature of the Ugandan state for the country’s nascent oil sector. It was about how Uganda would grapple with the so-called ‘oil curse’, considering the nature of governing institutions in place. This case sheds light on the contradiction inherent in Makerere as a neoliberal university where research is depoliticised and sanitised, and the shunning of radical social inquiry that challenges the way power is exercised and social order is maintained.57 It also bespeaks of the ‘two faces’ of the NRM regime. Upon capturing power in 1986, the NRM and its ideologues put up a mirage of openness to constructive criticism and the willingness to engage with the intelligentsia, particularly scholars at Makerere University. 58 This was partly because among the leading NRA commanders, including the commander-in-chief himself, Museveni, and different political commissars, were individuals inspired by the intellectual atmosphere at the University of Dar es Salaam in late 1960s and at Makerere University in the early 1980s. It was thus common for NRM ideologues, activists and military officers to participate in public The faculty member in question requested to remain anonymous. Jörg Wiegratz, Giuliano Martiniello and Elisa Greco (eds), Uganda: The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation (London: Zed Books, 2018), p. 10. 58 Interview with Frederick Jjuuko, retired Associate Professor of Law, Makerere University, Kampala, 12 March 2019. 56 57

Militarism and the Dilemmas of Decolonising Knowledge in Uganda

debates at Makerere in the 1990s and 2000s. I witnessed this as a young undergraduate student in the mid-2000s. Perhaps in an attempt to show that the military and the civilian public were in harmony and could engage in critical discourse, even serving army officers participated in public debates on topics that were decidedly political. More recently, Makerere’s Department of Political Science established a working relationship with the Senior Staff and Command College of the military in designing and providing academic training to officers of the Uganda army. However, the other face of the NRM culture among top political and military establishment is the tendency to overtly display hostility to independent-minded thought and academic freedom. This is all the more ironic considering Museveni’s own formative years, which at a minimum had some flirtation with radical Marxist thought and a consistent practice of intellectual engagement, including through published books and articles. 59 Yet, there is evidence of a longstanding anti-intellectual predisposition by Museveni and his regime. Writing in 1970 about his experience as a student at Dar es Salaam, for example, Museveni asserted that ‘it is Dar es Salaam’s atmosphere of freedom fighters, socialists, nationalists, anti-imperialism that attracted me rather than the so-called “academicians” of the University College, Dar es Salaam’.60 In recent years, Museveni chided Makerere for teaching ‘useless’ courses and on one occasion challenged the University’s faculty, who were protesting poor remuneration, to instead go rear goats.61 On many occasions, he has lashed out at prominent scholars at Makerere such as Joe Oloka-Onyango. According to one retired Makerere senior scholar, Museveni has a latent intellectualism yet he is anti-intellectual.62 He and his government have had a long-running acrimonious relationship with Makerere, an affair that reached fever-pitch levels when the University was shut down in late 2016.63 This summary closure was the worst escalation at Makerere since the 10 December 59 For example, Yoweri K. Museveni, What is Africa’s Problem? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); and Sowing the Mustard Seed: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in Uganda, 2nd edn (Nairobi: Moran Publishers, 2016). 60 Yoweri Museveni, ‘My Three Years in Tanzania: Glimpses of the Struggle between Revolution and Reaction’, Cheche, 2 (1970), 12. 61 Moses Khisa, ‘Professors Can Rear Goats but Makerere Will Limp’, The Observer (22 August, 2013), https://observer.ug/index.php?option=com_ content&view=article&id=27107:professors-can-rear-goats-but-makererewill-limp [accessed 30 September 2019]. 62 Interview with Jjuuko. 63 Daily Monitor, ‘Museveni Closes Makerere University after days of Turbulence’, 1 November (Kampala: Monitor Publications Limited, 2016). www. monitor.co.ug/News/National/Museveni---Makerere-University--days-turbulence-/688334-3438134-15h3gqp/index.html [accessed 15 October 2019].

139

140

Part II: Imagining Institutions

1990 student strike over government subsidies, which saw heavy military deployment and fatal shootings leading to death of students. Since the 1990 deadly encounter, matters at Makerere had stabilised somewhat. However, there was a growing environment of violent protests at the university especially in early 2000s, coinciding with appointment of a military general to command the Uganda Police Force – first General Katumba Wamala, succeeded by General Kale Kayihura. This appointment of a soldier to command the police intensified the militarisation of law enforcement. Thus, whenever there was a strike and protest at Makerere, whether by students over tuition fees increment or academic staff over demands for salary increment, it was always General Kayihura, and not the Minister of Education or the Chairperson of the University Council, the topmost decision-­making body, to engage both students and staff in negotiations to end any stand-off. Heavy police and especially military deployments at Makerere became routine through the 2000s and 2010s often leading to scuffles and shootings. During this period, Makerere had many stripes of militarism on and around the university campus that invariably created an environment unconducive to knowledge production.64 In October 2019, for example, the military raided halls of residence at night and engaged in acts of brutality against students who were protesting a tuition fees increment at the university.65 This manner of projecting military might through heavy deployment of police and military forces erodes freedom of academia and is contrary to Article 14 of ‘The Kampala Declaration on Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility’.66 The endless crises at Makerere, including on and off strikes and staffing problems, are quite instructive. While staff, faculty and administrators have repeatedly pressed for increased resource allocation from government (or attempted to raise tuition fees) in a bid to improve remuneration and to meet the University’s many financial needs, Museveni and his government have demanded that the university abandons teaching ‘useless courses’. By ‘useless courses’ (meaning the arts, humanities and social sciences), of course, Museveni is not referring to uselessness in a strictly functional or technical sense but rather political. He knows that the university is not there to purely service the 64 Interview with a senior faculty member in the school of Liberal and Performing Arts who requested anonymity, Kampala, 15 March 2019. 65 Daily Monitor, ‘11 Makerere Students Beaten, Hospitalised after Military Raid as Army Refutes Soldier’s Death Reports’, October 25 (Kampala: Monitor Publications Limited, 2019), www.monitor.co.ug/News/National/students-hospitalised-Judith-Nalukwago-Makerere-University/688334-5324262-o77px2z/ index.html [accessed 25 October 2019). 66 ‘The Kampala Declaration on Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility’, 29 November 1990, Kampala, Uganda, http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/ africa/KAMDOK.htm [accessed 8 June 2022].

Militarism and the Dilemmas of Decolonising Knowledge in Uganda

labour market and to produce technocrats. He knows that one need not go to the university to acquire basic technical skills and competences – vocational schools and tertiary institutions are very well-suited for that purpose. In fact, his government has largely neglected technical and vocational education. What Museveni and his government find unsettling is the potential political threat from a university that imparts critical skills and provides a liberal arts experience necessary for informed citizenship, independent-minded thinking and intellectual vitality. By attempting to stifle the civic contribution of true university education, and by undermining intellectual freedom through propagating a mostly hostile military attitude, the Museveni and his regime have quite significantly succeeded in disarticulating the University from the Ugandan society. A public university is not located in a social vacuum without a purpose. It necessarily belongs to a social milieu and in a very specific context with societal needs and demands. If it has no immediate relevance to society then it very well has little meaning and bearing to that society. Similarly, a university that blindly panders to what is fashionable and to random public sentiments without due regard to institutional standards is bound to be lost in the morass of public performativity and populist rancour. In that regard, Mamdani’s binary of relevance versus excellence is somewhat misplaced.67 The point here is that a university with a public presence must belong to society, but not under the sway of cheap populism and the expedience of political calculations. This in part is the essence of academic freedom, the freedom to serve society but from an independent and autonomous site of scholarly inquiry. Yet, it is precisely this basic foundational orientation and institutional positionality of the university, and of the scholar, that is in strong opposition to militarism – the overriding belief in the force of arms and not the power of persuasion or civic and constructive engagement. The institutional space and site of a university carries unique social currency and political potency. It is arguably at a university campus where individuals can ponder the unimaginable and do the unthinkable. Historically, it is out of the university settings that radical ideas are born and creative destruction is crafted. The privileged state of the university-space makes possible the asking of unsettling questions, providing courageous answers and especially speaking truth to power. Museveni fully understands this, thus the need to take deliberate steps aimed at controlling the university and curtailing intellectual freedom. After all, his own formative thinking and orientation as a specialist in revolutionary violence was forged at a university campus – Dar es Salaam. 67

Mamdani 2016, 2019.

141

142

Part II: Imagining Institutions

The precarious state of Makerere parallels the dilemmas of local publishing to which I turn shortly, but suffice to say that Museveni, as indeed are military authoritarian rulers in his mould, is wont to impose a form of command and control on the functioning of the university, to dictate what scholars pursue in their work and ultimately determine the knowledge production that takes place. This is contrary to Article 11 of ‘The Kampala Declaration on Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility’, 1990, which stipulates that: ‘Institutions of higher education shall be autonomous of the State or any other public authority in conducting their affairs, including the administration, and setting up their academic, teaching, research and other related programmes’.68 This chapter has not addressed the fate and state of scholarship in other public and private universities in Uganda, but it is arguable that matters there are worse than at Makerere, considering the latter is the premier and most prestigious higher education institution. Private universities, whether owned by faith institutions (Church, Muslim community) or private individuals, for one are likely to err on the side of caution in an environment where the nation’s topmost university, Makerere, has repeatedly suffered assault and intimidation by Uganda’s militaristic state.

The Dilemmas of Local Publishing

The state of local publishing is equally instructive as that of universities on the fate of knowledge production in Uganda. Scholarly productivity and output depends considerably on the immediate availability of outlets and platforms for independent publishing and dissemination. Local publishing is especially crucial for the flourishing of primary research and the growth of a core of citizen intellectuals committed to expanding the frontiers of local knowledge. In Uganda, the leading local scholarly publisher for long has undoubtedly been Fountain Publishers, owned by James Tumusiime, a former deputy head of the government-owned New Vision Printing and Publishing Company Ltd, the publishers of the New Vision newspaper and other media outlets.69 Along with William Pike, Wafula Oguttu and a few others, Tumusiime was among the early group of Ugandan media practitioners who embraced and supported the NRM agenda in earnest in 1986 – in a word, he was an NRM ‘cadre’. Later, Tumusiime left his position at the 68 ‘The Kampala Declaration on Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility’ 1990. 69 This company grew into a huge conglomerate, now called Vision Group, in which the government still holds shares but is also listed on the stock market. Its various media outlets, especially the New Vision newspaper, have for long been little more than propaganda tools for the Museveni regime.

Militarism and the Dilemmas of Decolonising Knowledge in Uganda

New Vision to build Fountain Publishers, transforming the company into the leading local book publisher with international partnerships and collaborations. A cursory look at Fountain’s catalogue of published titles shows a great deal of published works of history, politics, and economics, but also a notable dearth of publications that directly tackle critical and controversial issues of contemporary national politics and society in Uganda, especially those that directly cast the spotlight on the current government. In fact Fountain Publishers’ biggest business is in textbooks for Ugandan primary and secondary schools, and the bulk of this business comes from the Government of Uganda and donor-funded support programmes for the Ministry of Education. Naturally, as a business-­m inded person, Tumusiime has his eye on protecting his company and maintaining the flow of government contracts for school textbooks, and thus is unlikely to allow unfettered publishing of critical scholarship that may put his company on a collision path with Museveni. For the most part, therefore, works that are critical of the current political establishment or that raise serious questions about the state of democracy, rule of law, human rights, and social justice are either self-published or published outside Uganda be they by local or foreign authors. Quite instructively, when published outside the country, Ugandan intelligence and security agencies have on at least two occasions attempted to block entry into the country or confiscated copies of books that cast a critical spotlight on the NRM regime and the rule of President Museveni. This was the case with an edited volume on the 2016 elections, perceptively titled Controlling Consent.70 Earlier in 2010, copies of The Correct Line? by Olive Kobusingye were confiscated at Entebbe airport and did not circulate in Uganda until after many weeks.71 Both self-publishing and publishing abroad presents two sets of problems for local knowledge production and dissemination. With the former, much of what gets produced is not professionally processed, is less rigorous and falls short of expected high standards for scholarly publishing. By contrast, works published outside Uganda, especially in Western presses, tend to be expensive and inaccessible, and therefore have very low domestic Ugandan circulation. 70 Daily Monitor, ‘Book on 2016 Polls Seized’ (16 March 2017), www.monitor. co.ug/uganda/news/national/book-on-2016-polls-seized-1692380 [accessed 8 June 2022]. 71 Daily Monitor, ‘Government says it Won’t Free Seized Books’ (14 October 2010), www.monitor.co.ug/News/National/688334-1032550-b8l323z/index. html [accessed 15 October 2019]. Dr Kobusingye, a physician, is sister to Uganda’s then main opposition leader, Kizza Besigye. Her book took a point-by-point evaluation and take down of Museveni’s 1986 promises along with the corresponding contrasts of his actual practices.

143

144

Part II: Imagining Institutions

Without a robust and well-established network of independent local publishing, it is arguable that there are a large number of radical and revolutionary ideas out there among Ugandan scholars (and non-­ scholars too), which do not circulate in ways to influence key national discourses. This extends to the media. Listening to popular debates in vernacular on Ugandan airwaves provides some window into the potentially rich spectrum of ideas out there. Ugandans are a ‘talkative people’ and liberalisation of the radio airwaves in the 1990s unleashed highly engaging public debates through live talk-shows and especially the open-air, large-crowds live radio broadcasts, the ebimeeza (Luganda, ‘round table’) or people’s parliaments, featuring animated discussions.72 This novel genre of citizens’ civic engagement was later seen as a threat to national (actually regime) security and the ebimeeza were indefinitely banned by Museveni’s government in 2009. One of the major broadcasters of ebimeeza, the Buganda Kingdom-owned Central Broadcasting Services (CBS), was taken off-air for a year in a crackdown on independent media that included other privately owned radio stations. In 2002, 2005 and 2013, the Daily Monitor newspaper was shut down in a manner that left a chilling impact on this media house and the media landscape in the country as a whole. These attacks on free and independent media have important parallels with the state of academic freedom as they all speak to the necessity of resorting to self-censorship as a survival strategy.

Conclusion

Decolonising knowledge and pursuing critical scholarship requires an enabling socio-political environment, which is considerably dependent on the nature of the state and how state power is organised and exercised. The political atmosphere and the ideological predisposition of state elites are critical. Scholarly productivity and publishing requires financial resources, but the space for free pursuit of ideas and questions is equally crucial. This entails being able to ask questions that the powerful, especially the holders of state power, may not like asked of them or, if asked, would not want answered in an independent, scholarly manner. What I have tried to argue in this chapter is that this is not possible under conditions of militarism and militaristic rule where the force of arms buttresses state power, and the political culture is rooted in coercion not persuasion. Scholarly productivity is heavily constrained when the overarching worldview of the most important individual in a 72 Florence Brisset-Foucault, Talkative Polity: Radio, Domination, and Citizenship in Uganda (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019).

Militarism and the Dilemmas of Decolonising Knowledge in Uganda

country, the President, and the institutional texture of the most powerful institution, the state, are fundamentally militaristic: that is, when there is an overriding belief in military power and reliance on force of arms as the primary source and guarantor of authority. Half a century ago, Rajat Neogy noted that ‘the trouble in Africa is that we have too few intellectuals – people who will refuse to put their personal interests before intellectual honesty’.73 It appears that little has changed since then, but we need to nuance Neogy’s comment by noting that human beings are wired to be risk averse, to seek self-­ preservation, to prioritise personal wellbeing over lofty societal interests and grandiose agendas. In that regard, it is instructive that some of the leading and most influential Ugandan intellectuals in recent decades have deliberately, if carefully, steered clear of directly confronting some of the key questions in Ugandan politics. Many have refrained from writing about hot-button social questions like nepotism, an ethnically skewed and quasi-military regime and the blatant land grabbing that arguably promises to be the next main frontier of social conflict in the country. The core message of this chapter is that decolonising knowledge has to go beyond methodological and epistemological concerns. It must entail the question of the state, the uses and abuses of state power. To decolonise knowledge production necessarily requires democratising the state, and democratising the state means, among other things, demilitarising state power, political contestations, and social relations. Only then can it be possible to attain the ideal of ‘objective civilian control’, of subordinating the armed forces to civilian authority even as the armed forces retain autonomy over technical and operational matters.74 This is necessary for constructive civic engagement and critical scholarly intervention to flourish, without undue overt and covert intrusions of the state.

Rajat Neogy, ‘Rajat Neogy on the CIA’, Transition, 75/76, The Anniversary Issue: Selections from Transition, 1961–1976 (1997), 316. 74 Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957). 73

145

7 Institutional Knowledge and the Ugandan Public Service: From Colonialism and Neocolonialism to the New Public Service GENEVIEVE ENID MEYERS

The public service is one of the most critical institutions of government. It offers regulatory and service functions and implements essential government policies and programmes. The search for public service competencies has been an enduring concern since African nations emerged from colonialism in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Today, as African nations make a challenging transition from a predominantly narrow bureaucratic mindset toward a more broad-based governance approach to public service, an important consideration is the quality of institutional knowledge, values, and norms required to create the capacity to effectively promote the public interest. This capacity is important to deliver an ever-expanding range of public services to an increasing citizenry in a dynamic and complex environment that is filled with new challenges. The Ugandan public service, which entails numerous ministries, departments, and independent entities and agencies, just like many on the African continent, is rooted in the colonial institutional knowledge base and has for long operated mainly within the confines of the command, control, and compliance approach first introduced by the British colonial administrators. Where reforms have been initiated, they have fallen short of detaching institutional functioning from colonial precedent or they have been foreign, dictated by structural adjustment programmes and neoliberal values. This chapter is normative; I prescribe how the Ugandan public service ought to best serve the public interest by providing insight into how the production of institutional knowledge may be reimagined and reoriented to create a decolonial, more indigenous-values-based orientation to public service. The indigenous values I propose are enshrined in the precolonial customary rules and conventions through which society reached consensus and regulated itself. For instance, whether it was a property dispute debated and adjudicated by community elders or a crisis that needed intervention of the council of elders, the African community palaver offered a mechanism through which community engagement,

Institutional Knowledge and the Ugandan Public Service

discourse, and participation were utilised in decision making. Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba, observed that ‘the palaver is an appropriate community method and practice to resolve contradictions among the people and to strengthen organic mutual links of solidarity among all the members of the community’.1 It can therefore be asserted that when applied properly, critical and reflective dialogue about what constitutes the public interest can enhance collaboration and achieve agreement between the public service and the people it is supposed to serve. Other indigenous African practices like reciprocal obligation strategies that were utilised by the Baganda to attain balances of power, collaboration and accountability among the kings, chiefs and people may be helpful too. In addition, the African ubuntu philosophy that is rooted in the belief that to be human is to affirm one’s humanity by recognising the humanity of others and establishing humane and ethical relations with them, can be used to improve the performance of the Ugandan public service. While the ubuntu philosophy is not indigenous to Uganda, the belief in humanness, reciprocal social relationships and the appreciation of community interests over individual interests are. This is not to claim that the desire for personhood, individual rights, and autonomy and contradictions therefrom are missing. Rather, the argument here is that core indigenous ubuntu values like humanness, caring, sharing, respect, and communal participation among others, can inform the public service knowledge and operation to better serve the citizenry. In advancing these prescriptions, I am cognisant of the fact that Uganda is a country with significant diversity, which has often led to considerable strife in socioe-conomic, political, and administrative spheres. Yet, diversity in itself does not always breed strife and is not necessarily inimical to communal consensus on and participation in the public interest. It must also be emphasised that the above-mentioned values and prescriptions manifest in some form in almost all sectors of the Ugandan society. This renders them viable options for generating change within the public service institutional knowledge base after a long futile period of relying on foreign prescriptions. The chapter contributes to the current conversations about decolonisation of colonial knowledge, publics, and institutions by illustrating the varying ways colonial knowledge was contested and reproduced. It shows the contradictions of the Africanisation and nationalism agenda embraced by Obote and Amin in a largely colonial institutional knowledge framework and elucidates the manifestations of enduring colonial institutional knowledge in the Ugandan Public Service 1 Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba, Experience of Democracy in Africa: Reflections on Practices of Communalist Palaver as a Social Method of Resolving Contradictions among the People (Dar es Salaam: University of Dar es Salaam Press, 1985), p. 5.

147

148

Part II: Imagining Institutions

to date. It suggests ways to reimagine and reorient values, norms and processes that govern the operation of the public service so that it may be guided by institutional knowledge that is rooted in indigenous values and norms. Yet, decolonising public service knowledge in Uganda in the midst of flourishing neoliberal policies and programmes shall remain a challenge and deserves more interrogation by scholars and researchers. The chapter therefore, complicates current conversations about decolonisation of colonial knowledge by problematising Western-­based bureaucratic knowledge and indigenous knowledge in the era of neo­l iberalism.

Institutional Knowledge and the Ugandan Public Service

Institutional knowledge is comprised of values, norms, procedures, processes, and data among other categories that guide the operation of the public service. Institutional theory posits that public organisational structures, practices, and procedures are shaped by societal institutions which prescribe particular courses of action, regulate behaviour, and foster or inhibit diverse forms of collaboration and knowledge generation. The institutional knowledge of the contemporary Ugandan public service is rooted in colonial, postcolonial, and neoliberal institutions and formulations. The onset of colonialism heralded a radical change to the administrative stance and performance of the country’s precolonial societies as the British introduced Western-style bureaucratic administration to the country’s administrative fabric. The newly imposed system was a mechanism for control and subjugation rather than for serving the public interest and entrenching administrative ideals. As such, focus was placed on maintaining law and order, collecting taxes and ensuring the colonial interests rather than creating viable administrative infrastructures operated by trained Ugandans. Colonial administrators were often elitist, authoritarian, aloof, and paternalistic. When the country attained independence in 1962, the administrative system had to reform its structural composition and function. Besides maintaining law and order, the public service became the avenue for gainful employment, policy making, and social and economic development. Some of the post-independence public service decolonisation reforms included indigenisation of the bureaucracy and utilisation of the civil service to spearhead the development agenda. Nonetheless, radical transformation did not occur. In fact, the administrative system that emerged out of colonialism kept the colonial public service institutional structure intact and only marginally changed the presiding bureaucratic elites. Furthermore, decolonisation and independence did not entail disregard for the colonial bureaucratic ideals and principles which fostered unresponsiveness to the citizenry. Rather, the public

Institutional Knowledge and the Ugandan Public Service

service institutional knowledge base remained deeply entwined with colonialism and the colonial interpretation of bureaucratic ideals. To date, public service knowledge is still rooted in the colonial experience. It is this institutional knowledge, which guides the Ugandan public service functioning, that the chapter seeks to decolonise by prescribing normative elements rooted in indigenous values that reflect and define expectations held by citizens regarding the roles, goals and performance of the public service. The functions, structures, and performance of the Ugandan public service have, over time, been shaped by historical, economic, political, and ideological factors. While the post-independence political sphere rapidly evolved into incipient and actual political instability, there was a semblance of continuity in the administrative sphere. Yet, the political turmoil of the 1970s and 1980s led to personalist bureaucratic elite systems that, despite retaining the institutional structure, disrupted institutional knowledge, enhanced neo-patrimonialism and devastated the quality and capability of the civil service. A dismal economic and political performance made worse the already dire administrative conditions. In effect, despite the post-independence public service reforms, administrative efficiency, effectiveness, accountability, and responsiveness were not attained. If anything, the reform efforts proved inappropriate and inadequate. The local cultural and socio-political factors exposed the Western-derived administrative and political systems to tremendous challenges. This chapter offers an assessment of decolonisation of the institutional knowledge of the Ugandan public service by situating the analysis into three historical public administration periods: the colonial period, post-independence neocolonial period and the neoliberal period. Effort is made to show how each period affected public service institutional knowledge and development. In the first section, I offer a historical background to the Ugandan public service including colonial rule and its effects. In the second section, I spotlight the post-independence neocolonial period between 1962 and 1980. I present evidence of colonial bureaucratic knowledge continuity and decolonisation reforms undertaken by Milton Obote’s first regime and Amin’s regime. There­a fter, I focus on the lack of the politics/administration dichotomy under the Amin regime’s Ugandanisation of commerce and public service, and the effect it had on bureaucratic performance. The third section covers the 1980s neoliberal public service reform efforts spearheaded by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank during the second Obote regime and the early years of Yoweri Museveni’s regime. My goal here is to show that institutional knowledge development remained imitative rather than indigenous. The fourth section covers the reforms initiated from the 1990s to date, under Museveni’s rule. I show that, under that regime, the Ugandan

149

150

Part II: Imagining Institutions

public service has largely followed a neoliberal paradigm, leaving little room for local innovation and knowledge generation. I focus analysis on foreign neoliberal ideological assumptions popularised by the New Public Management (NPM), and the more recent New Public Service (NPS) and show how they have shaped institutional knowledge in Uganda’s public service. I contrast NPM with NPS and illustrate how the latter is more aligned with indigenous Ugandan values and practices, which, if selectively and creatively adapted, may engender a public service that serves the public interest. In the last section, I offer the conclusion and way forward by emphasising that for the Ugandan public service to revamp its system and pave the way for institutional reorientation in form, knowledge, and performance, major changes must be implemented to break the pattern of foreign-knowledge dependence. This will entail undertaking reforms and initiatives that embrace integrating local experience, indigenous knowledge, and non-traditional competences that are context-specific and favourable to serve the public interest. I conclude by cautioning that all the reforms proposed will come to naught if the current government’s corruption, clientelism, and political interference in administrative decisions are not curbed. Ultimately then, the legitimacy and political trajectory of the Museveni government may be the formidable obstacle to indigenisation of the Ugandan public service’s institutional knowledge to better serve the public interest.

Colonialism and the Ugandan Public Service

Colonialism and its effects on the colonised, whether in Africa, Asia, or Latin America, have long captured the attention of scholars from a range of disciplines.2 Across the African continent, colonialists were confronted with numerous alternatives in fashioning local administrative bureaucracies that could exercise authority over the indigenous peoples using Western bureaucratic standards. Numerous writers, European explorers, missionaries and colonial administrators acknowledged that there was a well-established and intricate indigenous system of administration in the communities of precolonial Uganda. 3 See Crawford C. Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Richard J. Reid, A History of Modern Uganda (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017). 3 See Reid, A History of Modern Uganda; Holly Hanson, Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003); (Lord) William Hailey, Native Administration in the British African Territories (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1950); Kenneth Ingham, A History of 2

Institutional Knowledge and the Ugandan Public Service

The Buganda Kingdom had a system of administration that the British used to institute indirect rule. When the early missionaries and later the British colonialists arrived in the Kingdom, they found an administrative system centred around the king, known as the Kabaka, with royal tax collectors, armies and an organised civil society. The administrative structure spanned from the king to the county (saza) chief, downwards to a sub-county (gombolola) chief and further down to a parish (muluka) chief. The Buganda administrative system was used by the British to enforce their administration and hegemony throughout the Protectorate. It is through indirect rule that the first seeds of colonial administrative institutional knowledge were sowed. According to Thomas Spear, the colonial administration relied on ‘African auxiliaries’ to implement its rule, which it then claimed was based on the ‘free choice of the people’, the ‘natural authority’ of the chiefs and the established customs of the people.4 The colonial bureaucracy used local chiefs to administer the government and, where no chiefs existed, they were created or those from Buganda were brought to implement colonial policies. However, this new form of administration lacked the customary balances of power and contestation of authority articulated through interactions among kings, chiefs, clans, and the people that characterised precolonial Ugandan territories. 5 Indirect rule then, as Mahmood Mamdani has argued, incorporated local chiefs into a state-enforced customary order in which the chief’s authority was now reinforced and backed by central colonial power – the process he terms ‘decentralized despotism’. Without any check from the colonised, the colonial administration extracted wealth from the colony at will. The colonial civil service, an instrument of the British imperial policy of indirect rule, was mainly concerned with the maintenance of law and order, the collection of taxes and the provision of the necessary framework for trade in the colony. It was not required to deal with issues of administrative governance and formulation of developmental socio-economic and political policies because such functions were not the immediate reasons for acquiring the colony. The colonial public East Africa (London: Longmans, 1962); William Barber, The Economy of British Central Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1961); William G. Fleming, ‘Authority, Efficiency, and Role Stress: Problems in the Development of East African Bureaucracies’, Administrative Science Quarterly 11 (1966), 386–404; Lucy Mair, Primitive Government: A Study of Traditional Political Systems in Eastern Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977). 4 Thomas Spear, ‘Indirect Rule, the Politics of Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention’, in Gregory H. Maddox and James L. Giblin (eds), In Search of a Nation: Histories of Authority and Dissidence in Tanzania (Oxford: James Currey, 2005), pp. 70–85. 5 Hanson, Landed Obligation.

151

152

Part II: Imagining Institutions

service was highly racially stratified in that the British occupied all the administrative, professional, and decision-making positions; the Asians6 most of the executive and a few professional positions; the local African population the clerical, secretarial, and the bulk of the ‘unskilled’ lower-level roles of cooks and shamba (garden) ‘boys’. As James Katorobo has argued, the top bureaucratic positions were in the hands of the British administrators instilled with the ‘spirit of empire and a sense of racial superiority’.7 It was a deliberate effort on the part of the Europeans not to offer higher education to the Africans and to then assert that the latter lacked the skills for higher level administrative positions. By the time Makerere College was founded in 1922 to offer indigenous Ugandans courses in carpentry, mechanics, and other artisan fields, the inequalities of opportunity in the civil service were deep. Prior to independence, the colonial administration made efforts to alter the composition of the civil service and hastened to train Ugandans on matters of administration. Considering prior reluctance to localise the civil service, there was an enormous bureaucratic gap to fill. As Anthony Kirk-Greene asserts, there were only five Ugandans holding senior positions in 1952. 8 At the end of the Second World War when the ‘winds of change’ could not be ignored, administrative Ugandanisation lagged behind the surge of political change. Ugandans were admitted into the colonial civil service but were not given positions in higher personnel offices nor sufficient representation necessary to provide a stable base for the soon to be new independence government. In any case, in so far as colonial rule was still in place, Africanisation of the public service – especially in the upper levels – was not viewed as prudent. Rather, relatively marginal changes focused on ending racial pay scales and increasing local personnel at lower and intermediate levels were implemented. According to Fred Burke, on the eve of independence, the colonial bureaucrats ‘conceived of their task as one of passing on an established body of knowledge concerning those routines, procedures and rules which they had successfully employed to rule Africans who were about to take over the reins of the state’.9 The onus was on the newly independent nation to modify or do away with those rules, routines, and procedures. However, no fundamental change The words ‘Asian’ and ‘Indian’ are used interchangeably in this chapter. James J. Katorobo, Education for Public Service in Uganda (New York: Vantage Press, 1982), p. 2. 8 Anthony Kirk-Greene, Britain’s Imperial Administrators, 1885–1966 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), p. 256. 9 Fred G. Burke, ‘Public Administration in Africa: The Legacy of Inherited Colonial Institutions.’ Paper presented at the World Congress of International Political Science Association, Brussels, September 18–23 (1967), p. 6. 6 7

Institutional Knowledge and the Ugandan Public Service

occurred. Rather, the post-independence political leadership operated an inherited colonial system of government and administration.

The Ugandan Post-Independence and Neocolonial Public Service, 1962–1980

The administrative institutions that were inherited when Uganda attained independence on 9 October 1962 were, in many respects, replicas and extensions of the ones utilised previously as instruments of coercion by the British. Therefore, the origins of the contemporary Ugandan public service administrative system can be traced to the British colonial service. Some of the maladies that have affected the public service performance have their roots in the colonial civil service and its operation. As Peter Langseth and Justus Mugaju have argued, the post-independence public service ‘was devoid of cultural attributes, shared values and historical traditions. It was an artificial institution which did not have any solid social foundations.’10 Moreover, the Ugandanisation of the public service by the British at the twilight of colonial rule was not only late but also incorporated only a small number of locals. While African senior administrative officers jumped from five in 1952 to 130 in 1961,11 this was not a significant increase considering the challenging role that awaited them just a year later. The limited time they had to internalise the functioning of the bureaucracy presented another challenge. At independence, Africans were shouldering a largely alien public service institution that lacked indigenous knowledge and roots. Not surprisingly then, soon after independence, cohesion and dedication to the public interest were often abandoned due to political divisions, the inexperience of the nascent civil servants, and subsequent corruption, nepotism, clientelism, and patronage – as the experience under Milton Obote’s rule and subsequent regimes shows.

Colonial Bureaucratic Knowledge Decolonisation and Continuity under Milton Obote

Upon attaining independence, one of the major reforms undertaken by former British colonies in Africa was the ‘Africanisation’ policy which entailed replacing British administrators with African ones. Despite the changes in personnel, the civil service structures were left 10 Peter Langseth and Justus Mugaju, Post-Conflict Uganda: Towards an Effective Civil Service (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1996), p. 3. 11 Edgar C. Taylor, ‘Affective Registers of Postcolonial Crisis: The Kampala Tank Hill Party’, Africa 89 (2019), 541–61.

153

154

Part II: Imagining Institutions

fundamentally unaltered. According to Burke, ‘Africanisation did not normally entail significant alteration in role definition, but rather that indigenous Africans were substituted for expatriate Europeans in roles already well-defined and already possessed of an established status and a highly routinised set of procedures’. He argues further that ‘these inherited roles, procedures and rules were not designed to achieve the goals of the newly established polity, but rather worked to perpetuate a pre-existing distribution of values’.12 The post-independence development goals necessitated a dynamic system of administration to manage rapid economic, political, and social change while at the same time evolving new forms of bureaucratic processes and procedures. Yet, partly because the institutional base and knowledge were still colonial in nature, the post-independence efforts faltered and fell short of generating the requisite change. In Uganda, Europeans and other foreigners were replaced per recommendations by the Commissioners for Africanisation.13 Prime Minister Milton Obote, recognising the paucity of well-trained personnel, was cautious about replacing British civil servants en masse. Instead, he opted to scale back his earlier calls for rapid Africanisation of the civil service, electing to retain significant numbers of the former British colonial civil servants in the bureaucracy. This position was not tenable, however, since many Ugandans and some of his close associates like John Kakonge and Adoko Nekyon were keen to remove any manifestations of colonialism, be they administrative, economic, or political – and perceived Africanisation as part of a larger nationalist drive for equality.14 At the same time, some of his government ministers, especially those who were educated in the mission schools where they were taught to be loyal and obedient to the colonial order and that served the colonial administration, were not eager for immediate Ugandanisation but favoured ‘administrative apprenticeship’.15 Obote was particularly concerned with who would fill the civil service jobs once the British had left and, therefore, had to walk a fine line championing self-rule and Africanisation, while at the same time relying on the colonial bureaucrats for administrative continuity and stability. He had to maintain a political coalition forged at independence that included his political party members, many of whom were anticolonial and leftist, and the Baganda whom he viewed with suspicion, dreading they would Burke, ‘Public Administration in Africa’, p. 22. Government of Uganda, Report of the Commissioners for Africanisation (Entebbe: Government Printer, 1962). 14 Taylor, ‘Affective Registers of Postcolonial Crisis’. 15 Taylor, ‘Affective Registers of Postcolonial Crisis’, 544. Taylor asserts that the most ardent supporter of administrative continuity was Felix Onama, Minister of Internal Affairs in the Obote Cabinet. 12

13

Institutional Knowledge and the Ugandan Public Service

occupy most of the civil service positions. 16 Consequently, political calculations merged with the Africanisation and decolonisation of the public service, setting the stage for patronage and subsequent poor performance. The process of rectifying colonial racial injustice through Africanisation generated problems that had profound effects on the civil service, the economy, and the quest for national cohesion. Dismantling the colonial racial hierarchy that had Ugandans at the base of the economy and public service structure, entailed marginalising Ugandans of Asian descent. Obote believed that economic nationalism and state control of the economy could hasten Africanisation, reduce economic disparity, and add variance in commercial opportunity. This inevitably led to the assessment of the role of Asians in the economy and country. Rather than fashion a non-racial national bureaucracy and economy, uniting African Ugandans and Indians in the newly independent nation, Africanisation set the stage for the socio-economic crisis that culminated in the expulsion of Kenyans in 197017 and the Indians in 1972. The politics of Africanisation therefore turned into competition among the elite to not only seize administrative power, but also state and economic power, albeit with each faction offering different justifications. Within the ruling UPC government, a right and left wing developed with divergent aspirations. The right wing consisted of wealthy southern traditionalists from whom colonial chiefs were recruited. They allied with the Baganda traditional rulers who preferred to maintain the status quo especially political power. The leftists, along with the well-educated and unionists, wanted to see radical transformation that would serve the needs of the majority rural and urban poor and that would break the cycle of Western economic exploitation. Obote found himself at the centre of the two factions and surrounded by petty bureaucratic bourgeoisie from areas disadvantaged by colonialism, notably Northern Uganda. Their main desire was to remedy the colonial regional inequality that had favoured Buganda.18 These political contradictions culminated in the arrest of right-wing members in 1966, the attack on the Mengo palace – and subsequent abolition of traditional 16 Obote became Uganda’s first Prime Minister because of the alliance between his political party the Uganda Peoples’ Congress (UPC) and the Kabaka Yekka (King Alone) party of the Buganda Kingdom. In reality he was weary of having Baganda dominate the civil service just as he was deeply suspicious of Kabaka Yekka’s secessionist tendencies. 17 For more analysis of the expulsion of Kenyans from Uganda, see Spencer Mawby, The End of Empire in Uganda: Decolonisation and Institutional Conflict, 1945-79 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). 18 Kasozi A.B.K., The Social Origins of Violence in Uganda, 1964 – 1985 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), p. 61.

155

156

Part II: Imagining Institutions

kingdoms – and, ultimately, the control of the economic base by the Obote government via the ‘Move to the Left’ pronouncements. In his attempt to decolonise institutional knowledge and function, Obote introduced The Common Man’s Charter in 1969 and the ‘Nakivubo Pronouncements’ in 1970. Rooted in socialism, both reforms were attempts to rid the country of feudalism and capitalist exploitation. In the Charter, Obote outlined the first step for the ‘Move to the Left’, arguing that for the country to attain the real meaning of independence, its material and human resources had to ‘be exploited for the benefit of all the people of Uganda in accordance with the principles of socialism’.19 He asserted further that the means of production and distribution had to be in the hands of the people. This led to mass nationalisation of private enterprises and banks. Indeed, in the 1970 Labour Day speech commonly known as the ‘Nakivubo Pronouncements’, Obote stated that government would assume 60 per cent control of major industries that varied from Kilembe Copper Mines to oil industries.20 Here again, we see continuity from colonial rule evidenced by policies and programmes that were not deliberated nor backed by the masses but rather, imposed from above. Nationalisation created an economic bureaucracy that used state enterprises and parastatal agencies as private property. Bureaucratic positions in the nationalised industries and companies became avenues for corruption and private enrichment. Mamdani argues that ‘the economic bureaucracy supplanted the party as the most important source of patronage’.21 Indeed, by the time Obote was deposed from the presidency, the inherited higher level bureaucracy dominated by Baganda at independence, was now dominated by northerners as was the economic bureaucracy generated by the nationalisation policies of ‘Move to the Left’. Obote abandoned the Weberian meritocracy system and opted for ethnic, regional, and religious concerns in the process of recruitment into and promotion within the public service. The Public Service Commission, in place at independence, was rendered powerless as the President took it upon himself to appoint, promote, and dismiss civil servants at will. For instance, educated Baganda civil servants were demoted without justification to the extent that between 1961 and 1967, the share of high-level jobs held by Baganda fell from 46.9 to 36.6 per cent.22 With the breakdown of systems of separation of powers, political calculations spearheaded all administrative action; 19 A. Milton Obote, ‘The Common Man’s Charter: First Steps for Uganda to Move to the Left’ (Kampala: Uganda People’s Congress, 1969), p. 1. 20 Mahmood Mamdani, Politics and Class Formation in Uganda (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), p. 272. 21 Mahmood Mamdani, Politics and Class Formation in Uganda, p. 273. 22 A.B.K. Kasozi, The Social Origins of Violence in Uganda, 1964 – 1985, p. 74.

Institutional Knowledge and the Ugandan Public Service

members of Obote’s political party the Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) were rewarded with promotions without regard to their skills and capabilities. For instance, it has been argued that Obote promoted Erinayo Wilson Oryema to the position of Chief of Police over Timothy Lwanga, a Muganda, who was a better qualified and highly experienced police officer.23 Not surprisingly, morale in the civil service plummeted as those protected by patronage with impunity started abusing public office and embezzling public funds. Another major legacy of the colonial administration was the centralisation of the bureaucracy. Indeed, the post-independence public service remained hierarchical. The power structure started from Kampala where rules, regulations, roles, and responsibilities were allocated downwards. For instance, the Local Administrations Ordinance enacted in Uganda in 1962 clearly placed the powers of recruitment and regulation of local government staff in the hands of the central government.24 In essence, local participation in decision making remained as absent as it was during the colonial period. This in turn kept the civil service unresponsive to the interests of the people. In addition, the Local Government Administration Act of 1967 revived and entrenched the powers of the chief. Akin to the ‘decentralized despotism’ of the colonial government, post-independence chiefs were used to tighten the hold of the central government on the ordinary people, as their powers, enumerated in the Local Government Administration Act Section 40 illustrate: to detect and bring offenders to justice and to apprehend all persons whom he is legally authorized to apprehend … he may without warrant, enter at any hour of the day or night any place in which he has reasonable grounds to suspect that illegal drinking or gambling is taking place, or to which dissolute or disorderly are resorting. 25

It is evident that the powers given to the post-independence chief made him a law unto himself. These powers far exceeded any law governing the bureaucracy because no other law authorised any public officer to act in a similar manner without check. As was the case in the colonial period, the chief was used by the Local Government Minister to implement unpopular policies and suppress the masses. This undermined administrative efficiency and development goals. It should be noted that despite Africanisation and decolonisation efforts, Obote’s government relied on neocolonial foreign aid to advance his developmental programmes rendering his nationalist efforts hollow. A.B.K. Kasozi, The Social Origins of Violence in Uganda, 1964 – 1985, p. 74. Uganda Government, Local Administration Ordinance 1962 (Entebbe: Government Printer). 25 Uganda Government, Uganda Local Administration Act 1967 (Entebbe: Government Printer). 23

24

157

158

Part II: Imagining Institutions

The nature and degree of capital penetration and resource exploitation remained dependent on Western markets, while the economy relied on production of resources introduced by the colonial government. Exports like tea, coffee, and cotton were not only dependent on the fluctuation of the world markets but remained rooted in the colonial legacy. The fusion of administrative and political functions and the use of the bureaucracy to extract economic gain in the colonial era, continued in the neocolony under the Obote regime. After he abrogated the independence Constitution in 1967, he vested all political and administrative power unto himself. He could appoint and discharge public service officers at will, while state enterprises were used for patronage. The politicisation of the post-independence public administration and the various policies initiated should therefore be viewed less as a departure from the colonial model than as continuity of a more familiar system. By the time Idi Amin came to power in 1971, centralisation, patronage, and patrimonialism permeated all sectors of the public service.

The Ugandan Public Service under Idi Amin: Decolonisation and Militarisation

Idi Amin came to power partly because Milton Obote relied on the oppressive military apparatus to advance his economic and political agenda just like the British colonialists did. It is the army that put him in power as executive President in 1966 when he overthrew President Kabaka Mutesa and it is the same army that disposed him from it. In his quest for political survival, Obote surrounded himself with members from his ethnic group both in government and the military while marginalising other groups. In so doing, he underestimated Amin’s political ambitions and skills. Throughout his tenure as Prime Minister and President (1962 to 1971), Obote presided over a divided political party and fragile bureaucracy, alienated Buganda, and failed to mobilise a strong popular mass base. To consolidate his rule, he relied on the military, and the military, in turn, became conscious of its vital position. In effect, Obote never fully established his rule and ultimately never secured his hold over the military. Democracy never had a chance to take root because, after 1962, Ugandans did not have the opportunity to effectively participate in politics and elect their national leaders. When Amin came to power through a military coup on 25 January 1971, he promised to return the country to civilian rule via free and fair general elections and denounced his predecessor’s dictatorial tendencies and sectarian politics. Administratively, he promised to re-establish rule of law, root out corruption, regenerate the public service and rekindle public trust in government. To this end, his first cabinet largely represented Uganda’s ethnic groups and was composed

Institutional Knowledge and the Ugandan Public Service

of ‘technocrats who were conversant with the problems of the civil service’.26 In addition, ‘there were only two soldiers including Amin in the first military cabinet’ which ‘appeared to mark the beginning of a more competent public administration’.27 The initial months after Amin’s takeover were optimistic ones, as people celebrated Obote’s exit and anticipated a fresh start. Amin set up commissions of inquiry into misdeeds of the previous regime including investigating abuse of human rights and allegations of corruption in the public service and government agencies. He attempted to balance the ethnic representation of the public service by appointing officials from all regions including Buganda.28 He freed Obote’s political prisoners, brought home the late Kabaka’s body from UK for proper traditional burial, and provided money to build the Uganda Martyrs Shrine at Namugongo among other popular acts. It is no wonder that Richard Reid finds him to be politically ‘savvy’, a ‘populist’, a ‘showman’, and ‘pragmatically shrewd’. Reid asserts further that Amin ‘transformed himself into the great patriot, the friend of the poor, the saviour of Uganda’ who was viewed as ‘a man with a plan, and a common touch to boot’.29 Unfortunately, the plan did not come to fruition, the poor remained poor or their condition worsened, and, by the time he was chased out of office, most Ugandans were relieved. In fact, not long after he assumed power, elements of what was to transpire in the future were visible. He suspended Parliament, banned political parties, issued decrees that overturned the rule of law and, before long, he began to shirk expert opinion and abandon cabinet meetings. Ultimately, Amin ruled by decree, personal impulses dictated policy, expertise played a minor role in government and administration, and the economy was reduced to a source of plunder for those in power and those out of it. The rule of President Idi Amin (1971–79), devastated the Ugandan public service. Not only did his rule compound the damage left by the Obote regime, but it wreaked havoc in ways that no one could have anticipated. First, like his predecessor, he totally disregarded the Public Service Commission (PSC), instead hiring, promoting, and firing workers as he pleased. According to Peter Onen who then was a Senior Engineer in the government, ‘Ministers, police officers, civil servants and diplomats were sacked or reinstated on the radio or television’. 30 Administrative continuity and stability were disrupted, as Amin could, by an announcement over the radio, force an entire cabinet Langseth and Mugaju, Post-Conflict Uganda, p. 9. Langseth and Mugaju, Post-Conflict Uganda, p. 9. 28 Hölger B. Hansen, ‘Uganda in the 1970s: A Decade of Paradoxes and Ambiguities’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 7 (2013), 83–103. 29 Reid, A History of Modern Uganda, p. 59. 30 P.M.O. Onen, The Diary of an Obedient Servant During Misrule (Kampala: JANyeko Publishing Centre, 2000), p. 77. 26 27

159

160

Part II: Imagining Institutions

to take leave. He went further and placed his administrative trust in newly created paramilitary groups which lacked the skills, technical know-how, knowledge and zeal to carry out bureaucratic functions for the public good. As Ali Mazrui argued, such ‘lumpen militariat’ and technocrats were only military sycophants not interested in grasping complex administrative issues. 31 They simply expected civil servants to carry out their directives without question. According to Henry Kyemba, Amin’s former Minister of Health, Amin’s appointments were ‘ludicrously inadequate’ and ‘an inexperienced junior officer corps virtually ran the country’. 32 This led to the militarisation of the administrative system which, in turn, caused many civil servants to abandon their posts, and some the country altogether. It can therefore be said that Amin’s public service was not entirely colonial in nature, but the use of military force recalls colonial rule. Second, policy making ceased to follow the normal channels of the bureaucratic policy process. Amin made policies and instantly announced them through the radio and newspapers, rendering the civil servants responsible for effecting such policies and programmes without the benefit of prior implementation analysis. As Derek Peterson and Edgar Taylor indicate, Amin used the media to give directives to civil servants and local government officers. They assert that ‘government-­by-directive was pre-emptory: there was no time for debate or dialogue about policy implementation’. 33 This view is in line with Kyemba’s assertion that ministers were often taken unawares by the Amin’s random proclamations in speeches and on radio. 34 Since cabinet meetings became fewer and fewer, ministers resorted to carrying notebooks so that they may write down what they were meant to do based on his speeches and announcements. 35 Third, the economy was not spared Amin’s destruction, and this exacerbated the public service woes. Amin’s ‘war of economic liberation’ which he framed in decolonisation terms, and manifested in the expulsion of the Asians, led to many unintended consequences. Skilled workers in the civil service and industrial business sector were lost, the taken-over businesses were grossly mismanaged, leading to not only scarcity of goods and services, but a diminished tax revenue base. Perhaps the most unexpected consequence was the development of a new separate field of illicit economic activity known as ‘magendo’ 31 See Ali A. Mazrui, Soldiers and Kinsmen in Uganda: The Making of a Military Ethnocracy (Beverley Hills: Sage Publications, 1975). 32 Henry Kyemba, A State of Blood: The Inside Story of Idi Amin (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1997), p. 49. 33 Derek R. Peterson and Edgar C. Taylor, ‘Rethinking the State in Idi Amin’s Uganda: The Politics of Exhortation’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 7 (2013), 65–66. 34 Kyemba, A State of Blood, p. 42 35 Kyemba, A State of Blood, pp. 42–43.

Institutional Knowledge and the Ugandan Public Service

(Swahili, ‘black market’) through which, outside the formal state channels, goods and services – undocumented and untaxed – were exchanged. 36 As government agencies, especially the agricultural parastatals, became more mismanaged and inefficient, farmers of major crops like coffee sold their produce to unlawful buyers that could pay them more than the government agencies. 37 Ultimately, Amin’s attempts at decolonisation and indigenising the economy and public service via the expulsion of Asians and other ‘foreigners’ undermined the very sectors he intended to revamp. It is important to note that, despite their largely constrained influence and the major difficulties encountered, public servants were resilient, fashioning a way to remain functional in a largely dysfunctional system. They used personal resources, initiated self-help projects, and manufactured statistics and paperwork to shore up their performance. 38 As Derek Peterson and Edgar Taylor indicated, Idi Amin’s rule generated ‘forms of creative action that bureaucrats, smugglers, businessmen, petitioners and other entrepreneurs pursued at the margins of the Ugandan state’. 39 Nonetheless, by the time Amin was removed from power in 1979, the Ugandan public service was in shambles, as ‘death and exile had depleted the ranks of the civil service and the lack of resources had by the end of 1978 ground government almost to a halt’.40 Despite laudable efforts by civil servants and local government workers to sustain the administrative system, the government and its bureaucracy barely functioned in the normal sense, because the organisational set-up with a modern public organisation systems function was missing. Soon after Amin was removed from office, the 1980 elections brought Milton Obote back to power. To revive the economy and rebuild the nation, he bowed to the pressure from the World Bank (WB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The Uganda Public Service and Neoliberal Policies

Neoliberal policies advanced by the WB and IMF were based on ideological assumptions which claim that free market competition is better than state intervention in enhancing customer satisfaction and cost-­ effectiveness, and therefore, the role of the state should be minimal as opposed to the role of the market. In the 1980s, these institutions Peterson and Taylor, ‘Rethinking the State in Idi Amin’s Uganda’, p. 71. Godfrey B. Asimwe, ‘From Monopoly Marketing to Coffee Magendo; Responses to Policy Recklessness and Extraction in Uganda, 1971–79’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 7 (2013), 104–24. 38 Peterson and Taylor, ‘Rethinking the State in Idi Amin’s Uganda’, p. 71. 39 Peterson and Taylor, ‘Rethinking the State in Idi Amin’s Uganda’, p. 63. 40 Cherry Gertzel, ‘Uganda after Amin: The Continuing Search for Leadership and Control’, African Affairs 79 (1980), 469. 36 37

161

162

Part II: Imagining Institutions

recommended that many African governments undertake neoliberal reforms known as structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), which included: currency devaluation, raising interest rates to fight inflation, cuts in government spending, privatisation of government enterprises, civil service reform, deregulation of prices of goods and services, and export promotion. Most of these programmes involved a contraction in the scope of the administration. They entailed the withdrawal of government from service provision, reduction of the parastatal sector, and the delegation of power and responsibilities to the lower-level administrative organs, local government, and to the private sector. A quest for financial viability called for more control in spending, improved budgeting, and enforcing accountability. With support from the WB and the IMF, the Obote II regime embarked on some economic reforms to bolster efficiency in the productive sectors, establish monetary controls to ensure frugal spending, and to create a conducive environment for both domestic and foreign investors. According to Arne Bigsten and Steve Kayizzi-Mugerwa, Obote floated the Uganda shilling, increased producer prices for export crops, removed price controls, rationalised tax structures and attempted to rein in government expenditure.41 Needless to say, institutional knowledge and development espoused by these reforms remained foreign and imitative rather than indigenous. Unsurprisingly, for varied reasons, these policies only generated minimal changes and also caused harm, because they were foreign, what John Kautsky calls ‘modernization from without’.42 Important too, is the fact that the political context remained volatile. The government responded to the Museveni-led guerrilla war – initiated following the 1980 elections that he alleged were rigged – by increasing its military expenditure, leaving little or very meagre resources for the operation of other sectors of the government. When the Obote II regime was toppled in June 1985 by renegade members of his military, the country was plunged into deeper anarchy. Looting, smuggling, insecurity, scarcity of both consumer and produce goods, and the near total breakdown of the government institutional structures, coupled with the rampaging Museveni-led civil war, left the country on the precipice of administrative, economic, and territorial collapse. Museveni’s National Resistance Movement (NRM), led by the National Resistance Army (NRA) took power in January 1986, and found the country traumatised by civil war, state terror, and lawlessness and the public service inefficient, demoralised, unresponsive, and generally Arne Bigsten and Steve Kayizzi-Mugerwa, Is Uganda an Emerging Economy? A Report for the OECD Project ‘Emerging Africa’, Research Report No. 118 (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2001), p. 19. 42 John H. Kautsky, The Political Consequences of Modernization (New York: John Wiley, 1972), pp. 44–45. 41

Institutional Knowledge and the Ugandan Public Service

corrupt. In 1987, Museveni’s regime embraced the WB and IMF neo­ liberal SAPs to revamp and stabilise the economy and rebuild the institutions of government. In 1989, the NRM government set up the Public Service Review and Reorganisation Commission (PSRRC) to examine the public service problems and make appropriate recommendations. The Commission found that the Ugandan public service was bloated in structure, inefficient, and generally a poor performer. It identified the following as major issues afflicting the civil service system: (a) inadequate pay and benefits, (b) poor management skills, (c) dysfunctional civil service organisation, and (d) inadequate personnel management and training. In the Commission’s view, the last led to abuse of office and government property, moonlighting and corruption, lack of discipline, an erosion of rules and regulations, obsolete procedures, lack of appropriate systems, thin managerial and technical skills, poor public attitudes, and massive bureaucratic red tape. The PSRRC made numerous recommendations on how to revamp the Service.43 These included: (1) Rationalisation of Government Structures and Functions including Decentralisation of power to districts; (2) Reduction of the size of the Public Service; (3) Pay Reform through salary enhancement and monetisation of non-cash benefits; (4) Personnel and Establishment control; (5) Improvement of Records Management; (6) Introduction of Results Oriented Management; and (7) Capacity Building.44 These recommendations, which were accepted by Government and endorsed by the National Resistance Council (NRC)45 in Sessional Paper No. 1 of 1991, formed the basis of the Public Service Reform Programme (PSRP). The overall objective of the programme was to create a service that was small, motivated, accountable, efficient, effective, productive, and responsive. The PSRP was undertaken in a phased approach. The first phase was implemented from 1991 to 1997, and it focused primarily on reducing the size of the civil service and improving the salary of the retained civil servants. The second phase guided by the Public Service Reform Strategy covered the years 1997 to 2002 and focused on reducing further the size of the service by restructuring ministries and departments, pay reform, and capacity building, and introduced the Results Oriented Management (ROM) system. The third phase was effected in 2002 to A total of 255 recommendations were made but, for strategic government, focused on the above seven critical components. 44 Ministry of Public Service and Cabinet Affairs, The Public Service Review and Reorganisation Commission, 1989–1990 Report, 1989, Kampala, Uganda Printing and Publishing Corporation. 45 The National Resistance Council (NRC) was the legislative body (equivalent to the parliament) of government from 1987–96. It was abandoned after the ratification of the 1995 Constitution and in 1996, new parliamentary representatives were elected into office 43

163

164

Part II: Imagining Institutions

run until 2007. Known as the Public Service Reform Strategy 2002–07, it focused on performance management for sustained implementation of government programmes especially the Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP).46 Since 2015, public service reform has focused on the attainment of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The PSRP enacted many positive changes. The size of public service was drastically reduced, the pay structure and payroll were standardised and computerised, allowances and benefits were monetised and consolidated into basic salary, and salary was enhanced in real terms. Capacity building efforts also generated benefits. Training needs assessments are undertaken in all ministries, based on the training policy. Various training programmes have been undertaken and personnel skills have been enhanced. In addition, efforts to recruit professional and technical workers with the necessary skills are being made. Although initiative for public service reform was the brainchild of the NRM government, external influence cannot be underestimated. Indeed, external initiatives for reform were paramount in providing both the technical and financial resources for both the reform programme formulation and its implementation. Donor influence in Uganda has arguably been at its highest during the NRM regime. The IMF and WB have notably been at the forefront of pushing the government to reform. The government embraced the SAPs as a conditionality for aid. In exchange for financial support, the NRM government agreed to establish recommended reforms like market liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation, public service reform, constitutional reform, and judicial reform among others. Museveni’s embrace of neoliberal reforms has been more pervasive than Obote’s ever was, reshaping almost all sectors of society: agriculture, banking, education, health care, and revenue collection among others. Some reforms have generated positive change in the civil service; for instance, capacity building programmes and results-oriented management systems have streamlined and enhanced performance and the creation of semi-autonomous agencies like the Uganda Revenue Authority restructured tax collection and enhanced domestic revenue. The neoliberal reforms implemented by Museveni are part of the New Public Management (NPM) principles of privatisation, managerialism, autonomisation, disaggregation and corporatisation. Indeed, the Uganda public service reform and institutional knowledge base since the 1990s are guided by NPM ideals This is seen as a paradigm shift in public administration and has been in existence since the early 1990s, popularised by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler’s book Reinventing 46 Genevieve Enid Meyers, ‘Decentralization in Uganda: Towards Democratic Local Governance or Political Expedience?’ in Gedeon M. Mudacumura and Göktuğ Morçöl (eds), Challenges to Democratic Governance in Developing Countries (New York: Springer, 2014).

Institutional Knowledge and the Ugandan Public Service

Government and the Bill Clinton administration’s National Performance Review. New Public Management was adopted in places such as New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom, and is generally perceived as a global public management reform movement that redefines the relationship between government and society. It is a general move away from traditional (Weberian) public administration to what has come to be known as the ‘new managerialism’, ‘market-based public administration’, and ‘entrepreneurial government’. It calls on government to focus on achieving results rather than primarily conforming to rules and procedures. It also calls on government to adopt market-like competition, innovations, and entrepreneurial strategies. In order to be market-like, public administration is called upon to be customer-driven and rely on market-based mechanisms to deliver public services.47 One of the problems of applying Western-derived NPM to a country like Uganda is that public service systems have never wholly adhered to Western Weberian bureaucratic ideals. The dichotomy between the civil service and politics has been lacking. At the same time, entrenched centralised rules and procedures abound, but those who are keen to get around the rules for reasons of self-interest can somehow do so, while committed and ardent managers find themselves snarled in red tape. Moreover, this market, still nascent, is incapable of assuming the vital roles of social service provision. In other words, NPM is not only foreign, but contextually not appropriate. In addition, NPM’s contention that public administrators should be conceived as entrepreneurs, seeking opportunities to create private partnerships and serve customers is ‘narrow, and is poorly suited to achieve democratic principles such as fairness, justice, participation, and the articulation of shared interest’.48 At a philosophical level, NPM is at odds with collective public interest since it prioritises an individualistic self-interest of the customer rather than the rights of and obligations to the public interest. The privatisation and contracting out of government services and creation of autonomous agencies that the NRM has zealously pursued have challenged the public service’s steering capacity to coordinate and check the divested enterprises and outsourced services. This has undermined accountability mechanisms and created appraisal and audit problems thereby exacerbating corruption tendencies and other unethical behaviour.49 The situation is made complicated by the fact 47 Christopher Pollitt and Geert Bouckaert, Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 48 Janet Denhardt and Robert Denhardt, The New Public Service: Serving, not Steering (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2003) p. 133. 49 Tom Christensen and Per Laegreid, ‘New Public Management: The Effects of Contractualism and Devolution on Political Control’, Public Management Review 3 (2001), 73–94; Yusuf Bangura, ‘Public Sector Restructuring: The Institutional and Social Effects of Fiscal, Managerial and Capacity Building

165

166

Part II: Imagining Institutions

that political leadership is still entangled with the market and private businesses, contrary to the values of economic liberalisation. As Roger Tangri and Andrew Mwenda assert, Museveni uses state resources to benefit some foreign and Ugandan capitalists while denying resources to those that criticise him or sympathise with political opponents. 50 Using NPM therefore, has undermined democratic accountability that Uganda so desperately needs, and relegated to the background the needs of the citizens, which should be the primary goal of any government reform. It is because of these concerns that a new approach to public service known as the New Public Service has emerged to reprioritise the objectives of public service back to collective public interest based on solidarity, trust, justice, and shared values of humanity.

From New Public Management to the New Public Service

The New Public Service (NPS) perspective on public administration emphasises the role of the general public in policy formulation and co-production of public services. 51 It views the citizens, community and civil society as not only the recipients of government programmes, but also as important contributors to the development of policy. Rooted in democratic theory, this approach offers the most viable channel for formulating rules and regulations that are rooted in the citizens’ values, interests, and needs. If applied properly, NPS can potentially generate indigenous institutional knowledge to the Ugandan public service. It calls on the public service to encourage citizens to articulate their interests through dialogue about shared values and to partake in the resolution of societal problems. In Uganda, this would epitomise the idea that a person depends on others in relationships distinguished by solidarity of humankind, empathy, respect, justice, and interdependence. These characteristics embody what is known as ubuntu (humanity). When viewed through the lens of ubuntu, then, NPS means that the public service must be the champion of the public interest, not the individual or customer or political interest. 52 This also means that the public must be at the centre of public sector programmes and initiatives to ensure that such programmes address the true needs of the citizens and to cultivate ownership of the said programmes by the citizenry. Reforms’, Occasional Paper No. 3 (United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 2000). 50 Roger Tangri and Andrew Mwenda, ‘Change and Continuity in the Politics of Government-Business Relations in Museveni’s Uganda’, The Journal of Eastern African Studies 13:4 (2019), 678–97. 51 See Denhardt and Denhardt, The New Public Service. 52 See M.B. Ramose, African Philosophy through Ubuntu (Harare:Mond Books, 1999).

Institutional Knowledge and the Ugandan Public Service

Public service programmes that build collaborative relationships with citizens and incorporate their norms and values in policy formulation reflect NPS. In Uganda, a good example of such a public service collaborative operation is the Alternative Basic Education programme for Karamoja (ABEK). Initiated by the regional local government’s district officers and local councils at the request of the Karimojong people, the programme is managed by committees that mirror the local government structure. Through this programme, the Ministry of Education offers alternative non-formal education to children, youths and even adults that could not participate in free formal primary education due to their unique ecological and sociocultural conditions. In 2016, ABEK infrastructure was comprised of 256 learning centres, of which 236 are sedentary and twenty are mobile. Sedentary ABEK caters for children who reside permanently within homesteads. Mobile ABEK centres, on the other hand, serve children who are in constant movement with animals in search of pasture and water. In this operational framework, ‘teachers usually move with the respective pastoralist community. Both mobile and sedentary centres offer flexible learning hours so that children and youth do not have to compromise their schooling with their roles and responsibilities, such as herding which is a major source of livelihood.’53 While government does not provide food in primary schools, ABEK is the exception. Because of ABEK, literacy and transition to primary school are improving in Karamoja. This example shows that shared responsibilities, values, and collaborative relations, rooted in indigenous knowledge and experience that enhance active local participation can generate positive change. To foster the public good, the Ugandan public service must utilise knowledge that creates public value in such a way that the public interest is addressed effectively. This can be achieved if the public are viewed as problem solvers to be actively engaged as co-creators of what is valued by the public and is beneficial to the public. This can be done through communal acts not individual self-interested acts. According to Kwame Gyekye, Communalism is the doctrine that the group constitutes the main focus of the lives of the individual members of that group, and that the extent of the individual’s involvement in the interests, aspirations, and welfare of the group is the measure of that individual’s worth. 54

In his view, this philosophy is given institutional expression in the social structures of African societies. I am cognisant of the dangers of reducing Ugandan reality to a monolithic view: Indeed, the country is Simone Datzberger, ‘Peacebuilding through Non-formal Education Programmes: A Case Study from Karamoja, Uganda’, International Peacekeeping, 24 (2017), 337–38. 54 Kwame Gyekye, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 208. 53

167

168

Part II: Imagining Institutions

not homogenous and has had its share of ethnic strife; hence a symbiosis of communal values may not be easy to attain. Moreover, while public involvement in dialogue and deliberation is critical for indigenous knowledge development and for better public service performance, it is not necessarily compatible with some public service professional standards, especially as the public service relies more and more on information technology and digital service delivery. Yet, the indigenisation of Ugandan public service institutional knowledge by rooting it in local values does not preclude embracing valuable bureaucratic norms and contemporary technological advancement. The so-called ‘Asian Tigers’ depict the possibilities of abiding by bureaucratic ideals without sacrificing indigenous values. The current neoliberalism in Uganda has reshaped society and culture in ways that work against NPS and indigenous values such as those based on ubuntu. These neoliberal-generated influences are in some ways reminiscent of social life during colonial rule and the Obote and Amin regimes. In their study of moral economy characteristics and dynamics in neoliberalised Uganda, Jörg Wiegratz and Egle Cesnulyte found that the key moral economic characteristics of neoliberalism among Ugandan traders include ‘a high level of self-interest, individualism, short-termism, opportunism, mercilessness, economic ambitiousness, acquisitiveness, aggressiveness, shrewdness and dishonesty; a speedy monetarization of life; and significant envy in the neighborhood and among friends’. 55 The traders they interviewed revealed that they face ‘significant difficulty to sustain cooperative practice in economic and social life’. In addition, ‘practice informed by notions of kindness, fairness, friendship, empathy, mercy, honesty, manners, trust, respect, care, social obligations, non-monetary social logics, or shame for wrong doing were hard to reproduce due to severe material pressures that favoured other logics’. 56 It seems that reviving values like ubuntu or values rooted in reciprocal obligation in a neocolonial/neoliberal context will not be easy after all. The most critical obstacle to NPS and its favourability to indigenous public service institutional knowledge development is probably the current political legitimacy of the NRM government. The shift from NPM to NPS must be taken and championed at the highest level of government. It is difficult to see why President Museveni and his NRM government would embrace an approach that undermines the ruling elite control over the public service. Since NPS is premised on the idea of an active and involved citizenry and the NRM has continually constrained that idea, it is probably apt to assume that while the ideals of NPS are 55 Jörg Wiegratz and Egle Cesnulyte, ‘Money Talks: Moral Economies of Earning a Living in Neoliberal East Africa’, New Political Economy, 21 (2016), p 6. 56 Wiegratz and Cesnulyte, ‘Money Talks’.

Institutional Knowledge and the Ugandan Public Service

desirable, they may not be applicable to the current Ugandan context. Moreover, NPS emphasises the importance of public service ethos, yet, the NRM government is ranked among the most corrupt in Africa. 57

Conclusion

The discussion offered in this chapter has attempted to historicise the Ugandan public service and provide insight into how the production of institutional knowledge may be reformed to create a new non-colonial, more indigenous-values-based orientation to public service. Colonial governments, regardless of the system adopted, managed their affairs in ways that would strongly impact the postcolonial states’ administrative systems. For the Ugandan public service, the path from colonialism through post-independence has been shaped by a confusing array of programmes, views, orientations, and a plethora of non-indigenous reform influences. The contestation of colonialism and colonial knowledge through indigenisation of the Ugandan public service entailed the replacement of foreign personnel with Ugandans, but without requisite internalisation or indigenisation of the bureaucratic ideals. The Africanisation of the economy opened the avenue for corruption, patronage, and neo-patrimonialism, and undermined efforts to form a cohesive citizenry of Africans and Asians. The neoliberal NPM and SAPs reforms advanced by the WB and the IMF helped stabilise the economy and rebuild the public service but undermined democratic accountability and service delivery. In effect, the Ugandan public service has not had an opportunity to generate public service reforms based on indigenous values and norms, deep community engagement, discourse and initiative, nor has it faithfully performed its sacred role of serving the public interest. Therefore, NPS seems to offer an avenue through which indigenous-values-based orientation to public service and indigenous knowledge may be created by building collaborative relationships between the public service and the citizens. Yet, for NPS to be fully realised, democracy must prevail. Since contemporary Uganda’s political trajectory is solidly rooted in semi-liberalised authoritarianism (the 2021 election exemplifies this phenomenon) with elements that harken to the colonial government, hopes for decolonising public service knowledge maybe untenable in the foreseeable future.

57 The 2021 Corruption Perception Index by Transparency International ranked Uganda 144th out of 180 countries with a score of 27 out of 100: Transparency International, www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2021/index/uga [accessed 14 July 2022].

169

8 Local Knowledge and Knowledge of the ‘Locals’: The Political Ambivalence of Bureaucratic Knowledge in Uganda’s Villages FLORENCE BRISSET-FOUCAULT

On 10 July 2018, for the first time in seventeen years, Ugandans elected their leaders at the village level (Local Council 1, or LC1). A few days later, government instructed that ‘all outgoing elected local council leaders are expected to handover government property in their possession’.1 This came among reports that some incumbents had refused to hand over their records after the election. A few weeks earlier, I had asked a chairman in Kampala about whether he would hand over his records to his successor. He paused and said: ‘They’re my papers’. This was not always the case. Most of the former chairpersons I met handed over their papers. But most had an affective relationship with the documents and data they had produced about their constituents. This chapter proposes to explore the relationship between knowledge and institutions by taking seriously the work of people who are not often considered as proper ‘producers of knowledge’.2 LC1 executives have been pictured as the irrelevant underlings of a remote State. 3 The 1 John Semakula, ‘Govt directs losers in LC1 polls to hand over offices’, The New Vision, 15 July 2018, www.newvision.co.ug/new_vision/news/1481479/ govt-directs-losers-lc1-elections-handover-offices [accessed 13 July 2022]. 2 Howard S. Becker speaks of ‘support personnel’: ‘Art as Collective Action’, American Sociological Review 39:6 (1974), 767–76. On unacknowledged knowledge producers in Africa see for instance Etienne Smith and Céline Labrune Badiane, Les Hussards noirs de la colonie. Instituteurs africains et ‘petites patries’ en AOF (Paris, Karthala, 2018); Lynn Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology: Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 3 Ben Jones, Beyond the State in Rural Uganda (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). The idea here is not to rehabilitate the importance of the State or its agents in Uganda’s villages. It aims at accounting for the presence of this bureaucratic work at the village level and to understand why it took varied forms across the country. Local Councils (previously named Resistance Councils) have often been studied to assess their influence on democratisation or as local courts: Apolo Nsibambi, ‘Resistance Councils and Committees: A Case study from Makerere’, in Holger B. Hansen and Michael Twaddle, Changing

The Political Ambivalence of Bureaucratic Knowledge in Uganda’s Villages

work they accomplish, keeping records, writing letters, filling forms, taking minutes, and other forms of ‘pragmatic writings’,4 is rarely seen as ‘creative writing’. 5 These tasks are usually not seen as accommodating subjectivities: bureaucracy, by definition, is supposed to be neutral. These writings are indeed strongly standardised, but they do accommodate some agency,6 and they are still meaningful sociologically. As Coton and Proteau say, ‘writing classifies … as much those who write as those who are written’.7 Indeed, the skills requested by such writings favour the acquisition or reinforcement of capacities that are unequally distributed within society; and as much as they are standardised, these writings can have political meaning. 8 Although subaltern, these knowledge producers can create new patterns of exclusion or reinforce existing ones. They have social resources that they use in order to put in place relatively personal regimes of documentation that fit their ambitions and socio-professional ethics. Although local chiefs also produce data on land transactions and document local courts proceedings, this chapter is mainly focused on the ways in which they produce knowledge on their constituents’ identity. It starts by exploring the history of the practices of documentation Uganda (London: James Currey; Kampala: Fountain Press; Athens: Ohio University Press; Nairobi: Heinemann, 1991), pp. 279–96. On their functions and mutations: Expedit Ddungu, ‘Popular Forms and the Question of Democracy: The Case of Resistance Councils in Uganda’, in Mahmood Mamdani and Joe Oloka-Onyango (eds), Uganda Studies in Living Conditions, Popular Movements and Constitutionalism (Vienna: JEP; Kampala: CBR, 1994), pp. 365–404. On their influence on political cultures: Richard Banégas, ‘Entre guerre et démocratie: l’évolution des imaginaires politiques en Ouganda’, in Denis-­ Constant Martin (ed.), Nouveaux langages du politique en Afrique orientale, (Nairobi, IFRA, Paris, Karthala, 1998), pp. 187–262. For a rich ethnography and analysis of their social embeddedness in Buganda: Per Tidemand, The Resistance Councils in Uganda: A Study of Rural Politics and Popular Democracy in Africa (PhD, International Development Studies, Roskilde Universitet, 1994). 4 Anaïs Wion, Sébastien Barret and Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye, ‘Introduction. L’écrit pragmatique en Afrique’, Afriques. Débats, méthodes et terrains d’histoire 07 (2016), https://journals.openedition.org/afriques/1941 [accessed 13 July 2022]. 5 Derek Peterson, Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004). 6 Mirco Göpfert, ‘Bureaucratic Aesthetics: Report Writing in the Nigérien Gendarmerie’, American Ethnologist 40:2 (2013), 324–34. 7 Christel Coton and Laurence Proteau, ‘Introduction. La division sociale du travail d’écriture’, in Christel Coton and Laurence Proteau (eds), Les paradoxes de l’écriture (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2012), pp 9–15 (p.14); see also on the denial of the mediating role of bureaucratic documents in Matthew S. Hull, ‘Documents and Bureaucracy’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 41:1 (2012), 251–67. 8 Peterson, Creative Writing.

171

172

Part II: Imagining Institutions

of people by local State bureaucrats, some of which contributed to the coming together of today’s methodologies of the generation of data at the village level. The chapter then unpacks the varied social agendas that often unintentionally coincide into a process of bureaucratised production of knowledge at the village level in today’s Uganda. This process cannot be reduced to the coerced compliance to a centralised agenda of political control, but should also be related to relatively autonomous social dynamics. The findings are based on observations and interviews (in English, and in Rutooro and Luganda with interpreters) with current and former members of village executives and residents carried out in eleven villages: five in Kampala, four in rural Kabarole and two in rural Kyenjojo. Research was also done at the Kabarole and Jinja District Archives, at the British National Archives, and in Audrey Richards’ anthropological papers.9 This chapter underlines how the production of bureaucratic and documentary knowledge over people by local bureaucrats reflects the nature of the colonial and postcolonial State and its attempts to consolidate and centralise power, while accommodating local subjectivities. It argues that it is actually the plasticity of its administrative instruments that has allowed the State to extend its reach, including in relatively remote territories. In the process of centralising power, some of the State’s agents produced knowledge also on their own terms. Any attempt to decolonise knowledge should take these ambivalences into account. Another element that the chapter shows as regards to the relationship between colonisation and knowledge production in Uganda is that the National Resistance Movement (NRM) system of administration encompasses forms of documenting (and imagining) people whose genesis is closely intertwined with a colonial situation. As we will see, there is a continuity in the ways in which the documentation of persons 9 These reflections are thus only valid for the Buganda and Tooro regions. For privacy purposes, I cannot name here all the people who provided me with a home and guided me in their villages and the neighbouring communities, introducing me to informants and several times acting as interpreters, but I want to symbolically thank them here. Solomon Akugizibwe transcribed and translated interviews carried in Rutooro as well as Local Council minutes and booklets. John Bosco Tibeeha provided precious insights. Robinson Kisaka’s help in finding relevant archival material and with translations from Luganda was invaluable. They are all warmly thanked here. Thanks also to Mountain of the Moon University and the Centre for African Development Studies for their support. This research was part of the PIAF (Papiers d’identité en Afrique) collective research project headed by Séverine Awenengo Dalberto and Richard Banégas. This chapter was considerably enriched by discussions from the ‘Decolonizing Knowledge in Uganda’ ASA panel in Atlanta (2018).

The Political Ambivalence of Bureaucratic Knowledge in Uganda’s Villages

and movements at the village level has been done, and thought across political regimes, even when some of these regimes claimed to be revolutionary: this system of knowledge production was established in a cumulative way. The village scale allows us to take a step back from official, political chronologies – and to challenge them. This chapter brings a nuanced response to the question as to whether bureaucratic knowledge production at the village level is a form of decolonised knowledge or a continuation of colonial knowledge production. Despite violent regime changes, this form of knowledge still reflects the concerns and agency of social actors who both enacted and endured political domination under colonial rule. The concern to document the geographical and moral belonging of persons at the village level was the product of a colonial situation. Later on, it provided the potential to reinvent the basis of citizenship while also yielding the deployment of dynamics of control. But ultimately, this chapter’s contribution is mostly methodological: it underlines the necessity to understand the socially complex intricacies of knowledge, power, and agency that need to be disentangled in order to imagine an emancipatory form of knowledge.

The Politics of Making Local Chiefs’ Bureaucratic Work Visible

Most of the bureaucratic documents produced by the lowest arms of the Protectorate administration are yet to resurface. Thanks to the important changes that have characterised Uganda’s archival landscape in the last few years, some of this work should be much better known in the future.10 It is however quite possible, despite district record officers’ efforts11 that a lot of these documents have been destroyed, and maybe not considered as worthy of archiving in the first place. As we know, the process of creating an archive is profoundly political.12 Lower chiefs’ work has scarcely been an object of research.13 It has however been a source for contemporary researchers, especially for 10 Edgar C. Taylor, Ashley Brooke Rockenbach and Natalie Bond, ‘Archives and the Past: Cataloguing and Digitisation in Uganda’s Archives’, in Terry Barringer and Marion Wallace (eds), African Studies in the Digital Age: DisConnects? (Leiden and Boston MA: Brill), pp.163–78. 11 Ibid., p.169. 12 Achille Mbembe, ‘The Power of the Archive and Its Limits’, in Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover et al. (eds), Refiguring the Archive (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), pp.19–26 (p.20). 13 With the exception of Shane Doyle: ‘Parish Baptism Registers, Vital Registration and Fixing Identities in Uganda’, in Keith Breckenridge and Simon Szreter (eds), Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 277–98; and Shane Doyle,

173

174

Part II: Imagining Institutions

colonial medical officers, and, to a lesser extent, for social scientists. In the studies endeavoured by the East African Institute for Social Research (EAISR) in Ganda villages in the 1950s, the investigators mainly based their analysis on oral history and on their own generated data (via surveys and sampling), but they also used, to a lesser extent, the data bureaucratically recorded by chiefs.14 For instance, in Audrey Richards’ papers, one can find copies of parish chiefs’ taxpayers’ registers, and birth registers, which were collected for the study carried out in Kisozi that forms the basis of her Changing Structure of a Ganda Village.15 For the book Economic Development and Tribal Change, for which field research was conducted in 1951, Richard’s team used the tax records as one of their major sources, and A.B. Mukwaya analysed legal cases.16 A revealing anecdote emerges in Richard’s papers regarding the status of the knowledge created by chiefs at the time. Before they picked the sample villages, the research team visited many villages and consulted Lukiiko (council) members at the gombolola (sub-county) level, in order to inform people about the study and collect preliminary elements. They sometimes faced reservations, and even in one case open hostility, a hostility that was met with irritation and contempt, as was the case for instance in a meeting that took place in Kyaggwe in February 1951. The researchers recorded the intervention of a member of the audience (whom they nicknamed ‘Nasty piece of work’ or N.P. of W.) and the exchange that followed with Audrey Richards (here A.I.R.), as follows: Nasty piece of work then got up, wearing jacket with the buttons off, done up with a safety pin, and a dirty open-necked shirt. Sitting in back row on left hand side looking down from platform. Unofficial representative? (Shd. add that I think I call him a nasty piece of work because he asked awkward questions, which I must admit were mostly intelligent).

First said that as we had heard that porters were scarce,17 and that we were finding that was true, what were we going to do about it. A.I.R. ‘Population Decline and Delayed Recovery in Bunyoro, 1860–1960’, Journal of African History, 41:3 (2000), 429–58. 14 This is based on Audrey Richards, The Changing Structure of a Ganda Village (East African Studies 24 (Nairobi: East African Institute of Social Research / East African Publishing House, 1966); and Audrey Richards (ed.), Economic Development and Tribal Change: A Study of Immigrant Labour in Buganda (Nairobi, Oxford University Press, 1973); and research in Audrey Richards’ papers. More research would need to be done in the EAISR archives. 15 Audrey Richards collection, the Women’s library, LSE, ref: RICHARDS/6 Buganda alphabetical files, 6/19S Kisozi Survey. 16 Economic Development, p.13–14. 17 Foreign labourers. See below.

The Political Ambivalence of Bureaucratic Knowledge in Uganda’s Villages

said we wd. write a report. Questioner replied that all the chiefs had sent in reports and nothing had been done. Why did we think that our report would be any better?

A.I.R. said that we were finding out exactly what happened. The chiefs were just guessing. Questioner said that if we were only going to one or two miruka in 4 sazas, how could we find out how many porters there were altogether. A.I.R. said that we were going through registers, and tried to give simple explanation of sampling system.

(Obvious by this stage that meeting was hostile and the most difficult we have had so far.)

Same questioner said that we were not Govt. members, and he has never seen any people like us before. A.I.R. said that a man came out to do the work, said it was too difficult and went home – so she decided she would see what women could do18 . Applause at this sally. N.P. of W. sat down.19

This passage is revealing in several aspects (not the least the gendered dimension of the debate on legitimate knowledge production). One is striking: the establishment by the EAISR team of a clear hierarchy in terms of the quality of knowledge production between their work and the chiefs’, who ‘were just guessing’. But the quote also shows that this hierarchy was already contested at the time. As with the LC1 chairpersons of today, local chiefs produced data and documents on their people, and they wanted their work to be acknowledged.

Tracing New Mobilities in Colonial Uganda

After the 1900 Agreement and the introduction of the hut tax 20, the newly appointed parish chiefs were required to keep a count of tax payers’ identities and, from 1908, births and deaths had to be registered at the sub-county level.21 Soon forced labour, the need to find work to pay the hut tax, cotton and coffee cultivation resulted into a massive

18 This is probably in reference to the fact that Richards replaced W.H. Stanner as head of the EAISR after a few months. Richards was assisted by A.B. Mukwaya and Jean M. Fortt. 19 Underlining in original. ‘Notes on Lukiko meeting, Mut. VII’s gombolola, Kyagwe, 23.2.51’, pp. 56–57. From the marginalia, it seems that these notes were taken by Fortt. Richards mentions this exchange in the published book: she notes that the person was ‘doubtful about the inquiry’: Richards, Economic Development and Tribal Change, p. 238. Miruka and saza are administrative units, usually translated as ‘parish’ and ‘county’, respectively. 20 William Tuck, ‘The Rupee Disease: Taxation, Authority, and Social Conditions in Early Colonial Uganda’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies 39:2 (2006), 221–45. 21 Doyle, ‘Parish Baptism Registers’, p. 238.

175

176

Part II: Imagining Institutions

increase in the geographic mobility of workers across the Protectorate.22 Resistance to taxation also led people to go into hiding.23 By 1914, in order to counter labour ‘desertions and tax evasion, the [Mengo] Lukiiko required people’ to carry tax receipts with them at all times.24 This receipt (omusolo in Luganda) was soon to become the equivalent of a pass, or an identity card.25 Local chiefs were asked to be on the lookout for labour deserters, report, and arrest them.26 In the 1950s, district authorities were asking their lower chiefs to record visitors to fight insecurity.27 From 1954, sub-county chiefs were also requested to identify Kikuyu and report monthly on their presence and activities, in the regional context of the fight against Mau Mau.28 All along the colonial period, the British were however reluctant to implement additional policies of identity documentation because they feared it might discourage labour migrations which were very much needed and greatly increased from the 1920s onwards, especially from what was then Ruanda-Urundi.29 Demands to produce records and identity documents also originated from below. Chiefs generated identity documents for women, most of whom did not pay taxes, and whose circulations were particularly monitored. 30 Fugitive wives were traced 22 Richards, Economic Development and Tribal Change; and Michiel de Haas, ‘Moving Beyond Colonial Control? Economic Forces and Shifting Migration from Rwanda-Urundi to Buganda, 1920–60’, Journal of African History 60:3 (2019), 379–406. 23 Tuck, ‘The Rupee Disease’, pp. 237–38. 24 Holly Hanson, Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003), p. 186. 25 And it remained as such until the Graduated Tax was scrapped in 2005. 26 Jinja District Archives, Finance, Box 39, File 10, Desertions, 1939. 27 Letter from the Saza office, Kiyunga Luuka, 23 August 1950, doc no.M/11/0/50, Jinja District Archives, Admin, Af. Local government, Box 11, File 14, ‘Native Correspondence including District Commissioner’s response’. 28 Letter from District Commissioner’s Office, Fort Portal, Toro, To All Saza Chiefs, Kabarole District Archives, Box 1039, folder 1, 27/04/1949–30/12/1963, Civil disorder, riots, emerg power, doc. 85. 29 Ashley B. Rockenbach, Contingent Homes, Contingent Nation: Rwandan Settlers in Uganda, 1911–64, PhD in History, University of Michigan, 2018. But there were debates about this within the colonial administration: the Medical Department was hostile towards migrants whom they considered as a great health hazard: Maryinez Lyons, ‘Foreign Bodies: The History of Labour Migration as a Threat to Public Health in Uganda’, in Paul Nugent and A.I. Asiwaju (eds), African Boundaries: Barriers, Conduits, and Opportunities (London and New York: Pinter, 1996), pp. 131–44. They recommended that they should be triaged and given identity documents, which was refused by the Governor: P. Powesland, ‘The history of the migration’ in Richards, Economic Development and Tribal Change, p. 47. 30 As Nakanyike Musisi has exposed, wives’ mobility had been restricted by the Buganda Lukiiko, under the influence of the church, as early as 1899.

The Political Ambivalence of Bureaucratic Knowledge in Uganda’s Villages

with the help of chiefs, who provided letters of recommendation to the aggrieved husbands for their safe travels. 31 In Buganda, it had become more and more difficult for many local communities to accommodate the increasing number of incomers. 32 Whereas in previous times, Ganda travellers could expect assistance from their clan members and local chiefs, 33 the old system of knowing and placing strangers could no longer prevail. Because they had migrated from another part of Uganda, or because they were foreigners, migrant labourers sometimes did not have an omusolo. In Buganda, relationships between natives and migrant workers were complex and evolved over time. Richards reports for the 1950s that most people favoured the massive arrival of migrant workers, because cotton needed to be picked. 34 But the situation could vary a lot according to status and class, and according to the region of the kingdom – depending in particular on the availability of land and the proximity of plantations. 35 There were differences in the appreciation of workers’ presence depending on whether they were inserted within hierarchical social relations or if they came to work for a foreign plantation and thus largely escaped the local set of obligations, 36 the worst-case scenario being when migrants were not even linked to a plantation through a labour contract. Within villages, the desire to preserve a socio-economic and moral order drove the local demand for identity documentation. In 1951, in the course of her research on labour migrations in central Uganda, Richards reports that, during a meeting near the sugar plantations in Lugazi, Married women’s mobility was dependent on their husbands’ and other men’s judgement: ‘Morality as Identity: The Missionary Moral Agenda in Buganda, 1877–1945’, The Journal of Religious History 23:1 (1999), 51–74 (pp. 60–61). More and more unattached women started to have access to land, leading to cries for the control of their social and geographic mobility: Hanson, Landed Obligation, p. 178; and Paula Jean Davis, ‘On the Sexuality of “Town Women” in Kampala’, Africa Today, 47: 3/4 (2000), 29–60. 31 Jinja District Archives, Admin, Af. Local Government, Box 17 File 21 ‘Permission to travel from one county to another’. 32 Hanson, Landed Obligation, p. 174. 33 Ibid. 34 Richards, Economic Development. 35 Powerful chiefs for instance who wanted to attract dependents tended to use the bureaucratic system in order to assimilate more migrants. More modest farmers tended to advocate for a more restrictive legislation regarding labour migrations; see Doyle, ‘Parish Baptism Registers’, p. 289. 36 See Christine Obbo, ‘Village Strangers in Buganda Society’, in William E. Shack and Elliott P. Skinner (eds), Strangers in African Societies (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 227–41; A.F. Robertson, An Analysis of the Social Change Processes Resulting from the Migration of Diverse Tribal Groups to Bugerere, Buganda, Uganda (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1967); and A.F. Robertson, Community of Strangers: A Journal of Discovery in Uganda (London: Scolar Press, 1978).

177

178

Part II: Imagining Institutions

[A man] got up and said there was a group of immigrants not settled anywhere who did no work but wandered round in bands. These were men who were thieves and bad people … No one could keep track of them because there is no way of identifying them. [The sub-county chief] wants to issue all the working porters with identity discs or distinctive uniforms. He would then be able to recognise those who are not working, and could arrest or deport them as vagrants. 37

This quote illustrates the fact that, in central Uganda, the idea that the identity and movement of particular categories of people should be documented emerged from the lower ranks of the administration. Unattached people were considered a moral and social hazard. This was not the result of a unilateral imposition from the highest spheres of the colonial State, but it was definitely the product of a colonial situation.

The Military Invention of Villages as Cradles of a Documented Personhood (1962–1986)

According to Doyle, the dense and effective system of registration of population by chiefs that existed in Buganda, in Bunyoro, and in Tooro, ‘collapsed’ after the kingdoms were abolished in 1967. 38 In the southern kingdoms, a large proportion of the chiefs were changed in 1967, and again under Amin. The data decreased in the case of births and deaths registrations. But more research would be needed on the work of tallying that parish chiefs continued to do in many parts of the country for the sake of collecting the graduated tax. 39 Also, we have traces of the fact that some local chiefs continued to produce documents on travellers.40 Indeed, between 1962 and 1986, ‘travel letters’, ‘travel permits’ and ‘certificates of identity’ were routinely signed by the District Commissioner (DC) in order for Ugandans or foreigners who did not own a passport to travel abroad. Sub-county chiefs could write letters recommending their residents to the DC so that he gave them these documents. The letters I studied were either typed or handwritten, in Rutooro or English, and shared the same pattern (particulars of the sender and the addressee, date, salutations, stamp). They comprised an appreciation of the bearer’s moral qualities, like in the case of this letter from April 1969: 37 RICHARDS 7/19 Kyagwe Survey, ‘Notes on Lukiko meeting, Mut. VII’s gombolola, Kyagwe, 23.2.51’, p. 58. 38 Doyle, ‘Parish Baptism Registers’, p. 280. 39 Indeed, interviewees in rural Tooro recollected how they continued to pay taxes and get their omusolo. 40 So far, it has not been possible to find written traces of chiefs’ bureaucratic work below the sub-county level for the period before 1986.

The Political Ambivalence of Bureaucratic Knowledge in Uganda’s Villages

Dear Sir, the bearer Mr/Mrs [name removed by FBF] of [name removed by FBF] Village in my Gomborra want to proceed to their mother county … in Masisi district Congo. The said gentleman together with his [word missing] are going with one child only; I in person would recommend them go round look for their parents. They are good trusted people. I remain, Sir [Signature].41

Letters from Tooro in the 1960s mainly recommended people who wanted to travel to neighbouring countries. Thus, with the exception of the period of the Rwenzururu conflict,42 it seems that at the time, the omusolo was enough to travel within Uganda. Things changed under Amin. Elizabeth Laruni reports that in Acholi, ‘permission had to be asked in writing to travel in and out of the district to any other counties in the region’.43 In Tooro, letters of introduction started being used to travel within the country. Again, letters carried mentions of the DC’s or the sub-county chief’s assessment of the person’s ‘good conduct’, ‘character’, or ‘reputation’, as if trust was put on chiefs’ direct knowledge of their constituents. This pattern continued with the civil war in the 1980s. In a context of counter-insurgency terror, letters of introduction were sought to maximise the chances to pass the multiple roadblocks safely. See for instance this letter written in February 1983 by a sub-county chief:

This is to introduce to you the above named who is a resident of [name removed by FBF] village, Butiiti sub-county, Mwenge. He is a very good citizen since his birth. Any assistance accorded to him will be highly appreciated.44

Some bore a lot of details on the purpose of the trip. Some were for individuals, others for extended families, established in the name of the husband, sometimes however detailing the names of the wife, children, and maids. Some were only temporary, giving details on the precise time frame within which they should be considered as valid by the security personnel. Based on sixty-seven letters written in 1982 and 1983 by the DC and collected in the Kabarole district archives, the 41 Handwritten letter in English, addressed to the OC Police, Fort Portal. From Omukumba’s office, Hakibaale Burahya. Kabarole District Archives, Box 161, File 1, ‘Immigr. and Emigr., passports, etc., travel permit letters, applications and certs. of identity’. 42 See Kabarole district Archives, Box 1039, folder 1, 27/04/1949–30/12/1963, ‘Civil disorder, riots, emerg power’. 43 Elizabeth Laruni, From the Village to Entebbe: The Acholi of Northern Uganda and the Politics of Identity, 1950–1985, PhD in History, University of Exeter, 2014, p. 210. 44 Handwritten letter, from the office of the sub-county chief, Butiiti, Mwenge, addressed to the District Commissionner Kabarole District. Kabarole District Archives, Box 1343, file 5, ‘Miscellaneous documents of Assorted Adminstration’.

179

180

Part II: Imagining Institutions

people to whom these letters were granted were mainly civil servants or prominent business people from Fort Portal. However, other bearers included former prisoners and people who had been expelled from a forest reserve: they were meant to prove they had a good reason to be on the move.

Mayumba Kumi: The Social Density of Village Bureaucracies (1979–1986)

As mentioned, the material traces of the bureaucratic work accomplished by the lowest chiefs in the first 25 years after independence are still elusive, but it is possible to reconstitute this work through oral history, especially after the fall of Idi Amin, when bureaucratic work started to be endeavoured by villagers themselves. In 1979, the UNLF government put in place a system directly inspired by Julius Nyerere’s nyumba kumi (Swahili, ‘ten houses’) that were set up in Tanzania in the mid-1960s as the lowest arm of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) ruling party.45 Similarly, to their Tanzanian counterparts, mayumba kumi (Luganda, ‘ten houses’) groups were requested to fight against crime and disorder, and to record information about visitors and newcomers.46 There was a very strong concern from the new authorities to eliminate the remains of Amin’s army and supporters within the Ugandan society and they made frequent appeals to the population to ‘join hands’ with the security forces in this endeavour.47 The mayumba kumi were also thought as a cheap alternative to a weakened police service and a way to educate Ugandans into the new political culture the UNLF desired to create.48 Concretely, one of the important tasks assigned to mayumba kumi was to filter the circulation of people through road blocks around the villages. A former mayumba kumi member from a rural village in Kabarole recalled: [We] would keep an eye on each other so that criminals don’t infiltrate … For instance if a visitor like you came to the village at night the ‘ten houses’ leadership would come to the guest and get information to assess whether the visitor is a risk to the village security or not … We would follow a visitor wherever he or she came from, even the

45 Charlotte Cross, ‘Community Policing and the Politics of Local Development in Tanzania’, The Journal of Modern African Studies 52: 4 (2014), 517–40. 46 Interview with Chairman KA, Kabarole, 4 October 2018. 47 See for instance, among many others, Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) SSA 79 071, ‘Liberation Forces Commander Announces Amin’s Ouster’, 11 April 1979. 48 Dani W. Nabudere, ‘The New Military Dictators in Uganda’, unpublished manuscript, 1980.

The Political Ambivalence of Bureaucratic Knowledge in Uganda’s Villages

village where he or she came from. ‘What’s the reason for coming to the village?’ You would go back to the village and sub-county leadership of where you came from and they give you an identity document so that we can be sure that the visitor is a good person (murungi).49

This quote shows that in the eyes of the mayumba kumi members, the moral quality of the person had to be guaranteed through his/her belonging to a village. In case a visitor did not have a school ID, a professional ID, or a recent tax ticket, they needed a ‘citizen ID’ purchased in town, signed and stamped by an official of the mayumba kumi of their village of origin, or a letter written by the same detailing the reasons to move, and stamped. 50 The fact that the stationary, pens and record books necessary for this bureaucratic work were sometimes provided by the sub-county shows how this system of village endorsement was important in the eyes of the authorities, not just the villagers. As one told me, at the time, ‘paper was available but not (essential commodities like) salt’. 51 After Obote came back to power in December 1980, the mayumba kumi were integrated within the counter-insurgency effort against Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA). In Buganda, they are associated with the UPC youth league, and remembered with terror and contempt. Because State terror did not affect civilians elsewhere as much as it did in Buganda, and because Obote’s Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) had a relatively long history in the region, the story of mayumba kumi is different in Tooro. In the villages where I did fieldwork, mayumba kumi are remembered by many as an effective answer to the general physical and moral insecurity that swept across the country from 1979, and as a way for landlords and dominant men to get the State’s backing and blessing in regaining control within the village. Mayumba kumi followed the instructions of the sub-county but their members used the structures for their own agenda, as a way to discipline youth, drunkards, and women. 52 Although no systematic survey regarding their profile and social background is available, it should be mentioned that, in the four villages of rural Kabarole where fieldwork was done, several mayumba kumi leaders were descendants of chiefs who held positions within the Kingdom of Tooro. One was also a teacher and a former field inspector, and later on worked as a salesman in a bookshop in Kampala. But another, from a neighbouring village, came from a much more modest background, could not read English, and worked as a farmer. He had misbehaved as a young man and being a mayumba kumi member was a 49 50 51

52

Interview with VA, Kabarole, 21 May 2019. Interviews with VA, TA and OA, Kabarole, 20, 21, and 22 May 2019. Interview with VA, Kabarole, 21 May 2019. Interview with TA, Kabarole, 22 May 2019.

181

182

Part II: Imagining Institutions

way for him to make amends and regain a certain status as an honourable man in the village. Thus, the politics of producing documents on villagers answered both to a national policy of counter-insurgency and localised social ambitions and agendas.

The Centralised Politics of Creating a Movement Village Bureaucracy

In the case of the Kabarole villages where fieldwork was carried, the transition from mayumba kumi to the Resistance Councils (RC) system that had been trialled by the NRA during the civil war was surprisingly smooth. Some mayumba kumi members became RC1 chairmen, and continued fulfilling the same bureaucratic functions. During the interviews, the chronological rupture of 1986 did not seem pertinent to them in terms of bureaucratic habits and rules. They kept on producing letters of recommendation to villagers and recording visitors as before. 53 The NRM was however very pro-active in its promotion of village bureaucracies. A hybridisation occurred between the bureaucratic and military culture of the previous regimes and the military revolutionary culture of the NRA. In Buganda during the war, RCs could provide people with kitambulisho, a Swahili word (which indicates it was typically used by the military), commonly translated as ‘letter of introduction’, or ‘pass’. People caught without it risked being accused of being an informer for the UPC. 54 In 1986–87, when the new system of local government was put in place, village chairpersons were briefed by the DC on how to manage security in their areas. Even if this does not appear in the RC statute of 1987, 55 many chairpersons recall how they were requested by the new authorities to ask for letters of introduction from newcomers before they allowed them to settle in the village. 56 Since then, there are ongoing efforts to harmonise these bureaucracies. For instance, one of the sub-counties from which I worked had recently retrieved all the LC1 old rubber stamps and had provided them with uniform stamps. Many RC1 and later LC1 executives benefited from training: whether by chaka mchaka (a military training programme for civilians), by the Uganda law society, or by specialised government agencies on issues such as hygiene, land rights, etc. They Interviews with RA, Kabarole, 21 and 23 May 2019. Tidemand, The Resistance Councils in Uganda, p. 139. 55 The Resistance Councils and Committees Statute (Statute 9), 1987. 56 The oldest letter of introduction from an RC1 that I was able to find dates back to November 1986. Contrary to those of today, these letters were signed and stamped by all administrative levels, from RC1 to the District Administrator: Jinja District Archives, Admin., District, Box 10, file 12, Travel permits 1986–1987, Doc 26. 53

54

The Political Ambivalence of Bureaucratic Knowledge in Uganda’s Villages

Figure 8.1 Old LC1 rubber stamps collected by the sub-county chief, Kabarole, May 2019 (picture by Florence Brisset-Foucault).

were often given material that advised them on how to collect data and keep records. These booklets are very instructive when it comes to understanding what is at stake in record keeping according to the official ideology of the Movement. Chairpersons have been encouraged by the police to request recommendation letters from newcomers and, in some cases, were given advice on their wording and aspect. This generated a certain degree of homogeneity of the aspect and the conditions of delivery of the letters. 57 From the mid-2010s, the LC1s have been the object of a strong political reinvestment by the central government, and by the security agencies in particular. Since 2015, in order to obtain their biometric National Identity Document (NID), Ugandans were meant to request an introduction letter from their LC1 chairperson, countersigned by the security services, authenticating their belonging to their ethnicity, clan and family. This letter was supposedly based on the chair­person’s knowledge of the person and her/his family history. 58 The 2018 elections were an occasion for their missions and rules to be reinstated Interview with chairman KA, Kabarole, 4 October 2018. See Mary Serumaga, ‘The National Identity Card’, Transition 117 (2015), 182–91; Gerald Owachi and Sandrine Perrot, ‘L’enregistrement biométrique des « autres ». Indigénéité négociée, citoyenneté et lutte pour les papiers de la communauté maragoli en Ouganda’, Genèses 113 (2018), 122–43; and Elisam Magara, ‘Personal Identity Systems and the Role of the State in Democratic National Elections’, in Joseph Oloka-Onyango and Josephine Ahikire (eds), Controlling Consent: Uganda’s 2016 Elections (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2017), pp. 455–76. 57

58

183

184

Part II: Imagining Institutions

by the President.59 Commercial banks were also important sources of external encouragements to formalise the documentation of identity at the local level as they requested letters of introduction in order to open an account or ask for a loan. Potential employers also routinely request such letters.

The Chairpersons’ Papers

External incentives do not however tell the whole story of why these documents are produced and how. We still need to explain sociologically why some LC1s followed the State’s instructions and produced this documentation and others did not, beyond explanations invoking the State’s authoritarian character or, on the contrary, a village’s remoteness from the centre of the country. One can observe variations regarding the dynamics that lead to the production of documentary knowledge from one village to another. For instance, within Kampala, I visited two zones in which an intensive work of registration of local residents was done by the LC1 executive. In the first zone, some members of the executive had daily contacts with the police and monthly security meetings with the Resident District Commissioner (RDC)’s office. In the second one, the chairperson was acting completely on her own. The multiple, internal rationalities that led to the production of village documents need to be unearthed. This does not mean that these dynamics are unconnected to national/centralised policies, but it should not obscure the plurality of social dynamics that can explain the urge (or not) to produce bureaucratised knowledge of the population. People usually pay in order to get documents. Prices vary, sometimes according to the chairman’s assessment of one’s wealth (usually between 2,000 [equivalent to GBP £0.44, US $0.53 in mid-2022] and 5,000 shillings [£1.11, $1.32], but it can be higher). This thus obviously restricts the number of people who can have access to these documents. The profile of the applicants, just as the profiles of the members of the executive of the Local Council, the immediate environment (the kind of stationary available, the possibility for people to get photo IDs or not etc.) and localised histories of literacy and bureaucratic literacy largely influence the shapes the documentary production is going to take. The bureaucratic aesthetic of the documents varies from a village to the other: their colour, shape, the kind of paper used, the logos, reflects this plurality. 59 Amon Katungulu, ‘In spite of all those liars, charlatans and criminals, NRM triumphs – Museveni’, 16 July 2018, https://nilepost.co.ug/2018/07/16/ in-spite-of-all-those-liars-charlatans-and-criminals-nrm-triumphs-museveni [accessed 1 March 2019].

The Political Ambivalence of Bureaucratic Knowledge in Uganda’s Villages

Despite that, there is a consistency in what LC1 executives do across the country.60 In chairpersons’ houses, or in some cases offices, with varied degrees and combinations, one can find surveys of residents and records of visitors in big notebooks, minutes of council or executive meetings, minutes of court meetings, introduction letters from incoming residents, copies of letters to outgoing residents, unfilled resident IDs, letters by landlords informing of coming and going of tenants, police or other higher authorities notifications (typically public health information), application forms to get a passport, copies of letters of people who want to open a bank account, land agreements written by villagers and overseen by the chairman, intertwined sometimes with private archives: omusolo tickets, diplomas, and certificates, family pictures, etc. Some records are extremely detailed, especially, but not exclusively in urban areas. In a village of Kampala for instance, the secretary kept a list of every new resident in big lined notebooks with, for each person: a picture, the names, sex, age, nationality, occupation, place of residence, place of origin, and phone number.61 In the 1990s, in the same village, the secretary of the LC1 would go around the village every weekend doing house-to-house surveys and updating the registry. Another chairperson in a nearby village kept a record of every request made at her office, detailing its nature, the course of action taken, the national identity number (NIN) and the phone number of the person. In a third Kampala village, the vice-chairwoman, who did not know how to read and write well and who did not speak English, kept another kind of record, featuring just an ID picture of the resident and his or her name. In urban areas, the executive of the LC1 often produces resident identity cards. These cards are more or less elaborate and expensive, according to the kind of paper used, and the format. They are then purchased by the villager from the LC executive. In rural areas, these cards are often bought by the villager at the market or from a hawker. In both cases, the cards are filled, signed 60 Jones briefly describes how the chairman has been keeping records: Beyond the State, pp. 82, 84. Richard Vokes studied photographs kept by an LC3 leader in Western Uganda: ‘The Chairman’s Photographs: The Politics of an Archive in South-Western Uganda’, in Christopher Morton and Darren Newbury (eds), The African Photographic Archive: Research and Curatorial Strategies (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 95–112. On village archives in another African context: David Zeitlyn, ‘The Documentary Impulse: Archives in the Bush’, History in Africa 32 (2005), 415–34, and on village writing practices: Aïssatou MbodjPouye, Le fil de l’écrit: Une anthropologie de l’alphabétisation au Mali (Paris: ENS Editions, 2017). 61 Although it might seem counter-intuitive in an urban setting, ‘village’ is commonly used by people on a daily basis (more than ‘zone’ which appears in the law), and is used on identity documents.

185

Figure 8.2 Resident identity card issued by Nakulabye Parish Local Council, Kampala, June 2018 (picture by Florence Brisset-Foucault).

Figure 8.3 Local Council 1 Residential Card, Nkrumah Zone, Kampala, June 2018 (picture by Florence Brisset-Foucault).

The Political Ambivalence of Bureaucratic Knowledge in Uganda’s Villages

Figure 8.4 Identity card purchased at the market in Kabarole, 2016 (picture by Florence BrissetFoucault).

and stamped by the chairperson and/or the secretary. Letters of recommendation or letters of introduction represent an important part of LC executives’ work. Today they are still needed by people on a daily basis in order to apply for a loan, a passport, find a job, sometimes to open a bank account, or to move to another village. Before settling in a village, people are supposed to have in their possession such a letter from their previous chairperson. They can be written in different languages (Luganda, Rutooro, English, were used in the areas where I did fieldwork), depending on the profile of the chairperson on the one hand, and of the addressee of the letter on the other. Most letters I saw were handwritten, but, in urban areas, many are typed, whether in a local internet café by an employee or, as I have seen in two cases, by the chairperson’s children. However, there is a striking consistency in the way they are worded. Despite nuances and the use of both English and vernacular languages, many use similar, almost standard formulae in their assessment of a citizen’s worth and qualities: people to whom they are granted are

187

188

Part II: Imagining Institutions

Figure 8.5 Identity cards, purchased at the market in Kabarole in 2016 (picture by Florence Brisset-Foucault).

deemed ‘hard working’, ‘law abiding’, ‘trustworthy’, ‘bona fide resident’, ‘responsible person’. They are said to be ‘well known to this office’ and ‘lawfully reside’ in the village. Chairpersons have varied habits regarding archiving. A chairman in rural Kabarole for instance keeps very detailed minutes of every council and executive meeting as well as court meetings, handwritten

The Political Ambivalence of Bureaucratic Knowledge in Uganda’s Villages

Figure 8.6 Letter to the General Manager [occluded], Bank Uganda Limited, 13 August 2018, recommending someone who wants to open an account (picture by Florence Brisset-Foucault, reproduced with kind authorisation of the bearer).

in Rutooro in several A4 lined textbooks he keeps in his home, but does not keep the introduction letters of new residents or copies of the ones he gives out himself. Others keep every document they had received and copies of the ones they produced in chronological order in large black ring binders. Others do not keep any records.

189

190

Part II: Imagining Institutions

The Reinvestment of Socio-Professional Habitus and the Quest for Social Standing

These variations correspond to the multiple profiles and thus relationships to the written word, and to the State, that members of the LC1 executive might have. The executive members are not civil servants sanctioned by a national recruitment process and a common training. They live in the village that they daily manage. They do not receive salaries. They thus potentially have very varied profiles. Despite the central State’s efforts to harmonise LC1 practices, chairpersons, intentionally or not, transfer singular methods and social heritages in their day-to-day practices: the influence of socialisation through religious organisations, agricultural co-operatives, professional experiences in an administration, a State corporation, a school, a trade union, the army, land owners’ habits of collecting data on tenants – all are important to study when it comes to understanding the way chairpersons work on a day-to-day basis. For instance, BA, born in 1957, is the chairwoman of a poor zone of Kampala.62 She keeps very detailed records of the residents who come to register at her office since she was elected in 2002. She says she did not get any encouragement to do so from the police or the RDC. For her, keeping neat records was a continuation of know-how, love for the written word, and the professional ethos she acquired and performed when she was a Primary school teacher. She enjoyed very much working and improving her registration system on a day-to-day basis. She had not been a teacher for long: she only taught for a year and a half and had to leave the job prematurely. Before BA was elected, she had been a housewife for many years. Yet she went to University in Britain before she got married. ‘My husband didn’t want me to teach’, she explained, preferring her to raise the children at home. Other chairpersons or LC1 secretaries I met were former foremen, tax collectors, veterans. They explained how their previous occupations helped them in keeping books, write reports, organise records. One of them was a former clerk in a car company and then at the Coffee Marketing board at the end of the 1960s: ‘All the letters I write, all those that were written to me, I file them … I was a clerk. I know how to do [this]. Much of these other LCs don’t know this system’.63 The reinvestment of such know-how can also be understood as a way to maintain a certain social identity. In many cases, becoming a LC1 chairperson is a way to reinstate meaning into a dead-end career or compensate for a career that was interrupted too early because of lack of educational opportunities. One 62

63

Interview with chairwoman BA, Kampala, 16 June 2018. Interview with chairman AA, Kampala 14 June 2018.

The Political Ambivalence of Bureaucratic Knowledge in Uganda’s Villages

informant, for instance, a former policeman, resigned from the police after he realised he would remain a traffic officer all his life as he did not have the right connections.64 Another who has been LC1 chairman since 1986 in Moyo in Northern Uganda explained that he went up to Senior 1 in a missionary school but had to interrupt his studies abruptly: ‘My father died … I wanted to be a priest. Some of my friends are priests, some are doctors’ he explained with regret.65 Sometimes the letters are not written by the chairman or even the secretary. They are written by the person requesting them and the chairperson only signs and stamps it: ‘We assess the weakness of our local leadership. You tell the purpose of the letter, and you translate what is written, for him’, a villager in rural Kyenjojo told me.66 More generally speaking, it is important to note that not ‘everyone’ indiscriminately requested or could access these papers. Not everyone could afford, or needed such letters, only those who seek to circulate, geographically or socially. As we will see below, not everyone was granted these letters. As a chairman from a rural village in Kyenjojo said: ‘It is mostly the educated who come’, those who seek formal employment, who want to pursue further study, see the world and seek a loan. In this case, the State knowledge production is largely fed by the ambitions and trajectory of particular categories of people within the Ugandan society. Indeed, some people are almost invisible in the chairpersons’ archives. Some because they do not request letters – wives, people whose requests were rejected by the LC, or people who want to elude being seen by the State. Many chairpersons I met in urban villages lamented the fact that a lot of people got around the system and did not come to register, or did not come to record their visitors. On the contrary, some people do not appear in the archives because they are rejected by the chairperson as being not worthy of being documented (see below). Indeed, the constitution of local corpuses of knowledge does not only reflect the individual profile of the chairman, but also more collective, social dynamics.

The Production of Knowledge as an Expression of Social Struggles within the Village

As mentioned earlier, since the mid-2010s, the central government has pushed for a revitalisation of the LC1 councils. In this context, in a village of the rural sub-county of Bufunjo in Kyenjojo district, a handful of university-educated villagers pushed not only to formalise 64 65

66

Interview with chairman LA, Kyenjojo, 3 October 2018. Interview with chairman NA, Kampala, 1 October 2018. Interview, Kyenjojo, 2 October 2018.

191

192

Part II: Imagining Institutions

meetings, hold minutes in English, and type them on a laptop, but also to initiate new modalities of the registration of people. It would be a mistake however to interpret this move as mere ideological support for the NRM regime. In this village, where the chairman is a very old man who does not speak English and who did not keep written documents of his administrative duties, it reflected the fact that this particular category of residents was trying to align the rules to be followed to their own social capital, their own skills, practices, and ethos. But it also reflected deeper socio-historical dynamics in this sub-county. These men are school teachers who migrated from other parts of Western Uganda. In 2012 they launched a community-based organisation (CBO) that has embarked on a wide variety of projects, from the promotion of tree planting to the encouragement of the use of solar stoves, and the pin-pointing of failures in public service delivery, to micro-credit. They have conducted ‘monitoring activities’ and produced an important amount of data on local social dynamics. They also generate data on loan beneficiaries’ solvency. All this data is produced using standardised forms provided by the Ministry of Local Government and an umbrella organisation that offers logistical support to CBOs. The latter has provided the CBO with a number of bureaucratic tools (models of schedules and data collection on loan seekers). They have also benefited from the support of an internationally funded NGO in Fort Portal which has advocated for particular formats of data collection and reporting, especially on public service failure. The founder of the CBO had been trained in financial management and book keeping with a farming association. He already possessed a bureaucratic culture as headmaster and is always willing to formalise further their daily activities. This attachment to the production of bureaucratic data and documents makes a singular sense locally. It is inserted within particular dreams and narratives of modernity and alongside other projects of ‘civilisation’ of the area, through migration, education, and religion. Bufunjo sub-county’s headquarters, Kifuka trading centre, is located in a remote area only accessible via a very bad road. It is often defined as ‘very local’ in the region, and often embodies the archetype of geographic isolation and social backwardness. It is, however, not that ‘local’: it has a cosmopolitan history and important links with the outside world. Bufunjo was for a long time very scarcely populated because of violent epidemics of sleeping sickness. In the 1950s, however, the population started to grow quickly with the massive arrival from south-western Uganda of Bakiiga who were strongly encouraged by the colonial authorities to settle in the region as part of a wide development project.67 Land was 67 Grace Carswell, Cultivating Success in Uganda: Kigezi Farmers and Colonial Policies (Nairobi and Oxford: The British Institute in Eastern Africa and James Currey, 2007); and Joel Hartter, Sadie J. Ryan, Catrina A. MacKenzie,

The Political Ambivalence of Bureaucratic Knowledge in Uganda’s Villages

plenty, the migrants dug, winning space over the forest, and cultivated maize, partly intended for commercial agriculture, which reconnected the area to the rest of the world. The value of land started to rise. It seems their arrival was well received by the few locals already there. A lot of inter-ethnic marriages were seen and today the migration is often presented as very positive by the local Batooro in narratives that value a collective itinerary of economic, social, and moral rebirth.68 In continuity with these narratives, the CBO is presented by its leaders as a way to ‘civilise’ the area and to contradict its very bad reputation. Its Secretary General explained: We wanted to elevate [Bufunjo] on the political arena. So that it can also be regarded as a sub-county with potential people. Because … the picture outside was that Bufunjo is so remote the people here … can’t easily do something reasonable. So [creating the CBO] was like making a challenge to the outside sub-counties that we can also manage … At first the whole of this sub-county was a forest and people shunned to live this side … It looked as a place of failures … The situation now has changed, given the upcoming of religion and modernity.69

The CBO is seen by its members as an opportunity to morally reform society, to establish their reputation as good, responsible, and seemly citizens, in order to acquire a status similar to the other sub-counties. It is regarded as a patriotic project. This patriotism is expressed through the efforts made to ‘modernise’ the area, the emic definition of modernity being closely linked to the provision of public services and the adoption of tools of standardisation and rationalisation of politics, that is to say bureaucracy. It is important to say that the bureaucratic attire and culture of accountability was also adopted by the CBO due to the increasingly repressive legislation adopted by government against NGOs, especially the NGO Act of 2016 that forces organisations to adopt particular norms in terms of accounting. Adopting bureaucratised structures and forms of action is also a way to reassure potential international donors. However, it would be a mistake to see the bureaucratic nature of the CBO as simply reactive and strategic. It is meaningful in terms of the civic culture local actors wished to see through: they wanted to distinguish themselves as deserving citizens and enhance the reputation of the village. This included changing the way the LC1 worked and adopting more standardised ways of producing data on residents and local activities. Abe Goldman et al., ‘Now there is No Land: A Story of Ethnic Migration in a Protected Area Landscape in Western Uganda’, Population Environment, published online 29 November 2014. 68 Interview with chairman MA, Kyenjojo 30 October 2016. 69 Interview, Bufunjo, 30 October 2016.

193

194

Part II: Imagining Institutions

Documenting People to Guarantee their Moral Anchorage

But more generally, the production of bureaucratised knowledge on the population at the village level still reflects an entrenched concern to locate people within a geographical, but also moral map. Recommendation letters are valued by LC1 chairpersons because they allow for a close and regular surveillance of residents: they are supposedly conditional to good behaviour. What transpires from interviews with chairpersons is a deep aversion towards unattached people, which echoes the concerns expressed by local leaders in the 1950s, analysed above, and had also been previously expressed through the crafting of ethnic homelands.70 Many chairpersons, especially in urban areas, lament the fact that, because of the recent implementation of National IDs, a lot of people do not come to register at their office anymore. They thus cannot endorse any more their role of custodians of a geographical and moral anchorage. Again, the movement of untraceable people within the national territory is seen as a security threat both by central and local authorities. Contrary to the NID, letters of introduction are supposed to guarantee that one comes from ‘a village’, presented as the cradle of good manners: that he or she is the moral product of a closely knit weaving of hierarchical inter-knowledge. Indeed, even though the NID mentions a village on the back of the card, chairpersons often pointed out that one can move and engage in uncivil behaviour and still bear the NID, whereas the letters of introduction are dated, supposedly conditional on good behaviour and feature the contact details of the chairpersons, thus allowing for a better traceability, updated information, and guarantees in terms of morality. Someone without a letter, without a village, without identifiable origins, cannot be trusted.71 In theory, only those deemed decent, hardworking and law abiding can be awarded letters, which potentially left villagers dependent on their chairperson’s appreciation of their worth. As Peterson says, ‘as a political practice, the act of record keeping [help] organizers conceive and consolidate imagined communities’.72 In the case of Ugandan villages, records, village IDs and letters of introduction helped imagine a community based on trust, not origins. However, there are nuances, and varied models of polity appear in the archipelago of village records one can find in Uganda. Residents’ IDs 70 Derek R. Peterson, Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent, c. 1935–1972 (Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 2012). 71 Interviews with chairpersons BB, Kampala, 19 June 2018; AA, Kampala, 14 June 2018; MA, Kyenjojo, 12 December 2016; BA, Kampala, 16 June 2018, etc. 72 Peterson, Creative Writing, p. 21.

The Political Ambivalence of Bureaucratic Knowledge in Uganda’s Villages

for instance are often given to foreigners, but in some cases, different books were kept to register foreigners and Ugandan nationals. In one zone in Kampala when the secretary had a doubt, he would add a little asterisk next to that person’s name and investigate her or his origins. The secretary of this particular village was a Ganda patriot, and his concerns echoed collective worries among Baganda around the presence of ‘false Baganda’ within the Kingdom, i.e., people from Western Uganda supposedly masquerading as Baganda, which would also be telling on their (im)moral character.

Conclusion

Taking local chiefs’ practices of knowledge production on their constituents seriously challenges in itself colonial representations of the hierarchy of knowledge. But to what extent do these localised systems of knowledge production reproduce established patterns of domination? The generation of bureaucratic knowledge by village leaders could be viewed as the result of growing State authoritarianism and of the increasing enrolment of local authorities in a sprawling apparatus of political surveillance. By generating data and documents on their constituents, village leaders do make society more legible to the State. Some do so as genuine supporters of the regime. However, an exclusive focus on this aspect hides the sociological, historical, and political depth of these practices of knowledge generation.73 State agents also create knowledge on their own terms: bureaucratic knowledge production can take a localised significance and meaning, according to particular social histories of literacy, domination, and representations of moral worth. These practices were tools of control and repression, but also of creative political ideas, however conservative. They were largely taken on from below, by particular categories of villagers who interpreted them according to their own agendas and moral ambitions. This social depth needs to be taken into account in attempts to detangle the nodes between knowledge creation and power. The ways in which the politics of documentation of persons and movements at the village scale cuts across established chronologies is remarkable. Its origins can be linked to reactions to the disruptions generated by the colonial political economy. It was appropriated by regimes with antagonistic ideologies, some presenting themselves as 73 On this, see Keith Breckenridge and Simon Szreter, ‘Recognition and Registration: The Infrastructure of Personhood in World History’, in Keith Breckenridge and Simon Szreter (eds), Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 1–36 (p. 19).

195

196

Part II: Imagining Institutions

revolutionary. These multiple historical inheritances contributed to the coming together and relative stabilisation of today’s methodologies of the generation of social knowledge at the village level. In a similar way, these systems of knowledge production are profoundly ambivalent from a political point of view. Despite the plural and often violent historical heritages that were highlighted above, they still have the potential to encourage the imagination of polities based on residence, rather than religious or ethnic belonging.74 However, they also reproduce patriarchal patterns of social hierarchies and lead to the imagination of a citizenship that is still compatible with ethnic patriotism (which, as we know, are profoundly moral projects) and that is, in many ways, confining and conservative: the system enabled by these documents aim to make it impossible to reinvent oneself through geographic mobility. It creates a citizenship based on reputation as assessed by local leaders, exclusive of those, men, but maybe particularly women, who live unconventional lives.

74 Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).

9 Coloniality and Power in Uganda’s Archives RILEY LINEBAUGH AND KATHERINE BRUCE-LOCKHART

We cannot decolonise what was never ours to begin with – but we can always create. When we face the past we understand the present. In understanding the present, we shape our future. (Decolonising the Archive)1

‘Are they here to recolonise the archive?’ In the summer of 2015, the authors of this chapter arrived in the eastern Ugandan town of Jinja to assist in the reconstruction and cataloguing of the district’s administrative archive. Both White, female graduate students, we fit in with our peers either on the basis of common origin (North America) or common interest (Ugandan history).2 Our team – which consisted of Ugandan students of archives and records management and foreign students studying history and archaeology – stood out like a warning sign in the halls of the district administration. Early into our two-month residency, a civil servant asked one of our Ugandan colleagues if we had come to ‘recolonise the archive’. Though in 2015 there had not been much attention paid to the archive, there was an understanding of its relation to colonialism. Our whiteness seemed a confirmation of this relation. Uganda’s archival landscape is one conditioned by the colonial past and the neoliberal present. The High Court Archive, which can be found in downtown Kampala, is located in the colonial court structure built in the 1940s. Lawyers dressed in British-style legal attire move through its hallways, walking above tens of thousands of case files held in the basement. At the nearby Central Police Station, individuals held in 1 ‘About Us’, Decolonising the Archive, www.decolonisingthearchive.com [accessed 2 July 2019]. 2 Our capitalisation of the term ‘White’ is informed by the following commentaries: Nell Irvin Painter, ‘Why “White” should be capitalized, too’, Washington Post, 22 July 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/22/ why-white-should-be-capitalized [accessed 18 July 2022]; Jean Allman, ‘#HerskovitsMustFall? A Meditation on Whiteness, African Studies, and the Unfinished Business of 1968’, African Studies Review 62:3 (2019), 6–39; and Jean Allman ‘Academic Reparation and Stepping Aside’, Africa is a Country, 17 November 2020, https://africasacountry.com/2020/11/academic-reparationand-stepping-aside [accessed 18 July 2022].

198

Part II: Imagining Institutions

police custody often walk past an overcrowded records room filled with decades’ worth of arrest reports. In the south-western city of Kabale, official records are housed in the original colonial government building, which sits next to a hanging tree formerly used for public executions. Throughout Uganda, archives thus remain intimately entangled with colonial power and its legacies. This is particularly visible in the Jinja District Archives (JDA), which represent the largest repository of provincial records in Uganda. 3 Nearly 15,000 files make up the collection, the oldest of which dates back to 1905.4 The records sit in the basement of the district government headquarters, also built in the colonial period. This space represents the asymmetrical power relations of the past and the present: the documents are housed in what was likely a holding cell for those deemed to have transgressed colonial laws and, at the time of our work, several rooms served as makeshift homes for Ugandans struggling to secure living space in an economy marked by significant inequalities. Drawing on our experiences in Jinja and other archival sites, this chapter explores the coloniality of Uganda’s archival collections, taking stock of its consequences and considering how it might be disrupted. Archives were a key export of empire, and they have remained relatively unchanged despite Uganda’s formal decolonisation in 1962. The archive represents an important site for thinking about colonialism’s ideological and institutional legacies, as well as the contemporary dynamics of state power and knowledge production. As we illuminate in the latter part of the chapter, such dynamics can be disrupted in a variety of ways, some of which work within existing structures and others that operate from a position of refusal. 5 The chapter begins by examining the archive’s role as an imperial technology – focusing on the British Empire and its East African colonies – before tracing the history of archiving in Uganda. It then considers the relationship between archival categories, knowledge production, and lived experience. Finally, the chapter maps out several ways in which the coloniality of the archive could be / has been unsettled. While ‘decolonising the archive’ is in many respects an important rallying cry – and has indeed been taken up by many scholars, archivists, and activists – many state archives, including in Uganda, are colonial institutions, shaped by colonial origins and logics. As Eve Tuck and K.W. Yang argue, ‘decolonisation is not a metaphor’ for the improvement or 3 Jinja District Archives Catalogue, 2015, https://derekrpetersondotcom. files.wordpress.com/2015/07/jinja-district-archives-catalogue.pdf [accessed 30 January 2019]. 4 Ibid. 5 Audra Simpson, ‘On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, “Voice” and Colonial Citizenship’, Junctures 9 (2007), 73.

Coloniality and Power in Uganda’s Archives

reform of existing structures, but rather an ‘elsewhere’.6 With this and our own positionalities in mind, we have chosen to focus on identifying and unpacking the archive’s coloniality, as well as thinking through how to disrupt it, rather than seeking to lay claim to the important decolonial work that happens beyond the archives and the academy.7

Archives and Colonialism

Thomas Richards argues that the British Empire was the first information society, not only in terms of information production but also in the use of information as a legitimising force of domination. As the fragility of the British imperial pretence, the ‘civilising mission’, was at odds with the actual fact of governance – brutal autocracy on the one hand and clumsy mismanagement on the other – control over the records of colonial governance was an essential part of controlling the legitimacy of the colonial state. Maps, surveys, censuses, and statistics were instrumentalised in the attempts to articulate and actualise the fantasies of empire.8 This section describes the archival theories and practices related to the development and function of the colonial archive system in the British Empire, and how they affected Uganda. The development of European archival theory accompanied the intensification of bureaucracy in relation to the state. In 1898, three Dutch archivists published Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives, the first treatise which brought archival principles to global attention. The manual advances one hundred rules to standardise best practice and to define both the nature and treatment of archives. It is recognised as the European basis for the professionalisation of the archivist and the modern conceptualisation of the archive. 9 In 1922, Sir Hilary Jenkinson published the second landmark archival text: Manual of Archive Administration. Jenkinson – who would go on Eve Tuck and K.W. Yang, ‘Decolonization is Not a metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1:1 (2012), 3, 36. 7 See J.J. Ghaddar and Michelle Caswell, ‘“To Go Beyond”: Towards a Decolonial Archival Praxis’, Archival Science 19:2 (2019) for further discussion on how contemporary archival practice and theory can uncover the discipline’s colonial heritage while revealing new decolonial possibilities. Also James Lowry, ‘Radical Empathy, the Imaginary and Affect in (Post)Colonial Records: How to Break Out of International Stalemates on Displaced Archives’, Archival Science 10 (2019), 185–203 for ideas on how British archival institutions can engage in reparative archival praxis. 8 Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 2011). 9 Terry Cook, ‘What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift’, Archivaria 43 (Spring 1997), 17–63. 6

199

200

Part II: Imagining Institutions

to work in one of the highest archival posts in the UK as the Deputy Keeper at the Public Record Office and act as a consultant to archival repositories in eastern Africa after independence – reiterated the principles set by the Dutch Manual, and argued for the objectivity and servitude of the archivist:

The Archivist’s career is one of service. He exists in order to make other people’s work possible … His Creed, the Sanctity of Evidence; his Task, the Conservation of every scrap of Evidence attaching to the Documents committed to his charge; his aim to provide, without prejudice or afterthought, for all who wish to know the Means of Knowledge …. The good Archivist is perhaps the most selfless devotee of Truth the modern world produces.10

In Jenkinson’s view, the archive’s contents and control were the business of the administrative body that produced them, with the archivist functioning as a gatekeeper. Within this framework, the administrative body holds total authority for what is included or excluded from an archival corpus and the archivist, as a servant to power, faithfully honours those parameters. Those who worked in British colonial archives, like all civil servants, were obliged to protect Her (or His) Majesty’s Government (HMG) through the observance of the Official Secrets Act. Introduced in 1889, the Official Secrets Bill criminalised unauthorised disclosure of the activity of British governance. In its second section, the Bill defined an official secret as ‘every piece of information possessed or generated by the state’.11 The Bill codified state power over access to information into law, articulating Jenkinson’s notion of archival control in its bleakest sense: contents and control over administrative information, in textual form or otherwise, would be a matter left entirely to the whims of an administrative entity. Archives within British colonies received very little attention in the first half of the twentieth century. Consequently, archives were typically poorly organised heaps of records which had not been sorted through. However, this changed with the onset of decolonisation. In 1947, shortly after Pakistan, India, and Sri Lanka won independence, the newly independent governments made claim to the administrative archives of the colonial government. The India Office ignored the request and British colonial governments adjusted their stance towards the archive in three major ways: (1) The Colonial Office took an interest in selecting the archival records upon which future research regarding the British Empire would be based; (2) The Colonial Office enforced the 10 Hilary Jenkinson, A Manual of Archive Administration including the Problems of War Archives and Archive Making (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), quoted in Cook ‘What is Past is Prologue’, 23. 11 Ian Cobain, History Thieves (London: Granta Publications, 2016).

Coloniality and Power in Uganda’s Archives

destruction and/or removal of records in the colonies that might tarnish the reputation of the British; and (3) The Colonial Office directed that new independent governments should inherit records which would allow for the continuation of the structures of governance instated during colonial rule. The archive was no longer just a dumping ground for the growing piles of ‘old’ and unused files, but the foundation on which the British Empire would be memorialised and its interests with newly independent states protected.12 While the Colonial Office scouted documents from colonies in an exercise of premature nostalgia, they simultaneously mobilised orders to conceal materials which did not shed a good light on HMG. In 1961, the Colonial Office formally launched Operation Legacy which, initiated in East Africa, oversaw the removal, destruction, and alteration of hundreds of thousands of files from thirty-seven former dependencies. Files were identified based on the criteria of ‘embarrassment’.13 For example, the Chief Secretary of Jesselton, North Borneo, instructed every Secretariat Officer to sift through files that might ‘hurt personal feelings or be critical of local personalities’.14 Additionally, files were to be removed if they revealed informants, compromised intelligence, or might be misused by the ministers of the successor government. These elaborate measures of control did not go unnoticed. In Kenya, for example, newspapers described the bonfires of colonial records on the eve of independence, and newly independent governments made direct claims to the British government for the return of their archives.15 These were rejected or ignored. In February 1961, the Chief Secretary in Entebbe circulated an explanatory memorandum detailing the specifics of Operation Legacy in Uganda.16 According to this memorandum, all administrative records that concerned defence, intelligence, the UK Security Service, the production and distribution of propaganda, and the activity of trade unions, or that exposed either religious intolerance or racial discrimination against Africans on the part of HMG should be removed and/or 12 Kenya National Archives/DC/Lamu/2/12/16 ‘Circular Letter no. 54 from Secretariat to all Heads of Department, Kenya’, 10 December 1948. 13 Shohei Sato, ‘“Operation Legacy”: Britain’s Destruction and Concealment of Colonial Records Worldwide’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 45:4 (2017), 708. 14 British National Archives/FCO 141/13025, Memorandum from the Secretariat, Jesselton, 9 January 1963. 15 Reports such as Clyde Sanger, ‘Bonfire of Documents: Kenya burning secret papers’, The Guardian, 3 September 1961 and in the East African Standard, 7 September 1961 as quoted by Musila Musembi, Archives Management: The Kenyan Experience (Nairobi: Africa Book Services, 1985). 16 British National Archives/FCO 141/19909, Circular Memorandum, The Chief Secretary’s Office (Entebbe), 28 February 1961.

201

202

Part II: Imagining Institutions

destroyed.17 The majority of ‘purged’ files had reportedly been burned by June.18 These included material from government headquarters in Entebbe and provincial headquarters such as Mbale and Jinja.19 Many other documents were scurried away to the United Kingdom, in some cases by the Royal Air Force. Over one hundred of these files are now viewable in the British National Archives.20 Documents that fell into this category contained material on the status of the Buganda Kingdom, the exile of Kabaka Edward Mutesa, anticolonial protests in the 1940s, and the relationship between Buganda and kingdoms such as Tooro, Bunyoro, and Ankole. According to an internal note in the Library and Records Department (LRD) of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, former archivist Mr A.C. Watson continued to send the LRD secret papers from pre-independence Uganda until at least 1984.21 The archives which remain in former territories, sit in archival institutions across the UK, or are still hidden from public view are connected not only by their contents, but also by the power relations inherent in their creation. In the words of former colonial archivist, Evelyn Bwye, the colonial archive should ‘serve the practical purposes of administration by providing precedents and historical background to government business in the shape of old departmental files and administrative reports’.22 The colonial archive serves the power which oversaw its creation. Any project aiming to ‘decolonise’ the archive must begin at deconstructing the archival function to protect and iterate state power at the expense of the people.

Archives in Uganda

Long before the British implemented the colonial system of archiving, the people who inhabit the area now known as Uganda used diverse mediums to reflect upon and record their past, such as oral traditions, 17 British National Archives/FCO 141/19909, Appendix to Circular Memorandum No. 2.1016, 28 February 1961. 18 Sato, ‘“Operation Legacy”’, 697. 19 British National Archives, ‘Colonial administration records (migrated archives): Uganda’, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/migratedarchives-8-tranche-guide.pdf: 28–35 [accessed 30 January 2019], and Michael W. Tuck and John A. Rowe, ‘Phoenix from the Ashes: Rediscovery of the Lost Lukiiko Archives’, History in Africa 3 (2005), 404. 20 ‘Colonial administration records (migrated archives): Uganda’, 28–35; British National Archives/FCO 141/19909, note, n.d. 21 British National Archives/FCO 141/19909, note to Library and Records Department, 21 October 1984. 22 Kenya National Archives/AJ/1/17, Letter C. Bwye to R. Charman, 9 September 1963.

Coloniality and Power in Uganda’s Archives

written documents, and visual sources.23 There are numerous examples of this, from the Nyero rock paintings in Teso, eastern Uganda, believed to have been made in the late Stone Age, to the writings of abagalagala in Buganda Kingdom courts in the nineteenth century.24 In the bureaucratic sense in which the archive is now commonly understood, however, archives were a product of colonial rule. As was the case across their Empire, the British imposed an archival logic and structure to Uganda to support, perform, and document their ruling strategies. Yet, they put minimal energy into records management in Uganda. As Edgar Taylor argues, the ‘systematic marginalization of archival labour’ was a deliberate outcome of colonial administrative logics, such as a ‘limited will to knowledge, a prioritization of secrecy, and a suspicion of African publics’.25 Since their introduction, archives have become the dominant mode of recording official activities in Uganda and are fundamental to inscribing the state’s version of history. On the current website of the National Records Centre, the centrality of archives in the state’s historical knowledge production is made clear: ‘A country without archives has no history’.26 It should be noted, however, that there were rich repositories of records created beyond the colonial state, including those of the Lukiiko (Buganda’s parliament), churches, and private or ‘tin-trunk’ collections of prominent anticolonial activists.27 Records of government activity were produced from the early stages of colonial rule, but there was no sustained attempt to create an archival repository until after the Second World War.28 In May 1950, the colonial government appointed Patrick T. English to be the Government 23 On Baganda oral traditions, which are the most closely studied, see for example: Neil Kodesh, ‘History from the Healer’s Shrine: Genre, Historical Imagination, and Early Ganda History’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 493 (2007), 527–52. 24 Catherine Namono, ‘Resolving the Authorship of the Geometric Rock Art of Uganda’, Journal of African Archeology 8:2 (2019), 250. 25 Edgar C. Taylor, ‘Risk and Labour in the Archives: Archival Futures from Uganda’, Africa 91:4 (2021), 532. 26 Uganda National Records Centre and Archives, Ministry of Public Service, https://publicservice.go.ug/national-records-centre-and-archives [accessed 30 January 2019]. 27 See Tuck and Rowe, ‘Phoenix from the Ashes’; Jonathon L. Earle, Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 28 Prior to the formalisation of a colonial archives service in 1950, the maintenance of administrative records was left to civil servants. This is clarified in Natalie Bond’s graduate student poster presentation, ‘Documenting a Nation’s Turbulent Past: Archives in Uganda’, at the Society of American Archivists’ Annual Meeting, 6–11August 2012, San Diego, California, http://files.archivists.org/conference/sandiego2012/P03-Bond.pdf [accessed 8 February 2022].

203

204

Part II: Imagining Institutions

Archivist.29 English had spent many years working in the colonial service, and had trained at the Public Records Office. His appointment represented the first of its kind in East Africa. During his brief tenure, English organised the archives of the Secretariat, which contained files from the 1890s onwards. Reflecting on his accomplishments, he characterised them as marking ‘the beginning of a task that has needed doing for over half a century’, adding, ‘I flatter myself that they show that in the modern Englishman the instinct for pioneering has not died out’. 30 His successor, a more seasoned archivist by the name of J.P.M. Fowle, was appointed in April 1955 but resigned just over a year later.31 During their period of employment, Fowle and English established some procedures for administering and accessing archives, as a well as a handwritten catalogue of several decades of Secretariat files. 32 Martin Mukasa, a clerical assistant, replaced Fowle, and would remain in charge of the collection until the Amin years. 33 Despite the work of these individual archivists, much of the collection was left uncatalogued. As Akugizibwe Moses of Mountains of the Moon University argues, ‘the challenge of [the] poor state of the archives in Uganda is rooted from the fact that they (colonial masters) on handover left a disorganized archive that the current independent Uganda inherited’. 34 Following independence, Uganda’s government placed considerable emphasis on the creation of information infrastructures that could serve the nation. Initially, this was apparent in the development of libraries. In 1963, the East African School of Librarianship was founded at Makerere University, making it the regional leader in this profession. 35 The impetus for state-sponsored archival training was to ensure that civil servants in the independent government were equipped with the historical references required to continue their work, being able ‘to 29 J.M. Akita, ‘Uganda: Development of the National Archives and the National Documentation Centre’, Paris: UNESCO, 1979, 3. 30 Patrick T. English, ‘Archives of Uganda’, American Archivist 18:3 (1955), 226–27 (230). 31 ‘Scheme of Service for the Records and Archives Management Cadre’, Ministry of Public Service, September 2015, http://mops.kacfa.com/mops_ media/2017/06/Schemes-of-Service-Records-and-Archives-Final-2015.pdf [accessed 30 January 2019]. 32 Taylor, ‘Risk and Labour in the Archives’, 536. 33 Edgar C. Taylor, Ashley Brooke Rockenbach and Natalie Bond, ‘Archives and the Past: Cataloguing and Digitisation in Uganda’s Archive’, in Terry Barringer and Marion Wallace (eds), African Studies in the Digital Age DisConnects (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 164. 34 Akugizibwe Moses, Digitization and Sustainability of Archives of Knowledge Resources (Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2017), 4. 35 I.M.N. Kigongo-Bukenya, ‘Education and Training of Archivists at the East African School of Librarianship in the 1990s and Beyond’, American Archivist 56 (1993), 362.

Coloniality and Power in Uganda’s Archives

refer to previous colonial cases, to check on precedents, answer questions by public, Parliament, or international agencies’. 36 Although archives were not the primary focus, the development of libraries facilitated the creation of archival collections. During this time, Uganda became involved in transnational networks of archival professionals. It became a member of the Eastern, Southern and Central Africa Regional Branch of the International Council of Archives (ICA), which was founded in 1969. 37 In 1970, Kampala was the site of UNESCO’s ‘Meeting of Experts on National Planning of Documentation and Library Services in Africa’. 38 Involvement in these networks entailed the ongoing centring of colonial-era practices and concepts. The ICA, which was set up in 1948 ‘to establish and promote relations and exchange of ideas between archivists of all countries’ oversaw the development of archival services in many of these countries following independence using Western models. 39 For example, in 1978, the ICA invited delegates from Uganda for reprography training convened by Albert Leisinger of the U.S. National Archives.40 In contrast to what might be expected, given the violence of the 1970s, military leader Idi Amin invested in the development of Uganda’s archives. Amin understood the link between archives and power, as he had carried out the destruction of the records of the Lukiiko as part of the Battle of Mengo in 1966.41 His interest in archives can also be explained by his preoccupation with performing legitimacy in ways that often undermined, but, at times, complied to, Eurocentric notions of statehood and bureaucracy. As Derek Peterson and Edgar C. Taylor have argued, the production of official paperwork was a key part of this performance.42 During Amin’s presidency, several Ugandans received official sponsorship to study in the Department of Library and Archival 36 Kenya National Archives, ARC(CG) 1/61/1, Plan by Committee for Archival Development of the International Council of Archives, April 1974, ‘Committee for Archival Development of ICA’. 37 Nathan Mnjama, ‘Migrated Archives: The African Perspectives’, Journal of the South African Society of Archivists 48 (2015), 45. 38 ‘Expert Meeting on National Planning of Documentation and Library Services in Africa’, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Kampala, Uganda, 7–15 December 1970, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED057818.pdf [accessed 30 January 2019]. 39 International Council on Archives, ‘ICA: 70 Years of International Influence’, 2016, www.ica.org/en/international-council-archives-0/ica-70–yearsof-international-influence-timeline [accessed 30 January 2019]. 40 Kenya National Archives/34/86, Invitation from ICA Secretary Microfilm Commissioner, 9 July 1977. 41 Tuck and Rowe, ‘Phoenix from the Ashes’, 403–04. 42 Derek R. Peterson and Edgar C. Taylor, ‘Rethinking the State in Idi Amin’s Uganda: The Politics of Exhortation’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 7:1 (2013), 52–82.

205

206

Part II: Imagining Institutions

Studies at the University of Ghana, 43 including Eugene J. Wani, who spent twenty-five years as the head of Uganda’s archives.44 This professionalisation enabled structural changes in Uganda’s archiving practices: following the Bikangaga Salaries Review Commission Report in 1974, it was decided that clerical officers would no longer manage records.45 Along with generating opportunities for training, Amin’s government initiated an assessment of Uganda’s archives by UNESCO consultant J.M. Akita.46 The final report, which was nearly fifty pages long, was completed in 1979 and set out an ambitious plan for creating a national archive. Any possibility of implementing the plan, however, was undercut by Uganda-Tanzania War (1978–79) and Amin’s subsequent overthrow.47 The 1980s brought continued warfare and political instability, along with major cutbacks to public service institutions due to structural adjustment programmes imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.48 Despite these challenges, Wani remained in his position and began granting researchers access to the national collection in the mid-1980s.49 His career reflects the myriad challenges and risks that Ugandan archivists have faced since independence, from the health hazards that arise from working in neglected archival spaces to the political perils of managing access to sensitive documents. 50 Uganda’s archival landscape has changed significantly since the takeover of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) government in 1986. These changes have unfolded in an environment marked by inconsistency, as the state has emphasised the importance of good governance and ‘modernisation’ while also adopting a derisive attitude towards the past. 51 As a result, some important state-led changes have taken place, but many have occurred outside its parameters. Two state-initiated developments stand out. The first is the drafting and passage of the National Records and Archives Act in 2001, which represents the most robust attempt to create a coherent national Akita, ‘Uganda: Development of the National Archives’, 3. Taylor et al., ‘Archives and the Past’, 165. 45 ‘Scheme of Service for the Records and Archives Management Cadre’. 46 Akita, ‘Uganda: Development of the National Archives’. 47 Elisam Magara, ‘Building Capacity for Archives and Dissemination of Information in Uganda: A Case Study of Uganda Broadcasting Corporation and Directorate of Information’, presentation at the First International Conference on African Digital Libraries and Archives (ICADLA-1), Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1–3 July 2009, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/39667856.pdf [accessed 30 January 2019]. 48 Taylor, ‘Risk and Labour in the Archives,’ 539. 49 Taylor et al., ‘Archives and the Past’, 166. 50 See Taylor, ‘Risk and Labour in the Archives.’ 51 Ibid., 167. 43 44

Coloniality and Power in Uganda’s Archives

framework for the ‘preservation, utilisation, and disposal’ of records and archives. 52 The Act defines archives as ‘records of enduring value selected for permanent preservation’, establishes a National Records and Archives Agency, identifies the National Archives as the primary deposit site for archival materials, creates guidelines for district archives, and outlines penalties for the removal or damaging of archives. 53 Today, it remains the key legislative framework for archives in Uganda. While it has been assented to by Parliament, it has not yet been implemented in practice. Despite the advantages of this framework, the Act perpetuates the coloniality of the archive in many respects. By law, the National Archive is a governmental agency. Its director is appointed by a governmental authority and its employees are obliged to take the oath of secrecy. The primary function of the archive is to ‘ensure that organs of the State follow good practices in managing public records’. 54 Under the Act’s provisions, the director has total authority in determining the rules of using archives under their control. If we recall the words of Evelyn Bwye, these characteristics echo the colonial function of the archive to state power. The second development is the creation of the National Records Centre and Archives building in Wandegeya, a neighbourhood in Kampala. Previously, the national archives collection existed in the former Colonial Secretariat building in Entebbe.55 While the collection had been catalogued by a team of Ugandan and foreign students in 2011, the site posed many logistical challenges.56 The World Bank provided funding for the Wandegeya site, reflecting the NRM’s reliance on international donors.57 This project was beset by a range of issues and, although the building was opened with great fanfare in 2016, its operations are marred by the encroachment of other organisations such as the Land Commission and the limited resources available for archival staff. Despite these developments, the state’s main impact on archival management within Uganda since independence has arguably been the consistent lack of funding. As Akugizibwe writes, ‘the Government of 52 Uganda Legal Information Institute, ‘The National Records and Archive Act, 2001’, https://media.ulii.org/files/legislation/akn-ug-act-2001-12-eng2001-06­-15.pdf [accessed 9 June 2022]. 53 ‘The National Records and Archive Act, 2001’. 54 Ibid. 55 Constant Okello-Obura, ‘Records and Archives Legal and Policy Frameworks in Uganda’, Library Philosophy and Practice (2011), 8. 56 For more on this process and the National Archives catalogues, see Derek R. Peterson, ‘Archive Catalogues’, https://derekrpeterson.com/archive-work [accessed 2 February 2019]. It is important to note that a catalogue existed prior to the 2011 project, which facilitated use of the collections. 57 ‘National Records Centre and Archives’, Ministry of Public Service.

207

208

Part II: Imagining Institutions

Uganda has allocated little or no funding at all in preservation of historical records for easy access by the nationals’. 58 This not only reflects the conditions of austerity that Uganda has faced in the postcolonial period, but the archive’s colonial origins. As Edgar C. Taylor argues, while it is tempting to regard postcolonial archives as reflections of institutional failure, ‘the history of Uganda’s archives suggests that impoverishment and destruction were founding conditions, not postcolonial deviations’. 59 Such funding issues not only impact current archival spaces and labour, but also the future of the field. There have been many struggles to maintain the Records and Archives Management (RAM) and library science training at the post-secondary level. First initiated at Makerere in 2008, there are now RAM degrees or diplomas at multiple universities.60 However, in 2007, the longstanding Bachelor’s degree in Library and Information Science and the RAM diploma at Makerere were removed from the list of courses eligible for government sponsorship, a decision that was later reversed due to widespread pushback.61 As Constant Okello-Obura and I.M.N. Kigongo-Bukenya have argued, the precarity of such programmes reflects the ‘little appreciation of the role libraries, records, and archives play in national development’.62 There are also important archival preservation initiatives that have emerged outside of the state’s purview. One of the most impactful is the series of collaborations between the University of Michigan and Ugandan universities such as Mountains of the Moon University, Makerere University, and Busoga University.63 Teams of local and foreign students and researchers have worked together to restore numerous official archival collections in Uganda. This collaboration facilitated our initial encounters with Uganda’s archives. Similar restoration and digitisation projects have been undertaken with the Archives of the (Anglican) Church of Uganda and the papers of anticolonial activist and intellectual E.M.K. Mulira.64 These extra-state operations speak to the Akugizibwe, Digitization & Sustainability, 17. Taylor, ‘Risk and Labour in the Archives’, 544–45. 60 Constant Okello-Obura and I.M.N. Kigongo-Bukenya, ‘Review Article: Library and Information Science Education and Training in Uganda: Trends, Challenges, and the Way Forward’, Education Research International (2011), 2. 61 See for example: Constant Okello-Obura, ‘We Cannot Wipe Out Corruption Without Good Records Management’, New Vision, 4 December 2007, www.newvision.co.ug/new_vision/news/1214012/wipe-corruption-recordsmanagement [accessed 2 February 2019]. 62 Okello-Obura and Kigongo-Bukenya, ‘Library and Information Science Education and Training in Uganda’, 5. 63 See Peterson, ‘Archive Catalogues’. 64 ‘Archives of the Church of Uganda’, BrillOnline Primary Sources, https:// primarysources.brillonline.com/browse/archives-of-the-church-of-uganda [accessed 30 January 2019]; Jonathon L. Earle, ‘Finding Aid: Eridadi M.K. 58 59

Coloniality and Power in Uganda’s Archives

contradictions that continue to animate the NRM’s approach to archives, as well as the limits of its investment in this aspect of public life.

The Work of (Colonial) Archival Categories

The contents of colonial archives have been described as sitting upon an ‘archival grain’.65 The consequences of this framing have served critical engagement with the words and worlds within archival files in order to more deeply engage with histories of colonialism. However, to more comprehensively identify and resist colonial logics, one must look at the archive in its entirety. This includes an interrogation not only of the structure of the archive but also the norms and categories it enforces, for these reflect the worldview of those who produced the records: both the world as it was seen and ordered and as it was imagined and attempted. This section briefly examines two categories deeply entangled with colonial power in Jinja’s archives: Land, and Justice, Law, Order and Security (JLOS).

Land: Archival Terms and Social Realities

The Uganda Agreement of 1900 was an early attempt for the British to come to a political agreement regarding the allocation, use, and ownership of land in Uganda in a new tenure system. The agreement, strategically made with and favouring Buganda Kingdom, attempted to delimit Uganda into a bounded area which could further be reduced into parcels of property. Individuals could purchase these parcels and prove their ownership with a mailo title.66 The first title was awarded on 2 January 1909 and, by 1964, over 48,000 were issued.67 In the view of Ugandan legal scholar and practitioner Nicholas Kihangire, the agreement and subsequent legal developments during colonial rule were attempts to introduce a feudal system into Uganda.68 This privatisation process produced its own papered bureaucracies featuring titles, leases, deeds, etc. Today, Ugandan land is still Mulira Papers: Cambridge Centre of African Studies’, www.repository.cam. ac.uk/handle/1810/257485 [accessed 30 January 2019]. 65 Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 66 Mailo, literally miles, referred to parcels of land broken into square miles. 67 Nicholas Kihangire, ‘Land Tenure in Colonial and Post Colonial Uganda’, NISH’s Law School Guide (blog), 1 March 2011, http://lawschoolguide.blogspot. com/2011/03/land-tenure-in-colonial-and-post.html [accessed 30 January 2019]; see also Henry W. West, Land Policy in Buganda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). 68 Ibid.

209

210

Part II: Imagining Institutions

described in the sense of capital, with economic reports describing land as an asset accounting for 50 per cent of the country’s total household wealth, or as the nation’s largest employer (in reference to agriculture). This crude view of land is put into practice most consequentially by the current Ugandan state amid the crisis of land grabbing. In the words of cultural anthropologist, Norah Owaraga: At a stroke of a pen, using State law, the first nations were dispossessed of their lands, which were taken over by Uganda and which are administrated under a colonialist-imposed land tenure system … As of 2010, Uganda has grabbed from the first nations 60 per cent of their land.69

In the Jinja District Archives, there are about seven hundred and fifty files categorised under ‘Land’ that span the period 1913–87. The bulk of these files deal with land surveys, boundaries, leases, and titles. Their contents illustrate the colonial economies ascribed to land through expropriation, privatisation, and enclosure: surveys describe land as a resource, boundaries define the market, and leases and titles authorise ownership. The JDA not only holds evidence of these historical processes, but it is also a place where they are contested. During the restoration project in 2015, our team’s work came to a sudden halt one afternoon when a gun was fired down the hallway. A man had come into the government offices regarding a land dispute and, presumably without evidential paperwork, he used another colonial tool of acquisition: forceful intimidation. Ultimately, colonial interests positioned land as an economic resource, an asset in political bargaining, and a mechanism of social control. Though the archive may contain some of these records, it does not inherently perpetuate colonial practices of land distribution. The way in which these records are used or how their meanings are interpreted is unfixed, depending on who lays claim to them. In political transition, archives present a dialectic: they can perpetuate former techniques of rule or they can facilitate a reckoning with the past, working ‘in the service of colonial institutions while also challenging the political and epistemic foundations on which they were based’.70 69 Norah Owaraga, ‘Land Grabbing in Uganda Is Sanctioned by State Law’, Daily Monitor, 27 August 2014, https://nowaraga.com/2014/08/27/landgrabbing-in-uganda-is-sanctioned-by-state-law [accessed 15 July 2022]. For a discussion on the role of indigeneity in disputes over rights within private property regimes and neoliberal structures in eastern Africa, see Dorothy Hodgson, Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous: Postcolonial Politics in a Neoliberal World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). 70 See the Introduction of this volume, 7.

Coloniality and Power in Uganda’s Archives

Justice, Law, Order, and Security: Producing Control

Jinja’s history is inflected by multiple struggles to assert control through coercive means. Located in the Busoga Kingdom, it was deeply impacted by the expansion of Buganda Kingdom and slavery in the nineteenth century. Jinja became a military garrison during the colonial period and remains an important military base. The area is also home to Kirinya Prison, a maximum-security institution on the shores of Lake Victoria. Reportedly, the prison’s land was the former home of Semei Kakungulu, the infamous military commander who worked on behalf of the British.71 These histories of contestation, coercion, and the imposition of colonial control are reflected in the archive. Within the JDA collection, the Justice, Law, Order, and Security category consists of 81 boxes and over 2,500 files.72 These files attest to the multi-layered nature of the colonial and postcolonial coercive apparatus, providing information on courts, prisons, the military, and policing systems. Jinja, like all districts, had a panoply of punitive arenas, as separate penal and judicial systems operated within the local and central governments. Categorisation was at the heart of these systems: certain activities, individuals, and groups were marked as the protectors of law and order, while others were viewed as its destabilisers. Court documents reveal the many disputes animating local life, from disagreements over land to murder cases. The prison records, which fill much of the space, document the day-to-day lives of prisoners and prison staff as well as more extreme moments, such as a strike in 1957 that involved nearly eighty prison officers.73 Much of the information is intensely personal, such as a lengthy appeal about a marriage dispute, or a paper trail of an officer’s career. Such lives are made visible in the archive because they intersect with the maintenance of colonial order and control, whether as an agent of the state or those whom the state had identified as ‘deviant’. Thus, the existence and parameters of this and other categories produce knowledge that reflects the priorities and anxieties of the colonial state, creating fractured and problematic traces of the past.

71 Isaac Mufumba and Moses Okeya, ‘Kirinya: A Prison Tainted by Rights Abuse’, Daily Monitor, 4 June 2013, www.monitor.co.ug/uganda/specialreports/kirinya-a-prison-tainted-by-rights-abuse-1544052 [accessed 9 June 2022]. 72 Jinja District Archives Catalogue. 73 Jinja District Archives/JLOS/4:6, ‘Commission of Enquiry on the Disturbances at Bufulubi Prison on the 2/3 October, 1957’.

211

212

Part II: Imagining Institutions

Uganda’s Archives: What Could Be?

Eric Ketelaar, the Former Director of the National Archives in the Netherlands, argues that there is a power-conflict inherent in any state archive: ‘Records … may be instruments of power, but, paradoxically, the same records can also become instruments of empowerment and liberation, salvation and freedom’.74 In this final section, we explore this idea by asking: how can Uganda’s official archives reveal rather than perpetuate coloniality? Can they function to disrupt and redistribute power? As White North American academics with ties to European universities, we belong to a community with privileged access to Uganda’s archives. Our heritage partly consists of scholars who assisted in closing the doors of state archives to Ugandans, criticised precolonial African history for its dearth of documentary evidence, and enshrined the primacy of European history in the curriculum of Makerere University.75 Part of our task is to clarify the historical and contemporary role of the researcher in perpetuating the colonial asymmetries of the archive and highlight some of the varied forms of resistance to and refusals of those asymmetries. Mariame Kaba insists that there are no experts in transformative justice, that we are all called to labour, that we are all called to do our part.76 With this section, we aim to join conversations on decolonial approaches to Uganda’s archives. We refrain from doing so with the prescriptive certainty of experts and recognise that a multitude of Ugandan voices should be the most prominent in this conversation. In his significant article on digitisation and postcoloniality in Southern Africa, Premesh Lalu argues that there is a ‘fundamental discrepancy at the heart of the archive’ in that it is ‘folded into the complicities of knowledge as a necessary condition for colonialism’.77 The bulk of this chapter has dealt with this half of the discrepancy: how colonial archives were a function of the attempt to create and maintain British hegemony. Our work has relied on these very archives, dispersed between Uganda, Kenya, London, and other locations. In their stacks, we have been able to imagine the past as it might have been. For the remainder of this chapter, we consider what Ugandan archives might Eric Ketelaar, ‘Archival Temples, Archival Prisons: Modes of Power and Protection’, Archival Science 2: 3–4 (2002), 221–38. 75 Carol Sicherman, ‘Building an African Department of History at Makerere, 1950–1972’, History in Africa 30 (2003), 253–82. 76 See Mariame Kaba, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2021). 77 Premesh Lalu, ‘The Virtual Stampede for Africa: Digitisation, Postcoloniality and Archives of the Liberation Struggles in Southern Africa’, Innovation 34 (2007), 35. 74

Coloniality and Power in Uganda’s Archives

become. In doing so, we hope to contribute to the efforts of information activists in Uganda who take great risks in their attempts to hold the state to account.

Archive as Commons

On 11 November 1963, W.T. Wright of the British Foreign Office wrote to E.H. Jones of the Commonwealth Relations Office regarding the destruction and preservation of documents in Kenya. In his correspondence, Wright stated: ‘The disposal of these papers is a matter to be decided between the Colonial Office and the Commonwealth Relations Office since the basic consideration is one of custody and not of origin’.78 Wright’s words summarise the ethos behind Operation Legacy and perhaps more broadly of the British colonial worldview: the rights of property and private interest, more than local condition, custom or communities, determined the administration’s course of action. These terms are of relevance within the archival profession, whereby typically custody (or ownership) is determined by provenance (the place of origin) but Wright divorced the two when, upon decolonisation, location no longer suited British interest. In November 2017, archivists and records managers from around the British ‘Commonwealth’ (the then Association of Commonwealth Archivists and Records Managers – ACARM) gathered in Mexico City to discuss the issue of the documents removed by the British upon decolonisation, or the ‘migrated archives’. The meeting produced a position paper that argued that the ‘migrated archives are the property of the countries from which they were removed’ and that the archival principles of ‘territorial provenance’ and ‘functional pertinence’ support their return to the locales in which they were produced rather than their further storage in Britain’s National Archives.79 In the case of Uganda, a clear starting point for repatriation are the files removed through Operation Legacy and held at the UK National Archives. Too often former colonial powers, such as the UK, evade the burden of decolonisation after withdrawal. The repatriation process would at least engage the UK government with the colonial past beyond recognition. Returning these materials to Uganda would also enable the subjects of these documents (and their descendants) to claim ownership over them. Examples of removed records with obvious personal value 78 British National Archives/CO 822/3199, Letter, W.T Wright to E.H Jones, ‘Destruction and Preservation of Documents in Kenya on Independence’, 11 November 1963; emphasis added. 79 ‘The ‘Migrated Archives’: ACARM Position Paper’, adopted by unanimous vote at the ACARM Annual General Meeting, Mexico City, 25 November 2017, 4.

213

214

Part II: Imagining Institutions

include individual wills, educational records, documents of legal proceedings, and deportation, refugee, and passport paperwork. Further, many of the records evacuated upon independence document the techniques and outcomes of state surveillance on the lives of individuals, such as trade union activists and religious leaders, deliberations on matters such as citizenship rights and constitutional development, and other files with significant historical value.80 The possession of such high-profile records may encourage the state to devote more resources to archival preservation. There have been some notable examples of successful repatriation thus far, including the return of objects to the Uganda Museum,81 and efforts to repatriate audio-visual recordings to their communities of origin.82 We support repatriation efforts but argue that the return of colonial archives should refuse any state government as sole proprietor of public archives. We reject the premise that administrative archives are state property because this assumption preserves the colonial function of the archive to serve administrative interests without oversight. This logic does not solve the problem of transparency and access rights within Uganda between a citizenry and its government. Moreover, the records removed from Uganda to Britain concern more than just those two countries. For example, among the files airlifted from Entebbe in 1961 were records related to political developments in Rwanda and Congo and the work of Pan-Africanists more broadly.83 In contrast to colonial territorial demarcation, Karen Weitzberg argues that ‘African states can provide a ground upon which to think about more flexible models of sovereignty and new types of … “post-nationalist” futures’, an idea that has also been put forth by Achille Mbembe, who, in his discussion of the ‘re-imagination of Africa as a borderless space’ insists on the importance of moving away from ‘the western archive’, which ‘is premised on the crystallisation of the idea of a border’. 84 In response 80 British National Archives/FCO 141/19909, Confidential Subject Index, ‘Entebbe Files’, n.d. 81 See for example: Nicholas Thomas, ‘We Need to Confront Uncomfortable Truths’, University of Cambridge Museums & Botanic Garden blog, 4 December 2017, www.museums.cam.ac.uk/blog/2017/12/04/we-need-to-confront-uncomfortable-truths [accessed 30 January 2019]; British National Archives/ FCO 31/1359, ‘Antiquities in Uganda: request for return of “Luzira Head” from British Museum, London’, 1 January 1972 – 31 December 1972. 82 Sylvia Nannyonga-Tamusuza and Andrea N. Weintraub, ‘The Audible Future: Reimagining the Role of Sound Archives and Sound Repatriation in in Uganda’, Ethnomusicology 56:2 (2012), 206–33. 83 See partial index of records removed from Uganda by Operation Legacy as listed in British National Archives/FCO 141/19909. 84 Keren Weitzberg, We Do Not Have Borders (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017) 177; Achille Mbembe, ‘The Idea of a Borderless World’, Africa is a Country, 11 November 2018, https://africasacountry.com/2018/11/the-idea-

Coloniality and Power in Uganda’s Archives

to these calls, we propose the archive as commons, whereby not only access to but also ownership of public records may be democratised. In this framing, the state could relate to public archives as stewards rather than as owners.85 A project originating at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid offers ‘the archive of the commons’ to express the notion of the archive as an engine for political activation in the present.86 It is with this spirit that our discussion follows.

Demand Transparency

In the mid-1950s, the UK government was formalising its rules regulating access to state archives. The archivists in East Africa joined the debate. In 1956, Bwye wrote to his colleague in Entebbe, wondering what their practices surrounding archival access were. In response to Bwye, G.B. Cartland clarified that there was no formal directive, but that their ‘practice in the past has been to admit to the use of the archives responsible scholars engaged on research, provided [Cartland was] satisfied that they are engaged on bona fide research and there is no security objection’.87 Without oversight or a regulatory framework, Cartland and others were thus empowered to decide how freely information flowed from the administration’s past to the public’s present. Only scholars whom he had personally vetted and whose work aligned with the interests of the colonial government were granted access to Uganda’s administrative archives. However, this was not without opposition. The struggle over access to information was a core feature of global anticolonial resistance and has resulted in key legislative protections in Uganda. As early as the 1940s, anticolonial activists advocated the free flow of information in order to ‘prevent totalitarian regimes using misinformation to secure their rule and foment international conflict’. 88 The of-a-borderless-world [accessed 29 March 2021]. See also Anne Gilliland, ‘Networking Records in their Diaspora: A Reconceptualisation of “Displaced Records” in a Postnational World’, in James Lowry (ed.), Displaced Archives (New York: Routledge, 2017), 180–95. 85 For example, see section 2.4 ‘Stewardship’ in ‘The Ethics of Cultural Heritage’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 12 July 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-cultural-heritage/#Stew [accessed 24 March 2021]. 86 Carlos Prieto del Campo, ‘Archives of the Commons: Knowledge Commons, Information and Memory’, www.internationaleonline.org/research/decolonising_practices/62_archives_of_the_commons_knowledge_commons_ information_and_memory [accessed 2 February 2019]. 87 Kenya National Archives/1/128, Letter, G B Cartland to E Bwye, ‘Access to Government Records by the Public – Policy Recommendations’, 15 August 1956. 88 Mark Reeves, ‘Manila, 1918: The Freedom of Information’, Online Atlas on the History of Humanitarianism and Human Rights, http://hhr-atlas.ieg-mainz.

215

216

Part II: Imagining Institutions

efforts of activists such as Carlos Romulo – a newspaper editor who came of age amid the anti-US American imperial struggles in the Philippines and was a co-founder of the United Nations – formed the political and organisational backbone of the international movement for the passage of Freedom of Information Acts that attempted to dismantle the secrecy that had enabled colonial rule. Their work bore fruit in 1948, as the nineteenth article of the UN Declaration of Human Rights asserted the right to ‘receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers’.89 Article 41 in Uganda’s 1995 constitution assures the rights of citizens to access information from their government. Further yet, the Access to Information Act (2005) was designed to promote transparency of government activity to its citizenry and thus empower the public to ‘scrutinize and participate in Government decisions which affect them’.90 However, the implementation of both has been imperfect. There are many Ugandans attempting to correct non-compliance with the Information Act through improving records management practices and raising consciousness about the importance of information as a human right. For example, Kabauma Carolyne, Bukenya Moses, and Akugizibwe Moses of Mountains of the Moon University have provided instruction for local government officials that emphasised records management practice in a compliance framework in order to make clear the relationship between transparency and good governance.91 These attempts for greater flow of information, both archival and contemporary, are strategic ways of making visible the work of government. Beatrice Nabajja-Mugambe, former Executive Director of Development Research and Training in Kampala, makes clear the importance of this work. During an NGO forum on aid effectiveness in 2013, Nabajja-Mugambe stated ‘civil society space in Uganda has been narrowing’, and noted that ‘surveillance has been stepped [up], phones are being tapped [and that] there has been a wave of robberies and break-ins supported and instigated by the Internal Security Organisation and the police’. 92 In the ‘narrowing’ space of Uganda’s de/articles/reeves-manila [accessed 12 July 2019]. 89 UN General Assembly, ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, United Nations, 217 (III) A, 1948, Paris, art. 19, www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights [accessed 2 February 2019]. 90 Access to Information Act, Part 1.3 ‘Purpose of Act’, published in The Uganda Gazette No. 42, Volume XCVII by Order of the Government, 19 July 2005. 91 Course description, Records and Archives Management, Mountains of the Moon University: Centre for African Development Studies, June–July 2018. 92 Mark Tran, ‘Transparency in Uganda’, The Guardian, 13 June 2013, www. theguardian.com/global-development/2013/jun/13/transparency-ugandabeatrice-nabajja-mugambe [accessed 30 January 2019].

Coloniality and Power in Uganda’s Archives

civil society, compliance with the Access to Information Act takes on new meaning. The persistence of Ugandan activists indicates the potential value of access to public records as pillars of what might be a postcolonial archive, which defends against one-way monitoring of a state against its public.

Access and Autonomy

Colonial archives were created with a limited audience in mind: colonial government officials. Records that were made and circulated about individual Ugandans’ lives and experiences often moved within a privileged circuit, rarely accessible to the subjects of the documents. Operation Legacy marked the first instance that the British Colonial Government spelled out who was permitted access to sensitive records within Uganda with the term ‘authorised officer’, or a British subject ‘of European descent employed by the Protectorate Government’. This term transformed the du jour racialised system of access to the work of government into a de facto system of segregation.93 One of the most important aspects of decolonial archival work is disrupting this circuit by making archives more accessible, thereby giving people greater awareness of and control over the information collected about their lives and wider collective histories. Creating such opportunities disrupts the archive’s power to assign certain lives and histories to the status of ‘debris’. 94 Achille Mbembe emphasised how the positioning of a document in an archive acts as a sort of ‘burial’, making it ‘possible to establish an unquestionable authority’ over such documents and ensuring that they are ‘prohibited from stirring up disorder in the present’. 95 As Marissa Mika has argued, rather than being ‘buried’, archives can be made to ‘stay alive’ when they become sites for public engagement. 96 Expanding access to records has obvious practical value. As former Director of the Namibia Library and Archives Services Ellen Ndeshi Namhila notes, access to archival records is crucial for people to defend their rights. Namhila calls this sort of document a ‘person-related 93 British National Archives/FCO 141/19909, Circular Memorandum, The Chief Secretary’s Office (Entebbe), ‘Uganda Pre-Independence Records’, 28 February 1961. 94 Achille Mbembe, ‘The Power of the Archive and Its Limits’, in Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover et al. (eds), Refiguring the Archive (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2002), 22. 95 Ibid. 96 Marissa Mika, ‘Living Archives and Dying Wards: Reflections on Medical Archives in Eastern Africa’, British Medical Journal Medical Humanities Blog, 30 January 2019, https://blogs.bmj.com/medical-humanities/2019/01/30/ living-archives-and-dying-wards-reflections-on-medical-archives-in-eastern-africa [accessed 1 March 2019].

217

218

Part II: Imagining Institutions

record’, which refers to ‘records that supply official and legally valid information about life events, marital status, ancestry, offspring, residency, religious affiliation, employment, property, as well as other vital details’.97 Such records, she continues, ‘confirm identities, both official (for example, as proof for citizenship rights) and private (as belonging to a family, to a community or to a cultural heritage), and carry proof of economical transactions (such as inheritance in estate records)’. 98 We have often come across Ugandans searching for such records, including pension documents and land titles, as they seek to hold the state to account and renegotiate the meaning and material provisions of their lives. Justine Nalwoga, the Principal Archivist at the Uganda National Archives, is working to make the collections there more accessible to Ugandans. This can be done, she argues, ‘through exhibitions and outreach programs’ in secondary and post-secondary institutions, appearances on television, and ‘creating online catalogues’.99 In particular, she emphasises the importance of giving Ugandan students the opportunity to work directly with archives. ‘By focusing on the evidence such as documents, objects, photographs, and oral histories’, she argues:

students can get a glimpse into the past beyond what a textbook can provide. Working with primary sources helps students develop critical thinking skills, refine cognitive, investigative, deductive reasoning and problem-solving skills, and help[s] [with] building personal connections with history.100

This stands in stark contrast to the longstanding environment of ‘deliberate inaccessibility’ promoted by both colonial and postcolonial governments suspicious of potential archival users and the potential political ramifications of their research.101 Scholars, who often have the most unfettered access to archival documents, also play a crucial role in creating spaces for dialogues about the past.102 One key example is the ‘Unseen Archive of Idi Amin’

97 Ellen Ndeshi Namhila, ‘Content and Use of Colonial Archives: An Under-­ researched Issue’, Archival Science 16:2 (2014), 113. 98 Ibid. 99 Correspondence with Justine Nalwoga, Principal Archivist and Ag. Government Archivist, Uganda National Archives, 6 August 2019. 100 Ibid. 101 Taylor, ‘Risk and Labour in the Archives’, 545. 102 Contemporary scholars also contend with a variety of gatekeeping practices that regulate access to Uganda’s archives, such as research clearance via the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology (UNCST). In addition to drawing attention to the material inequalities between scholars based in the Global South and the ‘well resourced extractive sciences … steered from the Global North’, Sung-Joon Park highlights how Ugandan scholars based at

Coloniality and Power in Uganda’s Archives

exhibit, which is drawn from over 70,000 photographic negatives and other media sources from the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation archives.103 The curators – Derek Peterson, a historian; Nelson Abiti, the head curator at the Uganda Museum and a PhD student; Richard Vokes, an anthropologist; and Edgar C. Taylor, a historian – have made public engagement a key priority of their collaboration. Before the exhibition launched in May 2019, the curators held a series of workshops inviting Ugandans to view the images and discuss how they could be exhibited in a way that would avoid simply reproducing the message of Amin’s propaganda. As part of the launch, Ugandans who lived through this period were asked to reflect upon their experiences through panels aired by UBC, thus making the conversation accessible to a broader audience. The curators have also invited all viewers of the exhibit to reflect upon the images displayed, as well as contributing their own personal materials from the 1970s. As a result, this collection and the exhibit have become a dynamic archive that is constantly being reshaped by the Ugandan public.104 It is also important to find ways to highlight and support the archiving initiatives that take place outside of official parameters. Part of this can include more robust dialogues about the value of community archiving in Uganda, which calls for the redistribution of archival authority away from the central state power in both ownership and contents. This has two implications: (1) state archives should be publicly and collectively owned, not the property of the administrative body that produced them, and (2) the state and its administration as extended across a territory are not the only bodies able to produce legitimate documentation that hold public value. Such principles are apparent in the work of History in Progress Uganda (HIP), a collaboration between Dutch scholar Andrea Stultiens and Ugandan photographer R. Canon Griffin. The project collects and digitises a wide range of photographic collections and operates outside of state parameters. As stated on the website, HIP has an explicitly democratising aim: Makerere University, for example, lack the institutional capacity to influence and set either a research or ethical agenda that is enforced by the UNCST. See Sun-Joon Park, ‘IRBs as Traveling Technologies: Between Regulation and Virtues’, in Ulf Engel, Claudia Gebauer and Anna Hüncke (eds), Notes From Within and Without – Research Permits Between Requirements and ‘Realities’ (Leipzig and Halle: Working Papers of the Priority Programme 1448 of the German Research Foundation, 2015), 23–26. 103 Idi Amin Exhibit, https://derekrpeterson.com/idi-amin-exhibit [accessed 5 May 2020]. 104 Richard Vokes, Derek R. Peterson, Edgar C. Taylor and Nelson Abiti, ‘The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin’, Africa is a Country, 11 July 2019, https://africasacountry.com/2019/07/the-unseen-archive-of-idi-amin [accessed 20 July 2019].

219

220

Part II: Imagining Institutions

By sharing the photographs online HIPUganda opens up the possibility to relate to, respond to, and think about how Uganda’s history is (and is not) available in photographs. We invite you to comment on what you see, add your knowledge and ask questions the photographs may raise.105

Another archival space that operates beyond the state is the ‘Nile Mansions Hotel’ exhibit created by Ugandan artist Bathsheba Okwenje.106 As anthropologist Ferdinand de Jong argues, ‘the archive has emerged as a paradigm through which artists pursue a range of engagements with colonial histories’ and becomes an important site through which to think about decolonisation.107 Due to her father’s position in the government during the Obote II years, Okwenje lived inside the infamous Nile Mansions Hotel, a site in which state paramilitary argents tortured alleged dissidents. Working through her own memories of this period, she created an archive of both personal and external narratives of the time, including photographs, media clippings, and correspondence with her father. ‘The contents and materiality of the archive’, she writes, ‘are offered up as a chaotic collection of often conflicting interpretations and impressions, some that support and others that refute the child’s memories’.108 Such approaches decentre the state as gatekeeper and create more space for individual and collective engagement with archives and the histories that they present.

Conclusion

Until independence, administrative archives across Uganda and elsewhere in eastern Africa received little attention. Active governance dealt with the present. The past was discarded into corners, attics and cellars – largely unattended and inaccessible. However, the end of colonial rule ushered in a new, historical phase of the British Empire. The role of administrative archives thus shifted to include preserving materials for history writing, protecting colonial state secrets, and promoting historical precedents for administrative activity within independent governments. The British removed, destroyed, or altered documents to conceal blemishes that would hinder their geopolitical role after empire. They left behind that which would uphold their 105 ‘About’, History in Progress Uganda, www.hipuganda.org/about [accessed 2 February 2021]. 106 Bathsheba Okwenje, ‘Nile Mansions Hotel: Archive, Uganda, 2014’, www. bathshebaokwenje.com/nile-mansions-hotel [accessed 30 January 2019]. 107 Ferdinand de Jong, ‘At Work in the Archive: Introduction to Special Issue’, World Art 6:1 (2016), 3–17. 108 Ibid.

Coloniality and Power in Uganda’s Archives

administrative apparatus, though neglected to organise it into usable archives. Successor independent regimes broke with the political past in different ways, but also maintained certain archival logics. Under Amin, Uganda’s national information infrastructure grew and professionalised in some respects, while still dealing with longstanding challenges. From the mid-1980s onwards, the NRM’s condescending view of history accompanied chronic underfunding of archival services, again continuing longstanding colonial patterns. These periods in Uganda’s history reveal how administrations sought to self-differentiate through the erasure, neglect, or re-branding of the past in order to maintain a convincing claim to rule. Evelyn Bwye set a clear task for colonial archives: to serve the interests of their governments. This task is visible in the archives. The categories which shape administrative documents – those found in Jinja’s Land and Justice, Law and Order collections, for example – indicate the logics and interests of colonial authorities. While archives may preserve the words within these documents, they need not preserve the will behind them. The activities and initiatives described at the end of this chapter represent some of the ways that the coloniality of Uganda’s archival collections can and has been identified, examined, and disrupted. In some cases, scholars, archivists, and activists work within the state, pushing for greater accountability, transparency, and access. Others refuse to work within state parameters, offering instead alternative sites for archival creation and engagement. The ability for the archive to lean out of its colonial frame depends on those who are willing and able to push it forward.

221

10 Higher Art Education and New Initiatives in Kampala: Potentials and Problems of Decolonising Knowledge MARGARET NAGAWA AND FIONA SIEGENTHALER

Although visual arts seem to occupy a marginal place in the local and international perception and research of Uganda, they offer a field of comprehensible size to carve out the political, cultural, and economic complexities that characterise the politics of knowledge in contemporary Uganda. The arts have always been a field of representation and critical reflection about their society and offer a rich entry point to understand broader issues and debates of a nation. Similar to other academic disciplines, the majority of scholarly research on contemporary art in Uganda perpetuates postcolonial hierarchies, and narratives inherited from colonial times and ignores more recent platforms and institutions in which important debates are pursued and alternative knowledges produced.1 However, to understand decolonial tendencies in contemporary knowledge production – and the challenges they encounter – requires research on and with recent artist initiatives and institutions of knowledge production as well as established (post)colonial universities. 1 While art has been taught and studied also in other Ugandan universities more recently, the historiography of Ugandan art continues to focus on Makerere University. Several recent dissertations are exemplary for this tendency, such as Sunanda K. Sanyal, ‘Imaging Art, Making History: Two Generations of Makerere Artists’, unpublished doctoral thesis, Emory University (Atlanta 2000); George Kyeyune, ‘Art in Uganda in the 20th Century’, unpublished PhD thesis, SOAS, University of London (2003); Angelo Kakande, ‘Contemporary Art in Uganda: A Nexus between Art and Politics’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg 2008); or Amanda E. Tumusiime, ‘Art and Gender: Imag(in)ing the New Woman in Contemporary Ugandan Art’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of South Africa (Pretoria 2010). NGO-supported institutions have in the last 10 years become sites of research especially among foreign visiting scholars, but there is almost no literature in the discipline of art history that considers art practices outside Makerere University, with a remarkable exception by Venny Nakazibwe, ‘Bark-Cloth of the Baganda People in Southern Uganda: A Record of Continuity and Change, 18th to Early 21st Century’, unpublished PhD thesis, Middlesex University (London 2005).

Higher Art Education and Decolonising Knowledge in Kampala

This chapter discusses and analyses established and more recent institutions as well as individual artist and curatorial initiatives in order to understand the current situation of contemporary visual art in Kampala. The focus of this chapter lies on the past twenty years after the Uganda Parliament passed the Universities and Other Tertiary Institutions Act in 2001. The Act provided a framework for establishing public institutions of higher learning besides Makerere University. The latter (as Makerere College) however played a crucial role in the establishment of modern Ugandan art as part of the University curriculum in the 1940s and 1950s. Its legacy is still felt today, and looking back to those colonial times helps to trace continuities and change up to today. Therefore, we first present established institutions of art formation, with a focus on Makerere University and Kyambogo University. The first prides itself on a glorious past but struggles with contemporary challenges while the latter is much younger but seems to more easily address contemporary requirements. In a second step, we discuss institutions that represent alternative sources of knowledge generation and acquisition in the field of contemporary African and international art trends. Associations, commercial galleries, NGOs and individual local initiatives contribute to the plurality of platforms in which artists and their audiences can engage. Among these, foreign-funded cultural institutions have gained a strong presence in the last ten to fifteen years but are also criticised for a neocolonial policy and interference. On the other hand, Kampala has featured an impressive number of innovative and engaged local artist initiatives and collectives that are excluded or at least marginalised in the historiography of contemporary Ugandan art. This applies to sales-oriented artist studios, commercial art galleries as well as more conceptually and collaboratively interested low-budget and community-oriented art projects. Since the 1990s, Kampala has also produced independent curators who introduced new event forms and projects for both a local and an international art audience. We analyse their engaged, sometimes decolonial impetus, and the ambivalent potential they offer for expanded and alternative forms of knowledge in Uganda. The chapter concludes by reflecting upon the entanglement of the politics of knowledge and contemporary artistic practices and initiatives in Kampala in a neoliberal and neocolonial setting that nevertheless offers non- or micro-institutional options for individual and collective decolonial agency.

Decolonising Knowledge

In common parlance, the term decolonisation is a historical designation for the transitional period when imperial colonies turned into independent nation-states. It also designates a political process in

223

224

Part II: Imagining Institutions

which inherited colonial institutions are replaced or restructured according to new affordances of a sovereign postcolonial nation.2 Often, this also implies the introduction of new institutions or the re-introduction of modified forms of precolonial cultural and political structures. 3 However, as decolonial theorists have emphasised, decolonial processes do not only take place through reforming and replacing political and public structures. Rather, they should also encompass a process towards decolonising the minds of formerly colonial and imperial subjects as well as the epistemologies, politics, and economies that shape and are informed by the institutions in question.4 These theorists refer to Aníbal Quijano’s notion of coloniality as a ‘colonial matrix of power’ that needs to be overcome by ending postcolonial continuities of power structures and epistemic dominance. 5 According to Walter Mignolo, coloniality is the ‘darker side of modernity’ because modernity is fundamentally rooted in coloniality and vice versa.6 Thereby, modernity represents the grand narrative of Western superiority, expansion and ontological legitimacy. Decolonial processes aim at deconstructing Raymond F. Betts, Decolonization (New York, 2004), p. 111. Margaret Kohn and Keally D. McBride, Political Theories of Decolonization: Postcolonialism and the Problem of Foundations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 142−48. 4 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London 1986); Samir Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World (London: Zed Books, 1990); Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse (Durham NC, 2018); Ramón Grosfoguel, ‘The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political-­economy Paradigms’, in Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar (eds), Globalization and the Decolonial Option (London: Taylor & Francis, 2010), pp. 65−77; Achille Mbembe, Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive, WISER public lectures (Johannesburg and Stellenbosch, 2015); Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Introduction: Coloniality of Power and De-colonial Thinking’, Cultural Studies 21 (2007), 155−67; Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom’, Theory, Culture & Society 26:7−8 (2010), 159−81; Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh (eds), On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, and Praxis (Durham NC, 2018); Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Bhikhu C. Parekh (eds), The Decolonization of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power (London: Zed Books, 1995); Madina V. Tlostanova and Walter D. Mignolo, Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012). 5 On coloniality, cf. Aníbal Quijano, ‘Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad’, Perú Indígena 13:29 (1992), 11−21. On the colonial matrix of power and delinking, cf. Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality’, in Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar (eds), Globalization and the Decolonial Option (London: Taylor & Francis, 2010), p. 320; Tlostanova and Mignolo, Learning to Unlearn, p. 38. 6 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham NC, 2011). 2 3

Higher Art Education and Decolonising Knowledge in Kampala

this continuing hegemony of Western values, knowledge traditions, and economic exploitation in favour of knowledges ‘from the South’, indigenous knowledge and epistemologies based on other traditions than the canonical, Western ones.7 They therefore imply more than the mere retreat of the colonial powers from the institutional and political structures and must be conceived as something that deconstructs the very values, philosophies, and rationales produced by colonialism that persist in most national institutions.8 The question of decolonisation therefore is not just one of reorganising colonial institutions into structures apt for independent nations, but of delinking the very epistemological systems on which they were built.9 This theoretical cogency of decolonisation is intriguing but it remains unfulfilled in practice. Several movements in recent years attempted to bring this somewhat idealistic theory of decolonisation into reality and practice, but they tended to fail in the face of contemporary challenges.10 One such challenge is the weakening of the nation-state itself and the increasing dominance of transnational and global migrations, economies and political entanglements. Connected to this is the need for shared values and languages that would cater for international and intercultural communication which often marginalises local or regional particularities in favour of dominant languages like English and economies like liberal capitalism. The ‘expectations of modernity’, as part of the colonial project, continue to be at the centre of most ambitions not only in Africa but worldwide.11 The structures shaping them continue to be informed by the colonial heritage, whether in material, ideational, or structural terms. Additionally, with geopolitical shifts of power relations and neoliberal economic structures gaining force, the idea of any form of epistemic autonomy or delinking becomes obsolete. This applies also to Uganda and its institutions of higher art education. While established national universities like Makerere struggle Cf. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South (Durham NC, 2018); Ramón Grosfoguel, ‘The Epistemic Decolonial Turn’, Cultural Studies 21, 2−3 (2007), 211−23; Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London, 1999). 8 Cf. Fiona Siegenthaler and Marie-Laure Allain Bonilla, ‘Introduction: Decolonial Processes in Swiss Academia and Cultural Institutions’, Tsantsa 24 (2019), 4−13. 9 Cf. Amin, Delinking; Quijano, ‘Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad’; Mignolo, ‘Delinking’, p. 320; Tlostanova and Mignolo, Learning to Unlearn, p. 38. 10 E.g. the Zapatista movement active since the mid-1990s or the more academically oriented and rather short-lived but still simmering #rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall movements in South Africa in 2015/2016. 11 James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 7

225

226

Part II: Imagining Institutions

to keep their position in terms of research output, student achievements, and financial sustainability, new institutions of higher education based on private funds and new curricula enter the scene.12 At times, the latter indeed harness decolonial ideas, as for instance the Nagenda International Academy of Art & Design (NIAAD) in Namulanda that co-operated in an international project on Decolonizing Art Education between 2015 and 2017.13 Under the auspices of the Another Roadmap School, artist Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa facilitated a series of workshops at NIAAD that encouraged students, professors, and visiting scholars to challenge the detrimental legacy of colonialism in art and design education. However, although universities have undergone changes in their aims, contents and teaching methods, they continue to represent a notion of knowledge akin to the ones introduced by their colonial and missionary founders in the colonial or early independence eras. Additionally, there is a contradiction between continued postcolonial national discourse and the concurrent replacement of public infrastructure and services by international organisations and private or investor-driven initiatives also in higher art education, contemporary art practices, art scholarship, and art institutions.14 The majority of scholarly research in contemporary art in Uganda perpetuates postcolonial hierarchies and narratives inherited from colonial times by maintaining the focus on established institutions like the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts (MITSFA) and ignoring more recent platforms and institutions through which important debates are pursued, transnational exchange promoted, and alternative knowledges produced.15 Art education, art markets, and the very aesthetics of contemporary art in Uganda are changing and pluralising, not least due to the embrace of post-civil-war NGO culture on the one hand and more recent neoliberal trends on the other. Godfrey B. Asiimwe, ‘The Impact of Neoliberal Reforms on Uganda’s Socio-economic Landscape’, in J. Wiegratz, G. Martinello and E. Greco (eds), Uganda: The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation (London: Zed Books, 2018), pp. 145−62. 13 See https://colivre.net/kampalaentebbe/blog/decolonizing-art-educationat-niaad-2015-2017 [accessed 25 January 2019]; https://another-roadmap.net/ kampalaentebbe/blog/decolonizing-art-education-a-staff-and-curriculumdevelopment-project-at-niaad-2015-2017 [accessed 6 February 2022]. 14 According to decolonial theorist Ramón Grosfoguel, international organisations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the World Bank are driving forces of ‘global coloniality’ because they reproduce the developmental discourse of coloniality; see Grosfoguel, ‘The Epistemic Decolonial Turn’, p. 74. Samir Amin argues in a similar line when he criticises the way Western powers dictate how ‘development’ is supposed to be implemented in ‘countries of the South’; see Samir Amin, Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or Ending Capitalism? (Bangalore: Books for Change, 2011), pp. 131−32. 15 Cf. footnote 1. 12

Higher Art Education and Decolonising Knowledge in Kampala

Art and Art History Education at Makerere and Kyambogo Universities

Art education in Uganda, and Africa in general, is rooted in a colonial pedagogy and is seen as a foreign introduction (albeit with regional influences) that has continued to suffuse current teaching. Higher education in Uganda in the past twenty years has aimed towards a globalised agenda that concurrently promotes a local market. The number of private universities has increased significantly since the turn of the millennium, and consultancies for creative and other industries have become as important as teaching and learning. Global networks of exchange are discernible in the lecturer and student exchanges with universities in Europe, North America, the Middle East, and beyond. These trends reflect an interest in pluralising and expanding knowledge and the economic networks beyond the Eurocentric legacy while revaluing local resources. However, these developments do not come without contradictions. The two most influential public universities in Kampala, Makerere University (including the Makerere Art Gallery / Institute for Heritage Conservation and Restoration [IHCR]) and Kyambogo University, serve here as examples to discuss these recent developments. The foundation of the Art School at Makerere College has achieved a canonical status in the narrative of Ugandan art to an extent that it is part of every PhD thesis on Ugandan art history. Inspired by a review of a London exhibition of Kenneth Murray’s Nigerian art students, British missionary, artist, and educator Margaret Trowell (1904–85) started the Art School by seeking permission from the Makerere College principal to start weekly ‘experimental classes’ in art. She embarked on teaching in 1937 with a philosophy informed by primitivist discourses of that time: while valuing African creativity as ‘untouched’ by European traditions, she encouraged African students to explore this creativity in local and European fine art media that she introduced.16 The prevailing ideology was of a tabula rasa African whose innate creative skills and energy could be encouraged and improved. Her stance of educational superiority towards her students is evident in her recollections, African Tapestry, in which she writes about students ‘coming together to do something which was quite new to them, with no complications or pre-conceived ideas of what a picture ought to look like, for they had seen practically none before’.17 Paradoxically, Trowell was introducing new ways of image making, while expecting to preserve an authentic native expression. Grounding her students in Christian iconography expressed pictorially through local imagery and scenery, she sought to promote her students’ art to international audiences by way 16 17

Margaret Trowell, African Tapestry (London, 1957), pp. 103–04. Ibid., p. 104.

227

228

Part II: Imagining Institutions

of art exhibitions in Kampala and London. This foundational pedagogy of what would become the School of Fine Arts of Makerere University College constitutes the beginning of the narrative of modern art history in Uganda, one that is now criticised as a colonialist and ethnocentric discourse.18 Despite Trowell’s dedicated encouragement to source from local traditions and develop an African aesthetics, colonial rule established the political rationale and intellectual infrastructure of art education at Makerere University.19 When Trowell retired in 1958, her student, the Tanzanian Sam Ntiro, headed the Art School for a year before Cecil Todd (1912–86), a Scottish artist based in South Africa, arrived to lead the institution in a modernist direction from 1959 to 1972. Todd was emphatic that Uganda was ‘artistically barren, or nearly so’ and believed that ‘East Africa can make no claim to an artistic tradition of the past in any significant measure’.20 He proceeded to broaden the curriculum scope beyond social and religious themes in favour of a Eurocentric and North American modernist art emphasising technical acuity in visual representation.21 This shift in teaching inevitably triggered controversy. Nevertheless, as the only art school in Eastern Africa, already at that time – and perhaps more so than today – Makerere attracted students and lecturers from the East African region and from around the world. Soon after Uganda’s independence, the University of East Africa was established in 1963 with university colleges in Makerere, Dar es Salaam, and Nairobi. Throughout the 1960s, art by students and lecturers of the Makerere Art School featured on the pages of Rajat Neogy’s literary journal, Transition, participating in transnational decolonial discourse.22 Todd and his colleagues had just successfully pressed for a Bachelor of Arts degree programme in 1970, when Idi Amin seized power and his Africanising agenda took root, making it increasingly difficult to 18 Sanyal, ‘Imaging Art, Making History’; Kyeyune, ‘Art in Uganda in the 20th Century’; Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, ‘Margaret Trowell’s School of Art: A Case Study in Colonial Subject Formation’, in S. Stemmler (ed.), Wahrnehmung, Erfahrung, Experiment, Wissen: Objektivität und Subjektivität in den Künsten und den Wissenschaften (Zürich, Berlin, 2004), pp. 101–22. 19 Elsbeth Court, ‘Margaret Trowell and the Development of Art Education in East Africa’, Art Education 38: 6 (1985), 36. 20 Cecil Todd, ‘Modern Sculpture and Sculptors in East Africa’, African Music 2: 4 (1961), 72. 21 Sunanda Sanyal, ‘“Being Modern”: Identity Debates and Makerere’s Art School in the 1960s’, in Gitti Salami and Monica Blackmun Visona (eds), A Companion to Modern African Art (Oxford, 2013), pp. 255–75 (p. 6). 22 For example, a photograph of Theresa Musoke’s terracotta sculpture, Anguish, appears on the page between a review of a South African play in London’s West End and an excerpt from K.A.B. Jones-Quartey’s A Life of Azikiwe. Theresa Musoke, ‘Anguish’, Transition 15 (1964), 49.

Higher Art Education and Decolonising Knowledge in Kampala

live in Uganda as a foreigner. It would be at this point only that leadership of the art school shifted into the hands of Ugandan artists. The first Ugandan head of the Art School, from 1975 to 1982, George Kagaba Kakooza (1936–82), studied with Cecil Todd and trained in metal sculpture at the Sorbonne in Paris.23 Kakooza’s A New Generation is Hatching (1971–72), a monumental bronze sculpture located in front of the Makerere University library, shows a maternal scene of a large bird protecting its just-hatched chicks. Makerere University commissioned the sculpture to celebrate the institution’s Golden Jubilee of 1972. Its location in front of the library indicates the value that the institution attached to the library as a research resource that collects, preserves, and provides students and professors access to intellectual and artistic works. However, the same year Kakooza started the monument, President Idi Amin took power and Kakooza’s sculpture remained incomplete in the political and economic turmoil that followed. Kakooza’s leadership of the Art School coincided with Amin’s ambition to Africanise Uganda’s economy. A New Generation is Hatching is as much about the experience of seeing through the cavity to Makerere’s future under Amin’s ideological stance, as it is about the art’s material production using scarce resources. The sculpture suggests the tension between Amin’s decolonising agenda, Makerere’s experiences of an illustrious past, and a failing economy in the 1970s. At the height of economic and political turmoil in the 1970s and 1980s, it was inevitable that art-making approaches changed as lecturers struggled to keep the Art School running. A ban on imports, art supplies included, enforced the creative use of locally available materials, enabling an art that was reasonable to produce and easy to transport. Kakooza created a vision of self-sufficiency in using locally available materials such as clay and wood. However, what would seem a disadvantage turned out to have its creative side: many artists exercised their intellectual inquiries using local materials as reflected in Francis X. Nnaggenda’s War Victim (1983–86).24 The sculpture, carved from an inverted mukebu tree trunk stoically balances on one leg, the other amputated at the upper thigh suggestive of the national trauma Uganda was undergoing, yet tempered by resilience. Although trained by modernist artists in Germany, Nnaggenda maintains his cultural rootedness in Buganda and encourages his students to use found objects, make tools and look to local and other forms of creativity in Africa and 23 Patrick Lwasampijja, Zoom interview, February 11, 2022. We are grateful to Lwasampijja for discussing his father’s work. Lwasampijja worked with sculptors George Kyeyune, Lilian Nabulime, and Steven Mwesigwa to complete Kakooza’s sculpture using embossed steel and concrete. 24 Sunanda K. Sanyal, ‘The Local and Beyond: Francis Nnaggenda’s Sculptural Innovations.’ Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 18:1 (2003), 76–79.

229

230

Part II: Imagining Institutions

beyond.25 Material resourcefulness in the 1970s and 1980s heralded a departure from reliance on imported materials and art historical references at Makerere Art School. In this way, Kakooza and Nnaggenda devised formal languages, material orientation, and art education to centre Uganda and call into question Britain as the location of artistic and epistemic knowledge. When Uganda attained relative political stability in 1986 after a fiveyear civil war, the new government sought to include Makerere University in rebuilding the country’s economy. Francis Musangogwantamu, the head of the Art School from 1986 to 1988, recommended three new areas in line with the new agenda: photography, crafts, and industrial art. Musangogwantamu advocated for the practicability of art education, arguing in the donor language of the time that the Art School would ‘produce job-makers rather than job-seekers’. That ambition for job creation led to course offerings in fashion design, weaving, business administration, and marketing, among others. However, although the shift towards applied arts fit the political and economic realities, lecturers did not get the necessary training in the theoretical underpinnings of these new areas of study. The structural reforms of the 1990s with a drive toward strengthening the national economy led to the Art School attaining faculty status in 1993. The curriculum transformed to offer courses that explored both ‘aesthetic concerns and community issues’.26 The inclusion of industrial arts in the renaming of the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts (MTSIFA) reflects its recent focus on connecting with industries that have a higher potential of marketability than fine arts. This extension into the community can be traced to the 1972 Association of African Universities (AAU) conference in Accra, Ghana which emphasised that it is imperative for a university in Africa to extend into the community.27 While applied art practice offers various possibilities to work into the direction of community work and economic integration, Art History is a contested discipline. Although a core subject in the art curriculum, it is shunned because of its requirement for extensive reading and writing and also because it is still mainly a Western art history – its main textbooks still are Helen Gardner’s Art Through the Ages and The Story of Art by E.H. Gombrich. Nevertheless, the discipline of Art History is changing its curriculum toward a stronger awareness for the Ugandan heritage and more generally for African art history. 25 Sanyal, ‘Imaging Art, Making History’, p. 219; Wanjiku Nyachae, ‘Francis Nnaggenda interviewed by Wanjiku Nyachae’, in C. Deliss (ed.), Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa (Paris and New York 1995), p. 273. 26 Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts, Makerere University, https://cedat.mak.ac.ug/academics/schools/mtsifa [accessed 27 July 2019]. 27 Tijani M. Yesufu (ed.), Creating the African University: Emerging Issues in the 1970s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).

Higher Art Education and Decolonising Knowledge in Kampala

In the late 1990s, student numbers were multiplying and putting pressure on the Art School’s physical infrastructure, their burgeoning curriculum, and more importantly, on professors who faced institutional requirements for PhD qualifications. The Mujaju Report adopted by Makerere University Senate in 2000 recommended that, to raise the quality of the academic staff, all lecturers hold a doctorate by 2002 or risk dismissal.28 For many lecturers, going abroad was the only way to acquire a PhD. Lilian Nabulime, for instance, took her PhD in fine arts at Newcastle University, UK.29 A few professors stayed at Makerere and pursued degrees in an interdisciplinary fashion including Kizito Maria Kasule and Rose Namubiru Kirumira. 30 Upon returning, PhD graduates engage in broader scholarly debates and represent a vital resource for the University. Nevertheless, the differing, sometimes clashing, doctrines and expectations gained abroad lead to academic and administrative frictions. This is not a new phenomenon. Francis X. Nnaggenda, for instance, faced similar resistance against, and misunderstandings of, his work when he returned from Germany, but in an increasingly competitive education system with limited resources, the question of epistemic priorities gains more vigorous attention and triggers controversial debates. 31 Consequently, there is yet to be a clearly defined process for the art PhD at MTSIFA that would acknowledge diverse bodies of knowledge and harmonise academic traditions. Makerere Art Gallery/IHCR, opened in 1969 as a purpose-built gallery located on the MTSIFA campus, has become an important locus of policy enactment and the link to heritage conservation that encompasses a wider constituency of scholars and institutions such as FEMRITE, the women writers’ organisation. The gallery is a display space and a resource for teaching and exposure to art in Uganda and beyond. Its exhibitions are a mix of showing work by recent and former art professors and graduates and exhibitions proposed by individuals and institutions from outside Makerere that provide alternative sources for funding to run its programming. Over time, Makerere Art Gallery has amassed the only comprehensive institutional art collection in Makerere University, Mujaju Report (Kampala, 2000). Lilian M. Nabulime, ‘The Role of Sculptural Forms as a Communication Tool in Relation to the Lives and Experiences of Women with HIV/AIDS in Uganda’, unpublished doctoral thesis, Newcastle University (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2007). 30 Kizito M. Kasule, ‘The Renaissance of Contemporary Art at Makerere University Art School’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Makerere University (Kampala, 2003); Rose K. Namubiru, ‘The Formation of Contemporary Visual Artists in Africa: Revisiting Residency Programmes’, unpublished doctoral thesis, Makerere University (Kampala, 2010). 31 Sidney L. Kasfir, ‘Nnaggenda: Experimental Ugandan Artist’, African Arts 3:1 (1969), 8−13. 28 29

231

232

Part II: Imagining Institutions

Uganda albeit limited to students and lecturers of the Makerere Art School. Unfortunately, although Makerere Art Gallery gained semi-­ autonomy in 2010 – constituted as the Institute for Heritage Conservation and Restoration (IHCR) under the directorship of George Kyeyune and curator Katrin Peters-Klaphake – access to the collection is a challenge because of the absence of comprehensive digitisation and limited access to the physical objects in storage. Documentation of their own collections and history is indeed a problem for public art-related institutions in Kampala. Artist and Makerere alumnus Ronex Ahimbisibwe is more than aware of this and therefore has compiled a digital archive of images and events in Uganda on Art Uganda, a publicly accessible Facebook page. 32 Ronex has a strong interest in solving the problem of lacking documentation of Uganda’s art history and has been documenting contemporary artists, exhibitions, and events for almost two decades. In July 2018 Makerere Art Gallery hosted MTSIFA Alumni, an exhibition Ronex organised to bring together current and former lecturers and graduates of the school to reflect on the importance of archival awareness. Such initiatives and critical impulses often come from artists and cultural practitioners who have left the university years before and who in the meantime entered conversations and professional relationships with artists, culture managers, clients and academics from outside the university and from neighbouring countries and overseas. While they are welcomed at MTSIFA, these artists continue to depend on infrastructure and funding from outside the university. Where Makerere Art School has a contentious history with material culture, Kyambogo has the ideals of indigenous knowledge espoused in its agenda, which is reflected in the diverse background of its professors. Emmanuel Mutungi, for instance, is a lecturer in the Department of Art and Industrial Design who graduated from Makerere Art School and Kenyatta University, Nairobi. He holds a PhD in Anthropology with a research focus on material culture and sustainable development. 33 His expertise engages indigenous knowledge and heritage as well as a community-­based research agenda, reflecting Kyambogo’s course offerings more generally that are designed to fulfil societal needs with a lasting impact on arts and the economy. A public university in Kampala, Kyambogo University took shape by merging three existing institutions into a degree-awarding univerArt Uganda, www.facebook.com/art.uganda [accessed 27 July 2019]. Emmanuel Mutungi and Tony Ghaye, ‘Enhancing Well-Being at the Household Level: The Impact of Informal Economy Activity on Poverty Reduction in the Traditional Ankole Kingdom of S.W. Uganda’, in M. Thai and E. Turkina (eds), Entrepreneurship in the Informal Economy: Models, Approaches and Prospects for Economic Development (New York, 2013), pp. 141–255. 32

33

Higher Art Education and Decolonising Knowledge in Kampala

sity in 2003. These were the Uganda Polytechnic Kyambogo (UPK), the Institute of Teacher Education Kyambogo (ITEK), and the Uganda National Institute of Special Education (UNISE), all located now on the same hill in eastern Kampala. Course offerings respond to creative industries, including furniture design and ceramics, to satisfy the needs of the growing middle class and the construction boom in Uganda, but they nevertheless also produce successful graduates in the fine arts. Kyambogo’s Diploma in Textiles: Fabric Decoration, for instance, boasts artists such as Hellen Nabukenya whose monumental textile installations have featured in exhibitions in Uganda, South Africa, Denmark, and France. Nabukenya works collaboratively with a small group of women she has trained to stitch fabrics. Together, she and her collaborators have impacted one another’s social and economic wellbeing. Nabukenya’s is a socially oriented art practice that emphasises ‘relational aesthetics’ as described by Nicolas Bourriaud. 34 As student numbers grow, there is a danger of neglecting intellectual independence in favour of international compatibility and neoliberal market orientation. Even in contexts where decolonial discourse thrives and where local art traditions are celebrated, there is a tendency of reproducing institutional power structures and cultural values inherited from colonial institutions, or of being absorbed by the neoliberal dictate of strong Western economies. However, in individual and small group activities, there is a push towards decoloniality in subject matter and media, while commercial art galleries serving a predominantly expatriate market keep some artists financially buoyant, allowing them intellectual room to experiment.

Other Sites of Knowledge Generation and Acquisition in the Field of Contemporary Ugandan Art

Apart from higher education institutions, there are numerous institutions, locations and cultural practices that contribute to the learning, mediation, and creation of the arts in Kampala. In African contexts like Uganda, such institutions are situated between governmental/ national and non-governmental/independent structures. Although it is true that most national institutions rely on governmental structures and many NGOs have a certain independence, they are not two distinctly different poles. Many governmental structures, especially in countries with a developing economy like Uganda, rely heavily on foreign investment and donor funding as well as non-formal training of skills in workshops and other small businesses, while NGOs cannot act independent of national institutions and regulations. On the contrary, 34

Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon, 1998).

233

234

Part II: Imagining Institutions

Uganda’s cultural policy increasingly speculates on non-governmental capital flows while NGOs significantly contribute to the establishment of structures that support, complement, or replace official ones. Individuals thereby play an essential part sourcing from the existing structures, creating additional ones, and establishing important networks that are driven by shared interests. While some follow the opportunities they find, others deliberately opt for a more independent position that allows for a critical perspective on established Westernised art education, and that propagates an understanding of art that is closer to a non-Western, indigenous agenda. While only a few of these initiatives are located at the art universities, they are mostly driven or represented by former students of these universities who seek collaboration with non-academic creatives. Cultural institutes and centres funded by other governments, NGOs, and artist-led initiatives offer alternative learning, production, and circulation of art outside the university structures, often foregrounding a more egalitarian and socio-political focus in their programming. This section discusses examples of such initiatives, including foreign-­ funded art and culture institutions such as 32° East | Ugandan Arts Trust, the Goethe Institute, and artist-led initiatives including artist associations and collectives, curatorial projects, publication platforms, and commercial galleries. While only a few of these initiatives collaborate with art schools at Makerere and Kyambogo, the driving force behind most artist-led initiatives is the collaboration among art school graduates and informally trained artists. Sponsorship is provided by foreign organisations to many cultural activities. UNESCO supports policy-level symposia and workshops; the British Council, Goethe-Zentrum / Uganda German Cultural Society, and Alliance Française promote artist exchanges between Uganda and their respective source countries. They constitute an important part of their nations’ foreign and cultural policies and budgets. On the other hand, there are many Uganda-based institutions like 32° East | Ugandan Arts Trust that are reliant on funding by overseas foundations and donors. Since its foundational years 32° East | Ugandan Arts Trust has put forward an ambitious programme of art making and discussions that engage Uganda’s history while also espousing an international outlook. With funding from such agencies as the Prince Claus Fund and crowd-funding 32° East | Ugandan Arts Trust offers studio space, a library, and artist exchanges with other spaces through their membership in the Arts Collaboratory network. Their international funding allows them room to experiment and act as a creative ‘power house’, but at the same time sets limitations due to funders’ expectations of administrative structures. 35 Internet con35

Carlos Garrido Castellano, ‘Institutionalism, Public Sphere, and Artistic

Higher Art Education and Decolonising Knowledge in Kampala

nectivity and internationally networked staff manifest a gateway for artists to a broad art world and its markets. Although such NGOs usually follow an agenda in support of local artists, their perspective and the aesthetics they promote are often inspired by current Euro-American art trends. These external stimuli are received ambiguously within the Kampala art scene as they offer alternative and international perspectives but also tend to introduce and promote aesthetics that do not easily integrate into established aesthetic practices. Yet, such institutions are crucial players in facilitating important platforms for exposure of local artists such as the KLA ART Festival, a city-wide bi-annual festival since 2012 that experiments in art making, exhibiting, and audience engagement. 36 As an initiative that attends to engaging audiences in non-gallery settings, 32° East/Ugandan Arts Trust contributes to the de-centring of university art education and encourages intellectual debates among artists and their audiences. Although Alliance Française and the Goethe-Zentrum Kampala / Uganda German Cultural Society (UGCS) might be criticised for using their financial power for a neocolonial dictate on the kind of art promoted, they also provide vibrant programming for dialogue and contestation. Considering the central government’s neglect of visual artists in its cultural politics, such financially stable foreign institutions offer a crucial platform for sustained discourse about art, and also about questions of decolonising knowledge. Goethe Zentrum for instance hosted a workshop in June 2017 titled Decolonize the Museum at their offices in Kamwokya and at the Uganda Museum. The workshop brought together Ugandan practitioners and the German curator Yvette Mutumba to address the framing of Uganda’s past. During that occasion, artist Fred Mutebi presented his collaborative work with abakomazi (barkcloth makers) in preserving barkcloth skills in Bukomansimbi, southwest of Kampala, since 2008. Mutebi, together with Paulo Katamiira, a skilled senior barkcloth maker, propagates mituba trees for environmental protection, economic viability, and cultural revival and trains a younger generation to professionalise the production of this politically and socially salient fabric in south-western Uganda. 37 Xenson Znja, for Agency: A Conversation on 32° East Ugandan Art Trust’, Critical Interventions 11:2 (2017), 116–31. 36 Katrin Peters-Klaphake, ‘Art in Kampala at Work 012’, in K. Pinther, U.-S.C. Nzewi and B. Fischer (eds), New Spaces for Negotiating Art and Histories in Africa (Berlin, 2015), pp. 52–71. 37 Margaret Nagawa, ‘Conveying the Mallet: Barkcloth Renewal and Connectedness in Fred Mutebi’s Art Practice’, Critical Interventions 12:3 (2018), 340–55; Fiona Siegenthaler, ‘Art Practice as a Field of Articulatory Engagements: Fred Mutebi’s Promotion of Barkcloth in Local and Global Networks’, Basel Papers on Political Transformations 18/19 (2019), 35–57.

235

236

Part II: Imagining Institutions

his part, spoke about his fashion design, performance, and installation art in which barkcloth is the primary material that he manipulates by dyeing, shaping, and collaging. Such conversations that bring non-­ institution-based activities in conversation with the museum offer a generative space to contest the preservation and promotion of colonial narratives about Uganda’s artistic and cultural history. Alongside the significant relationships built through international engagement, artists’ associations offer a stable community of like-­ minded individuals who want to develop professional structures. The Uganda Artists Association (UAA), started by artists, including Gen Elly Tumwine in the 1980s, serves the need to share experiences and opportunities. In 2014, it changed its name to Uganda Visual Artists and Designers Association (UVADA) to broaden the artist base, and uses Nommo Gallery, Uganda’s national gallery, as a meeting venue. However, UVADA remains an artists’ body independent of political affiliation. As an organised group, UAA collaborated with foreign cultural agencies such as the Alliance Française in the Artist of the Month exhibition programme from 2002 to 2006. Furthermore, UAA cultivated transnational travel, symposia, and exhibition opportunities with other artists’ organisations, for example, the Pan-African Circle of Artists (PACA) in Enugu, Nigeria.38 In 2002, the Uganda Artists’ Association convened a programme of weekly art meetings held at the Nommo Gallery which fostered a community spirit and what Taga Nuwagaba, the then Vice-Chair, called ‘fellowship’. Despite these successes in cultivating relationships of learning, UVADA continues to struggle with uncertainties regarding financial and member sustainability. Artists however also organise in less institutionalised groups as collectives, sharing studio space, materials, and skills. Their collaborative structures vary significantly, ranging from sharing the costs while working individually to the collaborative execution of major public commissions. Angavu Art Studios and Karibu Art Gallery & Studio, in the Kampala suburbs of Bukoto and Kamwokya respectively, are examples of the first mode. Their roots go back to an initiative by Rose Namubiru Kirumira, a former student of sculptor Francis X. Nnaggenda. She picked up his focus on local materials by deepening the research in Buganda material culture39 and adopted his international outlook while introducing an alternative to solo studio practice based on the Triangle Workshop model. The British sculptor Anthony 38 Cf. Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, ‘Performing Pan-Africanism: The Pan-African Circle of Artists’ Overcoming Maps, 2001−Present’, African Studies Association 2013 Annual Meeting Paper, https://ssrn.com/abstract=2237014 [accessed 26 July 2019]. 39 Rose Namubiru Kirumira, ‘Reconfiguring the Omweso Board Game: Performing Narratives of Buganda Material Culture’, African Arts 52:2 (2019), 52–65.

Higher Art Education and Decolonising Knowledge in Kampala

Caro and collector Robert Loder started the Triangle Workshops in 1982 with participants from the UK, Canada, and USA ‘triangle’, quickly expanding to other parts of the world. Although initially borne on the wings of a concept from the UK, artists embraced the workshops for their informal cross-generational peer training in remote locations outside university campuses, without the intervention of tutors, curricula, or quotidian distractions. In 1997 and 1998, Kirumira organised two workshops in rural Uganda after attending the Mbile workshop in Zambia and the Thapong workshop in Botswana in 1994.40 Their success lies in forging new networks, and the popularity of the Triangle Workshops compelled Kirumira to start Ngoma studios, a collective space in Kamwokya, Kampala, in 2000. Viewing Ngoma as an alternative space implies an oppositional model of aesthetic production to the university. Yet, Ngoma studios offered a space for complex interrelationships among the art school community and co-learning structures that affirm each other through critique. Ngoma’s impact reverberates in the many collectives subsequently formed by artists, such as the Njovu, Karibu, and Gecko collectives. Founded by Maria Naita (1968−2019) at her home in Mutundwe, Kampala in 1998 (later moving to Entebbe Road), KANN Artists is an outstanding example of the second mode of continued and close collaborative work. Consisting of a group of experienced senior artists, KANN is unique in employing an apprentice system where Naita and her colleagues shared sculpture techniques with younger artists on site, including now U.S.-based Ugandan sculptor Leilah Babirye. Artists from KANN won government commissions for public sculptures, among them The Stride (2007), which was commissioned to commemorate President Yoweri Museveni’s election as chairperson for the Commonwealth of Nations in November 2007 and to memorialise the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) hosted by Uganda in the same year. The CHOGM commission reveals the paradoxes prevailing in contemporary Ugandan art production. Cash-strapped Nommo Gallery is mandated by the government to support visual artists, but often it is the self-organised artists’ collectives that can access government commissions. While commissions may offer occasional income to some artists, other artists create social enterprises, realising their aesthetic vision with assistants untethered to the corporate work week or workplace. Makerere graduate Sarah Nakisanze, founder of Easy Afric Designs, Sidney L. Kasfir, Contemporary African Art (London and New York, 1999), p. 87; Rose K. Namubiru and Sidney L. Kasfir, ‘An Artist’s Notes on the Triangle Workshops, Zambia and South Africa’, in S.L. Kasfir and T. Förster (eds), African Art and Agency in the Workshop (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), p. 112.

40

237

238

Part II: Imagining Institutions

trained approximately fifty women in hand stitching techniques. Similar to Xenson Znja, Nakisanze’s primary material is barkcloth.41 A resurgence of interest in barkcloth among artists arose after UNESCO enshrined its traditional craft in the world’s canon of intangible cultural heritage in 2008.42 While UNESCO’s recognition attracts international attention, a revival in Uganda had already begun in 1993 when Buganda’s Kabaka Ronald Muwenda Mutebi was crowned, and in 1995 when the kingdoms of Uganda were partially re-admitted, as cultural institutions, in Uganda’s new Constitution. Like Fred Mutebi, mentioned earlier, Nakisanze exemplifies the agility with which artists engage in university education, commodification of heritage, and the development of social support infrastructures in a climate of renewed cultural pride. Both projects depend on the support of foreign patrons while at the same time promoting a material associated with national pride and opening up business opportunities that support regional economies. Another type of artistic practice is the artist-activist model represented by Bruno Ruganzu, an artist and lecturer at Kyambogo University. Ruganzu started Ecoart Uganda, working collaboratively with other artists and user communities to create playgrounds using recycled plastic bottles, thereby reducing trash. Working in a process-­ based mode rather than producing single-authored artworks, Ruganzu engages communities to generate problem-solving strategies and to improve their living environment. His first playground was in the Acholi Quarter, Banda, Kampala. He has since created other playgrounds and public sculptures in the USA, Denmark, and South Korea. Neither Kyambogo nor Makerere University offer courses in curatorial studies. However, curators including Violet Nantume and Martha Kazungu have, after engaging with institutions like the Goethe Institute or 32° East, completed curatorial studies in Europe and then returned to Uganda to initiate new formats to engage with art. Others, like Robinah Nansubuga, acquired and developed their curatorial skills by working in Kampala art spaces such as Afriart Gallery and the Fas Fas art centre. However, there are other forms of curating and mediating art that take place behind the spectacular setting of exhibitions. Often, the critical part of art practice is the less visible and less celebrated infrastructure around the work comprising studios, archives, and conversation platforms. Attending to these areas offers multiple entry points for audiences. For this reason, I, Margaret Nagawa, 41 Sarah Nakisanze and Deepa Pullanikkatil, ‘Ugandan Bark Cloth: From Coffins to Handbags’, in D. Pullanikkatil and C.M. Shackleton (eds), Poverty Reduction through Non-Timber Forest Products, Personal Stories (Cham, 2018), p. 144. 42 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Intangible Cultural Heritage, ‘Barkcloth making in Uganda’, https://ich.unesco.org/ en/RL/barkcloth-making-in-uganda-00139 [accessed 11 February 2022].

Higher Art Education and Decolonising Knowledge in Kampala

initiated the Kampala Art Tour from 2007 to 2010, where I took up to ten visitors to artists’ studios every week. During such meetings, artists would discuss their work in a relaxed space. Artist studios thereby become education locations outside formal teaching centres as well as essential sites for exchange and collaboration between artists and cultural producers.43 Publications are another way that artists have sought to disseminate their work. In 2005, Annette Natocho and Consodyne Buzabo published The Art Fest, a compilation of art, artists’ photographs, and short resumes,44 but it saw only one issue. However, the Start Journal of Arts and Culture, which began as a print publication by Kampala Arts Trust, has proven durable after it turned into an online journal.45 It is the only periodical publication in Uganda with a focus on contemporary art and visual culture and has undergone several transformations in order to remain relevant to its readership. As co-editor, I, Margaret Nagawa, led the journal’s change from a solo editor model to a collaborative editorial team structure with quarterly publications. Additionally, Ugandan scholars increasingly engage in international scholarly journals that have recognised the urgency to decolonise scholarship on African art.46 Also, artist-run galleries provide circulation avenues that function within European and North American models of art exhibiting to Ugandan artists’ advantage. Daudi Karungi, a graduate of Makerere Art School, founded Afriart Gallery in 2002. With its 20 years of existence, it is the most sustainable artist-run space in town. At two locations in Kampala, Karungi hosts exhibitions and artists’ residencies, and he represents East African artists at art fairs in South Africa, Europe, and the USA. Karungi also initiated the Kampala Art Biennale in 2004, attracting Ugandan, regional, and international artists and curators. Afriart Gallery and the Kampala Art Biennale facilitate conversations in the familiar context of Kampala as well as the interconnected network of fairs, prizes, and biennales while retaining autonomy in ownership and programming. Visual artists and curators in Uganda operate within a liberalised economy, taking what they need from international agencies while devising avenues they deem useful. Although commodification of art objects and working spaces is inevitable and necessary, this Margaret Nagawa, ‘Beyond the Gallery: Interactions between Audiences, Artists, and their Art through the Kampala Art Tour 2007−2010’, Art Education: The Journal of the National Art Education Association 65:2 (2012), 16−19. 44 Annette Natocho and Consodyne Buzabo, Art Fest (Kampala 2005). 45 Now the SJ Magazine of Contemporary Arts & Culture, www.startjournal.org [accessed 11 February 2022]. 46 For African Arts for instance, South African Scholar Ruth Simbao introduced a collaborative editorial team that emphasises perspectives from Africa, including several Ugandan contributions in the last five years. 43

239

240

Part II: Imagining Institutions

entrepreneurial approach builds art audiences by connecting a product of value to the needs of a specific market. However, there is an elusive sense of freedom and independence because many artists’ initiatives rely on international funding for their activities that tends to define specific aesthetic and socio-political parameters that are not always congruent with the priorities of the Ugandan artists and cultural practitioners. Nonetheless, many of these initiatives are emancipatory activities. They make inroads into decolonising processes of higher art education by showing and practising alternative ways of learning and being an artist.

Conclusion: Potentials and Pitfalls of Decolonising Knowledge in a Neoliberal Context

The role of globalisation and liberalisation in the decolonial project has not been problematised sufficiently so far, perhaps because its theoretical analysis must rely on specific case studies in order to grasp the complexity at issue. The example of higher art education in Uganda and the ways how artists in Kampala self-organise in a field defined by state failure, foreign investment, and the daily flux of globalised aesthetics and values offers at least a limited insight into this complexity. While Makerere University and other schools of higher art education provide in their curriculum a firm knowledge in classic art history, national art history, and, above all, technical art skills, Google, Instagram, and Facebook are the sites where artists and many of their audiences inform themselves about contemporary art trends and where they offer their work to an international professional constituency and potential patrons. At the same time, artists refer to barkcloth production, mythologies, proverbs and other local traditions of knowing.47 This deliberate recourse to local, regional, and national traditions underscores a decolonial impetus which is inspired by both post- and decolonial subjectivities and theories, and a global market craving for new or revalued products and ideas. Artists thus subjectively and situationally relate to national politics and non-governmental infrastructure, personal ambitions and collective imaginaries, subaltern interests and mainstream Ferdinand M. Kasozi, Introduction to an African Philosophy: The Ntu’ology of the Baganda (Freiburg im Breisgau: Verlag Karl Alber, 2011). Sidney L. Kasfir correctly discerns a prominence of Baganda artists in Kampala. Nevertheless, with a long history of migration, the city is home to a diverse set of cultural practices from Eastern and Central Africa and far beyond. See: Sidney L. Kasfir, ‘Up Close and Far Away: Renarrating Buganda’s Troubled Past’, African Arts 45:3 (2012), 56–69; Sidney L. Kasfir, ‘Lacuna: Uganda in a Globalizing Field’, in M.B. Visonà and G. Salami (eds), Companion to Modern African Art (Oxford 2013), pp. 507−27. 47

Higher Art Education and Decolonising Knowledge in Kampala

opportunities, the colonial heritage of a struggling art curriculum and an indigenous revival of royal heritage that depends on institutions like UNESCO and other international partners, as it has no claim to the national budget. Decolonising art education and aesthetics therefore, nowadays, means taking a critical stand to dominant structures, course contents, political discourse, and financial flows while nevertheless making use of them. A delinking in its radicality as claimed by many decolonial thinkers therefore is illusionary. On the contrary, artists who reject the moribund, stagnant, and entirely underfunded public structures of the postcolonial nation-state, co-opt global flows even if they claim local, indigenous values and narratives.48 At the same time, many politically sensitive artists have discovered ways to use this somewhat compromising situation to imagine other futures with different markets and a revival of Uganda’s art heritage. They overcome purist and binary concepts such as state vs. civil society, local vs. global, indigenous vs. cosmopolitan, national vs. transnational and explore the full range of options between these poles. Perhaps, this is the only way contemporary artists and their societies can avoid losing out on neoliberal politics: rather than countering, they co-opt them in ways that empower them to develop their own ideas and suggestions to society.49 Indeed, in view of the social dynamics taking place in local and foreign-­f unded NGO initiatives, the informal exchange of local artists in studios and associations, their hospitality for foreign visitors, researchers and art professionals, and the growing influence of the internet as a contemporary tool to access knowledge in other parts of the world, the University loses its dominance as the centre of knowledge production. It becomes just one of many resources which students and staff members use while setting up their own structures, networks, and knowledge priorities. This observation is in line with Boaventura Sousa Santos’ concept of the polyphonic university that he contrasts with the (Western and Westernised) university. 50 The polyphonic university includes institutionalised and non-institutional forms of knowledge, 48 Cf. David G. Pier, ‘The Transformation of National Performance Arts in Neoliberal Uganda’, in J. Wiegratz, G. Martinello and E. Greco (eds), Uganda: The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation (London: Zed Books, 2018), pp. 349−64. 49 Fiona Siegenthaler, ‘Co-optation as an Imaginative Act: Art-related Initiatives and Social Space in Kampala’, Social Dynamics 44:3 (2018), 526−44. 50 In their book Decolonizing the Westernized University: Interventions in Philosophy of Education from Within and Without (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), Ramón Grosfoguel, Roberto Hernández, and Ernesto Rosen Velásquez use the term ‘westernized’ for institutions and practices located outside the geopolitical territory roughly known as the ‘west’ but that have adopted Western structures, epistemologies, and values.

241

242

Part II: Imagining Institutions

encouraging pluriversality rather than universality. 51 The polyphonic university aims ‘to render different ways of knowing more porous and more aware of differences through intercultural translation’. 52 Such translation is only possible through collaborative practice beyond the university confines which, however, also connects to the latter. Ugandan artists and cultural workers do exactly that: while many of them maintain their connections to the University, they operate on the basis of non- or micro-institutional collaboration. The art and art history departments in Kampala are established, but also challenged, sites of institutional and public knowledge generation to which local initiatives and internationally funded NGOs and cultural institutions can offer alternative or complementary infrastructures and bodies of knowledge. But both are equally challenged by their imbrication in global (neo)liberal hegemonies. They tend to perpetuate the dominant Western narratives and feed into developmental discourses that run counter to decolonial purposes. 53 Ambitions of artists and institutions to work independently from the disinterested and negligent state run the risk of entering other dependencies resting on foreign capital and a rather subtle dictate of aesthetics and politics by Western or corporate institutions. As an example, many NGOs perpetuate a developmental policy by expecting art to serve civil society, alleviate poverty, and contribute to generating income for the artists and their unspecified ‘communities’. 54 Nevertheless, indigenous movements within the contemporary art scene in Kampala open up new opportunities beyond the nation-state and developmentalist structures by rediscovering the potential in the re-established kingdoms and their material, symbolic, and ritual traditions and by concurrently drawing a profit from neoliberal interests of tourists, expatriates, foreign investors, and the Ugandan government itself. Artists in Kampala tend to make use of a variety of actors and mechanisms in order to position their own ambitions, aesthetics, political alliances, and economic claims, juggling with them in different ways. 51 de Sousa Santos, The End of the Cognitive Empire, p. 277; Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity; Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse; Bernd Reiter (ed.), Constructing the Pluriverse: The Geopolitics of Knowledge (Durham NC, 2018). 52 de Sousa Santos, The End of the Cognitive Empire, p. 275. 53 Amin, Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or Ending Capitalism? pp. 134−38. 54 Cf. Jon H. Sande Lie, ‘Donor-driven State Formation: Friction in the World Bank-Uganda Partnership’, in J. Wiegratz, G. Martinello and E. Greco (eds), Uganda: The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation (London: Zed Books, 2018), pp. 43−59. The notion of the ‘community’ is just about as ‘frustratingly illusive’ as the notion of ‘local’. Nevertheless, as William Fisher states, it continues to be a central means of the discursive construction of NGO legitimacy: William F. Fisher, ‘Doing Good? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGO Practices’, Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1997), 439−64.

Higher Art Education and Decolonising Knowledge in Kampala

It seems that decolonial ambitions navigate a path somewhere between overcoming the colonial legacy of university teaching while also trying to enter the platforms and discourses of the so-called ‘international art world’, which continues to be an expression of the aesthetic and economic hegemony of Western and more recently also Asian values and markets. This situation exacerbates the revaluation of subaltern, indigenous or alternative forms of knowledge. Questions regarding the relevance of different forms of knowledge are omni­present. It starts with the difference in the understanding of art between university-­ trained artists and the broader population, between ‘art’ as a European concept and similar but non-congruent terms in Luganda and other Ugandan languages, between the dependence on foreign patrons and little interest in art investment among Ugandans. Other debates within the artist community circle around notions of professionality that are informed by the different education systems such as university, vocational training, artisanal apprenticeship and education transmitted by customary inheritance and affiliation. Additionally, the relevance of local art history versus canonical Euro-American art history, elitist versus popular art, or the question whether art education makes sense without a national art museum, continue to be part of debates in the Ugandan art world. Such debates reflect the fundamental question of what knowledge is relevant today and the epistemic dilemmas of the postcolonial situation not only for contemporary Ugandan artists, but also for those conducting research on and writing about them.

243

PART III MAKING PUBLICS

11 Repudiating a Liberal Framework for Political Accountability: The Politics of the Whole versus the Politics of the Party in Uganda in the 1940s HOLLY HANSON

An effort to decolonise knowledge in Uganda has to begin with fundamental premises regarding political power. By assuming and looking for dominating power, people have made invisible a kind of power that is unlocked by a group, a ‘power with’ instead of ‘power over’. To see this power, we have to recognise and remove multiple frames that organise our thought – not only colonial, but also Eurocentric and patriarchal – which imply that leading is active and being led is passive. We have to infuse followership with meaning. Political accountability built on assent looks different from that built on dissent. Once we have recognised that colonised knowledge imposes on Uganda a political philosophy premised on conflict, it is imperative to develop a methodology for actually decolonising knowledge. We have to read carefully, interrogate evidence, and see change that colonial categories make invisible. Recognising assent as a potent political strategy reveals hitherto unacknowledged intentions and aspirations in the key events of the 1940s, allows a fuller interpretation of the archival record of the late colonial period, and undermines the myth of Buganda exceptionalism. Looking closely at the long history of societies in eastern Africa, there is a logic of collective endeavour, of the power of participation, which begins with our earliest opportunities to observe, and continues – in changing forms – over time. In ancient eastern Africa, being ruled did not mean quietly accepting and obeying whatever powerful people decreed, and it did not mean participation for narrow, instrumental ends. Using the sources that allow historians to look into the deep African past, we can see a set of strategies that the peoples who now live in Uganda used to create functional polities over a great time depth. People sought to create calm, harmonious good government through at least three strategies.1 They actively demonstrated assent through 1 I explore these strategies over the long term in To Speak and Be Heard: Seeking Good Government in Uganda, ca.1500 to 2015, Ohio University Press, 2022.

248

Part III: Making Publics

being present in gatherings which constituted and affirmed the polity, they contributed to the hearing of cases and decision making through speaking in councils and in the hearing of cases, and they helped to compose groups which combined diverse elements through giving valuable gifts. These strategies are visible in oral traditions regarding the emergence of kingdoms around 500 years ago, and in peoples’ memories of how they responded to kings who ruled badly. Careful attention to ancient strategies of political accountability allows us to recognise that, across the twentieth century, Ugandans thought about and enacted citizenship using east African understandings, as well as colonial and postcolonial ones. Active assent is the fundamental building block of east African politics, but it has been distorted, discounted and misinterpreted through a conscious or unconscious reliance on a frame of reference which sees coercion at the centre of authority and voting and dissent as the basis of political accountability. Political strategies which create calm good governance through assent have been relegated to the realm of culture, whereas politics, according to A.R. Radcliffe-Brown in the preface to African Political Systems, is ‘the organized exercise of coercive authority through the use, or possible use, of physical force’.2 To see the reality of east African political logic, we have to look past our unquestioned assumptions regarding the nature of modernity. Can deceased community members be active agents in a political process? Are larger units inherently better than smaller ones? Does Weberian bureaucracy create equity? Was liberal democracy humanity’s greatest achievement? Clapperton Mavhunga warns that we must prioritise indigenous concepts and words to understand Africa, because ‘no void in ruzivo (knowledge) was ever created, and no wholesale “transfer” of revolutionary ideas from Europe filled a void that, after all, did not exist’. 3 A decolonised knowledge requires a recognition that people make the present building on what they already know. We must see creative people thinking, acting and innovating in a sequence of circumstances in order to reject colonial rule as the great divide between tradition and modernity in Africa. The tendency to sort people and actions that could be labelled ‘traditional’ from those that could be called ‘modern’ rationalised colonial rule, obscured interference with indigenous institutions, and hid the malfeasance of the well-educated and well-placed Ugandans who took advantage of indirect rule to arrogate to themselves an entirely new kind of power over others that was then called ‘traditional’. The profound transformation 2 A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, ‘Preface’, in Meyer Fortes and E.E. Evans-Pritchard (eds), African Political Systems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940), xiv. 3 Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, The Mobile Workshop: The Tsetse Fly and African Knowledge Production (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018), 319.

The Politics of the Whole versus the Politics of the Party in Uganda in the 1940s

of chiefship in the early colonial era eliminated the mechanisms of political accountability which indigenous systems had possessed. In Buganda, a complex system of more than 6,000 authority figures whose power derived from the spirits of places and remembered heroes, as well as from a wide variety of connections to royal power, became a rigid hierarchy of a few hundred ranked chiefs, beholden to colonial authorities.4 The titles were the same, but the mechanisms of accountability ceased to exist. Most critically, in the indigenous system people could and did leave a chief who ruled badly, but in the colonial era leaving a bad chief became a criminal act.5 The colonial relationship of people to chiefs, chiefs to the king, and the king to the people and chiefs, was entirely a colonial creation. Since everyone, whatever their degree of wealth and power, had to make older habits of thought and relationships fit new situations, the interesting question is not whether a social form was ‘traditional’ or ‘progressive’, but rather, what aspects of the past did people choose to wield, and for what purpose? In addition to recognising a particular liberal logic operating in our own minds as we seek to understand the east African past, it is also essential to problematise our sources. Ethnographic evidence gathered by colonial-era anthropologists can codify distortions of political practice that emerged in the late-nineteenth century and during colonial rule. This is a challenge wherever the actions of colonisers deprived people of resources and voice.6 Social scientists working at the East African Institute of Social Research at Makerere University College observed relationships between people and chiefs, and between the peoples of Uganda, which had been created in the twentieth century by colonial policy, but often their writings assert that those relationships had existed in the past.7 Their description of the dynamics of colonial 4 Holly Hanson, Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda, Social History of Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003), pp. 182–88. 5 Hanson, Landed Obligation, p. 186. 6 Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 70–71, 94, 178. 7 For example, Lloyd Fallers and Audrey Richards, The King’s Men: Leadership and Status in Buganda on the Eve of Independence (London: Oxford University Press on behalf of the East African Institute of Social Research, 1964); Martin Southwold, Bureaucracy and Chiefship in Buganda: The Development of Appointive Office in the History of Buganda (Kampala: East African Institute of Social Research, 1961), xiv; David Apter, The Political Kingdom in Uganda: A Study in Bureaucratic Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961); and D. Anthony Low and R. Cranford Pratt, Buganda and British Overrule, 1900–1955: Two Studies (New York: Oxford University Press on behalf of the East African Institute of Social Research, 1960). David Mills describes the origins and dynamics of the East African Institute of Social Research in David Mills, Difficult Folk? A Political History of Social Anthropology (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008).

249

250

Part III: Making Publics

Uganda makes invisible indigenous political structures and strategies and rationalises imperial violence. The massive archive of letters and statements addressed to colonial authorities and critics by eloquent Ugandans presents a further methodological challenge. Since Ugandans in the Protectorate engaged in a constant process of cultural translation, historians must take care to place sources in context, and avoid taking at face value the statements people made in a particular way to influence their British audience. Superb scholarship has been produced regarding elite Ugandans, particularly Baganda: this work, and the words of the intellectual leaders they analyse, reveal profoundly important aspects of colonial Ugandan society.8 Even so, the stirring words of elite, literate Ugandans, written to influence foreigners, cannot fully represent a society most of whose members would have experienced a different social reality than that experienced by the elite. The 1945 labour action and 1949 effort to educate the king provide an opportunity to recognise the operation of indigenous strategies and how they have been misapprehended. In a wave of actions which spread across Uganda in January 1945, people protested a failure of reciprocity on the part of colonial authorities by gathering in large numbers and refusing to provide labour to foreigners or food to Kampala. In 1949, a group partly led by the union of cotton farmers had massed large numbers outside the palace of the king of Buganda, in an effort to win him to their positions in conflict with the Protectorate Governor, when a violent break-up of the gathering led to arson attacks on chiefs and then months of harsh reprisals. There has been a tendency to view the ‘strike’ of 1945 and the ‘disturbances’ of 1949 as episodes in Buganda Kingdom politics, preludes to the Ganda politicking that delayed Ugandan independence and complicated post-independence politics. This perception is based on a misapprehension of what happened in 1945 and 1949, and an imposition backward of the consequences for Ugandan politics of the deportation of Buganda’s king in 1953. Based on 8 Jonathon L. Earle, Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire: Political Thought and Historical Imagination in Africa, African Studies Series (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Carol Summers’ contributions include, among others: Carol Summers, ‘Adolescence versus Politics: Metaphors in Late Colonial Uganda’, Journal of the History of Ideas 78:1 (2017), 117–36; ‘Catholic Action and Ugandan Radicalism: Political Activism in Buganda, 1930–1950’, Journal of Religion in Africa 39:1 (2009), 60–90; ‘“Subterranean Evil” and “Tumultuous Riot” in Buganda: Authority and Alienation at King’s College, Budo, 1942’, The Journal of African History 47:1 (2006),93–113; ‘Radical Rudeness: Ugandan Social Critiques in the 1940s’, Journal of Social History 39:3 (2006), 741–70; ‘Grandfathers, Grandsons, Morality, and Radical Politics in Late Colonial Buganda’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies 38:3 (2005), 427–47.

The Politics of the Whole versus the Politics of the Party in Uganda in the 1940s

the evidence of the 1940s, Uganda did not have an entrenched tribalism created by the British that would prove to be insurmountable, rather, all kinds of people acted together. The thousands of people who participated in the events of 1945 and 1949 were not just Baganda. They had a plan for good government they were trying to put into action: they did not think that their only role as citizens was to be obedient to the king. In these events, we see people asserting reciprocity and mutual responsibility through gifts of things and labour, and both offering and withdrawing their assent to be ruled. An essential component of decolonising knowledge in Uganda is to recognise the depth of meaning their actions invoked, and acknowledge that the vocabulary that has been used to describe it has been inadequate and distorting. Ugandans in the mid-twentieth century, like all human beings at that time and others, sought out new and useful ways of thinking and acting and employed them in combination with what they already knew. The politics of the whole and the politics of conflict combine in odd ways in the events of the 1940s, just as diverse and sometimes contradictory habits of thought are mixed together in one person. Across the 1940s, Ugandans articulated aspirations for good governance in the face of intensifying disappointments, which led, in 1949, to a mass action which became a violent insurrection. These actions followed an indigenous political vocabulary at the same time that they creatively sought to solve new problems.

1945: A Strike, an Effort to Assert the Interdependence of Parts of a Social Whole, or Both at the Same Time?

The participants in the 1945 mobilisation took a deep cultural understanding, innovated with it, and expressed it in different ways. The labour activist J.M. Kivu and the lines of picketers he organised outside the Labour Office demanded the rights of workers in opposition to capital. I.K. Musazi invoked the British General Strike of 1926 and the French Revolution when speaking to the assembled protestors.9 At the same time, many participants spoke and acted as though the parts of a social whole would be responsible for each other, and that across the gaps of wealth and power of Uganda of the 1940s, there could be mutuality. In the 1945 mobilisation, Ugandans combined their wellknown and long-exercised strategy for attaining accountability by withholding of labour and allegiance from superiors with the similar but differently inflected strategy of a general strike. A careful analysis 9 W. Scott, Chief Inspector of Police, Kampala, Police Memorandum 1945, Vol. II, p. 73, FCO 141/18109, The National Archive of the United Kingdom (Hereafter abbreviated as TNAUK); Earle, Colonial Buganda, pp. 74–75.

251

252

Part III: Making Publics

of the actions of the labour-withholders and their words to each other and to their colonial interlocutors reveals both the effort to use a work stoppage to regain a social whole, and the confrontational elements of a strike. The multiple rifts in Ugandan society across which people attempted to engage and communicate are starkly revealed in the written statements of all the police involved of their actions hour by hour, the memoir of J. Kivu, one of Uganda’s first labour organisers, and documents collected in secret Protectorate files in order to justify the deportation of the purported ringleaders. The labour action seems to have spread from workplace to workplace and from town to town by word of mouth: it took three weeks to spread from Entebbe to Gulu and Lira (see Map 11.1), and in the larger towns, the walkouts began in the Public Works Departments, then spread to factory workers and other town employees. People used easily recognisable symbols to identify leaders, and employed dance to consolidate a collective identity.10 An atmosphere of celebration turned more confrontational when police and special constables shot and killed protestors (eight were killed and fourteen injured in incidents in Kampala, Kawanda, Masaka, and Koja).11 Almost three weeks into the labour action, Governor Hall issued his first proclamation, telling people to return to work first, after which the proper authorities would consider labour demands. From the perspective of workers – and private employers who complained about it – the action of refusing to work had succeeded.12 Labourers received higher wages and everyone in government employment received a backdated war bonus, which had been planned (but not announced) before the labour action. A mobilisation which occurred in all four Provinces of the Protectorate and involved thousands of workers could reasonably be seen as a general strike. At the same time, it was a highly effective assertion of the reciprocity of rulers and people. People who spoke and wrote about the labour mobilisation in 1945 did not see the events as a wielding of the politics of assent: the Ugandan leaders had called it a strike, and Governor Hall claimed that a plot which had been ‘the result of long and careful planning’ caused the ‘wicked acts, acts of cruelty, of violence and of lawlessness’, as he 10 Driscoll, Superintendent of Police, Jinja, Police Memorandum 1945, Vol. III, p. 155, FCO141/18111, F. T. Reader, Inspector of Police, Entebbe, Police Memorandum 1945, Vol. II, p. 67, FCO 141/18109, R. A. Hook, Assistant Inspector of Police, Kampala, Police Memorandum 1945, Vol. II, p. 90, FCO141/18109, TNAUK. 11 N.H.P. Whitley, Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Disturbances Which Occurred in Uganda During January 1945 (Entebbe: The Protectorate Government Printer, 1954), pp. 18–19, Hereafter abbreviated as ‘Whitley Report’. 12 Whitley Report, pp. 18–19.

The Politics of the Whole versus the Politics of the Party in Uganda in the 1940s

Map 11.1 Map of labour strikes throughout Uganda, 1945 (map drawn by Eugenio Marcano).

observed.13 Gardner Thomson argues that Hall blamed ‘a plot’ because he sought to cover up his government’s failure to control wartime inflation, but it is also possible that Hall could not comprehend African collective agency, or its goals.14 The concepts ‘strike’ and ‘plot’ do not ‘End of Labour Troubles’, Uganda Herald (Kampala, 31 January 1945), pp. 1, 8. Gardner Thompson, Governing Uganda: British Colonial Rule and Its Legacy (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2003). 13 14

253

254

Part III: Making Publics

convey what happened in Uganda in the first months of 1945. A careful examination of the actions of participants and their words to each other and to their colonial interlocutors suggests that in 1945 Ugandans were energised by anticolonial rhetoric but they acted on different assumptions regarding power. The hour-by-hour accounts of the protest by every member of the Police Force who took part give the observer access to people whose lives and thoughts are otherwise difficult to capture in the historical record. That record shows people taking action in a way that assumes many people participate in making decisions and many will be leaders; it shows people striving, in the face of the deep fissure of wealth and poverty that the strike revealed, to assert mutual responsibility, and it shows people absolutely confident in their ability to demand accountability from their rulers. It is possible to see the politics of assent, along with anger, in the polite, logical, and well-evidenced letters which identified the flaws in colonial governance, in a form intended to communicate to English speakers. In these letters, some individuals employed multiple ways of thinking about power: sometimes the same letter contains angry accusations and invitations to reciprocity and good will. This voluminous correspondence argued for Africans’ control over their own lives and government. In a newspaper piece by G.K. Rock the people in the Protectorate are compared to a patient in a hospital, confined and controlled. He argued ‘the barbed wire legal restrictions’ surrounding colonised people had not been chosen by their own free will, and the limbs that they would lose, rather than allowing them to maintain their life, might prove fatal.15 According to one P.L. Musoke, the Lukiiko (the Parliament of the Buganda kingdom) was not representative, taxes were too high, people who formed formal associations were not heard, Africans were ‘very much deprived in trade, cultivators had “intelligent minds” but did not get good prices, and “the Government encourage syndicate and pools of none African [sic.] to take the profit instead of encouraging us; we grow cotton while no natives get profit the money left in hands are for taxes only”’. He criticised the level of education given to Ugandans, which names a course of study engineers when ‘a man is not an Engineer at all’, and regretted the regulations which prevented Africans from establishing private schools.16 It was not just that taxes were high and wages and commodity prices low, it was the paternalism, that people did not know 15 Letter, J.M. Kivu to Dr. Rita Hinden, ‘The British Imperial Government: British Restriction Administration Policy in East Africa. Does Municipal Legislation Override a Treaty, 2 November 1943’, Special Collections, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MSS Brit. Emp. s. 365/125/1a. 16 Letter, P.L. Musoke enclosed in a letter, J.M. Kivu to Dr. Rita Hinden, 2 November 1943, Special Collections, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MSS Brit. Emp. s. 365/125/1a.

The Politics of the Whole versus the Politics of the Party in Uganda in the 1940s

how far we may wander in the province of liberty of action, how we shall live, how we shall trade. We are compelled to throw down some of the business enterprises that we have already had in hand for years so that foreigners may take them up and make money therefrom, because you are masters of our fate.17

It is also possible to see the politics of the whole in the attempts labour protestors made to create a space for conversation. A key issue throughout the protest is participants’ concern that they will be heard. The daily morning speeches given to assembled crowds from a ladder placed on the wall of the Uganda Museum, and Kivu’s negotiations with the Buganda Resident, focused on this theme. K.B. Maindi, ‘the acting President’ of the Uganda African Motor Drivers’ Association (UAMDA) after Kivu was deported, insisted that many people had asked the Buganda Resident to open negotiations with the strikers and ‘were very much disappointed when he flatly rejected their demands and offers to negotiate’.18 Some leaders created spaces to allow protestors to speak and be heard. The Pokino, chief of Buddu, convinced a large and frustrated crowd in Masaka to move to the football grounds, where a long meeting with many speakers and an attentive chief diffused the tension.19 In Wobulenzi, the sub-chief Matiya Wamala refused to ‘beat the alarm drum’ or in other ways support his superior, Joswa Zake. This may have been because Wamala saw the protestors’ actions as a form of expression within their rights, or it may have been a dereliction of duty because the crowd was violent and dangerous, as his superior claimed.20 We know, from their first-person accounts, that the crowds on the streets approached policemen looking for opportunities for conversation. The politics of the whole can be discerned in the assertions by participants that their actions had been compelled by a failure of reciprocity. The moral logic that people would recognise and respond to others needs is apparent in how people voiced their demands. At the same time, the violence against working Africans which broke out revealed the almost impossible challenge of maintaining an ethic of reciprocity in the context of the massive divide in wealth that had been created in Uganda by 1945. The burials of strikers, attended by large numbers, 17 Letter, J.M. Kivu to Dr. Rita Hinden, ‘The British Imperial Government: British Restriction Administration Policy in East Africa. Does Municipal Legislation Override a Treaty’, 2 November 1943, Special Collections, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MSS Brit. Emp. s. 365/125/1a. 18 Letter, K.B. Maindi to C.W.W Greennidge, Secretary of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society and Dr. Rita Hinden, 17 March 1945, Special Collections, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Mss. Brit. Emp s. 365/125/1a. 19 Police Memorandum 1945, Vol. I, p. 27, FCO 141/18107, TNAUK. 20 Zake, ‘Nsibirwa Assassination Affidavits’, BNA, p. 8, FCO141/18157, TNAUK.

255

256

Part III: Making Publics

became an opportunity to assert social connection among people who had not previously been connected. Some, who had been to Europe, combined expectations of reciprocity with a confrontational tone, but at other times they switched to invocations of consensus. The war created severe hardship on the home front, intensifying the economic burden on the majority. According to P.L. Musoke, the poor sold household effects to pay taxes of Shs 39/- a year, and some went to jail and did hard labour because of their inability to pay. Christopher Harwich, a colonial police officer, wrote to the Fabian Colonial Bureau that crime was inevitable because people needed it to survive; he saw it as a ‘terrible reflection on our past policies’ and argued that aspirations for African welfare would never succeed until people saw the systematic inequality. Urban workers who had to purchase food had seen prices increase by between 40 and 80 per cent, and the imported consumer goods workers purchased, such as matches, bicycle tyres, and clothing, had increased in price to an unbearable degree, if they were available at all.21 The protestors, and their supporters with higher social status and a command of English, expected Government to take care of people. A.S.K. Cook, the Assistant Superintendent of Police in Masaka, was told by Sergeant Musoke on 17 January (the 3rd day of widespread strikes) that clerks in Government offices were also dissatisfied about wages, and ‘the government enquired but did nothing’.22 African workers knew that a committee had met to discuss wartime pay rises, and that these were to be announced on 10 January; the strike gained momentum when that date passed with no announcement.23 In Kampala at the Public Works Department where workers downed tools on 13 January, Sub-Inspector P. Kasirye of Kampala translated for the night soil men who told him ‘unless our pay has been increased to Shs. 45/- we will not work until the order has been issued out on Monday’.24 According to Kivu, the decision to not sell food to Europeans was a response to the first shooting, in the Kampala Bus Park. As a consequence, participants cut communication to Kampala, including digging out the culverts in roads so that trucks with food would not be able to enter the city. Kivu travelled to Masaka to tell people to avoid violence, but also to prevent Europeans from getting food. 25 Depriving others 21 Christopher Harwich to Dr. Hinden, October 1, 1945, Papers of the Fabian Colonial Bureau, MSS Brit. Emp. s. 365/125/1b, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. 22 A.S.K. Cook, Assistant Superintendent of Police, Masaka, Police Memorandum 1945, Vol. II, p. 137, FCO 141/18109, TNAUK. 23 Whitley Report, p. 31. 24 P. Kasirye, Sub-Inspector of Police, Kampala, Police Memorandum 1945, Vol. II. p. 84, FCO 141/18109, TNAUK. 25 J.M. Kivu, ‘The Life of Kivu’, Audrey Richards Papers, LSE Archives, London (hereafter referred to as ‘The Life of Kivu’), p. 48.

The Politics of the Whole versus the Politics of the Party in Uganda in the 1940s

of food underlined the reciprocities that political negotiation had had before: food moving along the roads had been a demonstration of the ruler’s need for his people. A prominent few, who had observed politics in Britain, did not articulate an expectation of reciprocity. Kivu, the trade unionist I.K. Musazi, and a few other powerful voices expected progress to emerge from confrontation: they held the views which Governor Hall attributed to the non-existent leaders he imagined were standing behind them. When all the leaders of the Drivers Union met with the Labour Advisor to the Colonial Secretary in the Office of the Resident, the Union identified precisely the laws that were not being followed: that the Labour Department was supposed to be surveying the public and it was not doing so, and that the government was not paying war bonuses.26 Kivu spent the days of the strike picketing the Labour Office with fifty other people. As Carol Summers has observed, a willingness to openly criticise colonial authorities entered Ugandan political rhetoric in the 1940s.27 Jon Earle documents Musazi’s study of revolution and rebellion in European history, and also Pan-African thought, when the latter studied in the UK.28 A rhetoric of confrontation also circulated through the reading aloud of letters from Semakula Mulumba, a people’s representative who was supported in London through collections at every large meeting of people discontented with their lives in the 1940s. Mulumba’s letters mocked and reviled the Governor, the Bishop, and British rule in general: his deliberately insulting prose followed an ancient Bantu tradition of insulting an opponent before a battle. They may have functioned as a kind of entertainment, as some of his injunctions (to curse God for having allowed colonialism) would not have found favour with his audience. The logic and actions of workers obeying the instructions of organised labour to win concessions from employers was part of what happened in Uganda’s 1945 labour protest, but many who participated spoke and behaved in ways that evoked the mutual interdependence of participants in a polity. To truly perceive the dynamics of the mobilisation, it is essential to pay attention to the actions of the thousands of participants as well as the words of a small number of leaders. Protestors wanted all Africans to leave their place of employment and join the protest. The challenges that arose from the protestors’ insistence that everyone stop working illuminate the tension between the value of a wage-earner’s individual right to choose to labour and the value of everyone in a community acting together. On one level, a general strike required a full labour stoppage, as some people explained. According to B.E. Pais, an Asian Assistant Sub-Inspector of Police in 26 27

28

‘The Life of Kivu’ p. 49. Summers, ‘Radical Rudeness’. Earle, Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire.

257

258

Part III: Making Publics

Kampala, gangs at the Government Indian School (on William Street) ‘were shouting that they want nothing but all the African boys should leave their jobs and follow them to make a complete success in their strike movement’.29 Others expressed an aspiration of unity: for example, in Masaka, where the crowd called to the police line ‘Why side with the white man against your fellow Blackman?’, ‘Your pay is bad too; your place is on our side’, and ‘We want the Constables to lay down their uniforms and come over to us’. 30 When a special constable had killed someone in a crowd of people attempting to get Government clerks to stop working in the Masaka Boma, a police corporal said to his superior ‘if only the Europeans would let their boys go, the crowd would be satisfied’, to which the officer responded, ‘as far as the Europeans were concerned the boys could go with the very greatest of pleasure’. 31 Unity among protestors would have been a goal for those committed to both the politics of assent and the politics of dissent, but not all Ugandans wanted to stop working. Over the course of the week of labour protest activity in Kampala, crowds became more aggressive in their effort to stop people from working. Unemployed young men who had been urged to convince working people to join the strike beat up Africans who continued to show up for their employment. The anonymous European businessman ‘Sundowner’ who wrote the column ‘Topics’ reported that the porters and P.W.D. (Public Works Department) workers ‘downed tools and sought satisfaction in an orderly manner with no indication of ill-­ feeling’ but then other people – whom he called ‘Kampala’s unemployables’ and ‘shabby totoes [toto, Swahili, ‘child’], loud mouthed and fleet of foot’ – who did not follow the lead of their elders took over. 32 He thought that the strike had been ‘utterly ruined’ by the outside sympathisers who were not workers themselves. As the Uganda Herald explained in its one-page edition on 17 January (which was all that could be produced because all the staff had walked out) ‘organized hooliganism’ had ‘aggravated considerably’ the strikes which had spread to other occupations from the lower paid Government employees. The Herald described stones thrown near their offices, and the doors of the printing works forced open to compel workers to leave. 33 Peskett, the Superintendent of Police, Buganda, noted that ‘many reports received from Indians [were] found to be much exaggerated on investigation’, but there was 29 B.E. Pais, Sub Inspector of Police, Kampala, Police Memorandum 1945, Vol. II, p. 80, FCO 141/18109, TNAUK. 30 A.S.K. Cook, Assistant Superintendent of Police, Masaka, Police Memorandum 1945, Vol. II, p. 142, FCO 141/18109, TNAUK. 31 A.S.K. Cook, Assistant Superintendent of Police, Masaka, Police Memorandum 1945, Vol. II, p. 142, FCO 141/18109, TNAUK. 32 Uganda Herald (Kampala, 24 January 1945), p. 3. 33 Uganda Herald (Kampala, 17 January 1945), p. 3.

The Politics of the Whole versus the Politics of the Party in Uganda in the 1940s

also quite a lot of beating. 34 The protest leaders tried to stop the violence, but could not. Some crowds were beyond the control of chiefs. Kivu asked the Buganda Resident for permission to urge people over the wireless not to be violent, but by the end of the week there were large crowds – one observer estimated about a thousand, who shouted out ‘we are beating everybody found working, we do not like anyone to be on duty until the pay will be increased’. 35 It is interesting to note that, in 2009, the anger of the poor at the easy life of the rich contributed to the actions of protestors, who stopped vehicles, and stripped women wearing trousers (a sign of middle-class status). 36 Sundowner’s perception that it was unemployed people who in 1945 dragged Africans from their workplaces and beat them severely, if true, may be an indication that increasing economic inequality among Africans had strained the assumptions of the politics of the whole. People responded to the shocking violence using the politics of the whole, trying to create a space for dialogue and emphasising mutual obligation. Protestors with sticks confronted police with batons and guns. After the first shooting of a protestor, the crowd of several hundred began to throw stones at the police ‘shouting that we Europeans had murdered their brother’. 37 People who had the means reached out to Protectorate authorities and asked them to make the shooting stop. Four days into the general strike, when six people had already been killed, Governor Hall announced that firearms would continue to be used and that the police and military would ‘direct their fire against ringleaders’, – an empire-wide protocol which failed utterly. On 19 January, when six people had been killed, Daudi Musoke, leader of the Baganda Cooperative Society and author of the provocative screed Buganda Nyaffe, Yaki Kiasi, a trader, and two Protestant clerks, Luben Lutwamu and Blasio Kahungu approached C.W. Curtiss, Superintendent of Police, in the Wandegeya market below Makerere College in Kampala, where he was making a broadcast from his car telling people to go back to work or stay out of town. They were ‘very agitated’ about the use of firearms, and with Curtiss’s assistance went to make a statement to the Resident, but, in that meeting, and a longer conversation with Curtiss, they were told that lethal fire was legal, and that they ‘should quietly start to work among their immediate friends and relations and in this way they could 34 G.W. Peskett, Superintendent of Police, Buganda, Police Memorandum 1945, Vol. II, p. 77, FCO 141/18109, TNAUK. 35 P. Kasirye, Sub Inspector Police, Kampala, Police Memorandum 1945, Vol. II, p. 85, FCO 141/18109, TNAUK. 36 Florence Brisset-Foucault, ‘What Do People Do When They Riot’ (presented at the African Studies Association Annual Meeting, Washington DC, 2012). 37 W. Scott, Chief Inspector of Police, Kampala, Police Memorandum 1945, Vol. II, p. 70, FCO 141/18109, TNAUK.

259

260

Part III: Making Publics

do a lot of good for themselves, their own people and the country’. 38 The leaders of the UAMDA held a meeting with the same goal with the Resident on 19 January after seven had been killed. By that time, all employees had left the Resident’s office, and the Buganda Kingdom Prime Minister had to interpret. According to K.B. Maindi (UAMDA President), they ‘begged that the use of firearms should be stopped forthwith against unarmed Africans, since the Protectorate Government came here merely to protect us’ but the Resident’s only reply was that they should advise people to return to work. 39 The Resident threatened that the Fabian Colonial Bureau might cancel the Union’s affiliation for not calling off the strike: Kivu responded that he would himself write to the Fabian society and explain ‘how the Government had killed harmless strikers who had never done any violence or used intimidation’.40 Writing to Rita Hinden, Secretary of the Fabian Colonial Bureau, four months later, P.L. Musoke described the great shock people had felt to see people shot, and asked whether there would be compensation to the families, or punishment to the shooters.41 Ugandans participated in the protest with the understanding that it was a form of communication among members of a society responsible to see and hear each other; their British interlocutors’ perception that shooting the leaders would cause the masses to give up was entirely misinformed. Burials of the protestors who had been killed built the politics of the whole on a larger scale. The burial of fallen heroes was a key element of the ‘1945 disturbance’ which does not figure in either scholarship or most contemporary accounts. Africans participating and observing the strike were shocked by the shooting of eight strikers, three of whom were killed by policemen, two by special constables, and four by the King’s African Rifles (KAR) outside the Polish detainee camp. They were four Batooro, one Munyarwanda, one Congolese, one Lugbara, and one Muziba. Burying the eight dead strikers, none of whom were Baganda, required finding spaces and authority figures willing to articulate new kinds of allegiances in the act of burial: evidence from the secret depositions supporting the deportation of key chiefs after a political assassination in August 1945 suggests that the burials of strikers became gatherings that asserted the moral value of sacrificing life for a 38 C.V. Curtis, Superintendent of Police, Commandant, Police Training School, Police Memorandum 1945, Vol. II, pp. 113–14, FCO 141/18109, TNAUK. 39 Letter, K.B. Maindi to C.W.W. Greennidge, Secretary of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society and Dr. Rita Hinden, 17 March 1945, Special Collections, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Mss. Brit. Emp s. 365/125/1a. 40 ‘The Life of Kivu’, p. 52. 41 Letter, P.L. Musoke to Dr. Rita Hinden, Kampala, 12 February 1945, Special Collections, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MSS Brit. Emp, 365, Box 125, file 1a.

The Politics of the Whole versus the Politics of the Party in Uganda in the 1940s

Uganda led by Ugandans.42 This might have been a misrepresentation of what happened to impugn the character of leaders the Protectorate tried to target, but Kivu described the burial of the Rwandan protestor conducted by I.K. Musazi’s father as a large gathering which ‘gave the strikers moral strength’.43 In the three successive meetings the protestors held on the grounds of the palace of the Kabaka (the king of Buganda), people took actions that had long been used to make their leaders listen and behave responsibly, and they acted with the expectation that their analysis was appropriate and that it would be heard. People gathered in the courtyard of the palace – where the Lukiiko building was located in the 1940s – on 19 January, returned the next day, and a few days later gathered again in large numbers and refused to leave until they had succeeded in the ousting of the kingdom’s treasurer. At the first meeting, the whole crowd entered the Lukiiko hall, rejecting a request to send two delegates, saying that if they sent only two, those two might be arrested. They overturned the elitist practice of the colonial Lukiiko, insisting on people’s right to be present in the Lukiiko and to be heard in it. Their three chosen delegates spoke about wages (Kayongo), War Bonuses (Gomeri Lwere, Secretary of the Drivers Association), and politics (Musazi). When Serwano Kulubya, the deeply distrusted Chief Finance Minister, tried to respond, the crowd shouted him down until he was silenced. Kiwanuka, the Chief Justice and acting Prime Minister, told them to return the next day to hear the response of the Kabaka, who was away hunting. Later that day, as the Kabaka returned from his hunting trip, the crowd holding the blockade across the road he was travelling ‘stopped him and told him that they were angry with him for seeking his own pleasure when his people were suffering’. According to Kivu, that crowd held up the Kabaka for half an hour.44 Later Kivu saw the Kabaka returning from visiting the Resident – he was having to drive his own car, which indicates that labour – at least the labour of his drivers – was also being withheld from the king.45 By disregarding the instructions of the Lukiiko, shouting down the Prime Minister, refusing to let the Kabaka travel and withdrawing labour from him, the mobilised masses said clearly that their interpretation of political disorder had to be heard. Both the Buganda Kingdom Government and the Protectorate Governor vehemently rejected the protestors’ right to be present in the palace and to speak critically. They called the crowd lawless and rowdy, not because the crowds assembled at the palace actually had been violent 42

43 44 45

Zake, ‘Nsibirwa Assassination Affidavits’, BNA FCO141/18157, TNAUK. ‘The Life of Kivu’ p. 50. ‘The Life of Kivu’ p. 54. ‘The Life of Kivu’ p. 54.

261

262

Part III: Making Publics

or disorderly in the gathering at the palace, but because their assertion of the mutual obligations of rulers and people challenged the colonial order. The British members of the Protectorate police force, who wrote comprehensive narratives of their individual actions and impressions for the Commission of Inquiry, unanimously described the crowd at the palace as orderly. On the third day, when the crowd had demanded the treasurer Kulubya’s resignation, E.J.G. Browne, observed that the crowd was ‘in good humour and not at all antagonistic’.46 Even the British Resident in Buganda, observing events, conveyed to Police Headquarters the information that the crowd at the Lubiri ‘was perfectly quiet and sitting down’ and less than an hour later their patience and polite behaviour was rewarded when it was announced to the crowd that Kulubya had resigned.47 A critical element of a decolonised understanding of Uganda in 1945 is the recognition that the crowd was disciplined: their outrageous offence against public order was their critique of colonial power. Within the politics of the whole, people could remove a leader by withdrawing assent: it is clear that both Buganda Kingdom and Protectorate officials believed the Kabaka was about to be overthrown on 23 January 1945. In four phone calls within half an hour the Kabaka’s Private Secretary reported that ‘the crowd are in the Lukiiko’ and the Omulamuzi (chief judge) was being beaten with sticks, the Resident reported that the acting Katikkiro (Prime Minister) had been seized and asked for the KAR, and the Kabaka’s secretary described an explosion but in a call ten minutes later informed the Governor’s office that the crowd was outside the outer fence, not beating anyone. He explained, ‘The trouble is wages … they are interested in some parts of the Native Government. They wish some changes to take place. The crowd are not all Baganda – mixed’.48 According to Kulubya, the rumour that the treasurer Kulubya had told the Governor that the protestors were like peanut soup, that would boil but cool down quickly helped to rouse the crowd against Kulubya, who was tricked into writing a letter of resignation with the false story that the mob had set the palace on fire in order to get him to resign. When the crowd learned that the Kabaka refused to accept the letter, someone got up on the speaker’s platform and suggested that if the Kabaka ‘did not accept and announce Kulubya’s resignation within 30 minutes, we would depose him’.49 Parents of people in the crowd might have been present in 1888 when Kabaka Mwanga 46 E.J.G. Brown, Assistant Superintendent, Police Training School, Police Memorandum 1945, Vol. II, p. 131, FCO 141/18109, TNAUK. 47 ‘Extracts from Kampala Diary of Events’, p. 153, Police Memorandum 1945, Vol. III, FCO 141/18111, TNAUK. 48 ‘Extracts from Kampala Diary of Events’, p. 153, Police Memorandum 1945, Vol. III, FCO 141/18111, TNAUK. 49 ‘The Life of Kivu’ p. 57.

The Politics of the Whole versus the Politics of the Party in Uganda in the 1940s

was overthrown with the words, ‘All Buganda refuses to take you to Sesse’. The crowd knew this, so did the Kabaka, and the Resident probably knew it as well, and the crowd obtained the Minister’s resignation they sought. A ‘strike’ does not fully represent what happened in the early months of 1945: in town centres, on rural-to-urban roads, on clan lands where elders buried strikers, and in the large, consequential gatherings in front of the palace, people took actions that had deep significance within the politics of the whole, even as these mid-twentieth-­century Ugandans also engaged new circumstances and other political vocabularies. All the actions in the protest required people to make meaning in new situations. Migrant labourers from other regions had been buried in Buganda, but not with honour as heroes of an emerging nation; required things had been withheld from rulers, but those things had not been commodities moving in lorries on tarmacked roads; meetings to decide a course of action had been held, but not by the residents of Mengo/ Kampala convening in a location like the museum. People acted in new contexts, and they sometimes spoke with the confrontational vocabulary of their British interlocutors, but the meaning they made asserted the politics of the whole. The withholding of labour and food, the assertion of connection in the burials, and the effort to create spaces of communication all suggest the expectation that all members of society have the power to act, and their reciprocal interactions create calm good government.

1949: An Insurrection or an Effort to Educate the King?

In 1949 people in Uganda made a peaceful attempt to influence the king using the indigenous political vocabulary of pleading in his courtyard, which only became a general insurrection when the Protectorate police forced people out of the political space that it was their right to occupy. The official commission named it a ‘disturbance’, A.B.K. Kasozi and Jon Earle described the participants as rioters, and Carol Summers and others have called the events an ‘insurrection’. 50 The intention was to compel the king to align more fully with his people, through the action of gathering ‘all of Buganda’ in the mbuga, the courtyard of the palace, and staying there until he learned to listen to his people. It was an attempt to win the king’s allegiance away from the ruling chiefs. 50 D. Kingdon, Report on the Commission of Inquiry into the Disturbances in Uganda during April 1949 (Entebbe: Government Printer, April 1949); A.B.K. Kasozi, Nakanyike Musisi and James Mukooza Sejjengo, Social Origins of Violence in Uganda, 1964–1985 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), p. 67; Earle, Colonial Buganda, pp. 39–43; Summers, ‘Catholic Action’, p. 64.

263

264

Part III: Making Publics

Although Kingdon’s official report claimed that ‘the inner circle of the conspirators’ planned to arouse anger that would lead to violence, a more logical explanation would be that the large scale burning of chiefs’ houses was an angry response to a baton charge at the palace which violated Buganda’s unwritten constitution by driving people away from the king. The violence directed against people with Protectorate connections seems to have been opportunistic, and demonstrates again the almost insurmountable social strains caused by extreme inequality. The gathering that began on 25 April 1949 at the palace of the Kabaka had been well planned. Throughout the period from 1945 to 1949 all kinds of meetings had taken place, in many locations, of many different combinations of people, in organisations with a variety of names, pursuing a variety of strategies to get Government to be more accountable. On 15 April about 300 people assembled at the Kabaka’s Lake (Ndeeba, Kampala) to discuss a plan to bring people to participate in a procession to the Lubiri on 25 April. A typed notice instructed people to bring food and firewood, so that they could stay until the king agreed to their demands: it began with a prayer and ended with ‘long live Kabaka!’ It was posted on trees and circulated, so that the plan was general knowledge. The Resident put pressure on the Kabaka to write a letter saying he would only see delegates, and only 500 people could assemble, and the Protectorate police made plans to prevent a larger gathering. Knowing this, crowds of thousands gathered at the palace at 5:30 am on the appointed day. It is clear that they intended to stay a long time, because they had trucked in mountains of food, and large amounts of cooking utensils and firewood that were later confiscated by the police from the compounds near the palace. 51 Everything about their conduct, as this failed effort at accountability began, shows an intention that the people of the kingdom have to be seen by the king, they have to communicate clearly, and the king has to listen. On 25 April, the crowd expressed frustration at Police attempts to limit their numbers and to prevent speakers from speaking. When the Police backed down, the crowd was eager to hear from its delegates, whose speeches lasted for two hours. They were unwilling to listen to the Katikkiro, and drowned him out (even though he was using a van with sound projection), so that he gave up, and gave the Kabaka’s typed remarks to one of the delegates to read. The crowd refused to leave the Lubiri at the end of the speeches, although the speakers stated that the Kabaka had requested that they leave. That day, the crowd were not violent, but they were not willing to be silenced or pushed out of the king’s courtyard, and they would not listen to the Katikkiro. The people who spent the night in the space were orderly, and in the morning, police reported they were singing hymns. Before 51

Kingdon, Report on the Commission of Inquiry into the Disturbances.

The Politics of the Whole versus the Politics of the Party in Uganda in the 1940s

the police baton charge on 26 April, the second day of the gathering, police reported that the crowd was orderly. 52 The people assembled assumed that people had an obligation to express their concerns to the king, and the king had an obligation to listen. Semakula Mulumba explained this in paragraph 37 of a letter to Governor Hall,

If all the people of Buganda desire to see their Kabaka in connection with a general issue, they assemble on the ‘Mbuga’, and ask the ‘Katikiro’, the Prime Minister to inform the ‘Kabaka’ that all his people assembled on the ‘Mbuga’ desire to see him. Without delay, the Kabaka goes to the ‘Wankaki’ [main gate] to meet the people face to face near the fire-place, ‘Buganda’. 53

To show that they represented ‘all of Buganda’ two women and two men represented the people gathered in the courtyard to the king – one indication, among many, that in Ugandans’ thinking, the obligation to exercise political voice rested with everyone. In their 25 April meeting, the delegates argued with the Kabaka about what it meant to have representative government, and how representatives and people must behave towards each other. This was the thrust of the first three points they make – they want a different kind of government, because the chiefs and others in the Lukiiko are not representing them. They say they are outnumbered in the Lukiiko and their voices cannot be heard. People gathered at the courtyard of the palace also expected the king to develop, to learn how to be a good king. There is some direct evidence of this, for example, in the police reports of rumours and spies at political meetings who say that people say the Kabaka is young and he can learn to be a better king. A translation of the Uganda Star version of the meeting in the migrated archives provides indirect evidence of people’s aspiration of the king learning to be responsive, as it reports a meeting with quite different dynamics. The conclusion of the meeting, according to the Uganda Star, was that the Kabaka told the delegates ‘All the demands you have submitted on behalf of my people will be considered, and I shall do something about them. But it is important that you let the people know that I must act in accordance with the constitution laid down in the Uganda Agreement of 1900, which I must maintain.’ The Kabaka’s proclamation a few days later, in which he called the people who had burned chiefs’ houses ‘pests’ and ordered that ‘He who hesitates to use his every endeavour towards bringing these people to justice is being unfaithful to me; he who fails loyally to defend his Chief is likewise failing in loyalty to me’ suggests that the king’s actual words were 52 Diary of the Commissioner of Police, p. 6, Police Memorandum 1949, Vol. II, FCO 141/18133, TNAUK. 53 Letter, Semakula Mulumba to Governor Hall, p. 37, FCO 141/18185, TNAUK.

265

266

Part III: Making Publics

probably autocratic and not conciliatory. 54 The Uganda Star’s version of a responsive, caring Kabaka held up the qualities people hoped the Kabaka would learn, through the polite insistence of ‘all of Buganda’ gathered outside his palace. The delegates hoped to meet with him again on 26 April. The Kingdon report version of the meeting obscures the political analysis of the delegation, and makes them sound deliberately rebellious. Being present in the mbuga was a dimension of the unwritten constitution – people felt they had a right to be there, and the police baton charge clearing the area at about 9:00 AM on 26 April was a profound violation of the unwritten constitution of the kingdom. At 6:00 AM there was a crowd of 500 quietly sitting, with some singing the anthems of the farmers movement written by Joyce Mukalasi, the leader of the women’s section of the farmers’ organisation. 55 At 8:22 AM, Curtis, the Chief of Police, announced that the numbers were too many and they had to disperse. Soon after, two polite ex-askaris (ex-soldiers) present a typed document that requested all police officers to sign their names and state by whose orders people were being prevented from seeing their Kabaka. Using the technologies of literacy, people sought to dramatise the rights that were being violated. The announcement that the crowd was too large and would have to disperse was greeted by shouts and jeers from the crowd. At 9:55 AM the police made a baton charge, people responded with the sound of alarm, and there was a general battle of people with stones versus police with batons; eventually the police drove people out of the courtyard, they retreated to the lake, where roaring and cheering could be heard about noon, labour immediately stopped working, and after that, the burning of chief’s compounds began, and lasted for three days. 56 The angry and frustrated leaders of the effort gave instructions to steal vehicles, and petrol, and burn the houses of chiefs. The groups that set out, in stolen lorries, to undertake the burning of ssaza (county) chiefs’ houses sought other targets when they were successfully turned away from the ssaza chiefs’ compounds. Their targets were people who had some kind of association with the Protectorate. The two days of violence in May and then the months of retribution, can only be seen as 54 ‘Message from H.H. the Kabaka to the Chiefs and all the people of Buganda’, 28 April 1949, in D. Kingdon, Report on the Commission of Inquiry into the Disturbances in Uganda during April 1949 (Entebbe: Government Printer, April 1949) p. 50. 55 Police reports describe people singing hymns, but Mukalasi’s songs inspired ‘a vision of a new future’: George W. Shepherd, They Wait in Darkness, republished as The Early Struggle for Freedom and Unity in Uganda: I. K. Musazi and the Farmer’s Cooperative Movement (New York: J. Day, 1955), pp. 33, 55. 56 Diary of the Commissioner of Police, Police Memorandum, Vol. II, p. 5, FCO 141/18133, TNAUK.

The Politics of the Whole versus the Politics of the Party in Uganda in the 1940s

class warfare. First, it was the poor burning the houses of chiefs and the extremely rich, and then, in the period of retribution, it was the most powerful chiefs attacking the financially autonomous emerging middle class. 57 Class warfare only started because the Protectorate authorities egregiously violated the unwritten constitution of Buganda.

Conclusion

The excessive, paranoid response by Governor Hall to the efforts towards accountable governance in 1945 and 1949 substantially hindered Uganda’s path towards independence. Uganda lost the insight, vision, and commitment to good government of the true patriots Hall deported, including the important Buganda Royal Prince Suna and the long-serving Saza (provincial) Chief S. Wamala, both of whom died in detention. If colonial authorities had been able to see twenty years into the future, they might have valued the openings for nation-building offered by the 1940s ‘disturbances’, in their employment of a highly diffuse, multi-centred practice of power, and in their expectation of people’s capacity to claim political accountability from their rulers, and in their attempt to assert the mutual responsibility of the people of the polity. Unlike the form of parliamentary democracy with conflict among parties that emerged from the Lancaster House negotiations, the 1940s efforts (successful in 1945 and not successful in 1949) were built on an indigenous political logic. Ugandans in the 1940s argued that rulers and ruled were part of a social whole: they had mutual obligations that could and would be met. Some of their political ideas and strategies, such as the responsibility and right of people of all ranks to take action, did not find expression in the independence-era constitution. The 1940s political innovation and the powerful aspirations for political agency, which were, according to police reports, multi-ethnic, mean that the Ganda conservatism of the 1950s was not inevitable, it has to be explained. An effort to decolonise knowledge regarding the 1940s requires looking beyond the perceptions and explanations offered by elite colonial authorities, indigenous rules, or their opponents, the elite, well-­ educated Ugandans whose statements in eloquent English and Luganda have been retrievable in archives. In the actions of participants in the so-called ‘disturbances’ of the 1940s in Kampala and elsewhere, we do not find old people holding to tradition and young people longing 57 The evidence of this in dozens of letters to D.K. Sekkuma itemising losses, which Sekkuma had solicited in Gambuze in 1952, deserves greater attention from scholars of Uganda. Papers of the Fabian Colonial Bureau, MSS Brit. Emp. s. 365/127/1, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

267

268

Part III: Making Publics

for modernity or a bataka party which operated using a clan logic in opposition to a bakungu group which accepted a royal logic. These oversimplifications and distortions promoted the interests of some indigenous elites and hid the negative consequences of colonial interference. Perhaps Protectorate authorities saw bounded interest groups in conflict with each other because that was all that they themselves knew. Unfortunately, the erroneous dichotomies that have made their way into scholarship and popular understanding obscure our ability to see the complexity and sophistication of the conception of politics Ugandans exercised in withdrawing their labour to make claims of reciprocity in 1945, and in gathering at the Kabaka’s palace to educate the king in 1949.

12 Decolonising Identity and Citizenship: Revisiting the Historicity of the Indian Question in Uganda ASIIMWE B. GODFREY

During the colonisation of Uganda, the British brought Indians who worked as soldiers, support staff and indentured labourers to facilitate the process.1 Their subsequent settlement was encouraged by colonial officials, notably Sir Harry Johnston. By 1926 when the creation of Uganda as a new country was completed, Indians had been associated with its formation and transformation. 2 However, their Ugandan citizenship remained contestable, and Afro-Asian relations were interspersed by suspicions, tensions, contestations, and direct and indirect struggles. Yet both Indians and Africans had for long been British subjects in a newly created Uganda. So, why were Afro-Asian relations characterised by contestations? Why did the citizenship of minority immigrant groups like the Banyarwanda, Ja-Luo (from Kenya) and Indians become an issue at the dawn of independence to the extent of expelling them? Why were generations of Indians excluded from Uganda’s Constitutions, which disqualified them from the superior citizenship by birth, yet their residence predated the completion of Uganda as a country?3 In East Africa, Indians were also referred to as Asians, and the two appellatives were used interchangeably (see S. Abidi, ‘The Return of Indians to Uganda’, Africa Quarterl, 36:3 (1996), 45–58 (46). They mostly originated from the British Indian sub-continent that included what are now known as Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. By 1911, they totalled 1,852 men and 364 women, and often brought their family and caste relations from India as trade assistants (M. Mamdani, Politics and Class Formation in Uganda, London: Heinemann, 1976), pp. 69, 80. 2 See Godfrey B. Asiimwe. ‘Migrations and Identity of Indian-Pakistani Minorities in Uganda’ in Michel Adam (ed.) Indian Africa: Minorities of Pakistani Origin in Eastern Africa (Dar-es-Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers 2015), pp. 317–50; Edgar C. Taylor, ‘Asians and Africans in Ugandan Urban Life, 1959–1972’, A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Anthropology and History) in the University of Michigan, 2016. 3 See Uganda 1962, 1967 and particularly the new 1995 Constitutions and its appended National Schedule. 1

270

Part III: Making Publics

To answer these questions, it is important to delve into the historicity of the ‘Indian Question’ in Uganda, and decolonise mainstream commonplace explanations. The contextual historical political-economy dynamics that constructed and reproduced identity controversies of minority immigrant groups like the Ugandan Indians, Banyarwanda, and Ja-Luo were often obscured by mainly ahistorical explanations.4 Asiimwe outlined some of the dominant discourses that sought to explain the Indian factor in Uganda.5 Some narratives maintain that Indians were mere victims of Idi Amin’s dictatorship; however, there was support for group re-alignments and some sections of society continue to be apprehensive about the return of Indians. Other discourses foreground the closed nature of Indian society; their association with the colonial project and aloofness from general socio-political undertakings like the independence struggles. Other arguments attribute tensions to concerns about the spectacular success and dominance of an ‘alien’ minority group at the expense of ‘citizens’.6 In this context, ‘anti-alien extremism’ is sometimes equated with xenophobia/racism. In Uganda, some narratives advanced the pre-ordained capabilities to explain the success of Indians compared to ‘natives’. These underline the frugality, discipline, and business acumen of early Indians like Alidina Lalji Visram and the petty traders (dukawallahs). Ramchandani maintains that the Indian duka had penetrated even the remotest areas of the Protectorate such as Karamoja.7 Sherali reiterates how 85 per cent of the Asians sat in their small shops from dusk to dawn.8 The presumably industrious Asians were compared to the so-called ‘indolent natives’, who often failed in business allegedly due to poor acumen, laziness, extravagance and primordial polygamy, high birth rate and communalism. The Asians were considered to be even more successful than the high-cost luxurious Europeans, which presumably enabled the expelled Indian refugees to excel in countries like Canada and Britain. Conversely, counter arguments depicted migrant merchant groups like Asians as crafty and manipulative, hence their success. Such arguments ignore historically entrenched structural enabling or disabling factors with regard to Afro-Asian positioning and subsequent relations. Accordingly, this chapter seeks to decolonise them on the basis of an historical approach, deciphering the political economy of coloni4 See Simone Abdoumaliq, ‘African Migration and the Remaking of Inner-City Johannesburg’, in A. Morris and A. Bouillon (eds), African Immigration to South Africa: Francophone Migration of the 1990s (Pretoria: Protea & Ifas, 2001), pp. 150–70; R.R. Ramchandani, Uganda Asians: The End of an Enterprise (Bombay: United Asia Publications, 1976); Sherali Jeffer in The Weekly Observer, 2 (020), August 4–10, 2005. 5 Godfrey B. Asiimwe, ‘Migrations and Identity’, pp. 318–21. 6 See Abdoumaliq, ‘African Migration and the Remaking’. 7 R.R. Ramchandani, Uganda Asians, p. 86. 8 Sherali Jeffer in The Weekly Observer, p. 33.

Decolonising Citizenship, Identity Contestations, and the Indian Question

al and postcolonial contextual policies that shaped the nationality, identity, and citizenship configurations of the new Uganda ‘nation’. There is a need to decolonise conformist ahistorical and diversionary knowledge that is replete with cover-ups and projections of policy virtues. Decolonisation of knowledge will help to unravel factors that constituted the spin-offs of Afro-Asian contestations; the question of post-­i ndependence nationhood; the subsequent expulsion of Indians and their return; and intermittent Afro-Asian contestations. Decolonisation of knowledge will enable holistic understanding of Afro-Asian relations which were characterised by intermittent contestations, the Asian citizenship question, expulsion, and strategies to enhance sustainable inter-group relations.

Conceptualising the Indian Question

The question of minority immigrants like Ugandan Indians is best understood from state-society relations, often circumscribed by interests. During the colonial era, the Indian Question is best situated in the colonial project that was predicated on the twin policies of indirect rule and divide and rule. These fermented divisions and intermittent frictions in Afro-Asian relations. Afro-Asian contestations became prominent during the 1945, 1946 and 1949 ‘riots’, where Indians and colonial chiefs were targeted.9 In 1954, and from 1959 to 1960, Africans organised a trade boycott against Asians’ shops. The colonial legacy of group re-alignments and resultant different identity consciousness and contestations unfolded into independence politics. The colonial-time Afro-Asian constructs bedecked nationalistic struggles and post-independence political interests. The incoming ‘indigenous nationalist’ leaders amplified the Indian’s ‘alien’ construct to serve identity and citizenship consciousness, ostensibly in pursuit of the ‘nation-building’ project. Under the banner of ‘nation-building’, there were designs of citizen making and un-making for repositioning and interests of redistribution. Against this backdrop, independence leaders pursued group re-alignments to reverse the colonial unequal placement legacy. Subsequently, Ugandan Indians oscillated between statelessness under indirect rule and ‘non-citizens’ after independence; and between political and economic ‘convenient’ citizens and refugees after expulsion. The chapter revisits systemic factors in the colonial and postcolonial architecture and highlights the political interests and resultant configurations along identity distillations for political 9 See H. Campbell, ‘The Political Struggles of Africans to Enter the Market Place in Uganda 1900–1970’, M.A. Thesis, Makerere University, Kampala, unpublished, 1975; Gardner Thompson, ‘Colonialism in Crisis: The Uganda Disturbances of 1945’, African Affairs 91:365 (1992), 605–24.

271

272

Part III: Making Publics

expediency in building the new Ugandan ‘nation’. It is equally important to deconstruct the conventional knowledge of the post-­i ndependence state-society relations and its bearing on minority immigrant groups like the Ugandan Asians. Accordingly, this chapter will foreground the impact of colonial and post-independence policies that served specific political interests at the expense of inclusive Uganda nation-building and Indian’s rights.

The Colonial Period

For political expediency, the colonial state and its policies like divide and rule and indirect rule constructed the immigrant Indians as ‘alien’ and superior to the ‘indigenous’, which preciptated the ‘we’ vs ‘they’ dichotomy. This served the colonial interest of ‘managing’ the two sets of its subjects while fermenting identity consciousness that spiralled into persistent Afro-Indian contestations. The twin policies undermined collective community membership bonded by shared colonial experience, with evolving strands of associational moral imperatives and obligations for the common good. While different African ethnicities were loosely stitched by the commonality of indigeneity, Indians continued to be perceived as ‘alien’ and ‘closed’. The policies weakened the evolution of collectivity in a Ugandan political entity with shared identity until the shift to unitarism under Governor Andrew Cohen in the 1950s when independence was imminent. Likewise, the supremacist doctrinaire begat constructs of pre-­ ordained social hierarchies and occupational capabilities, which yielded the desired antagonistic relations that enabled easy management of colonial subjects. In this vein, groups like the ‘coddled’ Baganda and the so-called ‘superior’ Indian race were pitted against fellow subjects. Such groups that had the potential to provide leadership were portrayed by the colonial and Milton Obote’s post-independence governments as the real problem. This stance served to sustain colonialism and Obote’s post-independence rhetoric of nationalism. With independence on the horizon, there was a challenge of building the ‘nation’ from various entities that had remained different due to indirect rule. In this context, Indians came with the colonial-time constructed label of ‘aliens’ and became vulnerable.

Debunking Colonialism’s Dichotomy of Subjects

Colonial officials encouraged Indians who had been brough as indentured labourers for the ‘Uganda Railway’, as soldiers, and as support staff to settle in the new Uganda Protectorate. Therefore, from the onset, Indians were convenient subjects for colonial interests. As a result, they

Decolonising Citizenship, Identity Contestations, and the Indian Question

equally bore the brunt of exploitation in their intermediary positioning and consequences of executing repugnant policies. Nonetheless, colonial officials were also conscious of the potential of powerful minority groups such as the Indians or dominant ‘natives’ such as the Baganda; hence, they adopted the policies of indirect rule and divide and rule.10 These twin policies, which aimed at easy ‘management’ of colonial subjects, shaped the Buganda and Indian questions; contentious AfroAsian and Buganda versus Uganda relations. Indirect rule, which was to administer ‘natives’ through their ‘indigenous’ institutions and territories, presumably to reduce administrative costs, yielded significant results. It tagged indigeneity to citizenship, canalised differentiation of ‘natives’ on their ‘ancestral’ land in their respective ‘tribal’ units and enabled unequal placement between ‘races’ and ‘native tribes’. Implicit in indirect rule was that indigeneity/ancestry was later to take precedence over residence in defining citizenship. As a result, although Indians had resided in Uganda as it was formed, they had no ‘traditional/indigenous’ institutions or territory through which they could be governed as per stipulations of indirect rule. Without ‘indigenous institutions/territory’, Indians were constructed as ‘aliens’, and by implication, qualified as ‘non-citizens’. Therefore, the enduring impact of indirect rule was that it circumscribed Indian’s ‘alien’ identity and citizenship question in the emerging ‘nation’. Indirect rule was augmented by divide and rule, which led to divisions between the different ‘tribes’ and the Indian ‘race’. Divide and rule was laced with a tinge of thinly veiled supremacist doctrine that construed Indians as superior versus ‘native tribes’ that were classified as backward11. Since ‘tribe’ connoted a lower stage of development, Indians and White settlers were constructed as higher, hence ‘races’.12 Ipso facto, divide and rule constructed hierarchies with the desired divisionism, enhanced identity configurations and insular consciousness. In colonial Uganda, dichotomous distillations were along ‘races’ versus ‘native tribes’; ‘refined’ Hamites versus Negros; northern ‘martial’ versus southern ‘weak’ tribes; southern cash crop growers and civil servants versus northern labour reserves and forces; developed centralised kingdoms versus ‘inferior’ stateless societies; and native cash crop growers versus Indian traders.13 This was aggravated Refer to the case of Baganda in Godfrey B. Asiimwe, (Mis)management of Sub-Nationalism and Diversity in ‘Nations’: The case of Buganda in Uganda, 1897–1980, Kampala: Makerere University Press, 2022. 11 See Henry Maine, Ancient Law, its Connection with the Early History of Society and its Relation to Modern Ideas (London: John Murray, 1861). 12 See M. Mamdani, ‘African States, Citizenship and War: A Case Study’, International Affairs 78:3 (2002), 493–506. 13 See H.S. Morris, The Indians in Uganda: Caste and Sect in a Plural Society (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), p. 11. 10

273

274

Part III: Making Publics

by differentiated and unequal placement for opportunities, access and control of resources. Although dominant colonial ideology justified identity differentiation, the raison d’être was dividing subjects for easy management by undermining any possible alliances against the colonial establishment. Consistent with supremacism, the presumably less developed natives were restricted to cash crop cultivation on their ancestral land. Few exceptions and from the southern region were in the lower stratum of the civil service. In contrast, Indians were positioned in the intermediary echelons of the civil service and commercial sectors. A handful of Africans who ascended to the middle civil service were deliberately paid less than their Indian counterparts who were considered a race, hence ostensibly occupying a higher status than the natives. In the commercial sector, Indians were positioned as agents for buying and selling import and export commodities for European monopolies. The colonial ideology justified the differentiation on the pretext that Indians were ‘more skilled and efficient’, hence, more ‘superior’ in administration and trade. Conversely, ‘natives’ allegedly had ‘comparative advantage’ for manual work, thus best suited for cultivation. The supremacist trajectory pampered specific potentially powerful groups like Baganda and Indians to preclude their potential leadership of fellow subjects against colonial rule. Indians had been colonised by 1850, thus likely to use their exposure and ‘skills’ to mobilise fellow subjects. Placing Indians in the presumably ‘privileged’ position intended to deploy them at the front-line as policy implementers and commodity buying and selling agents, hence in direct engagement with Africans. Therefore, they would be perceived as the real oppressors thereby serving as ‘shock-absorbers’ from reprisals emanating from adverse colonial policies. Furthermore, blocking Indians from land and agriculture also prevented their integration with Africans, which served to undercut possible unity of purpose among different subjects due to shared-experiences of oppression and exploitation that would lead to a backlash of reprisals against the colonial establishment. The twin policies undermined cohesions and generated inter-group tensions and contestations that escalated throughout the colonial and post-­i ndependence periods. To colonialism, this led to the desired anti-­ Indian and anti-Baganda disquiet, which was suitably diversionary from the colonial off-screen actors.14 The colonial state enacted specific policies to effect the division of its African and Indian subjects. A combined regime of policies, notably taxation, licensing, and regulations controlled the growth of African entrepreneurial classes, while restricting Indians to the commercial, 14 Also refer to the case of Baganda in Asiimwe, (Mis)management of Sub-­ Nationalism.

Decolonising Citizenship, Identity Contestations, and the Indian Question

processing, and produce-marketing sectors.15 The 1938 Trading Ordinance restricted Asians to urban centres, ostensibly to ‘protect Africans’ from Asian competition in the countryside. As a result, Indians stayed in the urban centres while Africans stayed in the rural areas, on their ‘ancestral land’. The notion of ‘protecting’ had the desired effect of constructing ‘natives’ as potentially vulnerable ‘victims’ of Indians. The deflecting intent was to obscure the real colonial exploiter and oppressor, who were now projected as the ‘protectors’ and ‘arbiters’. This amplified the separation and reinforced the Africans’ perceptions and stereotyping of Indians as ‘exploiters’. In this case, exploitation was given a race rather than a class identity.16 Indian’s urban residence and burial in municipal cemeteries due to lack of a traditional unit through which they were ‘indirectly ruled’ gave credibility to their portrayal as a ‘rootless’, ‘alien’ race of questionable citizenship. Relatedly, the 1938 Trading Ordinance had a knockon effect of heightening property prices in urban centres. It became expensive for Africans to acquire urban premises for enterprise while making Asians appear privileged town dwellers where all the facilities and amenities were allocated.17 Lop-sided narratives eschewed the effects of the deliberately instituted constraining frameworks. Since Asians did not possess land for agriculture, they had to perfect trade. Initially, government pursued a non-interventionist policy that enabled some Indians to operate at will and accumulate through contradictions of monopsony that were replete with transaction irregularities.18 Jamal succinctly notes: ‘The government encouraged them at first – or, at least, did not interfere with 15 Godfrey B. Asiimwe, The Impact of Post-Colonial Policy Shifts in Coffee Marketing at Local Level in Uganda: A Case Study of Mukono District, 1962–1998 (Maastricht: Shaker Publishing, 2002). 16 Colonialism used Asians, but sometimes projected them as bad before Africans, rendering them scapegoats, which served to undermine any possible alliance with Africans. See Danson Kahyana, ‘Narrating National Identity: Fiction, Citizenship and the Asian Experience in East Africa’, Democracy & Development, Journal of West African Affairs 4(1); and J.S. Mangat, The History of Indians in East Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). 17 Dent Ocaya-Lakidi, ‘Black Attitudes to the Brown and White Colonisers of East Africa’, in Michael Twaddle (ed.), Expulsion of a Minority: Essays on Ugandan Indians (London: Athlone Press for the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 1975), pp. 93–97 (p. 93). 18 Ignatius Musaazi narrated: ‘A habitual Asian cheater in Bombo was caught short weighing an illiterate peasant by 7 Ibs. The vigilant UAFU members trapped this Asian and called the police. After investigations the case was taken to court, but was then thrown out, and the members of the UAFU were charged with trespassing on the property of an Asian’ (Musaazi to Campbell, in Campbell, ‘The Political Struggles of Africans’, p. 157).

275

276

Part III: Making Publics

them and that was all they asked’.19 Meanwhile, the African entrepreneurial class which had accelerated during the preceding mercantile era was systematically suffocated through the colonial apparatus. Some Baganda landlords had also accumulated capital from land dues and often transferred proceeds to start or grow businesses. But under the 1912 provisions of the Trade Licensing Ordinance, no African was given a licence.20 By legislation, Africans were forbidden to own cotton ginneries. In the early 1930s, some Africans tried to set up their own ginneries, and they were told that ‘they were inexperienced and incapable of entrepreneurship’ and ‘eager to run before they could walk’.21 Yoshida and Belshaw note that when Robusta coffee was brought under Native Produce Marketing in 1936, both curing and marketing were monopolised. Buying centres were listed and exclusive licenses were given to A. Bouman and Co. and Jamal Ramji & Co. 22 The Credit to Natives (Restriction) Ordinance discouraged bank loans to Africans.23 Meanwhile, Asian entrepreneurs easily accessed credit, loans, and overdrafts from institutions like the National Bank of India. When a few Africans managed to make inroads as petty retail/ itinerant traders, the Uganda Chamber of Commerce demanded controls of the itinerant traders.24 By 1952, whereas African traders were 69 per cent of all traders, they handled only 27 per cent of retail trade. It was estimated that 5,227 Asian traders had an annual turnover of £28.4 million (£5,433 per trader), whereas 11,634 African traders had a turn­over of £10.6 million (£911 per trader).25 Ocaya-Lakidi elaborates: ‘But in Uganda, Africans, far from being given special support, were discouraged and restricted in economic entrepreneurship. At the same time Africans saw protected Asians getting rich, but rarely saw the supreme manipulator behind the scene: the colonial government.’26 By the 1920s, the colonial policies had yielded the desired hierarchy, fomented multiple inter-racial tensions and contestations and divided the two colonial subjects. Indians and Africans separately engaged the colonial state for their own interests. When the Legislative Council (LegCo) was established in 1921, Indians separately demanded representation. When government allocated them one seat, Indians who 19 Vali Jamal, ‘Indians in Uganda, 1880–1972: Inequality and Expulsion’, The Economic History Review, Second Series, xxix:4 (1976), 602–16 (603). 20 Ramchandani, Uganda Asians, p. 92. 21 C. Ehrich, ‘The Uganda Economy,1903–1945’, in V. Harlow and E.M. Chilver (eds), History of East Africa, Vol. 2, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965, p.467. 22 In Mamdani, Politics and Class Formation, p.106. 23 Yash Tandon, ‘Problems of a Displaced Minority: The New Position of East Africa’s Indians’, Report, 16, London: Minority Rights Group, 1973, p. 10. 24 See Mamdani, Politics, p.165. 25 Vali Jamal, ‘Indians…’ p. 613. 26 Ocaya-Lakidi, ‘Black Attitudes’, p. 93.

Decolonising Citizenship, Identity Contestations, and the Indian Question

demanded equal representation with Europeans rejected it until on 26 May 1926, when Chrunabai Jekabhai Amin took it up. Indians separately protested again in 1929, and a second Indian LegCo member was appointed in 1933.27 It was not until Africans rioted in 1945 against the colonial establishment, targeting the ‘exploitative and privileged’ Asians and African comprador chiefs that African representatives were nominated to the LegCo.28 Africans had to riot again in 1949 to be allowed to market their produce.

Foundations of Afro-Indian Contestations

The skewed arrangements that emanated from colonial policies shaped Afro-Indian relations in Uganda. There was an increase of group consciousness, contestations, and struggles against the colonial establishment and its perceived associates like the Indians and comprador chiefs. Owing to the separation, Indian-African contacts were more in sites of unequal power relations like workplaces, the market and Indian households where contestations arose.29 In the Civil Service, as early as March 1918, eighteen African clerks and interpreters petitioned government for stabilised terms of service and equal payment with their counterpart Asian staff. 30 In trade and produce-marketing spaces, African producers encountered Asian traders in an arena that was brimming with business irregularities. These were accentuated by the monopoly framework and controlled prices, which increased during the Bulk Purchase Scheme of the Second World War, and in economic recession. Subsequently, a host of stereotypes evolved and were reproduced by lack of interaction, thus fuelling contestations. 31 Africans’ continued protests climaxed with the 1945 and 1949 riots. 32 African leaders formed organisations that demanded access to credit, fair producer prices, and participation in the marketing sector. 33 27 Wild Report, in Grace Ibingira, The Forging of an African Nation (New York: Viking Press, 1973), p. 110. 28 On 4 December 1945, the first Africans to join the LegCo were sworn in. Michael Earnest Kawalya Kaggwa, the Katikkiro (Prime Minister) of Buganda; Petero Nyangabyaki, the Katikkiro of Bunyoro and Yekonia Zirabamuzaale, Secretary General of Busoga; Isaac Okello, ‘A Look at the History of Uganda’s Parliament’, https://parliamentwatch.ug/blogs [accessed 12 July 2022]. 29 Asiimwe, ‘Migrations and Identity, p. 322. 30 Nizar Motani, ‘The Ugandan Civil Service and the Asian Problem’, in Michael Twaddle (ed.), Expulsion of a Minority; Commonwealth Papers, pp. 98–111 (1975), p. 100. Petitioners included Joswa Kamulegeya, Sepiriya Kadumukasa, and Joseph Bampade. 31 For such stereotypes, see Ocaya-Lakidi, ‘Black Attitudes’, p. 95. 32 See Morris, The Indians, p. 512; Motani, ‘The Ugandan Civil Service’. 33 Such leaders and organisations were the Young Baganda Association and

277

278

Part III: Making Publics

During the 1945 and 1949 riots, Indians and comprador chiefs were the major targets. 34 Thompson enlightens thus: ‘The position of Indians as retailers was resented by Africans, especially at a time of rising prices’. 35 Governor Hall noted: ‘Attacks on Indians and Indian shops were common enough to be termed “typical”’. 36 For the 1949 riots, Thompson recorded some of the attacks on Indians as follows:

On Tuesday 16, … Indians were assaulted and police stoned … During the week there was further trouble in Buganda: at the Indian-owned sugar plantations and factory at Lugazi … and Masaka … where Indians were attacked … One Indian was killed when a mob attacked his lorry outside Kampala … Four were killed in the Koja incident; a Mutoro was shot in Kampala after a crowd attacked Indian houses. 37

Amid uncertainties as a result of intensifying struggles, the British Government passed the 1948 British Nationality Act under which some Indians acquired British passports-cum-‘citizenship’. However, this provided a pretext for ‘nationalistic’ politicians to conveniently label them ‘non-citizens’. Given the persistent struggles, the colonial state yielded concessions, which indicated that self-rule was inevitable. More Africans obtained trading licenses; in fact, in 1953, they were reportedly 12,000 constituting 68 per cent of the total number of traders. 38 In addition, the government tabled a Bill to allow African co-operative-like organisations to operate; however, it drew fervent protests from Europeans and Indians. 39 It was noted that the loudest opposition to the Bill came from the Indian Merchants’ Chamber; the Indian Member of the LegCo, Sir Amer Maini; the Central Council of Indian Associations in Uganda; the Uganda Cotton Association; the Indian Association of Kampala and Jinja; and all organisational representatives of Indian trading and ginning interests. ‘With one voice, they declared as “premature” the setting up of African co-operatives and opposed any hint of state assistance to them’.40 Co-operatives, Musa Kukasa of the Uganda Growers’ Cooperative, Neneza O. and E.B.N. Bungo of the Buganda Growers’ and Agriculturists’ Society, Bamuta of Bamuta Cotton Company, Sulimani Gyagenda, Erisa Kasimbe, Miti, and Mukubira who founded the Baganda Merchants’ Association. 34 Morris, The Indians, p. 512; Motani, ‘The Ugandan Civil Service’. 35 Thompson, ‘Colonialism in Crisis, p. 621. 36 Hall in Thompson, ‘Colonialism in Crisis’, p. 621. 37 Thompson, ‘Colonialism in Crisis’, pp. 606–08. 38 Most of these were petty traders; more than 80% earning less than UShs 1,000 net profit per annum, and depended on the Asian wholesalers and suppliers. 39 See H. Campbell, ‘The Political Struggles of Africans to Enter the Market Place in Uganda 1900 40 Maini petitions, in M. Mamdani, Politics, p. 213.

Decolonising Citizenship, Identity Contestations, and the Indian Question

Such vehement Indian protests to concessions for Africans revealed the ruinous success of the colonial divide-and-rule policy. Unfortunately, these re-enforced perceptions of Asians as selfish, against African interests, thus in cohort with ‘oppressors and exploiters’. Subsequently, radical elements of the African leadership mobilised masses against the Indians. Augustine Kamya formed the Uganda National Movement (UNM), which in 1954 and from 1959 to 1960 organised trade boycotts against non-African goods and called on Africans to buy from African-­ dominated suburb centres like Katwe and Wandegeya. The schism in the independence struggle widened as one trajectory turned against Indians. When intimidation and violence against Indians escalated, the colonial government played the ‘honest arbiters’ to protect Indians by arresting many UNM leaders.41 Therefore, at the height of independence struggles, Africans and Indians remained disunited, indicating the fruition of the divide-and-rule policy in staving off a united front. Indeed, Indians were potential independence struggle leaders given the invaluable inspiration from India’s 1947 independence success. This was because they were together with Africans, colonial subjects, simply in the service of the colonial enterprise. As subjects, Indians also engaged the colonial establishment. As earlier noted, Indians engaged the colonial state for equal representation to the Legislative Council, when it was established in 1921. However, due to divide and rule, Indians separately demanded representation. Furthermore, the Indian’s passive demeanour gave credence to the African perception that they were for long associated with the colonial establishment. This subsequently became a justification for post-independence re-alignment to reverse the skewed structures against the ‘indigenous’ who were considered the ‘legitimate citizens’.

Independence and Re-Alignments

In the post-independence period, citizen-state relations were often characterised by documentation, certification, classification, and construction of identities.42 In the ‘nation-building’ project of new states like Uganda, citizen classification engendered citizen ‘making’ and ‘unmaking’, hierarchies, marginalisations. Such was explicit in 41 For the arrest of UNM leaders, see Edgar C. Taylor, ‘Asians and Africans in Ugandan Urban Life, 1959–1972’, A Dissertation in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Anthropology and History) in the University of Michigan, 2016, 109–10. 42 V. Chhotray and F. McConnell, ‘Certification of Citizenship: The History, Politics and Materiality of Identity Documentation in South Asian States and Diasporas’, Contemporary South Asia 26:2 (2018), 111–26.

279

280

Part III: Making Publics

Uganda’s post-independence citizenship policies.43 As the new country continued to define nationality and the superior status of citizenship by birth on the basis of indigeneity, migrant groups like Indians, Banyarwanda, Ja-Luo faced uncertainty, which escalated into exclusions and even expulsions. While the process legitimised and bestowed the superior citizenship by birth to the ‘indigenous’, it invariably ramified identities, status and rights of groups that were categorised as ‘non-­ indigenous’, hence separating and excluding the ‘aliens’. Accordingly, Uganda’s new post-independence government pursued anti ‘non-­ citizen’ policies and rhetoric that beleaguered immigrant minority groups like the Ja-Luo and Indians. The Ja-Luo who originated from Kenya were expelled by the Milton Obote-led Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) government during the late 1960s. The first UPC government demanded the registration of Asians as citizens, after which they were expelled en masse by Idi Amin in August 1972. During the 1980s, the second UPC government expelled the Banyarwanda.44 With regard to Indians, Milton Obote’s first UPC government prioritised ‘Africanisation/Ugandanisation’ in reversing the colonially instituted asymmetries that favoured the ‘alien’ Indians. Yet, after the collapse of the UPC and Kabaka Yyeka political alliance, Obote reached out to Indians which, however, relegated them to ‘convenient citizens’. This was followed by Idi Amin’s bellicose expulsion of Indians. During the early 1980s under the second UPC government, Indians trickled back, albeit under constraining conditions. Many Indians returned during the National Resistance Movement (NRM) regime, but amid some lingering antipathies. It was exertion of the international pressure, notably the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, that accelerated the increased return of Ugandan Indians. However, the return of Ugandan Indians was marred by intermittent direct and indirect Afro-Asian contestations. On 12 April 2007, spontaneous riots engulfed Kampala, and Indians were targeted.45 43 See Uganda Citizenship Act, 1962; Uganda 1962, 1967 and 1995 Constitutions. 44 Joe Oloka-Onyango, ‘From Expulsion to Exclusion; Revisiting the Citizenship Conundrum for Migrant Communities in Uganda’. Kampala: Paper for the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) Symposium on Citizenship and Constitutionalism in Uganda, 18 July 2015. 45 Government planned to give 7,100 hectares of Mabira tropical forest to the Sugar Corporation of Uganda Limited (SCOUL) in Lugazi, east of Kampala, owned by the Mehta family. Rioters were against the continuous preferential donation of concessions and resources like land to foreign investors, including returned Uganda Indians like Mehta. Indians took refuge at the Central Police Station as rioters shouted at them to ‘return home’, which escalated into the gruesome mob lynching of Devang Rawal, a returnee from Gujarat. See ‘Body of Lynched Indian is Flown in from Uganda’ (dnaindia.com). At that time, Indians in some major towns like Masaka conspicuously remained few.

Decolonising Citizenship, Identity Contestations, and the Indian Question

The returned Ugandan Indians continue to seek to be considered as part of the groups that were in Uganda by 1926 as stipulated in the National Schedule appended in the new 1995 Constitution. This would automatically qualify them to the irrevocable status of citizenship by birth. However, the request remains unresolved. 46 The persistent contestations and distinction of Ugandan Indians disempowered their substantive citizenship, impacting their rights and the social-political development of ‘nationhood’. Independence-era politics emerged out of colonial-era identity configurations that continued to shape the socio-political landscape and development of most of the emerging new African states. Indirect rule, and divide-and-rule policies had the effect of fragmentation of the new ‘nations’ along narrow identity distillations of race, ethnicity, regionalism, and religion, which had served colonial subject management. For post-independent new states, the complex socio-political matrix was a statecraft dilemma, which required consolidation through the ‘nation-building project’, delineation and certification of citizenship. The legitimacy test for Prime Minister Milton Obote, was defining the ‘belonging’ question of the ‘new nation’. Delineating and certifying national citizenship were a priority imperative precondition for repositioning the ‘bona fide citizens’ in the redistribution of resources, sectoral re-alignments, placement to opportunities, and service delivery. However, this implied inclusion and exclusion of different groups, which led to the vulnerability of minority ‘non-citizen’ groups like the Kenyan Ja-Luo and Banyarwanda immigrants, and ‘aliens’ like Indians, who all faced expulsion. After independence, some Indians became active players in the new Ugandan community, hence undertaking substantive citizenship roles. They included Sugraben Allidina Visram, a Kabaka Yekka (KY) nominee to the LegCo; Narendra M. Patel, the first speaker of independent Uganda’s Parliament; Sherali Bandali Jaffer and Allidina were Councillors in Kampala City Council during the 1960s. However, Indians continued to dominate strategic spaces like intermediary jobs and commanding heights of the economy, which conspicuously accentuated entrenched systemic asymmetries. Accordingly, Obote’s re-alignments of ‘Indigenisation’, ‘Ugandanisation’ and ‘Africanisation’, adversely impacted the Ugandan Indians in the new ‘nation’47. 46 See, www.theafricareport.com/2676/ugandas-indian-community-seekstribal-status [accessed 18 September 2019]; Misairi Thembo Kahungu, ‘Indians cannot be a Ugandan tribe, says minister Mutuuzo’, The Daily Monitor, Kampala, 20 November, 2019. 47 Kenya talked of ‘Kenyanisation’ (see P. Walji, ‘The Indians: A Minority in Transition’, Department of Sociology: Nairobi University, Seminar Paper No.40, 1980.

281

282

Part III: Making Publics

The pretext for the new nation’s citizen certification was against the background of some Indians’ acquisition of British passports under the 1948 British Nationality Act, while other Indians possessed Indian and Pakistani passports. Indian acquisition of British passports had later been frustrated by the 1962 and 1968 Acts, which amended the 1948 Nationality Act, and also made ‘birth and ancestry’ the new criteria for British citizenship.48 According to the 1969 Census, out of 74,308 Indians, only 25,657 (35 per cent) were registered as Ugandan citizens while 48,651 (65 per cent) held British, Indian, or Pakistani passports.49 For Indians with British and other passports, it became a convenient pretext for politicians to showcase the ‘alienship’ of the Indians. After independence, government gave all Indians two years to register as Ugandan citizens, and non/compliant Indians gave credibility to their ‘non-citizen’ identity tag. Thereafter, it was appealing for ‘nationalist’ leaders to openly pursue re-alignments in favour of ‘Ugandanisation’. To the ‘nationalist’ leaders, the legitimacy test for independence was to reverse the ‘privileged’ positioning of ‘aliens’ in the commanding heights of the economy and civil service in favour of the ‘de facto – bona fide citizens’. Accordingly, Obote’s UPC Government pursued policies that were tailored to constrain ‘non-citizens’, while promoting the ‘indigenous’ people. Like the colonial government, policy instruments were applied, for instance, the Trade Licensing Act. Additionally, government instituted a new requirement for work permits and nationalisation. In Indian-­dominated sectors like trade, laws were passed to regulate produce marketing. This was appealingly couched in the rhetoric of ‘protecting’ the ‘simple African producers’ from the ‘profit-­maximising’ private sector of ‘crafty/fraudster’ traders, most of whom were ‘non-­ citizens’.50 Obote accused the ‘non-citizens’ thus: ‘They have never shown any commitment to the cause of Uganda or even Africa. Their interest is to make money, which money they exported to various capitals of the world on the eve of our independence’.51 Consequently, 48 By 1962, labour supply to Britain was deemed sufficient, hence the need to restrict immigration through the 1962 and 1968 Immigration Act amendments: see Stanley Hope, The Degrading of Human Dignity: A Short History of British Immigration Acts, 1962–1996 (Glasgow: Wild Goose Publications, 1997). 49 J.H. Mittelman, Ideology and Politics in Uganda: From Obote to Amin (London: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 228. 50 H. Mettrick, Aid in Uganda–Agriculture, (London: Overseas Development Institute, 1967), p. 41; A.M. Obote, ‘Move to the Left: The Common Man’s Charter’, Document No.1 (Entebbe: Government Printer, 1970). 51 A.M. Obote, ‘Communication from the Chair of the National Assembly by the Hon. Dr. A. Milton Obote, M.P., President of the Republic of Uganda, on the Occasion of the Ceremonial Opening of Parliament on 20 April 1970’ (Unpublished, 1970), p. 38.

Decolonising Citizenship, Identity Contestations, and the Indian Question

government promoted state-controlled co-operatives and marketing boards to take over marketing of farmer’s produce. Credit schemes and institutions, notably the Co-operative Bank for farmers and Uganda Credit and Savings Union (UCSU) (later Uganda Commercial Bank, UCB) for African entrepreneurs were established purposely to promote the ‘indigenous’ in accessing affordable credit. However, the UPC/KY political entanglement from 1965 to 1967 marked Obote’s shift from the anti-‘non-citizen’ policies to keeping Indians as ‘convenient citizens’. According to Obote’s calculus, the departure of Asians was likely to leave lacunae in the business sectors, which would be filled by the potentially entrepreneurial Baganda, now turned ‘political adversaries’.52 The shift travesty was epitomised by Obote’s toned-down anti-‘non-citizen’ rhetoric, even contemplating granting citizenship to 30,000 Indians. In this case, the hitherto chastised ‘non-citizens’ served Obote’s political interests, and hence Indians were reduced to ‘convenient pawns’ in the political calculus of post-­i ndependence Uganda.

Expulsion of Asians

The January 1971 coup ushered in Idi Amin, who in a short time retraced and executed the anti-‘non-citizen’ strategy by expelling Indians en masse in August 1972. Although several sections of Ugandan society were ambivalent to Amin’s radical method, many supported the revival of the re-alignment strategies. Many reasons are advanced for Amin’s expulsion of Indians. For this work, Amin the soldier who was transiting to politics, pursued unbridled ‘nationalism’ to rekindle the decolonisation agenda which attested to his claim to African leadership. This was tantamount to political expediency, whereby Indians continued to be relegated to ‘pawns’ at the expense of their rights. The expulsion cannot be simplistically attributed to a divine command. 53 Conversely, Paul Etyang, the Chief of Protocol and Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Foreign affairs, attributed the expulsion to an inspirational advice to Amin by Lt Col Kamisafi who was his confidant. Kamisafi allegedly advised Amin on getting ‘a place’ for the Nubian community who would replace Indians who had preferred 52 See Asiimwe, The Impact of Post-Colonial Policy Shifts, Chapter 3; Asiimwe, (Mis)management. 53 Amin claimed that on 4 August . 1972 in a dream in Moroto town, God instructed him to dismiss all non-citizen Indians, whereupon he woke up at 5.00 a.m. and gave them 90 days to leave Uganda (see Government of Uganda, ‘Uganda’s Economic War’, Publication Section: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Kampala, 1975); also interview with Khasim Ramathan, one of his military Governors (Sunday Monitor, No. 177, 26 June 2005), p. 16.

283

284

Part III: Making Publics

British citizenship. 54 From this perspective, Amin’s expulsion aimed at serving the political interests of opening spaces hitherto long dominated by Indians, for rewarding his supporters, thus building a powerbase. In this vein, Baganda entrepreneurs who had been suppressed by Obote particularly welcomed the coup, and Amin retraced and amplified ‘Ugandanisation’ for opening opportunities for such supporters. Amin’s expulsion of Indians was also driven by populism, as he sought to legitimise himself as a nationalist. In this endeavour, he sought to accomplish independence aspirations of ‘Africanisation’, which Obote had reneged upon by mollifying relations with ‘aliens’. This had enabled Indians to remain economically dominant at the expense of the ‘indigenous’. For instance, by 1971, 4,000 non-Africans controlled 70 per cent of the distributive trade, while 16,000 Africans were responsible for the remaining 30 per cent. 55 It was legitimising for Amin, the soldier turned politician, to be in tandem with the vogue of ‘nationalistic’ African leaders in castigating and reversing the bequeathed skewed colonial structure. While addressing the Organization of African Unity (OAU) General Assembly, Amin dismissed ‘imperialist media propaganda’ that he was a racist, and justified the expulsion based on the alleged Asian’s economic malpractices and ‘closedness’. Amin claimed that an Indian retired Minister of Finance had intimated to him that Indians were sending about £300 million to Britain from the East African States. He also accused Asians of economic sabotage through corruption, overpricing, undercutting prices, and evading taxes. He was quoted thus: ‘It was an intolerable state of affairs that our economy should be so milked dry by an alien minority, who blatantly rejected identifying themselves with us’. 56 The expulsion was possible due to the assuaging of extremism, whose contribution in the melodrama is hardly considered. Although it is expected that international organs offer guarantees, reflection shows that the torpid response from supra-national institutions was glaring as Amin expelled the Indians. The international community displayed inertia, which encouraged Amin’s erraticism against even Ugandan Asian citizens. On 6 August 1972, India barred 50,000 expelled Indians from entering India, maintaining that they were primarily Britain’s Paul Etiang, ‘Serving Amin’, Sunday Monitor, 29 May 2005, p. 12. Some stories associate Amin with Sudanic groups like the Nubians, who were brought as mercenaries during the colonising conquests by Samuel Baker and settled in Bombo because they also had no ‘ancestral’ place in Uganda. Nubians were part of Amin’s political base, and many benefited from redistribution of departed Asians’ properties. 55 W. Tordoff, Government and Politics in Africa, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1993,) p. 135. 56 ‘Flashback’, The Monitor, Kampala, 22–29 January, 1993. 54

Decolonising Citizenship, Identity Contestations, and the Indian Question

responsibility. Indeed, Britain had taken them and used them to establish colonialism yet deliberately designed inimical policies to divide and antagonise the ‘natives’. Kenya sealed its borders to keep out Indians arguing that it was not a dumping ground. In Britain, there was increase in anti-resettlement demonstrations and the unprepared government contended with helter-skelter escapism. The British Home Secretary summoned representatives of twenty-three airlines to tighten the immigration of Indians from East Africa, as its government dilly-dallied to search for a secret ‘island asylum’ to re-resettle the Indians. 57 A supra-national organisation like the United Nations exhibited a lacklustre stance, which energised Amin to proceed unhindered. The British Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home raised the expulsion problem and underlined its urgency to the UN General Assembly. However, the UN was instead ‘convinced’ by Uganda’s Permanent Representative, Grace Ibingira, who argued that Asian ‘non-citizens’ had enormously damaged the economy and were the responsibility of Britain, upon which Douglas-Home withdraw his plea. Even a proposal by the UN sub-committee on Human Rights to send a telegram restraining Amin was defeated by 14 votes to 1, and 6 abstentions. 58 This sequence of events reassured Amin of the defencelessness of the Indians and on 14 August 1972, he also decreed the expulsion of an additional 23,000 Ugandan Indian citizens. Thereafter, Amin’s regime confiscated Asian properties for redistribution to his cronies.

Of Dispossession and Booty

Amin’s crude confiscation of Indian properties was tantamount to state robbery, haphazard restructuring and primitive redistribution. However, some people praised Amin for tackling the long-time systemic asymmetries, which had enabled Indians to dominate. Amin ‘legitimised’ the process through promulgation of the Assets of the Departed Asians’ Act on 8 December 1973. Section 3 (1) of the Act stipulated that any assets, property or business declared by a departing Asian ‘shall without any further authority, vest in government’. Section 4 established the Departed Asian’s Properties Custodian Board (DAPCB), with 57 See ‘Chronology of the Expulsion of Indians from Uganda, August 5th – November 8th 1972’, www.asiansfromuganda.org.uk/chronology.php [accessed 11 June 2022]; The Weekly Observer, Kampala,, 4–10 August 2005; Alec Douglas-Home, ‘Draft Note with Confidential Letter within the FCO’, 13 December 1972; The Independent, ‘Public Record Office: Tories tried to Find Island for Migrants’, 1 January 2003. 58 UN Monthly Chronicles, October–November 1972.

285

286

Part III: Making Publics

powers to take over and manage all assets of the departed Indians. 59 The DAPCB was empowered to ‘sell or otherwise deal with such assets in the same way as the departed Asians may do’.60 In essence, the DAPCB was a state organ for the redistribution of the booty for the reward and expansion of the regime’s power bases. Banks were instructed to declare Asian’s accounts and the monies were deemed to be held on behalf of the Board by the bank or credit institution. The Act was succinct to the effect that: ‘No payments shall be made out of the account of a departed Asian unless the payment shall have been first approved by the board’.61 From an estimated 7,000 properties, government allocated thirty-­ eight businesses to co-operatives.62 Amin personally distributed 500 businesses to friends and supporters before establishing the Business Allocation Committee to distribute the remainder.63 From the beneficiaries, a quasi ‘class’ comprising an inner circle of top army commanders, Amin’s associated ethnic groups, and Muslim friends abruptly ‘fell into things’ (the euphemism that came into vogue for instantaneous acquisition of wealth/property) and became distinctively ‘oily wealthy’ (Mafuta mingi – Swahili colloquialism). The Mafuta mingi themselves engaged in excessive economic malpractices that bordered on primitive accumulation. However, unlike accusations against the Indians, Amin instead warned ‘envious saboteurs who heaped unfounded lies on the businessmen’, and cautioned security personnel to avoid such ‘jealous people who stifled Uganda’s advancement’.64 How can we understand Amin’s actions? Amin turned politician could boast of having boldly implemented ‘indigenisationation’, which catapulted Africans to centre stage in the socio-economic spaces, thus actualising real independence. To Amin, he had managed to ‘revolutionise’ the socio-economic structure, which legitimised his political credibility among peer African nationalists, unlike Obote, who had paid lip service to nationalism and the ‘common man’. However, the dictatorship’s arbitrary restructuring, mismanagement and the international embargoes plunged the economy into a downward spiral, which was sugar-coated as an ‘economic war’. 59 The DAPCB was composed of the Minister of Finance as Chairperson; the Minister of Commerce; the Minister of Lands, Minerals and Water Resources; the Minister of Local Government; the Attorney General and any two persons nominated by the President. 60 The Departed Indians Decree, 8 December 1973. 61 The Departed Indians Decree, Section 16 (1). 62 A. R. Kyamulesire, A History of the Uganda Co-operative Movement 1913– 1988, Kampala: Uganda Co-operative Alliance, 1988, p. 36. 63 J.J. Jørgensen, Uganda: A Modern History (London: Croom Helm, 1981), p. 289. 64 Literal translation of Amin’s words as quoted in Munno, 68:149 (1977), p. 1.

Decolonising Citizenship, Identity Contestations, and the Indian Question

Tepid Invitation of Indians by UPC and their Cautious Return, 1980–1986

After the fall of Amin, Obote’s UPC returned to power in 1980 and half-heartedly invited the Indians back. The interruption of Amin’s coup had changed the socio-political terrain, and Obote was actually not keen on the return of the Indians. First, Amin’s expulsion was a flipside accomplishment of his earlier anti-’non-citizen’ strategies. Second, like Amin, the incoming UPC government used the confiscated Asian’s properties as resources for dispensing patronage through rewarding and expanding the regime’s socio-political power bases. However, external pressure and conditionalities compelled cosmetic changes in Obote’s policies. Settling the Indian Question was made a prerequisite for Obote’s badly needed funds from multilateral financial institutions for economic recovery and fighting the raging NRM guerrilla war. Amid external pressure and local apprehension, on February 21, 1983, Parliament enacted the Expropriated Properties Act, which provided for the transfer of the departed Asian’s properties to the Ministry of Finance to enable repossession by owners or disposal by government.65 The Act comprised glaring ambiguities, which indicated government’s unwillingness to have Indians back. For example, Section 2 stated: ‘vesting of the properties in the Government’, and specifically managed by the Ministry of Finance, of which Obote himself was the Minister, hence effectively rendering him the Chairperson of the DAPCB.66 The Act further spelled out conditions, which in effect constrained the Indians’ smooth repossession and utilisation of their properties. Section 3(2) made it conditional that the Minister of Finance had to be “satisfied that the former owner shall physically return to Uganda, repossess and effectively manage the property or business” (emphasis mine). Section 4 demanded that intending applicants for repossession had to submit their applications in writing within ninety days, ironically a similar time span Amin had given Indians to vacate Uganda. Section 5 singled out the property or business in which the Government wished to participate, and ruled that in such a case ‘the Minister [who was Obote] shall notify the applicant accordingly and invite him or her to enter into negotiations for that purpose’. On successful conclusion of the ‘negotiations’, a joint venture company would be incorporated to which the Minister (Obote) would transfer the property or business ‘in the best interest of Uganda’. In the event that the previous owner failed to apply for repossession within the stipulated ninety days, ‘or failed to satisfy’ the Minister as required under Section 3(2), or that the negotiations under Section 5 failed, or the owner failed to return to Uganda, 65

66

Preamble, The Expropriated Properties Act, 1983. The Expropriated Properties Act, Section 2 (1).

287

288

Part III: Making Publics

Section 9 gave the Minister the prerogative of making an order ‘that the property or business be retained by Government, or be sold or disposed of’. Section 11 awarded the monies from the sale of such property to the Government ‘as the Minister may direct’.67 Under such conditions, Obote returned a house on Wilson Road in Kampala to Ugandan Indian Sherali Bandali Jaffer, but retained his Fairway Hotel because it could be classified as an asset in which government ‘wished to participate’.68 The Indians realised that the Act was phony as it was shrouded in uncertainties and, worse still, the situation was exacerbated by the prevailing general insecurity. These impediments forced many Indians to prefer compensation rather than repossession. Although a few Indians cautiously trickled back, their numbers stagnated, averaging 1,000 from the expulsion in 1972 throughout Obote’s regime in 1984.69 Needless to say, it was mainly the large-propertied Ugandan Indians citizens like the Madhvanis who re-established themselves. Manubhai, Prataphbhai, and Mayur Madhvani, children of the famous sugar baron, Muljibhai Madhvani, returned to rehabilitate their enterprises. Likewise, Alykhan and Amirali Kharmali, the children of Ali Mohamed Karmali, who was fondly called mukwano gwabangi (a friend of many) returned to run the Mukwano conglomerate. A few other high-profile Indians also managed to pay brief visits, because they were sentimentally attached to their country of birth. Such was Vali Jamal, former ILO senior economist, who first returned in 1982 and narrated: ‘Despite the ubiquitous road-blocks, it was such a nostalgic home-coming. I walked to all my childhood places in Old Kampala.’ Jamal was thrilled by archetypal childhood mischief 25 years back, when he inscribed his initials ‘VIVJ’ on his desk while he was a pupil at Old Kampala Senior Secondary School.70 He returned home in the 1990s and established Viva Café in Kampala. Owing to government’s rigidities, few Indians were cleared to repossess their properties. Whereas by June 1984 over 2,000 applicants had sought compensation, the Verification Committee had cleared only twelve, and none of these was in the business centre of Kampala City. Meanwhile, Obote advised parastatal bodies, co-operatives, trade unions and urban authorities to ‘take advantage of the Act to acquire some of these properties’.71 Such advice encouraged some property beneficiaries to threaten Indian claimants. For example, Gabriel William Lutaaya sued H.G. Gandesha for disturbing his entitlement to ‘quiet The Expropriated Properties Act, 1983. See The Weekly Observer, Kampala, 4–10 August, 2005, p. 32. 69 Gijsbert Oonk, Indians in East Africa: Images, Histories and Portraits (Amersfoot: SCA Producties, 2004), p. 53. 70 Vali Jamal, in Sunday Vision Magazine, Kampala, 1 July 2007. 71 Uganda Times, Kampala, 14 June 1984. 67

68

Decolonising Citizenship, Identity Contestations, and the Indian Question

enjoyment of the business’. However, Justice G. Masika ruled that the property was never legally acquired and that Lutaaya was a trespasser who had to pay.72 Claimants like Lutaaya who lost cases were mostly not in the inner circle of the ruling UPC; otherwise well-connected party supporters were allowed ‘quiet enjoyment’ of the acquired properties. The treatment of Indians as provisional/convenient citizens by UPC was again typified by the summary withdrawal of citizenship from a Makerere University Professor, Mahmood Mamdani, on 13 April 1985. Mamdani, a Ugandan of Indian origin, had dared to reason with the notorious Security Minister, Chris Rwakasisi, that the so-called natural calamities that were blamed for famine were, in fact, social catastrophes.73 For the perceived affront, the Immigration Department ‘at last discovered’ that Mamdani ‘was not a Ugandan citizen and that he had been wrongfully issued a Ugandan passport in 1963, 1979 and 1984’.74 Surprisingly, UPC was the very government that had issued the passport in 1963 and 1984. Mamdani was ordered to surrender the passport in seven days, thus reducing citizenship to ‘a privilege’ bestowed and revoked by the state at will. For the second time, Mamdani was made a refugee, amid widespread condemnation.75

Return, Property Repossession, and Contestations

Although many Ugandans welcomed the return of Ugandan Indian citizens, there were also some lingering unease, resent, and opposition, which emanated from the acrimonious process of property repossession marred by contestations, evictions, and tensions. Persistent donor pressure and the need to attract investors for economic recovery contributed to the NRM government’s invitation to the Indians and expeditious return of their properties. Museveni addressed the National Resistance Council (NRC) showing how donor pressure and need for investors for economic recovery were at play in accelerating the return of Asians thus:

Coming to the question of fully returning the property of the Asians … I am disappointed with the slow speed of implementation. First of all, we get pressure from donors. Secondly, other potential investors remain worry of [worried about] investing in Uganda as long as the

The Star, Kampala, 3 (14),14 August 1984. M. Mamdani’s address to the Uganda Red Cross Conference was entitled: ‘Disaster Prevention: Defining the Problem’, Review of African Political Economy, 12:33 (1985), 92–96. 74 See The Star, Kampala, ‘Kabwegyere Defends Mamdani’, 23 May, 1985. 75 See, Review of African Political Economy, 12:33 (1985), 91–92; Daily News, Dar-es-Salaam, 30 April 1985; The Star, 1985. 72

73

289

290

Part III: Making Publics

present leadership in Uganda appears not to unreservedly repudiate the unjust actions of Idi Amin. This slows down the speed of economic recovery … Asian capital is, as a consequence, not brought into play in the rehabilitation process … The economy is not short of unexploited potential, let the Africans move into those idle areas.76

Africans who had ‘purchased’ Indian properties considered the transactions as legitimate, or otherwise deserved compensation. Some contested the validity of some Indians’ claims, maintaining that they had either rightfully sold or had been compensated.77 By May 1988, pressure from the British High Commission for compensation of British Asian citizens had forced government to pay sixty-seven claimants a total of US $1.2 million.78 Bank of Uganda records reportedly showed that 410 Asians had been compensated in 1973 through UNHCR. For instance, claimants had received USh 453,666.65 (the exchange rate was US $1: USh 1) for their building on Plot 3, Kampala Road.79 Claims that Asians were making endless compensation claims reinforced the narrative of ‘stealing from Uganda’ and refuelled old stereotypes that ‘they were fraudsters’. On contested sales, Moses Kintu, the Minister of State in Charge of the DAPCB, authorised the repossession of a storied building on Johnston Street, Plot 20, yet it had been sold to government before the expulsion.80 However, it is also true that some earlier sales were liable to legal challenges because they had been contracted under irregular circumstances. For instance, a claimant was to repossess a four-storied building sold to East Mengo Growers Co-operative Union at a cost of USh 1.5 million before the expulsion. The Union had paid USh 150,000, and paid the balance of USh 1.35 million to the DAPCB after the expulsion, which made the transaction legally contestable. 81 Former property beneficiaries maintained that they were not accorded due attention, which left room for grudges. Some tenants organised under the Confederation of Uganda Tenants Association (CUTA) and Uganda National Tenants Association (UNTA) to advance the interests of the tenants of Asian property. Government was portrayed as being in ‘haste to please donors by returning properties grabbed from Indians’.82 By August 1992, Moses Kintu reported that as many as 2,400 out of the estimated 7,000 properties had been repossessed.83 The CUTA advised pressurising institutions like the IMF to ‘[b]uild a new city of 76

77 78

79

80 81

82

83

The New Vision, Kampala: 8:114, 17 May 1993, pp. 4–21. The New Vision, Kampala, 8:235, 5 October 1993, p. 15. The New Vision, Kampala, 26 January 1990, pp. 1, 12. The Monitor, Kampala, No. 53, 11–14 May 1993, p. 1. See The Monitor, Kampala, No. 1, July 1992. The New Vision, Kampala, 9:19, 24 January 1994, p. 13. The Monitor, Kampala, 11–14 May 1993, p. 1. The New Vision, Kampala, 6 January, 1992.

Decolonising Citizenship, Identity Contestations, and the Indian Question

the Indians’.84 In a press release of 29 December 1992, CUTA rejected Indian’s claims to property and land rights in Uganda, and pointed out that these had run to the extent of violently evicting Ugandans from residential and business premises. 85 In 1993, representatives of the anti-Asian repossession interests hastily tabled an anti-repossession bill that sought to amend the 1982 Expropriated Properties Act in order to protect the ‘bona fide’ purchasers of the Asian properties. However, the donor community opposed the Bill and asserted that the DAPCB had no legal right to sell Asian properties. Likewise, President Museveni rejected the Bill and questioned the legality of the ‘bona fide owners’. 86 One returnee, a Mr Gabiraani, noted that although reclaimed properties were not numerically very many, the un-repossessed or unclaimed holdings were less than 20 per cent of the total worth of properties left behind, then estimated to be valued at $800 million.87 Out of the 75,000 pre-expulsion Indian population, the present 13,000 to 15,000 Indians were fewer but had repossessed substantial properties, implying that most of the propertied Indians had returned. The unclaimed properties either belonged to Indians who deemed it not worthwhile to claim largely rural-based small shops (dukas). Other properties had expired or about-to-expire leasehold titles. Some claimants were possibly frustrated by the repossession process and gave up. Others had been compensated and transferred the proceeds to their new abodes, where many had flourished.88 These were replaced by a new wave of transient Indians in search of entrepreneurial opportunities after the economic reforms. Many Ugandan Indians who repossessed their properties contributed to economic recovery and growth. 89 Museveni maintained that Uganda needed serious investors like the Madhvanis and Mehtas. He elucidated: Madhvani who the government allocated some 34 square miles to plant sugarcane now contributes U Shs. 50 billion to the treasury in form of taxes from Kakira Sugar Works alone. He employs more than 8,000 people at the sugar estate.90

The concept that serious investors were the Madhvanis and Mehtas resonated with the old-time narrative about the industriousness of Indians compared to presumably indolent and spendthrift Africans.

The New Vision, Kampala, 8 January, 1993, p. 2. The New Vision, Kampala, 8 January, 1993; CUTA to President Y. Museveni, Ref. No. DAP 92, of 23 December 1992. 86 See The Monitor, Kampala, 12 February 1993, p. 24. 87 The New Vision, Kampala, 28 October 1993, p. 15. 88 See Sherali Bandali Jaffer, The Weekly Observer, Kampala, 4–10 August 2005, p. 32; The Courier, 1993. 89 Marc Lacey, ‘Once Outcasts, Indians Again Drive Uganda’s Economy’, Goanet News, 20 August 2003, available at [email protected]. 90 The New Vision, Kampala, 15:146, 20 June 2000, p. 38. 84 85

291

292

Part III: Making Publics

One Asian returnee expounded African behaviour: ‘once they made money, they wanted to own big cars, marry more women, leaving the business to employees’.91 However, government extended preferential incentives to attract investors and, as Museveni revealed, some returning Indians like Madhvani benefited from land allotments while local Africans were not supported.92 With the special incentives, the liberalised arena was structurally tilted in favour of foreign investors, which enabled them to thrive. Like the skewed colonial structures, such preferential policies that engendered ‘imperfect competition’ incubated undercurrents of resentment which were reminiscent of colonial-times anti-Indian contestations. Indeed, these erupted on 12 April 2007 through spontaneous riots after government was planning to give part of Mabira tropical forest to the Sugar Corporation of Uganda Limited (SCOUL)owned by the Uganda Indian Mehta family. Some discourses pointed to a political dimension of NRM’s enthusiastic support to foreign and returned Indian investors for political expediency. If so, this was in sync with Obote’s earlier shift in favour of Indians after the 1966–67 political entanglement with the Mengo government. In this regard, an ‘alien’ bourgeoisie remained indebted, thus loyal to the regime. In contrast, the ‘indigenous’ entrepreneurial classes were unpredictable because they could use acquired wealth and their local social bases to oppose the ruling regime. The returned Indians fervently supported Museveni, and a returnee considered him a ‘Godsend for Uganda’.93 Many Indians allegedly made financial contributions to NRM campaigns and networked with politicians through business ventures. The Immigration Board Chairman reportedly told a Parliamentary Committee that there was a lot of political interference even by some ministers who demanded that they should: ‘ leave those people’. He further substantiated: ‘Each Indian you see there has a godfather around. If you had an opportunity, you could try to arrest some of those people and you would see how many telephone calls you would receive’.94 In fact, some have expressed fears that the Indians’ support See The Weekly Observer, Kampala, 4–10 August 2005, p. 33. The Uganda Investments Authority (UIA) was established to specifically promote, facilitate, and expedite foreign investment, avoiding bureaucratic red-tape rigidities. Additionally, the Medium-Term Competitive Strategy (MTCS) was instituted to improve the regulatory and operational environment; the normal depreciation allowances with the addition of a special 50 per cent initial allowance on plant and machinery; a six-year exemption on corporate and withholding taxes, after which they were calculated at a low rate; zero rates of import duty tax on plant and machinery, and consideration of operational losses in tax assessment were some of the incentives to investors. 93 Field interviews, 2006 94 See The Daily Monitor, Kampala, 14 October 2005. 91

92

Decolonising Citizenship, Identity Contestations, and the Indian Question

for the NRM could jeopardise their rights after regime change.95 For this reason, some Indian respondents pointed to political uncertainty, possible violence with change of government and destruction of their investments. ‘We have reservations hence the slowed pace of investment’.96 Ugandan Indians sought recognition as one of the groups that were in Uganda before 1926 as stipulated in the Third Schedule of the Constitution. 97 This would automatically make them citizens by birth, but they still faced pockets of apprehension and resistance. The Minister of State for Culture, Peace Mutuuzo was succinct: I think Indians can become Ugandans through dual citizenship, by marriage. They can only be Ugandans to that level, but as far as integrating them as an indigenous tribe I think they wouldn’t have met our criteria. So, I believe that indigenous Ugandans are known and can be traced far back as time immemorial, Indians know where they come from and we know a country called India.98

The Constitution provided for the primacy of citizenship by birth, but continued to peg it to indigeneity. Alternative citizenships by registration or naturalisation are inferior because they can easily be revoked and the holder cannot qualify to hold the office of President.99 Yet Indians were already in the area that was designated as Uganda, hence could qualify to be citizens by birth in the absence of the encumbrance of ‘indigeneity’. This shows that the Indian Question, rights, and citizenship need more socio-political inclusion, institutionalisation, and entrenchment as Uganda grows into a new nation. The argument that Indians belonged to India disregards transnational citizenship, which in Uganda applies to groups like Banyarwanda, Bakonzo, and Lugbara that have been torn between different nations/citizenships.

Conclusion

This chapter has used an historical approach in the effort to decolonise conventional discourses about the Indian Question in Uganda. We underlined the colonial system’s deliberate policies that divided Indians and Africans for the political expediency of effective management of subjects. Owing to the colonial system, Indians became a conspicuous dominant minority yet were constructed as ‘alien’ versus Africans. 95 Baker Wairama, ‘Uganda: The Marginalisation of Minorities’, Report, Minority Rights Group International, 2001. 96 Respondent No. 3 (Indian) F., 72 years, Kololo, 3 May 2006. 97 The Constitution of Uganda, 1995, Chapter 3, Article 10 (a), pp. 212–13. 98 PML Daily Correspondent, ‘Museveni, Minister Clash over Indians’ Plea for Tribal Recognition’, 19 November 1919. 99 The Constitution of Uganda, 1995: Chapter 3, 14, Chapter 7, 102.

293

294

Part III: Making Publics

They were relegated to the bottom, yet constructed as ‘indigenous’, hence came to be de facto citizen claimants of the new Uganda ‘nation’. This structure engendered identity consciousness and subsequent alienation and contestations that continued to shape Afro-Indian relations in Uganda. Africans associated the colonial project with the two ‘foreign races’ of Indians and Whites and thus, struggled against all of them until independence in 1962. Subsequently, the post-independence leadership pursued policies aimed at reversing the order in favour of the ‘indigenous citizens’. The chapter has showed the overarching strand of continued use of a minority dominant group for narrow political interests, up to and including their expulsion and return. Accordingly, the chapter underscores the issues of rights and guarantees for vulnerable minority groups like the Ugandan Indians, which vividly unfolded during their expulsion saga. Their return and subsequent acrimonious property repossession process, the existing framework of neoliberalism that fosters imperfect competition, coupled with preferential policies perpetuated structural contradictions and refuelled contestations. These are often perceived through an interlacing of favoured investors, some of whom are the returned Indians, and exclusion of the ‘indigenous’. There has been need for mitigating strategies through entrenching socio-political citizenship and an institutional safeguard for minority rights. Interrelational spaces need to be enhanced and antagonistic structural asymmetries resolved to pave way for full integration of citizens of Indian origin in the new Uganda socio-political community.

13 Liberation Ethnology: District Decolonisation, State Knowledge Production, and the Neoliberal Revolution in Uganda ADRIAN BROWNE

‘Scientific socialists must avoid the anthropological approach to African political problems’.1

Scholars advocating for decolonisation are confronted in Uganda by a deeply embedded competing meaning of this term in popular political discourse. It is in the language of decolonisation, anticolonialism, and anti-imperialism that ethnic minority demands have long been framed by activists at Uganda’s district margins. Claimants speak of experiences of ‘internal colonialism’, ‘internal imperialism’, ‘sub-colonialism’, or, more simply, ‘colonialism’ at the hands of African ethnic others at the local political and administrative level.2 Decolonisation, according to this logic, constitutes the work of righting of these very local historical wrongs; it means recognition of particular ethnic communities by means of the creation and reservation of administrative districts and electoral constituency counties. Such claims, framed in such language, have been made by activists since the late colonial era; but they began to be validated and exploited to an unprecedented degree under President Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Movement (NRM), which seized power in 1986. His regime increased sub-national administrative units on an unprecedented scale; from 33 in the early 1990s to a staggering 146 today, with by far the greatest increases in the 2000s. The national legislature consisted of just thirty-eight persons in 1986, but now includes 312 electoral county MPs and a Woman MP for every one of the 146 districts. By its mid-2000s’ zenith, the wave of ‘district decolonisations’ was already far more openly tied to ethnicity by the regime 1 Yoweri Museveni, ‘Fanon’s Theory on Violence: Its Verification in Liberated Mozambique’, in Nathan M. Shamuyarira (ed.), Essays on the Liberation of Southern Africa (Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1971), 1–24 (5). 2 A. Syahuka-Muhindo, The Rwenzururu Movement and the Democratic Struggle (Kampala, 1991), 27:40; The Bugungu Cultural Task Force, ‘A Concept Note of the Proposed Bugungu Cultural Institution’ (2013), copy in the current author’s possession.

296

Part III: Making Publics

than some observers have assumed. 3 The NRM encouraged this politico-administrative fragmentation in response to not only the exigencies of patronage politics, but also the unfinished business of addressing real histories of discrimination, inequity, indignity, and conflict. ‘This is Museveni’s version of decolonisation’, Yahya Sseremba has asserted.4 The present chapter builds on Sseremba’s important insights by looking at how and why this particular and particularist valence of decolonisation developed and came to be used by the regime at a certain moment around the turn of the 2000s. This chapter argues that this idea, one with deep colonial-era roots, was built into the constitutional foundations of the state by the NRM in the mid-1990s, but soon came to be refracted through the movement’s internal ideological struggles – its own identity crisis. The chapter connects the history of ‘district decolonisation’ to one of the anti-imperialisms of the Ugandan Left over the course of the neoliberal mode of capitalism’s rise to global ascendancy and hegemony since the late 1970s. This crisis and disorientation manifested in the internalisation, localisation, and ethnicisation of notions of sovereignty and self-determination, representing an exemplar of what Achille Mbembe referred to as an ‘emerging junction between the old anti-imperialist thematics – “revolution,” “anticolonialism” – and the nativist theses’. 5 Thirty-six years since snatching power, the NRM’s ‘liberation argument’ may have lost its legitimacy and credibility as has recently been posited.6 But this impoverished and exhausted liberation discourse – ‘the old anti-imperialist thematics’ – increasingly found purchase in the state’s management of ethnic politics. The term ‘liberation ethnology’ is coined here, and used with intended irony, to capture the phenomenon’s composite and perhaps ostensibly incongruous ideological nature – a quality it shares with the ‘liberation theology’ movement, which was primarily associated with left-wing Roman Catholic priests in Latin America. Liberation ethnology repre3 Elliott D. Green, ‘Decentralisation and Conflict in Uganda’, Conflict, Security and Development, 8:4 (2008), 427–50 (443); M.A. Nsamba, ‘Decentralization and Territorial Politics: The Dilemma of Constructing and Managing Identities in Uganda’, Critical African Studies, 5:1 (2013), 48–60; Nicholas Awortwi and A.H.J. (Bert) Helmsing, ‘Behind the Façade of Bringing Services Closer to People’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 48:2 (2014), 297–314; Janet I. Lewis, ‘When Decentralization Leads to Recentralization: Subnational State Transformation in Uganda’, Regional & Federal Studies, 24:5 (2014), 571–88. 4 Yahya Sseremba, ‘Ethnic emancipation and conflict escalation’, Third World Quarterly, 41:12 (2020), 2030–47. 5 John Narayan and Leon Sealey-Huggins, ‘Whatever happened to the idea of imperialism?’, Third World Quarterly, 38:11 (2017), 2387–95; Achille Mbembe, ‘African Modes of Self-Writing’, Public Culture, 14, 1 (2002), 239–73 (263). 6 Anna Reuss and Kristof Titeca, ‘When revolutionaries grow old: the Museveni babies and the slow death of the liberation’, Third World Quarterly, 38:10 (2017), 2347–66.

Liberation Ethnology, District Decolonialism and State Knowledge Production

sents the marriage of practices of colonial ethno-taxonomy and state knowledge production with discourses of anti-imperialism and ethnic minority rights. In tracing divergent tributaries of this ideological confluence, this chapter engages, and brings into dialogue, multiple scholarships. It speaks to a growing, critical literature on the myriad dimensions of the four decades of policies that made Uganda the African poster child for structural adjustment programmes under the neoliberal mode of capitalism.7 By bringing these understandings of contemporary Uganda into closer dialogue, the chapter also contributes to a scholarship that examines the compound local ideas and practices formed out of interactions between neoliberalism and neo-Leninism in the Global South.8 It draws on the insights of work that explores the desocialised traces of neo-­Leninism – stripped of all Marxism – in the ‘neo-liberation movements’ who have built Africa’s illiberal developmentalist states since the 1980s.9 Bringing to mind earlier work by Ali Mazrui, this scholarship tends to focuses on the influence of Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, his Bolshevik Party, and followers, including Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese Communist Party.10 Work on ‘neo-liberation’ movements has focused on the African remnants of the Leninist tradition’s political innovations: the vanguard party as a body of committed professional revolutionaries dedicated to educating the masses; the Maoist ‘protracted people’s war’, steadily laying the groundwork among the peasantry to overcome armies with superior military might; and the one-party state, informed by principles of democratic centralism. But this chapter identifies traces of a combination of other strands of desocialised Leninism – fundamental elements of political thought, as opposed to strategy. It looks at the afterlives of anti-imperialism – constrained and contained within sub-national See the contributions to Jörg Wiegratz, Giuliano Martiniello and Elisa Greco (eds), Uganda: The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation (London: Zed Books, 2018). 8 Ritanjan Das, ‘Producing Local Neoliberalism in a Leftist Regime: Neoliberal Governmentality and Populist Transition in West Bengal, India’, Contemporary South Asia 27:3 (2019), 373–91. 9 Harry Verhoeven, ‘The Party and the Gun: African Liberation, Asian Comrades and Socialist Political Technologies’, Third World Quarterly 42:3 (2021), 560–81; Constantin Katsakioris, ‘Socialist Federalism as an Alternative to Nationalism: The Leninist Solution to the National Question in Africa and Its Diaspora’, Humanities 8:3 (2019), 152. For an account less concerned by the genealogies of these political technologies, see Anna Reuss, ‘Forever Vanguards of the Revolution: The Uganda People’s Defence Forces’ Liberation Legacy, 30 Years On’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 14:2 (2020), 250–69. 10 Ali Mazrui, ‘Between Domestic Policy and Regional Power: The Role of Ideology in Uganda’, in Justus Mugaju and J. Oloka-Onyango (eds), No-Party Democracy in Uganda: Myths and Realities (Kampala: Fountain, 2000), 127–40. 7

297

298

Part III: Making Publics

units, reduced to vocabulary and affect by means of its divorce from a materialist conception of imperialism as a stage in the logic of accumulation under the capitalist mode of production.

The Ugandan Left’s Anti-Imperialisms from UPC to NRM, 1960s–1980s

The anti-imperialisms of the NRM reflected diverse, intertwined lineages. Many senior NRM figures were in their late teens and early twenties in the middle of the 1960s – the global ‘anti-imperialist’ decade. Different political figures and factions in the newly independent country railed against imperialism and neocolonialism from different ideological positions. Against the backdrop of Western military intervention in Congo and Vietnam, Prime Minister Milton Obote worked to burnish his radical credentials on the international stage by making opposition to neocolonialism and imperialism increasingly central to his rhetoric.11 But such moves also represented an effort to curb rival mobilisations by a generation of more radical leftists in Uganda. These activists operated principally within the Youth League of Obote’s Uganda People’s Congress (UPC), emerging forcefully in 1963–64 under the de facto leadership of Delhi-educated firebrand, John Kakonge, who was also the UPC’s Secretary General.12 Museveni was about 21 years old when this left grouping was crushed and expelled by the right wing of the party in 1964–65. At that very moment the anti-imperialist Left was increasingly rejecting the ‘utopian socialism’ of Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere’s ‘African socialism’. The young Museveni and colleagues were carried along in this ideological shift. Its moving spirits were a London-educated duo from Eastern Uganda: barrister Dani Wadada Nabudere and Makerere University extramural lecturer w’Obanda Baloki Chango Machyo. By the time they had returned from London in 1963–64, these two figures were increasingly convinced by scientific socialism’s materialist conception of the world; they versed themselves in work of Marx, adopting a class analysis of the capitalist mode of production. They melded their materialism not only with Lenin’s anti-imperialism, but also his political technologies. Early Marxism-Leninism in Uganda was inflecting with the Pan-Africanism of Ghana’s Nkrumah and the USA’s W.E.B. Du Bois, and the peasant-oriented guerrilla strategies of Mao. Outside the UPC, from about 1965, Nabudere and Machyo led an activist and political education collective in their home region, later establishing the Ali A. Mazrui, ‘Nkrumah, Obote and Vietnam’, Transition, 43 (1973), 36–39. Edgar C. Taylor, ‘Affective Registers of Postcolonial Crisis: the Kampala Tank Hill party’, Africa, 89 (2019), 541–61. 11

12

Liberation Ethnology, District Decolonialism and State Knowledge Production

Uganda-Vietnam Solidarity Committee (UVSC) in anti-imperialist solidarity in 1968. It was as a press delegate representing this organisation that Museveni had in September 1969 appeared in North Korea at the World Meeting of Anti-Imperialist journalists.13 These Ugandan circles were part of the early seedbed of the NRM’s anti-imperialism, existing in parallel to Museveni’s better-known encounters with Marxism-­ Leninism and Maoist theory at Tanzania’s University of Dar es Salaam and the camps of the Southern African liberation movements. In the 1970s, the ideological character of Museveni’s anti-­i mperialism transformed, however. While Nabudere languished in prison for his criticism of the Obote regime; the young Museveni took up a post in the President’s Office in 1970. After the military coup that brought Idi Amin to power in 1971, Museveni fled to Tanzania and soon led a new organisation, the Front for National Salvation (Fronasa), which emerged out of an early break with the Oboteists in exile. In keeping with Leninist revolutionary strategy, Fronasa embarked on political and military education of cadres.14 But what the political education entailed is difficult to discern; Museveni somewhat unconvincingly claimed that ‘questions of leadership and ideology’ were not for him to answer; they would be ‘settled through a democratic process by the people of Uganda’ once the incumbent president was ousted.15 Privately, and to the relief of certain figures Museveni sought to bring into the fold in 1978, he had reached certain conclusions; he had reconciled himself to capitalism.16 The conclusions met with very public criticism from Uganda’s anti-imperialist Left. While Machyo joined Museveni’s new Uganda Patriotic Movement party to contest the 1980 election after Amin’s ouster, most of his former comrades rejected Museveni as a militarist charlatan.17 The largely London-educated Marxist collective dubbed ‘the Gang of Four’ by their detractors sought ‘national independence’ and the ‘elimination of any foreign interference in Uganda’s national affairs’ – aims they set out in the manifesto of their new organisation, the Uganda National Liberation Front-Anti-Dictatorship (UNLF-AD).18 The UNLF-AD was spearheaded by Machyo’s former close comrade, 13 BBC Monitoring Service, Summary of World Broadcasts: Far East, Part 3 (London, 1969), FE/3198/c/5. 14 Yoweri K. Museveni, Sowing the Mustard Seed (London: Macmillan, 1997), 53, 92, 152. 15 Colin Legum and David Martin, ‘Guerrillas against Amin’, The Observer, 4 February 1973. 16 Matthew Rukikaire, 70 Years a Witness: From Colonialism to Resistance and Beyond – An Autobiography (Kampala: Dominant Seven Publishers, 2019), 166–67. 17 Dani W. Nabudere, ‘The New Military Dictators in Uganda’, July 1980, unpublished manuscript in author’s possession. 18 UNLF(A-D), The New Uganda We Want (Mbale, 1982).

299

300

Part III: Making Publics

Nabudere, who had returned to Uganda after several years in exile at the University of Dar es Salaam, where he became known as a Marxist-­ Leninist authority on imperialism.19 After a short-lived Maoist ‘protracted people’s war’ in Eastern Uganda against Obote’s second regime in 1981, the UNLF-AD continued to mobilise in exile against those working ‘on behalf of foreign powers’ – the government and the Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA), who continued their own self-consciously Maoist guerrilla war.20 For a time, Museveni, as he neared power, continued to command at least some anti-imperialist social democratic cachet. The NRM’s Ten Point Political Programme offered reassurances to a variety of domestic and foreign actors through promises of a ‘mixed economy’, yet promised an ‘independent, integrated and self-sustaining national economy’. The Programme declared that ‘most economic activity’ would be ‘carried out by private entrepreneurs’ alongside state participation ‘in crucial sectors’ in order to ‘avoid laissez-faire capitalism’. The models Museveni tended to invoke before coming to power were – regrettably absent their welfare states – something ‘very similar to [the] British or Scandinavian economies’.21 His occasional criticisms of the international financial institution’s impositions on Uganda won him credibility with certain anti-imperialist leftists in the Global North seeking reasons for hope at a time of historic defeat for the Left worldwide.22 But Museveni was soon forced to reframe his professed anti-­ imperialism under external pressure from imperial hegemons old and new. His blandishments towards Western social democracies did not placate Western donors for long after he took power in 1986. The states he claimed to admire were targets of an intensifying global counter-­ revolution, which had already been trialled in the Global South. In 1987 his regime accepted donor prescriptions for economic liberalisation in the form of a structural adjustment programme. But the NRM was not ready to relinquish the anti-imperialist mantle. They now brandished it against internal and external advocates of multiparty democracy – opponents of his broad-based ‘no-party’ NRM, the Leninist one-­party state, rebranded. Ostentatiously resisting foreign donors’ demands for political liberalisation was, for a time, made easier by the alacrity 19 Zeyad el Nabolsy, ‘Lenin and East African Marxism’, in Robert Maclean and Alla Ivanchikova (eds.), The Future of Lenin: Power, Politics, and Revolution in the 21st Century (Albany: SUNY Press, 2022), 205–34. 20 George Padmore Institute Archives/LRA/08/10/UNLF(A-D), ‘Statement on the “Peace Agreement” between the Ugandan Military Council and the National Resistance Movement of 17th December, 1985’, 18 December 1985. 21 William Pike, ‘Museveni Interview in the Bush in 1984’, New Vision, 26 January 1990. 22 Victoria Brittain, ‘The Liberation of Kampala’, New Left Review 156 (1986), 51–61.

Liberation Ethnology, District Decolonialism and State Knowledge Production

with which Museveni had earlier accepted the same actors’ prescriptions for economic liberalisation. 23 Museveni’s attempts to reimagine anti-imperialism by means of separating the political from the economic faced significant opposition within the regime in the late 1980s. A materialist critique was levelled from the margins of the regime by one of the ministers in the first cabinet, Machyo, whose Marxist-Maoist anti-imperialist commitments had been sharpened by Uganda’s early 1980s experience of the international financial institutions.24 In his frequent columns in the government-owned New Vision newspaper, he made the case for state planning by the NRM in order ‘to achieve an independent national economy’.25 Like-minded figures in the NRM attempted a rear-guard action through political education of new cadres at the party school – this Marxist-Leninist political technology – overseen by the National Political Commissar (NPC) at the NRM Secretariat.26 Machyo himself became Deputy NPC from 1989, under the watchful eye of more compliant Secretariat officials.

The Inventories of Tradition: Decolonising Ethnology, 1990–1995

Amid the liberal capitalist triumphalism of the early 1990s, however, the dissenting anti-imperialist voices within the NRM tried to reconcile themselves to the movement’s early concessions to the new common sense of the post-Cold War world. Machyo spent considerable time maintaining NRM links with an increasingly capitalist China. He also became focused on the sphere of culture and gained public notoriety for his antipathy towards imported religions, particularly Christianity. ‘Decolonization must call for the total eradication of the cultural forms of thought and behavior developed under the colonial conceptions’, Machyo declared. ‘[It must call for] the reconversion 23 M. Anne Pitcher, ‘Conditions, Commitments, and the Politics of Restructuring in Africa’, Comparative Politics 36:4 (2004), 379–98. 24 Chango B. Machyo w’Obanda, ‘The World Bank, IMF and Deepening Misery in Uganda (The Mbale Experience)’, Mawazo 6:1 (1985), 27–49. 25 Vivian Asedri, ‘Politicise Masses, Chango’, New Vision, 5 December 1988; Chango Machyo w’Obanda, ‘How to Achieve an Independent National Economy’, New Vision, 5 May 1989; Joshua B. Mugenyi, ‘IMF Conditionality and Structural Adjustment under the National Resistance Movement’, in Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle (eds), Changing Uganda: The Dilemmas of Structural Adjustment & Revolutionary Change (London: James Currey, 1991), 61–77. 26 Dani Wadada Nabudere, ‘The Uganda Crisis: What Next?’ Ufahamu 15:3 (1987), 54–78.

301

302

Part III: Making Publics

of colonial mentalities into African or Uganda[n] mentalities’.27 The regime combined this stance with a rejection of ‘imperialist’ prescriptions for multipartyism. The NRM had always expressed some interest in culture. A 1985 planning document sorted through identities and cultures in a section titled ‘Peoples of Uganda’ which contained a list of thirty-three ethnonyms sub-grouped according to language families.28 The regime now looked to ways to celebrate and contain these differences; a conducive, legitimising environment was produced by the rise of global discourses of cultural heritage and indigenous and ethnic minority rights that attended the end of the Cold War. A few months after the adoption of the neoliberal reform programme in 1987, the NRM set up a National Culture Committee, with the aim to ‘ensure that the different cultures are organised and used in the implementation of the ten-point programme of the NRM’.29 It was against the backdrop of UNESCO’s World Decade for Cultural Development that the NRM’s newly established Directorate of Cultural Affairs at the start of the 1990s embarked on the formulation of a national policy that set out to canalise ethno-­political energies into cultural production for the market, cultural museums, and events. 30 This inter-ethnic terrain was not readily managed and depoliticised. The language of decolonisation had long been appropriated by political actors at various levels. A phenomenon most commonly known as ‘sub-­colonialism’ had been a feature of British rule in Uganda. Sub-­ colonialism’s embodiments were African agents – often, but not exclusively, from the Buganda Kingdom. 31 Perceptible largely at the margins of the state, these practices represented the administrative operationalisation of an ethnically differentiated colonial view of different African ethno-­cultural communities’ relative civilisational standing.32 Around the end of colonial rule, public discourse on decolonisation had often devolved or reoriented to these district-level ethnic politics, amid an efflorescence of ethnic consciousness and cultural production across 27 Chango Machyo w’Obanda, ‘Need to Have a Cultural Stand’, New Vision, 27 July 1989. 28 Masindi District Archive/Box 511, MIS.12/4/National Resistance Movement/National Political Commissariate/‘Guidelines to Primary Politicisation Programme prior to Executive Committees’, 27 November 1985. 29 David Mukwaya, ‘Cultural Museums to be Set Up’, New Vision, 4 August 1987. 30 Geoffrey Mugarura and Willie Aguma, ‘Culture Policy in Offing’, 6 September 1990; ‘How Culture Promotes Development’, New Vision, 24 December 1991. 31 Andrew D. Roberts, ‘The Sub-Imperialism of the Baganda’, Journal of African History 3:3 (1962), 435–50. 32 Adrian J. Browne, ‘Classificatory Violence: Difference, Discipline, and (De) Gradation in Uganda’s Northern Albertine Rift, c. 1860 to c. 1991’, PhD Thesis, Durham University, 2020.

Liberation Ethnology, District Decolonialism and State Knowledge Production

the country. 33 ‘Focusing on local-level nationalism and internal boundaries in eastern Africa reveals that as countries progressed towards independence, ethnic demands often superseded nationwide concerns’, Pamela Khanakwa writes. 34 Sub-colonialisms were seen by many ethnic minority activists to have persisted in cultural, political, and economic form in the postcolony. Despite the political advantages that might accrue from acceding to demands for district creation on clearer ethnic lines, Obote’s UPC proved chary, however. The regime confronted only the arch-sub-imperialists, including the federal ‘feudalists’ Buganda, by abolishing the historical kingdoms in the mid-1960s. Talk of internal imperialisms and district decolonisation was a symptom of resurgent royalisms in the 1980s. Monarchists from the historical kingdoms of Buganda, Bunyoro-Kitara, Tooro, and Busoga articulated demands for federalism or revival in some other form. Ethnic minority activists – often drawn from communities who felt subsumed under these neo-traditional institutions – increasingly demanded to hear their languages on Radio Uganda and to be granted separate administrative districts. Such demands only intensified in response to the (‘Mamdani’) Commission of Inquiry into Local Government in 1987 and 1988. 35 The Commission recommended the creation of just four new districts, and even then only reluctantly, believing the ‘arbitrary, haphazard and hardly defensible’ multiplication of administrative units merited a wholesale review, with a view to downgrades for certain products of Idi Amin’s fit of district creation in the mid-1970s. 36 Ethnic entrepreneurs consequently redirected their district decolonisation ambitions to the Uganda Constitutional (‘Odoki’) Commission, which was established in 1989 to review the constitution and to draft a new one on the basis of consultations with the populace. The Commission attracted criticism both for its tutelary approach and composition; Museveni maintained leverage by providing funding and selecting members, appointing, as secretary, the Makerere University

33 Adrian J. Browne, ‘The Alur-ization of Aidan Southall – Contested Ethnonymic Traditions in North-Western Uganda’, History in Africa 45 (2018), 221–44. 34 Pamela Khanakwa, ‘Reinventing Imbalu and Forcible Circumcision: Gisu Political Identity and the Fight for Mbale In Late Colonial Uganda’, Journal of African History 59:3 (2018), 357–79. 35 Mike Butera and Alfred Wasike, ‘Bafumbira Want District’, New Vision, 16 May 1989; Mike Butera, ‘Bafumbira Pass Resolution’, New Vision, 19 October 1988; Simon Kizito Kifuko, ‘Letter to the Editor: Protect Bakenye Culture’, 13 October 1990. 36 ‘Four New Districts Proposed’, New Vision, 18 August 1990; Republic of Uganda, Commission of Inquiry into Local Government (Kampala: The Commission, 1987), 119, 122–23.

303

304

Part III: Making Publics

historian Phares Mutibwa who was the Director of Research and Political Affairs at the NRM Secretariat. 37 A focus on sub-colonialisms was sustained in public discourse partly by the Commission’s treatment of the question of citizenship. The only qualification for citizenship made in the independence Constitution of 1962 had been a residency requirement of five years. Residence rather than ‘indigeneity’ was also part of the basis on which citizenship was defined by the NRA when instituting local Resistance Councils in controlled areas during the 1981–86 war. 38 It was partly for this reason that the NRA had gained traction in the diverse population living in the Luweero Triangle. The area was home to many Nyarwanda, who faced exclusionary practices of more established self-styled ‘indigenes’ as they were widely considered to have a more tenuous right to belong in Uganda, having arrived from Rwanda at different points over several decades. 39 But in the early years of NRM rule contestations over citizenship remained at the heart of many violent local struggles over local control, recognition, and access to resources. The interim report by the Odoki Commission submitted in December 1990 maintained that Ugandans tended ‘to confuse national citizenship with tribal identity’.40 The Commission’s technical committee on citizenship, which included the Director of the Legal Division in the NRM Secretariat, Jotham Tumwesigye, was required to suggest a way through this difficult terrain.41 But the Commission’s answer to this difficult colonial-era legacy was a colonial technology of state control and knowledge production. The possibility of citizenship from birth was not to be a right determined solely by geographic residence, but one restricted to those born in Uganda who had a parent or grandparent from a Ugandan ethnic group.42 This path disregarded fears about possible consequences of such a criterion – in terms of the prevention of ethnic others from either settling or running for office outside their home areas. Redefining citi37 Uganda Constitutional Commission, Guiding Questions on Constitutional Issues (Kampala: Uganda Constitutional Commission, 1990). Many such memoranda can be found in Makerere University Library. 38 Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 159–84. 39 Mahmood Mamdani, ‘African States, Citizenship and War: A Case-Study’, International Affairs 78:3 (2002), 493–506 (497). 40 Uganda Constitutional Commission, Interim Report of the Uganda Constitutional Commission (Kampala: Uganda Constitutional Commission, 1990), 11. 41 Benjamin Odoki, The Search for Consensus: The Making of the 1995 Uganda Constitution (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2005), 171. 42 Uganda Constitutional Commission, Interim Report of the Uganda Constitutional Commission (Kampala: Uganda Constitutional Commission, 1990), 13.

Liberation Ethnology, District Decolonialism and State Knowledge Production

zenship in this way necessitated the creation and inclusion of an ethnological inventory in the Constitution, which represented an innovation in the African context. But there had not been a question about ‘tribe’ in the censuses of 1969 or 1980; this question had last appeared in the final colonial census of 1959. This sort of explicitly ethnological state practice had thus ceased. The state bureaucracy under the NRM, like its colonial forebears, began to produce knowledge in the service of organising and ordering cultural difference. The directorate of the National Population and Housing Census (NPHC) included a question about ethnicity in a population census conducted in January 1991, just weeks after the interim report of the Odoki Commission had been submitted.43 The NPHC did break with the colonial tradition of providing a prescribed list of tribal categories; the 1991 enumerators were instructed to record ‘the tribe or group to which a person considers he or she belongs’.44 But the forty-five ethnonyms apparently thus generated were not each coded separately in the census results; they were instead distributed across thirty-two census codes (which happened to be the same number that appeared in 1959).45 In several cases two or even three categories had been placed under the same code. Often these were categories whose relationship to each other was widely considered to be ambiguous and between which distinctions had not been drawn by the colonial censuses (e.g., ‘Acholi, Labwor’; ‘Alur, Jonam’; ‘Banyoro, Bagungu’; and ‘Banyankole, Bahima’). In some instances, synonymous terms were inserted parenthetically (e.g., ‘Sebei (Sabiny)’), sometimes not (e.g. ‘Bagisu, Bamasaba’, ‘Batwa, Pygmies’, and ‘Badama, Japadhola’). The category ‘Other Ugandan tribes’ further clouded matters. The census results released in late 1992 were therefore rather inscrutable. But from this point on, Uganda under the NRM was increasingly an ethnological state, to modify Nicholas Dirks’ formulation.46 Ethnic minority activists pursuing district decolonisation were in many cases provoked by the Odoki Commission’s use of knowledge thus produced. In an ill-conceived effort to remedy any enduring colonial-era ethnonymic sub-colonialisms the Odoki Commission unabashedly invoked the very colonial state that had produced them. The CommisAlfred Wasike, ‘Coming Census Will Catalyze Change’, New Vision, 13 December 1990. 44 Republic of Uganda, 1990 Population and Housing Census: Enumerator’s Instructions (Entebbe: Ministry of Finance and Development Planning, Statistics Department, 1990), 16. 45 Excluding ‘Kikuyu’, ‘Jaluo’, ‘Tanganyika’, ‘Congo’, and ‘Kenya’. 46 The concept of the ‘ethnographic state’ was developed in reference to the far more ambitious state knowledge production system of the late-­n ineteenthcentury British India in Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 43

305

306

Part III: Making Publics

sion’s mid-1993 final report cited the 1959 colonial census but appended a fifty-ethnonym inventory (titled ‘Uganda’s ethnic composition in 1959’) which represented an expansion of that same colonial census’ list of tribes.47 This move was in a sense necessitated by the fact that even the single particular census of 1959 did not claim to provide an unequivocal image of the country’s ethnic composition: ‘[s]mall indigenous tribes’ had been lumped in with ‘the main tribe of their areas’.48 The enlargement had occurred under the influence of a 1975 ethnological compendium written by a British Makerere geographer, who had himself used the 1959 Census, but only as a template, from which he expanded the entries using ethnonymic and ethnographic data compiled from monographs, largely written by colonial-­era anthropologists.49 The matter was further confused by a separate Odoki document released at the same time – a draft constitution, which included a different list of ethnonyms. This inventory was labelled ‘Uganda’s ethnic composition as at 1st February, 1926’, in a rather obscure and quite misleading reference to the date when the colonial state had finalised Uganda’s borders. 50 This list contained only forty-­eight categories; the two designations dropped were ‘Barundi’, referring to people from the nearby Great Lakes country of Burundi, and, seemingly in error, ‘Bakenyi’, which referring to people largely living on the shores of Lake Kyoga, in the centre of the country. The Commission’s ethnologues had also, in conspicuous fashion, continued to exclude categories championed at the fringes of Buganda and the other neo-traditional kingdoms; the revival of such institutions in symbolic form as ‘cultural institutions’ had been permitted by the NRM to head off their federalist claims. At the same time, the Commission had included controversial categories, like Nyarwanda, and – as if designed to animate ethnic electoral anxieties – specified each community’s ‘core’ territory and population size, in descending order. 51. It was perhaps little surprise that in November 1993 certain communities, like the Nyarwanda in Luwero, found themselves blocked from Uganda Constitutional Commission, The report of the Uganda Constitutional Commission: Analysis and Recommendations (Kampala: Uganda Constitutional Commission, 1993), 899, 72–73. 48 East African Statistical Department, Uganda Census, 1959, African population (Nairobi: East African Statistical Department, 1961), 1. 49 Bryan W. Langlands, ‘Notes of the Geography of Ethnicity in Uganda’. Makerere, Department of Geography, Occasional Paper 62 (Kampala: Makerere University, 1975). 50 Uganda Constitutional Commission, Draft Constitution of the Republic of Uganda (Kampala: Uganda Constitutional Commission, 1993). 51 Uganda Constitutional Commission, The report of the Uganda Constitutional Commission, 72–74. 47

Liberation Ethnology, District Decolonialism and State Knowledge Production

registering for the election of delegates to the Constituent Assembly. 52 The government’s adoption of a donor-prescribed decentralisation programme in the same year only increased the stakes in the competition for new districts. 53 Tensions concerning district colonialisms were on show when the elected Constituent Assembly convened in mid-1994 to scrutinise the work of the Odoki Commission and finalise the Constitution. For many participants, the target was separate districts for their community. Even leftists like Machyo, representing his county in the Assembly, were found adopting this objective and framing. His people – Basamia – were suffering under the perpetuation of ‘colonial injustice’, he claimed; the neighbouring Basoga ethnic group were acting as ‘internal imperialists’ in denying them a district. 54 But as there was still a significant degree of regime resistance to district proliferation, claiming a spot on the Constitution’s ethnic schedule became the primary objective of many representatives. This goal was particularly pressing for representatives of Bagungu and Basongora – categories that had been named in the census (albeit under shared codes alongside the kingdom-­ identities of ‘Banyoro’ and ‘Batoro’ respectively) but were missing from the draft Constitution’s Schedule. 55 Delegates of self-identifying ethnic minorities such as these exercised strong influence through an informal caucus.56 For many other participants, the ethnic minority recognition agenda had the advantage of undercutting the historical kingdoms.57 But this politics was difficult to control. It provided space for the revival of complex debates associated with Museveni’s home sub-region in Uganda’s south-west, where division between Bahima and Bairu threatened the integrity of the Banyankole ethnic category. In addition, still far from settled was ‘the Banyarwanda question’ which had, in turn, triggered efforts from other activists hailing from the Uganda-Rwanda 52 Joan Kakwenzire, ‘What about Banyarwanda Rights?’, New Vision, 24 November 1993; James Kigozi, ‘‘Cater for Banyarwanda’’, New Vision, 8 July 1994; Ruhaama Ruzindana, ‘Banyarwanda Must be Protected’, New Vision, 17 August 1994. 53 ‘Decentralisation Plan Out’, New Vision, 12 December 1992. 54 Chango Machyo, ‘Samia district a human right’, New Vision, 25 January 1995. 55 John Nzinjah, ‘Basongora disown kingdom’, New Vision, 5 August 1993; John Kakande, ‘Basongora seek recognition, New Vision, 22 October 1994; Henry B. Magino, ‘Opinion: Why Bahima alone, and not others’, New Vision, 13 January 1995. 56 Interview with retired politician, Hoima Town, 2 October 2017. 57 Quirno Mabuma Mukasa, ‘Letter to the editor: I expected very sharp protests’, New Vision, 12 August 1994; Abubaker Mukose, ‘I can’t apologise for what I am’, Sunday Vision, 19 February 1995.

307

308

Part III: Making Publics

borderlands to distance themselves from these controversies by obtaining a separate place in the Constitution for the ‘Bafumbira’.58 Ultimately the process behind the decolonisation of the colonial ethnological inventories remained as shrouded in mystery as its colonial predecessors. 59 After some intense and prolonged debate in the open Assembly, the Select Committee dealing with the ethnic schedule raised eyebrows in late January 1995 when it presented a report on the inventory, now titled ‘Uganda’s Indigenous Communities as at 1st February, 1926’.60 It recommended the addition of five ethnonyms: ‘Bagungu’, ‘Batagwenda’, ‘Bagwisi’, ‘Banyala’, and ‘Bakusu’. Another two – ‘Bakenyi’ and ‘Baruli’ – were hastily added. The Assembly had, by unclear reasoning, enshrined fifty-six ‘indigenous communities’ in the 1995 Constitution’s Third Schedule. Defenders of the inventory’s completeness and legitimacy invariably considered the Schedule’s authority lay in its use of ‘documentary evidence’, or, simply, the ‘prominent and eminent’ nature of the lawyers and judge who had sat on the Odoki Commission.61 Additional ethnonyms proposed for the Schedule were dismissed by the Assembly on the grounds that they were either not ‘real’ ethnic groups or had missed the deadline.62 The political nature of the whole affair was brought into sharp relief by the one case from which the Assembly explicitly shied away. The matter of ‘Bahima secession’ from the Banyankole category was deemed too vexing to touch by both the Select Committee and the open Assembly, at least partly because it concerned Museveni’s own ethnic group; the President soon intervened decisively in opposition to the separatists.63

Decolonising Districts, c.1996–c.2010

The decolonisation of ethnology came to provide the basis for the decolonisation of districts. The Constitution’s First Schedule, naming thirty-­ Hilary Nsambu, ‘Include Bafumbira – CAD’, New Vision, 4 July 1994. For the only prior detailed examination of this document, see John-Jean Barya, Reconstituting Ugandan Citizenship under the 1995 Constitution: A Conflict of Nationalism, Chauvinism, and Ethnicity (Kampala: Centre for Basic Research, 2000). 60 Bart Magunda Katureebe in Republic of Uganda, Proceedings of the Constituent Assembly: Official Report (Entebbe, 1995), 2933. Hereafter Proceedings. James Obua Otoa in Proceedings, 2929; ‘A Tribe Born Out of Cultural Resentment’, New Vision, 9 January 1995; Stephen Higenyi, ‘Gisu Imbalu Rebel to be Caught, Cut’, New Vision, 18 January 1995. 61 Bwambale Biira Loice in Proceedings, 2934–45; Elly Karuhanga in Proceedings, 2924. 62 James Wapakhabulo in Proceedings, 2935, 2929. 63 ‘Museveni Blasts Bahima Demand’, Sunday Vision, 19 February 1995; Grace S. Ibingira, ‘Don’t Overload Constitution’, Sunday Vision, 26 February 1995. 58 59

Liberation Ethnology, District Decolonialism and State Knowledge Production

nine districts, almost immediately came under strain from patronage politics. In March 1997, Parliament passed a resolution to create six new districts, including a number that corresponded clearly to vociferous demands of mid-sized ethnic communities including those of Baruuli for Nakasongola District and Basamia for Busia District, to free them from the ‘sub-colonialisms’ of Baganda and Basoga respectively.64 Mobilisation for district status also started among smaller ethnic communities, wielding their new found recognition in the Third Schedule – with its special reference to ‘1926’ – as tool of district decolonisation.65 It was the 1995 Constitution’s most unusual and deeply but discreetly consequential innovation. Ethnic activists like Nicholas Onegi p’Minga from Nebbi District hoped the conferral of constitutional recognition would make the crusade for district decolonisation easier. ‘Maybe we the Jonam as a people and tribe enshrined in our Constitution of 1995 shall live to see this happen under your administration’, he enjoined Museveni.66 The anti-imperialist discourses and colonial ethnologics that had come to the fore in the constitution-making process remained at the centre of claims levelled from Uganda’s internal peripheries. But Museveni, for a time, resisted openly adopting such a framing. In public, he chastened politicians who made such ethnically framed ‘liberatory’ demands – they were responsible for ‘creating division’.67 This stance changed amid the multiple, converging crises faced by the regime around the millennium. At their heart lay a profound crisis of anti-imperialist identity, which had been prefigured in debates in the Assembly between Machyo and Nabudere. The latter had recently returned from exile in Denmark in about 1992, joining the minority of other Assembly members in National Caucus for Democracy in advocating for a multiparty democracy in place of what Machyo framed as NRM’s ‘anti-imperialist’ no-party system. Nabudere drew attention to the humiliating dependency of the country – even the Assembly in which they spoke – on funding by the very same Western donors.68 The reckoning deepened in the mid-1990s amid the accelerating programme of privatisation which was increasingly converted into opportunities for political allocation by the regime, expanding patronage networks but further damaging Museveni’s reputation in many quarters.69 The 64 Philipp W. Roseman, ‘An Ambiguity in the 1995 Constitution Concerning the Creation of New Districts in Uganda’, Uganda Journal 44 (1997), 47–57. 65 Interview with retired schoolteacher, Masindi Town, February 2011. 66 Onegi p’Minga to Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, n.d. (but between 1995 and 2000), in current author’s possession. 67 Museveni, Sowing, 90; ‘Museveni on Districts’, New Vision, 4 August 1997. 68 Chango Machyo in Proceedings, 4914–15. 69 Geoffrey B. Tukahebwa, ‘Privatization as a Development Policy’, in Holger B. Hansen and Michael Twaddle (eds), Developing Uganda (Oxford: James Currey, 1998), 64–78.

309

310

Part III: Making Publics

President claimed he had been able to show ‘the radical wing that it was actually more patriotic to privatise’.70 In reality, this element of neoliberal reform triggered stronger criticism than earlier elements from older leftists like Machyo, who retired from the Secretariat in 1999.71 Fiercer denunciations still followed from those external to the regime, particularly after the foreign policy scandals of the late 1990s and early 2000s, as the regime exported their squalidly acquisitive ‘liberation’ deep into the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo and cozied up to Washington as its regional sub-imperialist client in the emerging ‘War on Terror’.72 Museveni’s anti-imperialist rhetoric in resistance to Western donors’ multiparty democratisation agenda of became even more difficult to sustain after he relented to some of their demands in 2003. The public questioning of Museveni’s anti-imperialist and Pan-­ Africanist credentials prompted innovation in anti-imperialist rhetoric by the regime.73 The most infamous aspect of this project was the NRM’s exploitation of moral panic about homosexuality, provoking fierce criticism from ‘imperialist’ Western donor governments, with whom he made a great public show of trading barbs.74 More commonly overlooked by scholars were the ethnicised, districtised manifestations of Museveni’s transmogrifying anti-imperialist discourse. He framed the problems experienced by many at Uganda’s rural district peripheries and interstices without recourse to the logics of either NRM rule or the encompassing global political-economic system. Threatened by the donor-imposed opening of political space, the regime began to use the creation of districts and electoral constituencies as one of the main channels by which to distribute patronage and recentralise power within an overarching logic of divide et impera, in preference to proposing the creation of further overmighty neo-traditional institutions. Museveni’s intervention in his own community’s intra-ethnic debates had portended a far more openly ethnological, micro-­managerial role in matters less familiar to him. The legitimising discourse for this strategy Museveni, Sowing, 184. ‘Clean Up Before Selling Another Company’, New Vision, 21 March 1999; ‘Chango Backs Zimbabwe Veterans’, New Vision, 22 May 2000; Chango Machyo w’Obanda, ‘UCB Sale: MPs in Bed with Enemy’, The Monitor, 5 October 2000; Chango Machyo w’Obanda, ‘When “Mzungu” goes Away, “Modern Africa” Dies. Why?’ The Monitor, 13 June 2001. 72 Chris Obore, ‘Beware of Museveni’s Change, says Nabudere’, The Monitor, 20 February 2003; Dani W. Nabudere, ‘Taking Stock of Bush Visit’, The Monitor, 30 July 2003; Chris Obore, ‘UPDF Fighting for Congo’s Oil says Nabudere’, 27 March 2003. 73 Yoweri Museveni, ‘Museveni speaks out’, The Monitor, 2 February 2003. 74 Josephine Maseruka, ‘Arrest Homos, Says Museveni’, New Vision, 28 September 1999. 70

71

Liberation Ethnology, District Decolonialism and State Knowledge Production

centred on sub-colonialism. The first of many Museveni speeches in this vein, in the early 2000s, apportioned some sub-colonialist culpability to Buganda, which so happened to be challenging the regime through its resurgent federal aspirations.75 But soon the concept gained wider applicability. In his State of the Nation address in 2004, Museveni pointed to the widespread, enduring features of ‘the 18 Colonial districts’ which had been ‘quite oppressive because they contained diverse peoples’. ‘Even where there was no violence, there was constant grief’ owing to ‘cultural chauvinism’, he added. Museveni devolved Uganda’s continuing problems the level and legacy of ‘sectarian local administration’. Melding ethno-taxonomy with the language of radicalism, he assured the nation that the districts he was creating ‘are actually instruments of liberation from sub-colonialism’.76 As this regime-validated idea of liberation ethnology took hold in public discourse, minority ethnic entrepreneurs in search of recognition made sure that the ‘definitive’ ethnological statement that was the 1995 the Third Schedule did not remain untouched when Museveni prised the Constitution open for amendment to perpetuate his rule. The Ssempebwa Commission’s 2003 Constitutional Review named three communities who claimed to have been ‘left out’ of the Schedule. The resulting Constitution (Amendment) Act 2005 included these ethnic labels – along with six others – in the Third Schedule: ‘Aliba’, ‘Aringa’, ‘Banyabutumbi’, ‘Banyaruguru’, ‘Barundi’, ‘Gimara’, ‘Ngikutio’, ‘Reli’, and ‘Shana’.77 Amid the outcry concerning Museveni’s bid to remove presidential term limits, the use of the Constitutional Review as an opening for the advancement of such agendas barely registered among the populace, beyond certain MPs who unsuccessfully moved to strike the Banyarwanda ethnonym from the Third Schedule.78 The NRM encouraged these politics by using fresh ethno-taxonomic knowledge produced by both state and non-state bodies. When the Constitutional Review proposed amendments to the 1995 Third Schedule, the Sheema County South MP Ephraim Kamuntu satirically quipped that the need to obtain ‘authentic information about identification of these tribes’ meant that the Ministry for Internal Affairs ‘should have a Department of Anthropology’.79 But extant state institutions came to serve an approximate ethnological function. It was the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) that imbued liberation ethnology with a scientific guise. Its 2006 analytical report on the 2002 census used the census’ ‘Kibaale – Museveni’s Plan’, New Vision, 24 April 2002. Yoweri Museveni, ‘Address to the Nation’, New Vision, 13 September 2004. 77 Republic of Uganda, Report of the Commission of Inquiry (Constitutional Review) (Kampala, 2003), Chapter 11, 157–58. 78 James Odong and Cyprian Musoke, ‘MPs Oppose Tribes in Constitution’, New Vision, 21 July 2005. 79 Republic of Uganda, Hansard, 15 August 2005. 75 76

311

312

Part III: Making Publics

ethnic categories in an analysis of demographic trends, placing the population sizes of ‘small ethnic groups’ under a special spotlight.80 In the same year the National Cultural Policy published by the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development validated the fears of such communities. ‘[T]here exists indigenous minorities that are marginalised. Some of these are faced with loss of identity, which threatens their existence’.81 Aiding and validating the apparatus of ethnological state knowledge production through publications, surveys, and network events were a handful of Global North-led civil society organisations concerned with ethnic minority rights. 82

A luta continua: The Liberation Ethnologist, Since c.2010

Since about 2010, Museveni has come to rely less and less on state apparatus to sustain the project of liberation ethnology. In keeping with the general trend towards personalisation of power in Uganda, the President has added liberator-ethnologist to other elements of his ‘transcendental singularity’ – his multifaceted persona, in which older enduring guises of warrior and philosopher, noted by Ali Mazrui, have also been joined by that of entrepreneur and grandfather.83 Ethnic minority activists validate his ethnological role through lengthy memoranda replete with detail that the aficionado assimilates and regurgitates:

You … get some of these local groups colonising other groups within Uganda. For instance, you had Teso [District, which was] populated by Ateso and Kumam. Kumam are a totally different group, they are Luo-speaking while the Ateso [sic.] speak Ateso, which is the same as Karimajong [sic.] … So when we created the district of Kaberamaido; that became the centre of gravity of the Kumam. They were liberated.84

In this way, the President frequently exhibits his ‘wealth of knowledge’ about ‘the culture of the rural peasantry’.85 The doyen of ethnic

80 Uganda Bureau of Statistics, Uganda Population and Housing Census: Analytical Report – Population Composition (Kampala, 2006), 21–26. 81 Republic of Uganda, ‘The Uganda National Cultural Policy: A Culturally Vibrant, Cohesive and Progressive Nation’, December 2006. 82 The Cultural Rights of Ethnic Minorities in Uganda – A Call for Action (Kampala: Cross-Cultural Foundation of Uganda, 2015). 83 Mikael Karlström, ‘On the Aesthetics and Dialogics of Power in the Postcolony’, Africa 73:1 (2003), 57–76; Ronald Kassimir, ‘Reading Museveni: Structure, Agency and Pedagogy in Ugandan Politics’, Canadian Journal of African Studies 33:2/3 (1999), 649–673; Ali A. Mazrui, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Philosopher King in East Africa: The View from Uganda’, Ufahamu 15:3 (1987), 98–108. 84 Daniel Kalinaki, ‘It is Easier to Create an Army than to Fight Corruption, says Museveni’, Daily Monitor, 11 April 2010. 85 Museveni, Sowing, 206.

Liberation Ethnology, District Decolonialism and State Knowledge Production

difference is apt to emphasise his ability to adjudicate and address cases produced by deficiencies and misapplications of colonial knowledge. One face of this role is that of the committed revolutionary waging an emancipatory struggle against those urging restraint and compromise – often certain government ministries concerned by the spiralling costs. In a leaked 2015 letter, Museveni sought to persuade Minister of Local Government Adolf Mwesige of the ‘need to continue with the process of internal emancipation’, and to educate him on the ways ‘[t] he old colonial districts … used to lump together the different groups of our people without paying attention to their identities’. Museveni gave as an example Arua District in Uganda’s north-west: ‘you would imagine that all the people there are Lugbara – not knowing that there are Kakwas, Jonam, Alur, etc’.86 Museveni’s expensive exercise in applied salvage ethnology has slowed, and evolved, a little in recent years. No ethnonyms have been added to the Constitution’s Third Schedule since 2005; but there are various claimants. The Uganda Human Rights Commission, a body itself established under the 1995 Constitution, details in a recent report that it is ‘as a result’ of several ethnic minority groups’ lack of recognition in the Schedule that they ‘experience a sense of exclusion and marginalization’; exclusion from this document constitutes deprivation of ‘rights to an ethnic and cultural identity, self-determination, heritage and participation’.87 Tackling ‘sub-colonialism that had emerged with colonialism’ in regard to certain peoples has sometimes involved creating new electoral constituencies, rather than or in addition to districts’.88 In a May 2016 speech before Parliament, in an unlikely reference to anthropologist Colin Turnbull’s controversial 1972 monograph The Mountain People, Museveni declared that it was owing to this element of his ‘glorious and massive liberation movement’ there were now MPs for the Tepeth ethnic group, and even for the Ik, who ‘had been described as the “vanishing tribe of Africa” by one of the writers in the 1960s’. The ‘freedom fighters’ of the NRM had ‘done away with the sub-colonialism’, he claimed.89 Only six new districts became operational elsewhere in the country in 2017 as part of the routine quid pro quo of electoral politics. Museveni remained committed to district crea-

86 Yoweri Museveni to Adolf Mwesige, 16 March 2015, reproduced in Edris Kiggundu, ‘Why Museveni wants 36 New Constituencies’, The Observer, 18 May 2015. 87 Uganda Human Rights Commission, The 21st Annual Report – 2018 (Kampala: Uganda Human Rights Commission, 2019), 144. 88 Museveni to Mwesige 16 March 2015, reproduced in Kiggundu, ‘Why Museveni Wants 36 New Constituencies’. 89 Republic of Uganda, Hansard, 31 May 2016.

313

314

Part III: Making Publics

tion, on a scale without global precedent: it was saving voters from the ‘tyranny of numbers’, he claims, without any apparent sense of irony.90 There is little doubt, however, that liberation ethnology tends to produce ‘ever-diminishing circles of belonging’, and ever-diminishing freedoms.91 In July 2014, the MP for Busongora County South riled the Konzo majority in Kasese District by laying the groundwork for minority administrative secession. He petitioned Parliament, demanding places in the Third Schedule for two of the district’s ‘indigenous ethnic minority communities’ – ‘Bakingwe’ and ‘Bagabo’. In response, the MP for Busongora County North Musabe William Nzoghu claimed that these minorities are ‘non-citizens of Kasese’; he derided them as interlopers ‘who came to this place as fishmongers’.92 Little more than two months later, bloody clashes erupted in Kasese District between state security agencies and members of local communities. Over the years a minority of politicians have lobbied for the abolition of this Schedule as part of an overhaul of Uganda’s citizenship laws.93 The most wellknown critic of the schedule has been scholar Mahmood Mamdani, in his capacity as chairperson of the Asian African Association, an organisation launched in 2013 by Africans of south Asian descent in Uganda. Mamdani has called for the eradication of the schedule and related constitutional distinctions between the categories ‘indigenous’ and ‘immigrant’ in order ‘to correct the adverse legacies of the colonial divide-and-rule policy, and to ensure equal treatment in the matter of citizenship’.94 Other Ugandan Asians have historically validated the Schedule through their claims to be permitted a category of their own, however.95 The Constitution and its categories are a source of serious unease for many citizen and non-citizen indigenous and migrant communities owing to histories of expulsions and other forms of exclusionary practices. While the history and stated function of the Third Schedule has long been forgotten by most, this document, and the claim-making in which 90 Sam Waswa, ‘Museveni Defends Creation of New Districts’, ChimpReports website, 11 September 2017 https://chimpreports.com/museveni-defendscreation-of-new-districts [accessed 8 July 2022]. 91 Francis Nyamnjoh, ‘“Ever Diminishing Circles”: The Paradoxes of Belonging in Botswana’, in Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn (eds), Indigenous Experience Today (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 305–32; John Lonsdale, ‘Unhelpful Pasts and a Provisional Present’, in E. Hunter (ed.), Citizenship, Belonging and Political Community in Africa: Dialogues between Past and Present (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2016), 17–40 (29). 92 Republic of Uganda, Hansard, 23 April 2014. 93 Ephraim Kamuntu in Republic of Uganda, Hansard, 15 August 2005. 94 Mahmood Mamdani and Arshad Bholim, ‘Who is a Ugandan?’ Daily Monitor, 19 July 2015. 95 ‘Asians Want to Be a Tribe’, New Vision, 9 March 1995; George Bita, ‘Nabudere Backs Indian Tribe’, New Vision, 10 May 2007.

Liberation Ethnology, District Decolonialism and State Knowledge Production

it is entangled, are likely to endure in Museveni’s Uganda as occasional weapons of district decolonisation. When ethno-liberation by means of district decolonisation proves disappointing, the Third Schedule is in some cases reused by ethnic entrepreneurs to underwrite assertions of further entitlements such as the very sort of separate state-funded ‘cultural institutions’ Museveni once avoided creating.96 Bagungu cultural entrepreneurs, after having achieved Buliisa’s administrative separation from Masindi District in 2006, are now pursuing ‘cultural autonomy’ from Bunyoro-Kitara Kingdom.97 These activists ground this project in the fact of their inclusion in the Third Schedule which, owing to the inventory’s title, in their view underwrites their claims to be ‘an independent ethnic group who ‘existed in Uganda long before 1926’.98 Increasingly since the mid-2000s, peoples self-identifying as ‘indigenous people’ in a special sense recognised by international bodies – normally associated primarily with marginalised livelihoods such as foraging and transhumant pastoralism – have together demanded affirmative action initiatives from the government.99 But the NRM regime has demonstrated little receptivity, in part because responding to certain strategic essentialisms may entail acknowledging customary rights to state-controlled resources such as forests and other protected areas.100

Conclusion

Like other projects of decolonisation, Museveni’s project is a historical endeavour, an act of engaging with the past to orient Ugandans in the present. It acknowledges a past in which domination and indignity was not experienced equally by all Africans. It is, perversely, more concerned with the redistribution of resources than many decolonisation projects; but it is similarly averse to the materialist terrain of political economy.101 It does little to challenge entrenched global and local asymmetries. It is decolonisation as the disinterment of colonial Isaabaruuli Isaabarongo Mwogezi Butamanya, The History of Baruuli/ Banyala (Kampala: Earnest Publishers, 2004), 31, 68, 93 97 Edward Ssekika, ‘Oil: Bunyoro Kingdom Faces Split’, The Observer, 11 July 2013. 98 The Bugungu Cultural Task Force, ‘A Concept Note of the Proposed Bugungu Cultural Institution’, 2013, copy in the current author’s possession. 99 ‘Minority tribes want MPs’, New Vision, 10 June 2008. 100 Rane Willerslev and Lotte Meinert, ‘Understanding Hunger with Ik Elders and Turnbull’s The Mountain People’, Ethnos 82:5 (2017), 820–45 (840–41). 101 For more on this point, see Kevin Ochieng Okoth, ‘Decolonisation and its Discontents: Rethinking the Cycle of National Liberation’, Salvage 10 (2020), 20–43. 96

315

316

Part III: Making Publics

ethnology, redeployed in patronage politics at the rural district margins by an avowed anti-imperialist. This discursive chimera manifests the contorted afterlives, the composite debris, of imperialism and anti-­ imperialism in a country where economics and politics have been arguably further wrenched apart by neoliberalism than in anywhere else in Africa. Liberation ethnology places strict limits on aspects of the past – the sorts of divisions and antagonisms that are open to excavation and confrontation. Though initially granted a veneer of scientific neutrality by certain state institutions in the 2000s, this project rendered the past a province of Museveni alone in the 2010s. It is unclear what the future holds for this mode of governance, amid the engagement of an ascendant China, the breakdown of the Washington Consensus, and the heavy national debt incurred by the ‘liberation generation’ on its way out. It remains to be seen whether the competing, combined projects – political, economic, cultural, and epistemological – of Museveni’s anti-­ imperialist critics may still be revived by a new generation of scholars and activists.102

102 For ideas around decolonial Marxism, see Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘Revisiting Marxism and Decolonisation through the Legacy of Samir Amin’, Review of African Political Economy 48:167 (2021) 50–65.

14 Finding Ourselves, Seeing Ourselves: Nationalism and Reclaiming Colonial Spaces in Uganda DANIEL KALINAKI AND REBECCA RWAKABUKOZA

Kampala was not the first point of contact for the missionaries and eventually the administrators of the British Protectorate in Uganda. Entebbe, farther away and closer to the Lake Victoria shores, with a port for the new long-term visitors, was the administrative seat. When Kampala was eventually formed as a commercial centre, it made sense to migrate the government administrative functions to the city. With all of the main functions of the state now in the capital city of Kampala, it became a site that is at once historical and contested, with clear markers of colonial expressions within its blueprint. Kampala, as a capital, belongs to all of Uganda and its proximity to the government makes it a spatial platform for public memory and state-­sponsored decoloniality projects. As the colonial government carved out public spaces in the new Protectorate, they used names to signal their conquest and to locate themselves and the Empire within the land. This history within the geography makes denaming and renaming of public spaces in the politically independent Uganda an archive of public decolonisation processes. This chapter explores the narrative of nationalism within Uganda’s national spaces and identity, and how political leaders use these spaces, through naming, to project their nationalistic credentials in public decolonisation projects. Names are often the markers for a society’s memory, triggering stories and remembering people and events of importance. Place names are essential markers for the inhabitants of a place to locate themselves within an area, and in relation to physical landscape. These place names make up part of a city’s ‘emotional geography’.1 In colonial Uganda (and other colonised spaces), they became ways to mark territory and insert memories and people from a different place. New names consequently over-wrote any temporal claims to the land from the residents, creating 1 John Bradley and Amanda Kearney, ‘“Too Strong to Ever Not Be There”: Place Names and Emotional Geographies’, Social & Cultural Geography 10 (2009), pp. 77–94.

318

Part III: Making Publics

a new spatial territory for which the independence and decolonisation process involved renaming. These names have mostly gone unnoticed and unscrutinised in postcolonial Uganda, with their histories and significance lost in their utilitarian roles in the city and woven into the dwellers’ lives. But, as argued by other scholars (Till, 2012: Yeon, 1996), it is important to critically analyse these urban space representations. Till pushes this argument further, and says to ignore such symbolic and cultural representations of the lived realities of urban dwellers is ‘limiting our appreciation both of the possibilities for urban change and the prospects for more than just urban futures’.2

Colonial Places as Unfamiliar and New

In what would eventually become the British Protectorate of Uganda, different societies and language groups had different names for shared spaces and geography such as lakes, rivers, or mountains. For instance, what would become renamed as Lake Victoria, the freshwater lake in the heart of Africa, was known as Nyanja or Nyanza (Bantu words to describe a mass of water), Nalubaale to the Baganda who lived to its north, and Ukerewe to the people living on its southern shores, in present-­day Tanzania. 3 In Kenya to its east, some communities knew it as Namulondwe.4 Communities had lived near and around these places for several generations and engaged with these natural spaces in several ways, including culturally, spiritually, and linguistically. 5 European exploration in the nineteenth century which sought to ‘discover’ and ultimately conquer foreign lands and resources interrupted this engagement. The concept of exploration in and of itself requires the discovery of ‘new’ things and spaces. While these discoveries were not new and were already well known and described by local communities, explorers may have named them to justify the cost of the expeditions and burnish their pride and reputations. These spaces with their new Western names 2 Karen E. Till, ‘Wounded Cities: Memory-Work and a Place-Based Ethics of Care, in Alastair Fraser (ed.), Anniversary Essays: Forty Years of Geography in Maynooth (National University of Ireland Maynooth, 2012), pp. 253–83. 3 Richard Francis Burton, First Footsteps in East Africa (London: Darf Publishers, 1986 [1894]). 4 Barbara Angopa, ‘Ugandan Campaigners seek to Decolonise Kampala’s Streets’, Al Jazeera, 25 June 2020, www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/6/25/ugandan-campaigners-seek-to-decolonise-kampalas-streets [accessed 13 March 2021]. 5 The name Nalubaale has its etymology in ‘Lubaale’ which the Baganda referred to as spirit mediums of departed ancestors, www.buganda.com/ eddini.htm [accessed 14 December 2019].

Nationalism and Reclaiming Colonial Spaces in Uganda

would later be ‘discoveries’ turned over to the colonial administrators who often followed shortly afterward. It is easier to claim ownership or stewardship over ‘newly discovered’ spaces than over those that local communities had known and occupied for millennia. ‘Discovery’ involved an exchange of knowledge and ignorance as foreign explorers and local communities tried to learn about one another by trying to interpret and master language, names, and geography. It is clear that whether or not local communities had a name or several names for something was of little importance to explorers eager to acquire territory and signal conquest. This often came with another language. But language, and the naming rights it conferred, is more than utilitarian and can become a power tool, carrying with it a new master, a new religion, and a new spatial identification. The power to name spaces and identify through language allowed the visitor to become the host. Local communities tended to learn or corrupt the names of foreign objects without always attempting to appropriate them by giving them completely new names. The colonisers, on the other hand, rarely sought to render local names into their own language or vocabulary, preferring to paint over local nomenclature, memory, and culture. Some scholars and commentators have tended to give these explorers the benefit of the doubt by suggesting that they seldom had the time or the linguistic knowledge to make the necessary inquiries in order to accurately record the names of things and places. H.B. Thomas and Ivan R. Dale have argued that, ‘in the absence of readily ascertainable local names they frequently employed European proper names, of persons great, or not so great, who for the most part had some association with the country or the map-maker’s project’.6 This is only partially true. As earlier noted, even where communities had provided the names of key features, such as Lake Nalubaale, explorers and eventual colonial administrators very often disregarded them and instead imposed their own names. They named places and spaces after foreign monarchs or after themselves and their patrons. Thus, Nalubaale became Victoria after the British monarch; Lake Mwitanzige became Albert, named after her husband; while lakes Gweru and Masyoko became Edward and George respectively after two princes of the British crown. The nearby water falls on the River Nile were named after Roderick Murchison, the long-term head of the Royal Geographical Society, as would be the wildlife reserve surrounding the falls. This renaming was deliberate and political. When Dr Frank Stuhlman, the German aide to Emin Pasha, tried to name some of the peaks and approaches of the Ruwenzori Mountains after prominent German professors of the time, he faced resistance from the British authorities.7 6 Ivan R. Dale and Harold B. Thomas, ‘Uganda Place Names: Some European Eponyms’ Uganda Journal 17:2 (1953). 7 As it was, the highest peak of the mountain was named Margherita in 1906

319

320

Part III: Making Publics

The proposed names would not carry (for the British, anyway) the significance that they looked for in a name, neither would they serve the purpose of spatial acquisition and territory marking in the Protectorate. The explorers did not always name public spaces after people and the monarch. The explorer John Hanning Speke named a part of the Nile the Somerset River after his home county in England. In a note about the map Speke gave to him, Samuel Baker says, ‘he has marked the Victoria Nile below the Ripon Falls as the Somerset river. As I have made a point of adhering to all [local] names as given by him upon that map, I also adhere to the name Somerset river for that portion of the Nile’.8 Baker was so grateful to Speke’s work and happy to ‘confirm his discoveries’, and in friendship, reaffirmed Speke’s Somerset mark.9 Other spatial responses to personal memories include the ‘Jack’s Mount’, a hill in Kyaggwe in Buganda that Henry Stanley named after his beloved and then recently deceased dog, Jack. The bull terrier that had accompanied him from England was assaulted and killed by a cow gifted to him for subsistence.10 This naming and renaming of places and spaces was first noted by Lt Col William Ross King in a notice to the Royal Geographical Society in 1875. King asked that explorers consider maintaining local names instead of imposing inappropriate British and Irish names.11 His critique focused on the impracticality of naming multiple places across the world after British and Irish cities, towns, and counties and not after public figures. It was okay to name after public figures from the empire, as they were not marking territory for themselves so much as they were for Britain. This appears to confirm views that suggest that, rather than acting out of ignorance, the European explorers were aware of the ‘problem’ of culture contact and were, in fact, acting deliberately to adapt local culture – including names – to their own.

The Protectorate: Old and Unfamiliar Space

Buganda formally became a British Protectorate in 1894. At this point, the colonial period became a remaking of the possessed land, with the colonised people having to exist in a newly formed space with new by Prince Luigi Amedeo Abruzzi, a name it carries to this day, after Queen Margherita of Italy. 8 Samuel W. Baker, The Albert N’Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile (London: Macmillan & Co, 1866), p. 333. 9 Ibid., p. 347. 10 Henry Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, vol. 1 (Hamburg: Karl Gardener, 1878), p. 234. 11 William Ross King, ‘On the Names of Places in Geography’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of London 19:2 (1874–1875), 134–36.

Nationalism and Reclaiming Colonial Spaces in Uganda

and unfamiliar spatial and temporal markers. The act of renaming – whether the colonial agents and enablers thought of it as renaming or not – became in this period a signifier of conquest and, often, a direct association with the seat of the British Empire. Most of the naming in this period is attributed to Frederick Lugard, the soldier, mercenary, and colonial administrator – who had helped impose control over Buganda on behalf of the Imperial British East African Company, and, eventually, on behalf of the British Crown – assisted in this regard by another soldier, Lt Col J.R.L. Macdonald. The spatial landscape takes on a military domination, as Apollo N. Makubuya points out, which reinforces the violent occupancy of the land.12 Apollo Makubuya started an informal pressure group in 2020 that is named ‘Team PPP’ after the title of his 2018 book, Protection, Patronage or Plunder? In their petition on change.org, Team PPP refers to the street names as ‘visible vestiges of a colonial hegemony’ whose removal is a ‘crucial part of a process of decolonisation and ending an era of domination and impunity’.13 Many of the names given to streets, forts, and places, were not of monarchs, explorers, or scientists, but rather of military officers involved in the military campaigns against rebellious local kings, or far-flung stand-out outposts.14 The naming was, therefore, a political act of subjugation: military victory was written in the names of the victors. These place names became official, codified first in the official maps Macdonald drew in 1899 – which was the official cartographical record of the new Protectorate – and in the new laws. Thus, conquest followed in the streets, forts, and hills in the Kampala capital which were named after colonial military male officers like Colonel Trevor Ternan, Major General Sir Henry Edward Colville and General Francis de Winton, colonial administrators like Sir Harry Johnston and Clement Hill, or religious leaders like Revs G.K. Baskerville and G.L. Pilkington. This naming was followed by or conducted alongside a physical appropriation of spaces around the Kampala capital by both the missionaries and colonial administrators. Principally, this revolved around the appropriation of strategic locations previously under the control and use of the local power structures, manifested through the building of cathedrals and administrative forts on hills previously occupied by royal enclosures or traditional places of worship.15 By the time colonial Apollo N. Makubuya, personal interview, Kampala, 26 November 2019. Apollo N. Makubuya, ‘Petition to Decolonise and Rename Streets in Kampala and other Landmarks in Uganda’ Change.org www.change.org/p/ president-museveni-petition-to-decolonise-and-rename-streets-in-kampalaand-other-landmarks-in-uganda. 14 Dale and Thomas, ‘Uganda Place Names: Some European Eponyms’. 15 Lord Lugard would boast about this appropriation in his diaries published posthumously in 1959, as would Bishop John Joseph Hirth of the Catholic White Fathers. 12

13

321

322

Part III: Making Publics

rule was fully imposed, the imperial imprint had been firmly etched into the spatial fabric of the Uganda Protectorate. All major lakes, the main national wildlife reserves, major waterfalls, mountain peaks, notable valleys were renamed after European monarchs, explorers, scientists, or military officers. Kampala’s city streets were named or renamed in similar fashion. Sir Apolo Kaggwa, a long-serving Katikkiro (Prime Minister) of Buganda, and one of those who collaborated with the colonial enterprise, is the only notable local after whom a major street was named in the centre of the capital. Significantly, there are no major streets in the city centre named after Kabaka Mwanga of Buganda or Omukama Kabarega of Bunyoro, both of whom resisted the imposition of colonial rule. Similarly, not all local allies are recognised. Semei Kakungulu, who expanded the British sphere of influence in the Uganda Protectorate; Stanislus Mugwanya, a key leader in the Catholic Church and one of the three regents of the child king Kabaka Chwa II; and Ham Mukasa of the Anglican Church and one of Buganda’s most powerful chiefs are some of the notable local elites who are perhaps deserving of but do not receive any such naming rights. In other words, the colonial authorities rewarded and recognised collaborators (or at least a few of them) in this manner while the resistors were ignored or forgotten.

Independence: Inheriting a Contested Space

Mahmood Mamdani has argued that African countries had three core agendas at independence: deracialising civil society, detribalising the local governments, and developing their economies despite unequal international relations.16 Deracialisation was manifested mostly in the form of indigenisation or nationalisation, or both. This nationalisation is evident in the symbolism of place names. Renaming is an important spatial response to regaining agency during the process of political independence among colonised societies and people. As African countries got independence, there was a wave of renaming as countries reframe their identities and project their nationalism. The first African country to gain independence, the Gold Coast, was named Ghana; while the last, South West Africa, was named Namibia in 1990.17 Across the continent, a new name marked political independence and often signified a new identity that pushed against the imposed colonial name. The Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 17 It is worth noting that when it finally seceded from the Sudan in 2011 the newly independent country took on the iterative name Republic of South Sudan. 16

Nationalism and Reclaiming Colonial Spaces in Uganda

Republic of Upper Volta was named Burkina Faso in 1983. The British Protectorate of Bechuanaland became Botswana in 1966. Belgian Congo became Zaire in 1971 (and later the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Northern Rhodesia became Zambia in 1964. Within these and other countries, there is a larger renaming project of public spaces and street names, with the most documented in South African cities like Pretoria during the post-apartheid period. Karen Till theorises that in the case of a ‘wounded city’, the space is more than the property ownership.18 Names serve as active reminders of the coloniser and the active erasure of local identities during the colonial period. At Uganda’s independence in 1962, the country created the symbols that would signify its newly independent status: a flag, national anthem and coat of arms. A redesigned currency was issued to replace the face of the British monarch, Queen Elizabeth, with what was supposed to be more neutral, a photograph of Lake Victoria.19 It is remarkable that there was little contest to the replacement of the queen with a lake which was renamed by explorers in an extension of British power after her great-great grandmother, Queen Victoria, as many colonial names remained uncontested. Public spaces, facilities, or roads named during the colonial period retained their names. The first post-independence government, of Prime Minister Apolo Milton Obote, concerned itself with what Mamdani calls ‘detribalisation of the Native Authority’, as it attempted to undermine the authority of its ruling coalition partner, the Kabaka Yekka (KY) party and the Buganda Kingdom whose interests KY represented. Having abolished traditional kingdoms in 1967 and imposed a new republican constitution without debate, Obote announced a ‘Move to the Left’ in 1969, a programme of nationalising major enterprises to heal the wounds of inequitable property ownership and control of the economic surplus. The people welcomed Obote’s removal, in a coup d’état in 1971, writing letters of support and thanks to Idi Amin for ‘saving’ the nation.20 He also enjoyed the initial support of the United Kingdom, but this alliance was to end quickly.21 Till, ‘Wounded Cities’. Edgar R. Batte, ‘The Evolution of Ugandan Money’, Daily Monitor (Kampala), 10 October 2012, www.monitor.co.ug/artsculture/Reviews/The-evolution-ofUgandan-money/691232-1529446-15atqfu/index.html [accessed 14 December 2019]. 20 Alicia C. Decker, In Idi Amin’s Shadow: Women, Gender and Militarism in Uganda (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014), p. 41. 21 Richard Slater (High Commissioner, Uganda) to Alec Douglas-Home (Foreign Secretary), 6 August 1971, ‘The first six months of General Amin’s government’, http://markcurtis.info/2015/06/27/british-support-for-idi-amin-1971 [accessed 14 December 2019]. 18

19

323

324

Part III: Making Publics

Without a political constituency, Amin undid Obote’s detribalisation efforts by launching a major recruitment drive for the military, which doubled within three months, and put at its core a four-thousandstrong force of Sudanese and Zairean soldiers, which by some accounts amounted to no more than a mercenary force.22 He then adopted the very policies of nationalisation that had led to Obote’s ouster, and took them to the extremes with the expulsion of the Israeli and Asian communities, appropriating their properties and businesses, and nationalising the land. His rule consolidated power within the military and reinforced a ‘violent form of masculinity’.23 It is in this context that Amin’s renaming of spaces in Uganda must be understood. He assumed a stance to ‘nationalise the land’, renamed national spaces and extended military conquest over the nation. Most of the naming was done as an imposition from the Office of the Presidency, and with public offices like the Parliament disbanded during this time, it can be assumed that this process was a reflection of Idi Amin’s own political agenda. Alicia Decker writes that because Amin had come to power by the barrel of a gun, he worked harder to establish political legitimacy. He wanted to be seen as the ‘father of the nation’.24 When he banned miniskirts on 27 May 1972, Amin called on the people to ‘not be brainwashed by imperialists’, a decree that changed over time but was always linked to cultural nationalism.25 This anti-imperialism nationalist agenda extended to the naming of public spaces. During his term of office, Queen Elizabeth National Game Park became Rwenzori National Game Park; Murchison Falls and the national park in the area with the same name were renamed after Omukama Kabarega of Bunyoro, whose kingdom encompassed the area; Mt Elgon became Mt Masaba and Lake Edward was named Lake Idi Amin. Several streets in Kampala were also renamed. In a legitimisation of his military conquest, Prince Charles Drive became 25 January Avenue to commemorate the day of the coup that brought him to power, and Shimoni Road became Army Avenue. Other roads were renamed after African independence leaders: Queen’s Road became Lumumba Avenue after the assassinated Congolese Prime Minister; Salisbury Road became Nkrumah Road after the Ghanaian leader; Allidina Visram Road became Bokassa Street after the Central African Republic’s Jean-Bédel Bokassa, Hunter Road turned into Luthuli Avenue after the South African chief, while Harcourt Avenue was renamed Kimathi Avenue after the Kenyan nationalist. Stanley Road in Kampala was Mahmood Mamdani, Politics and Class Formation in Uganda (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1999), p. 303. 23 Decker, In Idi Amin’s Shadow, p. 57. 24 Ibid., p. 60. 25 Ibid., p. 63. 22

Nationalism and Reclaiming Colonial Spaces in Uganda

renamed after John Akii-Bua who had become the first Ugandan to win an Olympic gold medal only months before the renaming. These associations with independence leaders (like Nkrumah), African nationalists (like Kimathi) champions (like Akii-Bua) were a reiteration of Amin’s call to look to the continent for identifiers and legitimacy, even though some were problematic (like military leaders Bokassa and Mobutu). Amin’s moves and new names combined nationalism, Pan-Africanism and populism. It could be said that the naming process was more for him to be seen and legitimised than for Ugandans to see themselves in the landscape. But the underlying political intention of ‘healing’ the colonial wounds is unmistakable and coded in his public speeches. During a public event on 18 January 1973 to officially unveil the renamed Lumumba Avenue, Amin said that this was as a fulfilment of a promise made a month earlier to give roads ‘new names’. The change of names was planned ‘to give the people of Uganda and all of Africa dignity and respect, and to enjoy their freedom, previously denied them by parasites and foreign agents’.26 It can be argued that Amin used the nationalisation and expulsion of the Asian business owners to appropriate the economic surplus and redistribute it to his military and political allies, while drumming up nationalist fervour, including with the renaming of public spaces, to entrench himself against a hostile external environment and an increasingly unstable internal one. He presented himself as one healing the economic and identity wounds of the colonial past, as well as of the immediate post-independence government. The Asian expulsion is also followed by a much less recorded period of renaming of schools in the capital that bore Asian names. In a meeting between the heads of department on Education Matters at City Council of Kampala on 16 February 1973, the Education Officer said ‘since the Asian departure from this country, schools bearing Foreign names like Ramgarhia Primary School etc. had no significance to the African Community’ and that it was ‘a matter of policy to rename the schools’. 27 Both the title of the minute in the meeting notes, ‘ED.2/15/73: Change of Imperialistic School Names’ and the emphasis on significance to the community carry the tone of reclaiming spatial authority in Amin’s nationalist speeches. The names were more than locators and the people needed not just to find themselves but to see themselves in the landmarks; and although the bulk of the names were Indian (a former colonised population itself) and not British, Ugandans viewed their presence as an extension of the Empire in Uganda. 26 ‘Abantu Ba Lumumba Banaasonderwa Ensimbi’, Munno 63:16 (Kampala: Marianum Press) 19 January 1973 (quote, our translation). 27 Minute ED.2/15/73 in Report of the Heads of Departments on Education Matters, City Council of Kampala, 16 February 1973.

325

326

Part III: Making Publics

The names proposed and eventually adopted by the education ministry, however, were more practical than political. The three-person sub-committee formed decided to rename Norman Godhino Primary School as Buganda Road Primary School and Mandal Primary School as Bat Valley Primary School.28 Another name, Nakivubo Road Primary School for Ramgarhia Primary School, was rejected by the committee because ‘the name would tend to cause some confusion since there was already a school in Kampala with almost a similar title namely, Nakivubo Primary School’.29 The people needed to locate themselves, without confusion. The City Council played a similar role when the Executive Office of the President would rename roads, clarifying and sharing circulars from the Commissioner of Lands and Surveys on which roads and sections of roads had been renamed. 30 In a meeting of the acting town clerk and other heads of departments on development (planning, lands, works, and traffic) matters, the town clerk reported receiving a letter from the public on the confusion with the new Kimathi Avenue (previously Harcourt Avenue) which continued from Tucker Road in front of the Independence Arch. The meeting resolved to rename Tucker Road as well to Kimathi Avenue so that the new Kimathi Avenue stretched from the Independence Arch through to Parliament. 31 Dedan Kimathi was part of the core Mau Mau leadership that resisted British rule in Kenya. This could be an important stretch, if politicised, but the name decision was more a matter of practicality than it was political.

No Models to Memorialise

When the process was political, it was not without contestation. The naming, denaming and renaming of the largest hotel in Kampala during the 1970s is perhaps the best example for the contestation of memory for contemporary actors in postcolonial Uganda. The hotel was established as an Act of Parliament, Apolo Hotel Corporation Act 1967, and construction finished in time for the five-year anniversary of political independence. The hotel idea, according to John Kakonge, then Minister of Planning and Economic Development, during the second reading of the Bill in the National Assembly, started in 1963 but was delayed due to a lack of financing. 32 Opened on 15 September a few days before the 28 Minute ED.6/64/73 in Report of the Heads of Departments on Education Matters, City Council of Kampala, 22 June 1973. 29 Ibid. 30 Sometimes only sections were renamed. 31 Minute DC.12/75/73 in Report of the Meeting of the Acting Town Clerk and other Heads of Departments on Development (Planning, Lands, Work & Traffic Matters), City Council of Kampala (No. 12 DC of 1973). 32 Official Report of the Proceedings of the National Assembly, First Session,

Nationalism and Reclaiming Colonial Spaces in Uganda

independence anniversary celebrations on 9 October, the Apolo Hotel was located close to the State House in Nakasero, an upscale neighbourhood. Its name was contested during the discussions of the Bill – not because it was similar to the President’s but rather because it was not African. The Kampala East representative H.M. Luande asked, ‘why not use a Ugandan name? … but it is not a Ugandan name. It is quite confusing’. 33 The discussions alternately refer to the hotel as ‘Apolo Hotel’, ‘Apolo State Hotel’ or ‘State Hotel’, but the Members of the National Assembly were careful to mention that it could be any Apolo, not necessarily the President – even Apolo Kivebulaya, a twentieth-­century priest and evangelist. However, the possible connection to Obote was unacceptable for Amin who denamed it in an active erasure of his predecessor’s legacy and rejection of his power and called it Kampala International Hotel. 34 This extends the contestation of memory beyond the colonial period and actors. Indeed, when Obote returns to power in December 1980, one of his symbolic acts was to rename the facility the Apolo Hotel. The company paperwork and legislation had remained Apolo Hotel, rather convenient for Obote as the rhetoric of his government, and subsequent governments, promised to erase and heal the nation from the brutality of the Amin years. The hotel is currently known as Sheraton Hotel, after divestiture in the privatisation drive during the early years of Museveni’s government. 35 In many ways, after eight brutal and disruptive years, the post-Amin era became a time of healing this time from national governments in the immediate postcolonial era. Uganda was once again a ‘wounded place’ that needed healing, some of which required removing the markers of those years embodied in the names: Lake Idi Amin became Lake Edward again, and 25 January was renamed Prince Charles Avenue. Army Avenue returned to Mackinnon Road and Shimoni Road. It was an erasure not of African identity but of Idi Amin, as it targeted those names that were directly linked to the former president and his brutal regime. It was also to an extent a healing of international relations as the subsequent governments courted the British and other international powers. With the old imperial colonial-era names, they signalled a difference in their international policies from Amin’s and that they were not completely rejecting the Empire. Fifth Meeting, 28 April 1967 Uganda Parliamentary Debates (Hansard) Second Series, Vol. 69, p. 1955. 33 Ibid., p. 1938. 34 This is no relation to present-day International Hotel 2000 Ltd often referred to as ‘International Hotel’ that is located in Muyenga, a south-eastern suburb of Kampala. 35 It is still legally under Apolo Hotel Corporation Limited but operating with ‘Sheraton Hotel’ as its business name.

327

328

Part III: Making Publics

It is possible that postcolonial Uganda has failed to find models to commemorate given the turbulence of the immediate postcolonial years. On the importance of reputational politics for those who are remembered, Derek Alderman notes that these social figures serve ‘both as ‘models of society’ that reflect how society shapes the past to serve its present interests and needs, and ‘models for society’ that guide how society shapes its actions and attitudes through a comparison with the past’. 36 For the dominant actors in the turbulent postcolonial Uganda, they do not serve the interests and needs of the current Uganda and neither do they provide any guidance.

Denaming as Healing and Nationalist

The National Resistance Army/Movement capture of the capital of Kampala on 26 January 1986 at the end of a five-year guerilla war presents yet another opportunity to examine nationalism in identity politics as seen in the naming of national spaces. 37 The NRA had already demonstrated its awareness of the power of names while waging its armed rebellion against the Obote government by adopting noms de guerre for its top leaders and commanders. This tactic might have been borrowed from the anti-Portuguese struggles in Angola and Mozambique, where the NRA leaders obtained military training. Furthermore, many fighters and political leaders in the rebel group abandoned the use of their Christianised first names in what can only be interpreted as a personal exercise in Pan-Africanism. 38 In addition, the rebel group demonstrated knowledge of the power of symbolism by naming its fighting units after Pan-Africanist icons including Eduardo Mondlane, Abdel Gamal Nasser, and Kwame Nkrumah, as well as the two Ugandan kings that resisted colonialism: Kabarega of Bunyoro and Mwanga of Buganda. 39 In his autobiography, Sowing the Mustard Seed, Yoweri K. Museveni says that the battalions were named ‘in honour of African heroic figures’.40 It is important to note that while wars had been fought for centuries before and this group could have chosen to identify with any number of warriors (men 36 Derek H Alderman, ‘Street Names as Memorial Arenas: The Reputational Politics of Commemorating Martin Luther King Jr in a Georgia County’. Historical Geography 30 (2002), 99–120. 37 The NRA/M took power on 25 January but delayed the announcement until the next day in order to avoid sharing an anniversary with Idi Amin who had taken power on the same day in January 1971. 38 For example: ‘Warren’ Kizza Besigye, ‘John Patrick’ Amama Mbabazi, ‘Saverino’ Kahinda Otafiire, ‘Gregory’ Mugisha Muntu, et al. 39 Yoweri Museveni, Sowing the Mustard Seed (London: Macmillian, 1997). 40 Ibid. p. 137.

Nationalism and Reclaiming Colonial Spaces in Uganda

or women), they opted to pick from (male) Africans and Ugandans, who had resisted colonial rule. The Abdel Gamal Nasser unit would later take on a less politicised ‘Task Force’ name as it became in charge of urban operations in Kampala.41 To some extent, the NRA carries the same revisionist outlook to identity as Idi Amin, yet they constructed their political and military legitimacy in healing the wounds suffered under the Amin regime, particularly the breakdown of rule of law and respect for human rights. How would the new regime reconcile these contradictory positions? Here, again, the narrative of nationalism takes on utilitarian value and we see interesting similarities as well as important differences with the Amin regime. Like Idi Amin before, the NRA was militarily strong but politically weak and was therefore keen to build political alliances with the traditional governments. For instance, in the case of the influential and central Buganda Kingdom, with which Obote had fallen out as part of his detribalisation effort, Amin had built bridges with the return for burial of the remains of its king, Kabaka Edward Mutesa, who had died in exile in England.42 Similarly, the NRA courted key Baganda leaders as well as Mutesa’s heir, Ronald Mutebi, and eventually restored the kingdom that Obote had abolished in 1967 to appease the Buganda elite and ensure their allegiance.43 Another important similarity is that the NRA, like Amin, had benefited from foreign backing that was decisive in acquiring state power. Apart from receiving arms and ammunition from Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the NRA had also entered an alliance of interests with the British, through businessman Tiny Rowland, ahead of the Nairobi peace talks in 1985.44 As far as narrative is concerned, there are at least three ways in which Museveni and the NRA attempted to differentiate itself from the Amin regime they so openly despised but with which they also shared some key similarities. First, the NRA regime presented itself as being distinctly different from the more turbulent Uganda of the 1970s and 1980s and tried to generate consensus on the country being wounded and in need of healing by appointing a Commission of Inquiry into Violations of Human Rights in May 1986.45 This was also supported by the denaming of the places Ibid. p. 157. Henry Lubega, ‘How Amin Announced Plans to Return Muteesa’s Remains’, Daily Monitor (Kampala), 13 March 2017 www.monitor.co.ug/ Magazines/PeoplePower/How-Amin-announced-plan-to-return-Muteesa-sremains/689844-3845486-15tatgs/index.html [accessed 13 January 2020]. 43 Joe Oloka-Onyango, ‘Constitutional Transition in Museveni’s Uganda: New Horizons or Another False Start?’ Journal of African Law 39:2 (1995), 165. 44 Daniel K. Kalinaki, Kizza Besigye and Uganda’s Unfinished Revolution (Kampala: Dominant Seven, 2014), p. 84. 45 The inquiry covered the period from independence to January 1986 when 41

42

329

330

Part III: Making Publics

Amin had renamed, such as Kabarega and Ruwenzori National Parks, Lakes Amin and Mobutu Sese Seko which, as noted, reverted to their colonial-era names. Secondly, the new regime carefully highlighted its Pan-African credentials by leaving some of Amin’s named heroes in place, like Nkrumah and Nasser, while expanding the list with their own additions. A large new Chinese-built stadium on the eastern outskirts of Kampala was named after Nelson Mandela while a military training facility was named after Oliver Tambo, the South African anti-­ apartheid politician and revolutionary who led the African National Congress from 1967 to 1991. A large new mosque in Old Kampala, whose construction began during Amin’s rule, was named after Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.46 Thirdly, and perhaps most interesting, was that the new regime went in search of its own new domestic heroes drawn from a more recent past: the post-independence and contemporary political periods. This is especially important to the city, the seat of government and commercial centre, in which all Ugandans are to see and find themselves. Thus, the landscape had become, as Alderman calls it, a ‘memorial arena’ for the contestation of collective memory and identity. While it is perhaps understandable to erase the public record of Amin’s memory engraved in the landscape given the upheaval of those years, the changes were not just about healing from Amin’s regime but were also calculated to appease an external non-Ugandan audience. Lake Mobutu and Lake Idi Amin were rejected in the same stroke as Kabarega Falls. The same calculations are carried when one considers that the roads named after the Pan-African actors would remain unchanged from Amin to Obote to Museveni, even as some of them, such as Siad Barre, lose power and suffer serious reputational damage. It is as though the relative neutrality and distance of the contemporary Pan-African actors makes them more acceptable to Ugandan political protagonists. The names are useful power tools though, in signalling a change of power and a coming of a new era, one supposedly better than those before. There is a clear preference for Pan-African actors over national Ugandans for commemoration in place names. The new government – which barely acknowledged the 1970s efforts – gets legitimacy from these African figures who extend unity and shared identity ideologies, but simultaneously continues the erasure of the local actors in the the NRA took power but its report was never debated, leading critics to dismiss it as window-dressing – much like the 1974 Commission of Inquiry into disappearances during Amin’s regime. 46 The Libyan leader paid for the building of the mosque. It is also worth noting that a military barracks in Eastern Uganda named after him during the Amin years has kept its official name to this day.

Nationalism and Reclaiming Colonial Spaces in Uganda

making and remaking of Uganda. It is possible that the delocalisation of the naming issue offers an easier decision for the national power watching over a multicultural space. Should the city of Kampala’s spatiality be left to be the business of the Buganda Kingdom, there could have been a possibility for other names and inclusion of women as other models for society from precolonial times but that would also offer different contestations on ownership of land: kingdom versus nationstate. This would open a scar, to extend the analogy of ‘wounded cities’ that the regime might not know how to resolve. Although the NRA/M had acknowledged the role of Mwanga and Kabarega in its fighting units, it discarded these heroes from the past when it came into power in 1986. Instead, the new regime presented a new list of contemporary and post-independence heroes after whom roads and public spaces were to be named. Yusuf Lule, the first NRM Chairman and Ignatius Musaazi, an independence-era politician were both reburied with honours at the Heroes’ Corner in the Kololo national ceremonial grounds in Kampala.47 Yusuf Lule also had a road changed to his name – former Kitante road. Ben Kiwanuka, the Chief Justice dragged from his chambers and murdered under the Amin regime had a street renamed after him, as does John Babiiha, who was Vice President under Obote between 1967 and 1971. The painting over of the Amin years had started almost as soon as he was deposed. In 1979, the transitional Uganda National Liberation Front government under President Yusuf Lule renamed Bokassa Street to Luwum Street after Archbishop Janani Luwum who the Ugandan leader was accused of having murdered. Mobutu Road in Kampala became Makindye Road. The NRA/M regime also declared a new heroes’ holiday on 9 June, built around contemporary heroes, in particular Edidian Luttamaguzi, a peasant who refused to reveal the whereabouts of the NRA rebels, including Museveni, and paid with his life.48 The denaming served to dissociate from other African leaders who had overseen similar horrific regimes in their countries. Leaders like Zaire’s Mobutu and Central African Republic’s Bokassa were erased from the landscape while the others, like Lumumba, retained their place. The next task of the denaming and renaming process was to remind people about the tragedies and extend responsibility to the collective so that the nation might not return to ‘those days’. This was the 47 Ronald Odongo, ‘MP Ogwal wants Obote, Oyite Ojok Reburied at Kololo’, 4 February 2013, Uganda Radio Network, https://ugandaradionetwork.com/ story/mp-ogwal-wants-obote-oyite-ojok-reburied-at-kololo [accessed 10 March 2020]. 48 Faustin Mugabe, ‘Why NRM declared June 9th Heroes’ day’, Daily Monitor (Kampala) 9 June 2019, www.monitor.co.ug/Magazines/PeoplePower/-NRMJune-9-Heroes-Day-UNLA-Luweero-Obote-Museveni/689844-515000013qh1ki/index.html [accessed 28 February 2020].

331

332

Part III: Making Publics

usefulness of including Kiwanuka and Luwum streets. The narrative has remained useful as a national holiday on 16th February is now observed in honour of Luwum. During the declaration in 2015, President Museveni, also the NRM Chairman, said the killing of Luwum ‘was a tragedy and shame to Uganda’.49 Here he extends the wound (and shame) to the entire country, for whom the day is a collective remembrance not just of the late Archbishop but of the tragedies from the previous Amin regime. The first Luwum day was observed in 2016, two days before a presidential election, with heavy engagement from the church as a political actor. 50 Notably, the renaming under the NRA/M is mostly of neutral spaces. In 2001 President Museveni renamed Owen Falls Dam at the country’s main hydroelectricity plant, Nalubaale Power Station, after the local name of the lake that feeds the River Nile, but this is an exception. 51 Most of the places renamed under Amin had their colonial-era names replaced. The renaming has the main effect of undoing the memory of Amin and the Obote regimes and the painting over of new contemporary memories, without significantly challenging the militant and colonial nomenclature imposed upon the land. To this day, roads in the heart of Kampala carry the names of colonial soldiers and Pan-African heroes but very few of the country’s own heroes, and hardly any women. The Kampala City Council Authority had a total of 652 named roads in 2019 and is in the process of naming a further 6,000 roads. 52 The ‘memorial arena’ for contemporary Ugandan actors who get street names in the capital is dependent on a shared understanding of damage and therefore need to heal. The streets that are named after prominent people killed during the Amin era catch on quickly: Luwum Street and Ben Kiwanuka Street right in the heart of the city. Here the commemoration seems to be an act of redress and healing, as city dwellers take on the names and quickly adapt spatially, finding and seeing themselves. Luwum, a doyen of the Anglican Church and Kiwanuka, the poster model of the Catholic-Ganda elite, qualify as ‘models for society’. John Babiiha Avenue, a recent rename of the Acacia Avenue, does not catch on in the same way as dwellers continue to refer to the street as ‘Acacia’. The memory of the former Vice President from the Obote regime is not prominent enough in contemporary Uganda to be a ‘February 16 named Janani Luwum Day’, Daily Monitor, 16 February 2021. www.monitor.co.ug/uganda/news/national/february-16-named-janani-luwum-day--1600766 [accessed 16 March 2020]. 50 Eva Namusoke, ‘Church and State in Post-Colonial Uganda, 1962–1981’. PhD diss (unpublished). University of Cambridge, 2015. 51 The dam had been named after Maj. E. Roderic Owen, a colonial-era soldier and aide to the Marquess of Ripon, the Viceroy of India, after whom the nearby Ripon Falls were named. 52 Flavia Zabali, email to authors, 13 February 2019. 49

Nationalism and Reclaiming Colonial Spaces in Uganda

model for society. The public memory of Kiwanuka and Luwum are bolstered often in other commemorative spaces. The Judiciary has annual Benedicto Kiwanuka Memorial lectures, and his murder is often repeated in the feature articles in media. On the annual public holiday remembering Archbishop Luwum, media houses revisit his life story and martyrdom. With no comparable efforts, John Babiiha is easy to forget.

Conclusion

Names are important to the identity of a people. Place names are more than locators; they transport themselves to our daily routines and our school syllabuses, making the past present and passable to the next generation. Every day, the occupants codify their placement in these names, finding and seeing themselves. They are functional and yet they must also be political, as they become sites to insert memories, continue narratives and trauma, and for repossession and reclamation of space by postcolonial societies. Where the colonialists used names to signal that which they had conquered, the Ugandan regimes from Amin to Obote and to Museveni, have used the power of names and memory to project their nationalistic credentials while presenting themselves as correctors and healers of the wounded national spirit and psyche. In many ways, they are not any different from the colonial authorities who used place names to impose their own world view and lay claim on locally owned spaces. However, the type of names selected, the continued erasure of women and the spaces chosen for renaming are indicative of which constituencies different regimes represent and those whose memories they seek to contest or erase.

333

15 Rudeness/Incivility as Political Strategy: The Poetics and Politics of Stella Nyanzi’s Facebook Work DANSON SYLVESTER KAHYANA

Stella Nyanzi is a Ugandan medical anthropologist, feminist, queer rights activist, and scholar who has conducted extensive research on African sexualities in Uganda and the Gambia that has informed some of the strategies she uses in her political and sexual rights activism.1 She has authored and co-authored more than fifty papers on different aspects of sexualities, for instance sex work, HIV and AIDS, and homosexuality. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communication and Literature (Makerere University, 1993 to 1996), a Master of Science in Medical Anthropology (University College, 1999 to 2000), and a PhD in Anthropology (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, 2003 to 2008). She has worked in the Gambia (as Local Anthropologist at the Medical Research Council Laboratories) and in Uganda (as a Researcher at the Law, Gender and Sexuality Research Project, and as a Research Fellow at the Makerere Institute of Social Research, MISR, Makerere University). In 2017, she was suspended by Makerere University after she staged a naked protest against Professor Mahmood Mamdani, who closed her office when she refused to teach on the MISR PhD Programme. In December 2018, Makerere University dismissed her on the ground that her contract had expired. On 11 June 2020, the High Court of Uganda ordered Makerere University to reinstate her upon ruling that the academic institution was in contempt of its own staff Appeals Tribunal that had ruled against the suspension.2 Her work is widely cited. As of 28 February 2022, Google Scholar reported that her work had been cited by 1,992 people. Celia Murias Morcillo calls her ‘one of the most visible activists in her country’. 3 1 Blossom Shimayam Ottoh-Agede suggests that ‘Nyanzi’s medical anthropological scholarship and diaspora interaction have supported her guts in deploying the kinds of metaphors she does’ (2020, 26). 2 ‘Court orders Makerere to reinstate Dr Stella Nyanzi’ (12 June 2020). The Independent. n.d. nwww.independent.co.ug/court-orders-makerere-toreinstate-dr-stella-nyanzi [accessed 30 June 2020]. 3 Celia Murias Morcillo, ‘Feminist Activisms in Africa: Trends and Strategies

Rudeness/Incivility and the Poetics and Politics of Stella Nyanzi’s Facebook Work

Her activism exemplifies the role women are playing in fighting repression and misrule in Uganda, not just in the political sphere where dissidents are detained, tortured, and prosecuted, but also in the social one where homosexuality is widely condemned and even criminalised, thereby violating LGBTIQA+ rights. This links her work with that of other great African women who have fought hard for the political, economic, and social welfare of their societies since precolonial times, including valiantly contributing to ‘resistance to colonial expansion’ and ‘the fight for independence’.4 The main goal of this chapter is to reflect on Stella Nyanzi’s Facebook work as a form of political participation in Uganda. Special focus is placed on the language she uses to articulate her opinions and to provoke debate. A look at the comments on Nyanzi’s work on her Facebook timeline shows that, while some people consider her choice of language robust and poetic, there are those who declare it rude or uncivil. I attempt to examine Nyanzi’s choice of language and the extent to which it helps her pass her message not only to her readers, but also to the people she attacks (mostly Museveni and his wife). For, although we do not have evidence that these two read Facebook, they have officers who look into what is happening on this platform, for instance the Uganda Police Force which has a Department of Media Crimes and a Directorate of Information and Communications Technology. Many scholars have investigated the role that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter play in fomenting political protests. Anita Breuer, Todd Landman, and Dorothea Farquhar, for instance, show ‘how social media acted as a catalyst for protest mobilization during the Tunisian revolution in late 2010 and early 2011’ by allowing ‘a “digital elite” to break the national media blackout through brokering information for mainstream media’, providing ‘a basis for intergroup collaboration for a large “cycle of protest”’, reporting ‘event magnitudes that raised the perception of success for potential free riders’ and providing ‘additional “emotional mobilization” through depicting the worst atrocities associated with the regime’s response to the protests’.5 Helen Margetts, Peter John, Scott Hale, and Taha Yasseri; John T. Jost, et al. and Diana Letcher, among others, all examine how social media platforms enhance political participation. Margetts et al. point out that social media shape ‘the context of collective action … by providing real-time information about whether and of the New Movements’, in Itxaso Domínguez de Olazábal and Elsa Aimé González (eds), Africa Report: Transformations, Mobilization and Continuity (Madrid: Fundación Alternativas, 2020), 66. 4 Ibid., 59. 5 Anita Breuer, Todd Landman and Dorothea Farquhar, ‘Social Media and Protest Mobilization: Evidence from the Tunisian Revolution’, Democratization, 22 (2015), 764–92, 764.

335

336

Part III: Making Publics

when other people are participating’, given the fact that ‘social information is an important influence on social behaviour’,6 while Jost et al. adduce ‘evidence from a variety of studies of protest movements in the United States, Spain, Turkey, and Ukraine demonstrating that social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook do indeed serve as important tools for information exchange and the coordination of collective action’.7 As for Letcher, she observes that ‘[t]he network processes of social media can further the constitution and operation of the informal arrangements, enabling organizers and protesters to distribute participation information, harmonize activities immediately, and catalyze adherents’.8 This chapter contributes to the literature on social media and political protest by focusing not only on the subject matter of Nyanzi’s posts (what she says), but also on her style, that is to say, the way she uses language consciously as a weapon of protest. It also demonstrates that while social media platforms enable people to participate in political activism, for instance by providing ‘them with a safe environment to explore new venues and express their feelings of frustration with the status quo’,9 in repressive regimes like that of President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni in Uganda, this participation comes with some limitations due to harassment of activists in the form of arrests and prosecution. In this work, I conceive Facebook as a performance space where there is a contention for power between the artist, Nyanzi, and the state of the Republic of Uganda. I base this conception on Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s influential article, ‘Enactments of Power: The Politics of Performance Space’, in which he argues that ‘[t]he war between art and the state is really a struggle between the power of performance in the arts and the performance of power by the state – in short, enactments of power’,10 since this space ‘is always the site of physical, social and psychic forces in society’.11 Drawing from his experiences in post-independence but neocolonial Kenya, where his work as a playwright saw him subjected Helen Margetts, Peter John, Scott Hale and Taha Yasseri, Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 68. 7 John T. Jost, Pablo Barberá, Richard Bonneau, Melanie Langer et al., ‘How Social Media Facilitates Political Protest: Information, Motivation, and Social Networks’, Advance in Political Psychology, 39 (2018), 85–118 (111). 8 Diana Letcher, ‘Online Political Participation, Collective Action Events, and Meaningful Citizen Engagement’, Geopolitics, History, and International Relations, 10 (2018), 70–75 (74). 9 Elham Gheytanchi and Valentine N. Moghadam, ‘Women, Social Protests, and the New Media Activism in the Middle East and North Africa’, International Review of Modern Sociology, 40 (2014), 1–26 (9). 10 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, ‘Enactments of Power: The Politics of Performance Space’, The Drama Review, 41 (1997), 1–30 (12). 11 Ibid., 13. 6

Rudeness/Incivility and the Poetics and Politics of Stella Nyanzi’s Facebook Work

to the ‘state’s performance of punishment’ when he was detained from 1977–78 and later on exiled from his homeland in 1981, Ngugi makes two observations that are pertinent to my discussion of Nyanzi’s Facebook work.12 First, that ‘the more open the performance space, the more it seems to terrify those in possession of repressive power’;13 and second, that ‘[t]he performance space of the artist stands for openness, that of the state, for confinement’.14 Nyanzi’s choice of Facebook as her publication channel makes it possible for her work to be read anywhere in the world where this medium is used to access and share information, thereby making it difficult for the Uganda state to confine her and her work within Ugandan borders. In carrying out this study, I do not seek to provide a comprehensive commentary on Nyanzi’s Facebook work as whole. Rather, I select two of her posts, which I consider representative of her Facebook political writing. These are: her now famous ‘Museveni Matako nyo!’ (Museveni is a Pair of Buttocks), posted on 28 January 2017, and the birthday poem she dedicated to President Museveni (posted on 16 September 2018). While this is certainly a small sample of her large Facebook corpus, there are advantages that come with working with just two pieces, the obvious one being that it enables me to perform a detailed close reading of them. Nyanzi has been depicted by the ruling party and numerous moralists as an immoral woman who uses obscene, vulgar language, and as someone with a psychiatric problem who needs to be subjected to a mental examination.15 It is my hope that this paper will contribute to understanding the nature of the contention for performative space between her and the Ugandan state, as she uses Facebook to articulate her criticism of Museveni and his government, who in turn deploy the Uganda Police Force and the courts of law to silence her. It will also hopefully be useful in giving insights on the postcolonial condition in different African countries where political dissent is prohibited and penalised.

The Concern with Decolonisation

The national motto – ‘For God and my country’ – imagines the Ugandan nation as God-fearing. I suggest that the image of Stella Nyanzi as an immoral, vulgar woman is one of the vestiges of colonial brainwashing that Ugandans continue to experience in the form of Christian teaching Ibid., 21. Ibid., 26. 14 Ibid., 28. 15 In fact, government tried to have this done but the courts of judicature ruled against it. See www.newvision.co.ug/new_vision/news/1455973/ court-blocks-nyanzi-mental-examination [accessed 11 March 2020]. 12

13

337

338

Part III: Making Publics

and moral posturing.16 Mikael Karlström has demonstrated that in colonial Buganda, ‘[e]ach Christian denomination asserted its status as the preeminent moral and political community to which its adherents owed allegiance, subordinating and in some respects negating the solidarities of kinship, clanship, and polity that had set the boundaries of collectivity in colonial Buganda’.17 Christian missions were so interested in emptying the local people of their cultural content, he observes, that they suppressed initiation rituals, which served in many African contexts as both a collective transition to adulthood and a periodic enactment of polity and cosmology … condemned Ganda naming rites because they employed magical sanctions to ascertain paternity … and they were vehemently hostile toward the entire sequence of ceremonies prescribed for twin births because of its focus on fertility and sexuality and the central role of the deity Mukasa [the god believed to give twins to parents].18

The fact that Protestant and Catholic missions ‘sought to promote Christian alternatives [to these life-cycle ceremonies] such as baptism, church weddings, and funeral rites presided over by clergy’ demonstrates that their intentions were colonial.19 Sylvia Tamale makes a more or less a similar observation when she states that in Uganda ‘the principles of religion are deeply embedded in our statutory laws’ for ‘[c] olonialists employed various methods to acculturate African people to Western beliefs, including religious proselytizing, the formal education system, and criminalizing “immorality”’.20 This work by the missions and the colonial government has had far-reaching effects even in the post-independence era, so much that traditional healing (to mention just one area) is still called witchcraft, implying that it is evil as Okot The magistrate who presided over her trial, Gladys Kamasanyu, said that Nyanzi’s birthday poem to Museveni should never have been put in the public domain for it had suggestions which ‘could only be made by an immoral person’. See www.monitor.co.ug/News/National/Excitement-court-sets-Dr-StellaNyanzi-free/688334-5462462-x1el3az/index.html [accessed 11 March 2020]. 17 Mikael Karlström, ‘Modernity and Its Aspirants: Moral Community and Developmental Eutopianism in Buganda’, Current Anthropology, 45 (2004), 595–619 (600). 18 Ibid., 601. 19 Ibid. 20 Sylvia Tamale, ‘Nudity, Protest and the Law’, Inaugural lecture (Kampala: Makerere University, 28 October 2006). Tamale further observes that the process of ‘civilising’ Africans, as the colonialists and missionaries called their missions, took ‘many forms but the most potent came in the shape of religion, education and the law. In Uganda, the effects of proselytization, enculturation and acculturation were tremendous, including the values, beliefs and meanings that we associated to our bodies’ (19). 16

Rudeness/Incivility and the Poetics and Politics of Stella Nyanzi’s Facebook Work

p’Bitek observes.21 By decoupling Nyanzi’s work from Christian notions of morality and locating it instead in traditional moral economies of protest like those explained by Carol Summers, 22 I provide a decolonised reading of it. To understand Nyanzi’s work, it is important to reflect on public perceptions of Museveni’s leadership, since she writes against him and his regime. Joshua B. Rubongoya has rightly observed that from 1996 to 2001, Museveni’s regime became increasingly intolerant to dissenting views and opinions, leading to ‘the re-emergence of neopatrimonialism and its twin institutions of clientism and presidentialism’, 23 the former defined as ‘the award of personal favors (patronage) through informal channels to select groups of people (clients) in return for mobilization of political support and deference to key political elites or patrons on most political matters’, thereby breeding ‘corruption and rent-­seeking behavior’.24 As for presidentialism, Rubongoya refers to it as ‘the concentration of power in the office of the president’ – a practice that undermines ‘the constitutional efficacy of other state institutions, such as the legislature’ and erodes ‘the foundations of democratic legitimacy’.25 The 2017 publication Controlling Consent: Uganda’s 2016 Elections (edited by J. Oloka-Onyango and Josephine Ahikire) shows that the situation has worsened since 2011, with Museveni’s regime treating political opponents with utmost ruthlessness, thanks to a police force and an army that serves the interests of the regime, not of the nation, as James Nkuubi elaborates.26 With this state of affairs, Museveni’s earlier record of 1986–96, considered his golden decade in terms of good leadership, and which earned him (and other presidents like Paul Kagame of Rwanda) the praise ‘Africa’s New Breed of Leaders’ from U.S. President Bill Clinton when he visited Africa, 27 has been shattered. The leader who throughout the 1990s ‘was ranked close to [Nelson] Mandela as a new-style leader of a country that almost all objective observers recognised had been pulled out of the doldrums into which it had been plunged in the 1970s and 21 Okot p’Bitek, Africa’s Cultural Revolution (Nairobi: Macmillan Books for Africa, 1973), p. 7. 22 Carol Summers, ‘Radical Rudeness: Ugandan Social Critiques in the 1940s’, Journal of Social History, 39 (2006), 741–70. 23 Joshua B. Rubongoya, Regime Hegemony in Museveni’s Uganda: Pax Musevenica (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 131. 24 Ibid., p. 163. 25 Ibid., p. 131. 26 James Nkuubi, ‘Of “Yellow” Police, A Cadre Army and the Liberation War Psychosis: The Question of Electoral Security’, in J. Oloka-Onyango and Josephine Ahikire (eds), Controlling Consent: Uganda’s 2016 Elections (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2017), pp. 401–30. 27 www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article11283 [accessed 29 April 2019].

339

340

Part III: Making Publics

1980s by successive civilian and military dictatorships’, 28 is a shadow of his former self.29 Under his regime, ‘corruption by top government officials has trickled down into the lower echelons of the institutions of the state and has also become the normative basis for any transaction, be it if official or private’. 30 It is because of this reversal of fortunes that in his collection of poems entitled Africa’s New Brood (2005), Timothy Wangusa plays on the concept of ‘Africa’s new breed of leaders’ to declare Museveni and other African leaders like Paul Kagame of Rwanda ‘a new brood’, in order to highlight how menacing and deadly these rulers have become.

Locating Nyanzi’s Protest Language in Selected Ugandan Traditions

Language is at the centre of Nyanzi’s Facebook work for the simple reason that it is her major weapon in her protest against Museveni’s dictatorship and kleptocracy. The notion of words serving as weapons brings to mind Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s work, particularly Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo-Colonial Kenya (1983), in which he argues – in part – that because post-independence Kenya is a replica of colonial Kenya since the Black people in power rule on behalf of their masters in capitalist Europe and North America, the writer needs to challenge neocolonial repression with the hope that the masses will eventually see what is at stake and work hard to overthrow the interlopers. This means that those writers who see their role in this way are writers in politics (to echo a title of another of his books), whose work in one way or another protests against misrule and injustice. I suggest that Nyanzi’s writing can be located in four Ugandan political traditions. The first one dates back to late-colonial Uganda, particularly the late 1940s, when the Baganda actively protested against the colonial regime and its local collaborators using ‘technologies and tactics of modern politics – newspapers and pamphlets, loudspeakers and mass demonstrations, and international lobbying’. 31 This protest 28 Oloka-Onyango, J., ‘“New-Breed” Leadership, Conflict, and Reconstruction in the Great Lakes Region of Africa: A Sociopolitical Biography of Uganda’s Yoweri Kaguta Museveni’, Africa Today, 50 (2004), 29–52 (33). 29 Museveni’s Sowing the Mustard Seed: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in Uganda contributed to this image of a leader ‘imbued with a messianic zeal’ and who ‘sought to build a movement that sowed the seeds for new structures where future leaders could create national unity without the personal ambitions of self-advancement and corruption’, as Gilbert M. Khadiagala observes in his review of it: Foreign Policy 111 (1998), 141–44 (143). 30 Rubongoya, Regime Hegemony in Museveni’s Uganda, p. 165. 31 Summers, Carol, ‘Grandfathers, Grandsons, Morality, and Radical Politics

Rudeness/Incivility and the Poetics and Politics of Stella Nyanzi’s Facebook Work

sometimes took the form of what Carol Summers calls ‘radical rudeness’ – ‘an attack on the forms of manners and politeness that had shaped both British and Ganda deployment of power and influence in Buganda since at least the beginning of the Uganda Protectorate in 1900’, 32 characterised by ‘elaborate social rituals of affiliation, association, and patronage’. 33 One of the radicals who was adept at deploying this tactic of rudeness was Semakula Mulumba. Based in London where he agitated against British colonialism in Buganda, Mulumba understood that politeness and civility were tools which one’s enemies used to win him or her to their corner, so to speak. So, when Bishop Stuart, whom he accused of ceding to the British Government ‘all rights to minerals of the lands which in the Uganda Agreement of 1900 were given to the Church in trust for African Churches’ invited him for dinner, he declined the invitation in a letter he wrote to the Bishop on 29 August 1948. 34 In this letter, Mulumba describes Bishop Stuart as ‘a ripe apple rotten at the heart’ and as somebody who is ‘crooked’, since ‘[i]nstead of being zealous for the spiritual interests of his flock he works diligently in cooperation with the British Government in their secret schemes for the acquisition of Africans’ land’. 35 In other communications, mostly telegrams, Mulumba described Britons in deliberately rude and insulting language, for instance as ‘a gang of professional thieves that hide their colonial booty in the British law’. 36 There is a similarity in this language that Mulumba used to castigate the colonial government and its officials and the one Nyanzi uses to castigate Museveni and his government. In an email to me on 29 June 2020, she indicated that she had not been aware of this tradition until she was already in prison in 2017. ‘I was encouraged to find records of other Ugandans using their writing to challenge authoritarian rulers’, she wrote, adding, ‘I was encouraged to learn that other Ugandans were penalised, even to the point of arrest, trial and detention because of writing against misrule, corruption and lawlessness of national leaders’. Since then, she has embraced the tradition to the point of declaring, in a book chapter published in 2020, ‘I see radical rudeness as the only viable means to challenge those in power. As I have said elsewhere, challenging power isn’t polite or beautiful’. 37 in Late Colonial Buganda’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 38 (2005), 427–47 (428). 32 Summers, ‘Radical Rudeness’, 741. 33 Ibid., 743. 34 Ibid., 744. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 756. 37 Stella Nyanzi, ‘Personal Narrative: Bloody Precarious Activism in Uganda’, in Chris Bobel, Inga T. Winkler, Breanne Fahs, Katie Ann Hasson et al. (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), p. 558.

341

342

Part III: Making Publics

The second protest tradition that I locate Nyanzi’s Facebook work in is Ugandan writers’ condemnation of misrule during the regimes of Milton Obote and Idi Amin. Many scholars have written at length on this tradition, highlighting the link between the literature that was produced in those regimes and the excesses reflected therein. Peter Nazareth, for instance, gives a detailed exploration of several writers, including himself, on how they handle what one would call the ‘Amin theme’ in their work, that is to say, they write in anticipation of an Idi Amin kind of character and then protest his presence when he appears. Abasi Kiyimba builds on Nazareth to explore ‘the ghost of Idi Amin in Ugandan Literature’, that is, the preoccupation of many writers with fictional Amins. As for Austin Bukenya, he explores what he calls ‘an idiom of blood’ in selected novels on Idi Amin and his regime; while Rose Mbowa handles the theme of repression – how writers who criticised Idi Amin, for instance Byron Kawadwa, were hounded or even killed. Like this work before it, Nyanzi’s Facebook writing protests against misrule and tyranny with the hope that the people in power will take heed and run the nation in a better way. In her email to me mentioned above, Nyanzi indicated that she is aware of this second tradition as she has ‘quoted from Okot p’ Bitek to defend my Facebook posts before critics who asked why I wrote about genitals and copulation’. The third tradition surrounds the ethics of political hospitality, and hospitality as practised in Uganda. In an article entitled ‘On the Aesthetics and Dialogics of Power in the Postcolony’, Michael Karlström observes that in Buganda (and to some extent the rest of Uganda), political hospitality goes hand in hand with reciprocity: local communities host somebody they give the transcendental position of guest of honour in anticipation that they will receive a favour from him in return. Calling this ‘a form of state-society mediation through ceremonial staging’, 38 Karlström identifies a number of benefits that come with this performance. For instance, it ‘sets the stage for communicative interaction between rulers and subjects’, and it serves as ‘a circuit of reciprocity: in return for a properly hospitable local reception and exaltation the guest becomes bound, at least normatively, by a vaguely defined but generalized obligation to respond to the needs of the local community’. 39 Unfortunately, at national ceremonies like independence celebrations, this kind of staging is not adhered to, Karlström observes, for No gifts are given, no food is ingested, and, above all, no subaltern utterances are possible, be they verbal or performative. In fact, contrary to the logic of political hospitality, it is the state that is

38 Mikael Karlström, ‘On the Aesthetics and Dialogics of Power in the Post­ colony’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 73 (2003), 57–76 (67). 39 Ibid.

Rudeness/Incivility and the Poetics and Politics of Stella Nyanzi’s Facebook Work

staging its own ceremonial legitimation. The state issues the official invitations, and the ceremonial site is aggressively marked as state territory, accessible only by controlled permission and encircled by soldiers. It is therefore the (uninvited) general public rather than the state officials who are the outsiders – albeit hardly guests, since they are treated to no hospitality.40

This staging, which Karlström refers to as constituting a ‘ceremonial gulf between state and people’,41 is certainly the kind that obtained on 26 January 2017, when President Museveni, while presiding over the National Resistance Movement day celebrations in Masindi town to mark his 31 years in power, in an inflammatory speech that attracted widespread condemnation, declared:

I am not an employee. I hear some people saying that I am their servant; I am not a servant of anybody. I am a freedom fighter; that is why I do what I do. I don’t do it because I am servant; I am not your servant. I am just a freedom fighter.42

This is the statement that Stella Nyanzi responded to in the Facebook post that I discuss in the section below. The scandal of this statement, as I explain below, is that it goes against the grain of the Ganda concept of ‘reciprocal obligation’ that Holly Elisabeth Hanson identifies as ‘the social glue of the Buganda Kingdom’ and which holds that leaders have certain obligations to their followers, involving giving and asking for gifts, with the followers having the right to ‘dissolve relationships of obligation by refusing to participate’.43 I argue that Nyanzi’s statement is informed by this concept in the sense that it is fair for her to expect that President Museveni will give a speech that shows reciprocal love and respect for the people listening to him – people whose welfare and that of their children he is constitutionally entrusted with as Head of State. When he departs from this expectation and states that he is not a servant of anybody, he sets himself for reciprocity of a different kind: that of condemnation and ridicule. Her decision to call him a pair of buttocks, I suggest, is in the spirit of this different kind of reciprocity. The final tradition that Nyanzi works in has to do with her identity as a Nnalongo, the title that the Baganda give to a mother of twins.44 Ibid., 70. Ibid. 42 Cited in Solomon Rukundo, ‘“My President is a Pair of Buttocks”: The Limits of Online Freedom of Expression in Uganda’, International Journal of Law and Information Technology, 26:3 (2018), 252–71. 43 Holly E. Hanson, Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003), 6. 44 Immaculate N. Kizza, The Oral Tradition of the Baganda of Uganda: A Study and Anthology of Legends, Myths, Epigrams and Folktales (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Company, 2010), 141. 40 41

343

344

Part III: Making Publics

Because ‘[h]uman twins transgress the normal order of things’,45 which explains why there are elaborate rituals associated with twinship, the mother of twins (Nnalongo) and the father of twins (Ssalongo) are considered special people, since they performed the extraordinary feat of birthing twins. Having transgressed the normal order of things by birthing twins, the Nnalongo and the Ssalongo are given some licence to transgress in certain social spheres. For instance, on the day they perform the ceremony called okuziina abalongo (dancing the twins), they are allowed to harvest food from other people’s gardens, without asking for permission. And during that ceremony and others like it, they are allowed to use obscene language, for instance making explicit reference to sexual intercourse and sexual parts. I suggest that in order to understand Dr Nyanzi’s robust use of language, the reader needs to keep her identity as a Nnalongo in mind since ‘among the Baganda there is customary license for a Nalongo … to express herself graphically’.46

The Power of Metaphorical Language: Nyanzi Declares President Museveni ‘a Pair of Buttocks’

Nyanzi’s declaration that Museveni is a pair of buttocks was made in a January 27 2017 Facebook post that reads thus:

Museveni matako nyo! Ebyo byeyayogedde e Masindi yabadde ayogera lutako. I mean, seriously, when buttocks shake and jiggle, while the legs are walking, do you hear other body parts complaining? When buttocks produce shit, while the brain is thinking, is anyone shocked? When buttocks fart, are we surprised? That is what buttocks do. They shake, jiggle, shit and fart. Museveni is just another pair of buttocks. Rather than being shocked by what the matako said in Masindi, Ugandans should be shocked that we allowed these buttocks to continue leading our country. Matako butako.47

This post, like much of Nyanzi’s work, can be considered one that shocks, if we understand shock as that which ‘presumes an encounter with the unexpected, an experience of being wrenched in an altered frame of mind’.48 When a citizen declares her Head of State a pair of buttocks, the reader may find this so shocking that he or she may take time to respond to it in a coherent way, for as Rita Felski observes, shock

45 Peter Hoesing, ‘Kusamira: Singing Rituals of Wellness in Southern Uganda’, African Music, 9:2 (2012), 94–127 (98). 46 Stella Nyanzi, ‘Personal Narrative’, 553. 47 Stella Nyanzi, ‘Facebook Post’ (27 January 2017) Facebook, www.facebook. com/stella.nyanzi/posts/10154878225000053 [accessed 11 March 2019]. 48 Rita Felski, The Uses of Literature (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 113.

Rudeness/Incivility and the Poetics and Politics of Stella Nyanzi’s Facebook Work

‘can wreak havoc on our usual ways of ordering and understanding the world [for] (o)ur sense of equilibrium is destroyed; we are left at sea, dazed and confused, fumbling for words, unable to piece together a coherent response’.49 Indeed, the first time I read this post, I was worried that some harm would come to Nyanzi in one way or another. Indeed, it came in the form of arrest and criminal prosecution. 50 I would like to suggest that President Museveni unleashes his police on Nyanzi with a vengeance because he is aware of how devastating her powerful imagery is to his reputation as a person and as a president. Indeed, towards the end of his book, Sowing the Mustard Seed, he reflects on a number of images he created during elections to communicate to his audiences, for instance orubengo (a traditional grinding stone) and okulembeka (collecting rain water from iron roofs into containers). ‘I have no doubt that these images increased our support by anything up to 20 per cent, because they clarified people’s perceptions of the problems’, he writes. With this understanding of the power of language, Museveni tries to break Nyanzi’s back and spirit through incarceration. Before we discuss this post in detail, let us note that Museveni’s view that he is not a people’s servant contradicts his stance in 1997 – the time he still considered himself a servant of the people. In Sowing the Mustard Seed, he claims that for him, political leadership is a kind of national service, because the real livelihood of my people is keeping cattle … When I realised that unless we solved the national problems that beset Uganda in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, those problems would interfere with our livelihood, I decided I must, for the time being, accept the sacrifice as a service to my country … Leadership, therefore, has been a tremendous sacrifice for many of us and was never a sine qua non for my original participation in the struggle. 51

Ibid. Debbie D. DuFrene and Carol M. Lehman observe that ‘inappropriate language can cause a multiplicity of problems, ranging from the projecting of a negative image for one’s self and the organization to the creation of a hostile work environment’ (48). In Nyanzi’s case, this is certainly the case. In terms of image, she is known as the woman who strips: see Ivan Byenkya’s ‘Sente Ekaaye Luno’, in Danson Kahyana, Bob G. Kisiki and Beatrice Lamwaka (eds), As I Stood Dead Before the World: Creative Writing from Luzira Prison (Kampala: Ugandan PEN, 2018), p. 6; in terms of the hostile work environment, she was on two occasions suspended from Makerere University, first for stripping in protest against what she termed Professor Mahmood Mamdani’s highhandedness, and later for using abusive language against Hon. Janet Yoweri Museveni, First Lady and Minister of Education, whom she described as empty-brained. In December 2018, she lost her job at Makerere University when she was dismissed from University service. 51 Yoweri Museveni, Sowing the Mustard Seed: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in Uganda (Oxford: Macmillan Education, 1997), p. xiii. 49 50

345

346

Part III: Making Publics

There is no doubt that Museveni has since abandoned this stance as shown by a number of actions meant to ensure he stays in power as president, perhaps until death, most important being amending the 1995 constitution in order to remove the presidential term limit (2005) and later the presidential age limit (2017). By calling him a pair of buttocks, Nyanzi declares Museveni’s speech in Masindi nonsensical – mere noise we should expect from a leader who has utter contempt for the people he leads. A closer look at Nyanzi’s post shows that the phrase ‘a pair of buttocks’ is meant to be a metaphor – a figure of speech in which ‘a word or expression that in literal usage denotes one kind of thing is applied to a distinctly different kind of thing, without asserting a comparison’. 52 If ‘[a]ll power belongs to the people who shall exercise their sovereignty in accordance with this Constitution’ as the 1995 Uganda Constitution says in Article 1(1), then Museveni’s declaration that he is not a people’s servant is an abrogation of the sacred law of the land, and potentially a criminal offence. By saying that he is not the servant of the people who voted him into office, he disavows them and their vote. So, Nyanzi decides to tear up his speech – so to speak – using metaphorical language, for, by declaring that he is not a people’s servant, he evacuates himself from the world of reaon and respect, to that of the lowly, which is symbolised by the buttocks. That Nyanzi uses buttocks as a symbol is evident in a Facebook post of 26 July 2018, where she asks her readers not to limit her statement to just a pair of buttocks, but an innumerable number of them. She explains thus: matako is not restricted to just a single pair of buttocks. It could mean two buttocks, three buttocks, many many many buttocks, heaps of buttocks, continents of buttocks – there is no limit or specification to the number of buttocks the plural form matako connotes or denotes. It is very possible that I was meaning an infinite amount of buttocks, or that I was meaning a dozen of buttocks or tonnes of buttocks … So, perhaps, I was referring to Museveni being a mass of buttocks in perpetuity! He is forever buttocks. 53

What does it mean for someone to be ‘buttocks in perpetuity’, or ‘forever buttocks’, as a figure of speech? It means to lose hope in that person as someone capable of acting empathetically, rationally, and patriotically. This is why to Nyanzi, Museveni’s speech is evidence that

He is the worst curse upon Uganda, a cancerous tumour eating up our body politic, a festering ulcer oozing with sepsis, a serial rapist of the

52 M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpharm, A Glossary of Literary Terms (Boston, MA: Wadsworth, 2012), p. 97. 53 See, www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=the%20ontological%20and%20 linguistic%20referent&epa=SEARCH_BOX [accessed 16 April 2019].

Rudeness/Incivility and the Poetics and Politics of Stella Nyanzi’s Facebook Work

constitution, a big fat worm feeding on our children’s inheritance, a hissing viper full of venom that poisons all our public institutions, a piece of low-lying vermin uttering promises never once fulfilled, a blood-sucking vampire feeding on the carcass of what is left of Uganda, a thieving scoundrel stealing not only from home but also abroad, a butchering murderer of those his paranoia suspects of being his enemies. 54

The reader can see how lyrical and explosive Nyanzi’s posts can be. The lyricism lies in the musicality of her writing. Notice, for instance, how the use of commas in the above quotation controls the rhythm of the long sentence, making each segment read like a line in a poem. Besides, the commas serve to emphasise her point, which is that Museveni is such a hopeless leader that there are so many adjectives Nyanzi can describe him with in a single sentence, nay, an incomplete sentence, for the use of ellipsis precisely underlines this point: the adjectives to describe Museveni are too many to exhaust. The explosiveness of the post lies in the no-holds-barred approach to political debate Nyanzi adopts. It is worth noting that Nyanzi’s ‘pair of buttocks’ post is one of the very few in which she uses both Luganda (the most commonly used lingua franca in Uganda) and English (the official language). Explaining this code-switching can be the subject of another book chapter, but suffice to make a few observations on it. First, Nyanzi uses both languages because she is lost for words at Museveni’s declaration that he is not a people’s servant. If it is true that ‘switching languages can be used as a tool in therapy when working through emotionally difficult or traumatising experiences’ as Wilhelmiina Toivo avers, then Nyanzi’s use of Luganda should be seen as one way of processing and coming to terms with Museveni’s bombshell. 55 Secondly, it is possible that she wanted to communicate her shock to all Ugandans irrespective of their level of education, so using Luganda in part of the post is meant to hail those citizens who cannot read English into her discourse/critique, given the fact that it is ‘the de facto national language of Uganda’, being ‘the most widely spoken Indigenous language and the most widely spoken second language next to English’. 56 Calling President Museveni a pair of buttocks is a way of disrobing him, since the mind of the reader sees the naked part that the writer has named – the part with which she asks the reader to substitute the 54 See, www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=a%20cancerous%20tumour%20 eating%20up%20our%20body&epa=SEARCH_BOX [accessed 16 April 2019]. 55 www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2017/mar/27/bad-language-whybeing-bilingual-makes-swearing-easier [accessed 29 April 2019]. 56 Judith Nakayiza, ‘Luganda in Uganda’, in Heritage Language Policies around the World, eds. Corinne A. Seals and Sheena Shah (London and New York, Routledge, 2018), p. 152.

347

348

Part III: Making Publics

President. This serves the purpose of making Museveni vulnerable to ridicule and shame, which destroys the aura of visibility around him. It is true that the poet is not able to attack him militarily, but through the power of the written word, she is able to shame him. This shaming has two potential uses. The first one is that Nyanzi scores a political victory over the President, for by holding him up for ridicule, the voters could shun him during the next presidential elections. The second one is that the President could refrain from making reckless statements like the one that attracted Nyanzi’s ire as a way of avoiding similar poetic attacks from her and other people like her in future. That is to say, he could – in the words of Diabate – acknowledge his wrong doing, ‘repent, and plead to be given the opportunity to make amends’. 57 It is significant that Museveni’s disrober, Nyanzi, is a woman, given the fact that in those African societies that practice naked agency and genital cursing, it is women, particularly mothers, who ‘are tasked with the survival of the community as a whole [and] are expected to right its wrongs, which may include punishing offenders, whether of military, political, or royal rank’. 58 I need to qualify my use of Diabate’s insights on naked agency and female genital cursing because her book is concerned with women who disrobe themselves in order to make a political point (what she terms ‘naked agency’), while Nyanzi, in the Facebook post I am discussing, does not disrobe herself, but instead poetically disrobes his target of criticism – President Museveni. 59. 57 Naminata Diabate, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2020), p. 13. 58 Ibid., 14. 59 In actual life, however, Nyanzi has disrobed herself at least twice to protest injustice. The first one was on 18 April 2016 when she

denounced what she considered the patriarchal mode of operation of the MISR and its director, the renowned academic Mahmood Mamdani, in a dispute about the use of her office and the time allocated for teaching and researching. Nyanzi ultimately locked herself up in her office and, when she was about to be evicted, took her clothes off in front of those present, including the media, while she uttered sexual language and insults at the director (Morcillo, 66–67)

The second one was on 1 August 2019 when she bared her breasts to a magistrate who sentenced her in a male prison where she appeared via video link, instead of being produced in a courtroom where she expected the support of her friends and family members. She has written a poem on this incident entitled ‘Breasts Blazing Like Bazookas’, which reads in part: Escorted by four powerful female prison staff, And surrounded by twelve male prison staff, I could have caved in and collapsed, Given up in defeat, Surrendered the struggle with both hands up.

Rudeness/Incivility and the Poetics and Politics of Stella Nyanzi’s Facebook Work

‘Mourning Uganda’s Fate’: Nyanzi’s Poem for Museveni’s 74th Birthday

Nyanzi’s poem for President Museveni’s birthday is an elegy in which she mourns Uganda’s fate at having a ruler who strangles her instead of prospering her. The persona of the poem suggests that the President should have died at birth to save Uganda the ills that he has unleashed on the nation – oppression, suppression, repression, dictatorship, corruption, unprofessionalism, unemployment, and under-employment. The persona chooses a no-holds-barred approach: she wishes that different parts of Esiteri (Museveni’s mother)’s reproductive system should have done harm to him before he was born or as he was being born. The diction that carries her wishes to the reader is loaded with insults and curses, bringing to mind Donna Shai’s observation that ‘[w] hile a curse expresses the wish that evil may befall a certain person, the insult attributes to a person a vile adjective with the intention of lowering the dignity of the person addressed’.60 I could have withered like a flower, Cowered in shameful cowardice, But I refused defeat. I thought of my ancestors and refused defeat. I thought of my children and refused defeat. I raised both my middle fingers And shot rapid slurs at the justice system. I improvised an impromptu oration exposing the fucked up judicial system. After poetically fucking the failed court system, I pulled up my kitenge blouse. I hoisted up my power bra, Let loose my big brown breasts And shot down my enemies With rapid bullets from my nipples. Pwah pwah pwah pwah! My breasts were blazing bazookas – Shooting down the injustices of justice. (157–58, original emphasis) Commenting on this protest that they call ‘breast juggling’, Julie Webber et al. observe that it ‘was meant to amuse her supporters and at the same time critique the very social boundaries that refuse to take women seriously as political subjects’ (‘The Political Force of the Comedic’, Contemporary Political Theory 20, 2021, 429). They are apt on the second point (of critique), but wrong on the first point (of amusement) for this would turn Nyanzi into a comedian whose objective is to entertain, and not a shrewd activist whose every move is calculated to score political points. 60 Donna Shai, ‘Public Cursing and Social Control in a Traditional Jewish Community’, Western Folklore, 37:1 (1978), 39–46 (40–41).

349

350

Part III: Making Publics

Imagining Esiteri diseased, the persona wishes that ‘the smelly and itchy cream-coloured candida festering in [her] cunt had suffocated [Museveni] to death’, the way he is ‘suffocating [Ugandans] with oppression, suppression and repression’. Imaging Esiteri dirty and not well kept, the persona wishes that ‘the lice-filled bush of dirty pubic hair overgrown over [her] unwashed chuuchu had strangled [Museveni] at birth … just like the long tentacles of corruption [he] sowed and watered into our bleeding economy’. The other wish is that ‘the acidic pus flooding Esiteri’s cursed vaginal canal had burnt up [Museveni’s] unburnt fetus’ as badly as he has ‘corroded all morality and professionalism out of our public institutions in Uganda’. There is another wish: That ‘the infectious dirty-brown discharge flooding Esiteri’s loose pussy had drowned [Museveni] to death’ the way he has ‘sunk and murdered the dreams and aspirations of millions of youths who languish in the deep seas of massive unemployment and under-employment in Uganda’. The penultimate wish is that ‘the poisoned uterus sitting just above Esiteri’s dry clitoris had prematurely miscarried a thing to be cast upon a manure pit / Prematurely miscarried just like [Museveni] prematurely aborted any semblance of democracy, governance, good governance and rule of law’. Nyanzi concludes her poem by wishing that ‘Esiteri’s cursed genitals had pushed out a monstrously greenish-bluish still-birth’. The last two lines of the poem are meant to emphasise all the wishes she has articulated: ‘You should have died at birth, you dirty delinquent dictator / You should have died in birth, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni’. The first time I read this poem – just after it was posted on 16 September 2018 – I remember telling a colleague: ‘I think Nyanzi will be arrested again’. It took seven weeks before the arrest took place, on 7 November 2018. On 3 August 2019, she was convicted over the offence of cyber harassment and sentenced to 18 months of imprisonment, but after a protracted legal battle, she secured her freedom on 21 February 2020, when the High Court acquitted her and ordered for her immediate release. My fear was informed by the fact that this poem was more energetic in diction and imagery than the first post I discussed in this chapter, which had led to Nyanzi’s first arrest. But there was a second reason that made me fear for her: The poem was attacking Museveni while referring to his departed mother in pathological terms. As we have already seen, Esiteri’s cunt is said to have ‘smelly and itchy cream-coloured candida’ and ‘infectious dirty-brown discharge’; her vaginal canal is said to have ‘acidic pus’; and her uterus is said to be ‘poisoned’. This was bound to infuriate Museveni, for in African culture, mothers are ‘venerated and placed on the highest pedestal’.61 For this reason, nobody can let an insult thrown at his/her mother go unchallenged since, as Shai states, 61 Dominica Dipio, ‘African Motherhood Proverbs and Worldview: A Matriarchal Perspective’, Legon Journal of Humanities, 30:1 (2019), 3–23, 13.

Rudeness/Incivility and the Poetics and Politics of Stella Nyanzi’s Facebook Work

honour can be thought of as a family possession, the repository of honour for all the men of an extended family being the conduct of the women. Therefore, curses directed against the family are particularly insulting and harmful, especially when the curses touch upon the moral character of members of the family. Thus, we find that the father, the mother, ancestors and children are the main targets of cursing. Every curse directed against them attacks at the same time their sons and grandsons.62

There is no doubt that Nyanzi’s loathing of Museveni makes her attribute disease and toxicity to Esiteri’s mother as if to suggest that a diseased or toxic body will inevitably give birth to a monstrous personality of Museveni’s kind who bleeds a country and its citizens to desperation so much that one of these citizens is driven to wishing that he should have died at birth. This explains why Nyanzi refers to Esiteri’s genitals as ‘cursed’, because they brought forth a creature which has become a curse on the land. While Nyanzi is working in the realm of figurative language which aims to make speech or writing vivid through attribution of similarity (simile), transference of qualities (metaphor), and exaggeration of subject (hyperbole), I find her depiction of Esiteri problematic. This is because the fact that her son turned out a repressive and dictatorial leader is not a fault of hers as a mother since, as a Lhukonzo saying goes, a parent gives birth to a body/flesh, but not to the heart/soul.63 To refer to Esiteeri’s body and her reproductive system in a pathological way is therefore a form of disrespect for her – a disrespect similar to the one we see in colonial discourse where the colonised people were represented as diseased to suggest that they were sub-human.64 The full force of this poem will be appreciated in the context in which it was written – Museveni’s successful manipulation of the National 62 Shai, ‘Public Cursing and Social Control in a Traditional Jewish Community’, 44. 63 The Bakonzo, to whom I belong, inhabit the Western Uganda districts of Kasese, Bunyangabu, Ntoroko, and Bundibugyo. Lhukonzo is their language. 64 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 44. Fanon observes that ‘the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms. He speaks of the yellow man’s reptilian motions, of the stink of the native quarter, of breeding swarms, of foulness, of spawn, of gesticulations’ and of ‘those distended bodies which are like nothing on earth’ (p. 44). Musisi makes a similar observation in her study of Dr Albert Cook’s work in Uganda. To her, Cook believed that Baganda women were ‘entrenched behind the triple ramparts of ignorance, superstition and dirt i.e. unsanitary conditions’ (100) – a view that contained ‘a good deal of cultural and ideological colonialism’ (103). Nakanyike B. Musisi, ‘The politics of Perception or Perception as Politics? Colonial and Missionary Representations of Baganda Women, 1900–1945’, in Women in African Colonial Histories. Eds. Susan Geiger, Jean Marie Allman, and Nakanyike Musisi (Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 95–111.

351

352

Part III: Making Publics

Assembly in 2017 to have Article 21(b) scrapped from the 1995 Uganda Constitution. This article stipulated that a person beyond 75 years of age may not be eligible to stand for the position of President of Uganda. Had this article not been tampered with, Museveni would have retired in 2021 when that term ended. Nyanzi’s provocative poem is therefore borne out of the frustration she feels at seeing her country slowly but surely heading into an abyss, to use a word from Moses Isegawa’s novel, Abyssinian Chronicles, where a character called Serenity describes Uganda as ‘a land of false bottoms where under every abyss there was another one waiting to ensnare people’, leading him to conclude that ‘the historians had made a mistake: Abyssinia was not the ancient land of Ethiopia, but modern Uganda’.65 It should be remembered that the age-limit constitutional amendment was not the only high-profile constitutional amendment President Museveni had engineered. In fact, the first amendment was the removal of term limits from the country’s 1995 constitution on 11 August 2005 when Parliamentarians belonging to his ruling National Resistance Movement were bribed with five million Uganda Shillings (an equivalent of about US $2,000 then) each. Nyanzi’s birthday poem to Museveni has a postscript: ‘If you want to beat me for my heartfelt birthday poem, come and find me at my home. Ask the boda boda men to direct you to Mama Stella’s house with a red gate.66 I refuse to be gagged.’67 I suggest that there are two ways of reading this postscript. First, Nyanzi is aware that she has gone overboard, so she anticipates some danger to her person in the form of a beating, which could mean being arrested. But it is also possible that the postscript was written to forestall the beating or arrest: since she foretold it in the post, perhaps government officials would re-think their decision to effect it, since by beating or arresting her, they would be confirming that they cannot stand a frank voice.

Nyanzi’s Facebook-Mediated Audience

It is important to reflect on the publics to whom Nyanzi’s work is addressed, because this partly explains both her choice of subject and style. Basically, Nyanzi addresses the digital elite who are interested Moses Isegawa, Abyssinian Chronicles (London: Picador, 2000), 469. A boda boda is a bicycle or motorcycle taxi that provides ‘services in circumstances where the main alternative is to walk, which is slow and of limited capacity and expensive as a means of load carriage’ (Howe, 2003, 175). It is Uganda’s most ubiquitous form of transport, which is perhaps the reason as to why Nyanzi recommends it, tongue-in-cheek, to state agents. 67 See www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=if%20you%20want%20to%20 beat%20me%20for%20my%20hear tfelt%20bir thday%20poem&epa=SEARCH_BOX [accessed 16 April 2019]. 65

66

Rudeness/Incivility and the Poetics and Politics of Stella Nyanzi’s Facebook Work

in the way Uganda is governed – people, armed with smartphones and University education, who are invested in a discourse of good governance and human rights observance. These people are mostly University students, particularly those who are interested in student politics, and the political elite who belong to opposition political parties, whose work in Uganda is perilous because of censorship of the media (due to the activities of the Uganda Communications Commission which has the power, under the law, to withdraw operations licences of media houses it deems a threat to public order and security, which is another way of saying that they are critical of the government) and the unprofessionalism of the Uganda Police Force (which makes it more or less impossible for the opposition political parties to hold public events, because for them to do this, they need clearance from the police as provided by the Public Order Management Act – a clearance they usually refuse to give). For these publics, Nyanzi’s work is novel, for it tackles a subject matter that Ugandan traditional media would not dare publish, both for professional reasons (since her critique of Museveni is not balanced as it considers his failure as a leader total, with nothing he has done being worthy of praise as an achievement) and for moral reasons (since she uses a language that certain sections of the Ugandan population consider taboo). For the political elite who belong to opposition parties, Nyanzi’s stance of total critique of Museveni and her style of reducing him to a nonentity not worthy of any respect is important for it articulates their point or stand, moreover using a social media platform, Facebook, that many youths in Uganda access.68 There are many advantages that come with the use of social media as a communication channel for political messaging. Besides the fact that ‘mobile and social media represent the biggest growth in the way readers are accessing information’,69 social media ‘provide opportunities to create and expand audiences, increase geographical reach, respond more quickly than ever before to news events and issues, and interact with news consumers in more immediate and direct ways’.70 This observation is relevant to this chapter for Nyanzi’s work has the potential to reach every corner of the globe where Facebook is used, thereby enabling readers in disparate locations to read it, comment on it or even share it with other people in their networks. This is made 68 Independent web analytics company, Statcounter, gives the following statistics for the social media sites mostly used in Uganda between February 2019 and February 2020: Facebook (53.06%), Pinterest (22.2%), Twitter (14.71%), Instagram (5.11%), YouTube (4.55%), and LinkedIn (0.14%). https:// gs.statcounter.com/social-media-stats/all/uganda [accessed 11 March 2020]. 69 Kathyrn Bowd, ‘Social Media and News Media: Building New Publics or Fragmenting Audiences?’ in Mary Griffiths and Kim Barbour (eds), Making Publics, Making Places (Barr Smith Library: University of Adelaide Press, 2016), pp. 129–44 (136). 70 Ibid., 129.

353

354

Part III: Making Publics

evident by the number of people who have liked, commented on and shared particular posts. At the time of writing this chapter, the post in which Nyanzi declared President Museveni a pair of buttocks, for instance, had been liked 4,000 times, had received 2,200 comments, and had been shared 1,300 times. The birthday poem had been liked 1,900 times, had received 2,000 comments, and had been shared 561 times. This means that both pieces have been read widely, as each sharing of them opens up new avenues where they are read and re-shared. Besides, the pieces remain active posts in the sense that they continue to receive new readers and new commentators, making them incomparable to traditional print newspapers which are read once and then deposited into a library or a study for future reference. To appreciate what these figures mean, we need to remember that the circulation of traditional print newspapers is going down by the day as shown by statistics given by the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC), South Africa. Muhereza Kyamutetera reports that according to ABC, the two mainstream English Ugandan newspapers, The New Vision and Daily Monitor, combined, sold 42,644 copies in the first quarter of 2019 as compared to 44,787 copies in the first quarter of 2018, which translates into a 5 per cent drop in sales. He further reports that in the last 12 years since 2007, the two Ugandan English dailies combined have lost 28 per cent in copy sales, despite the population growth by 49.3 per cent from 30.6 million people to an estimated 45.7 million people in 2019, and higher incomes and literate rates. Another advantage that social media platforms provide is the ease with which information can be retrieved, if specific phrases in the posts are known. Anita Breuer, Todd Landman, and Dorothea Farquhar speak to this aspect when they observe: Social network platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook have multiplied the possibilities for retrieval and dissemination of political information, and thus afford the internet user a variety of supplemental and relatively low-cost access points to political information and engagement. Social media users can be updated about their friends’ political activities through their own newsfeed. They can comment on these activities or join online discussion groups, which engage them in political conversation from the convenience of their homes at any time of the day. They can ‘befriend’ political organizations online and stay informed about their activities without having to attend a meeting or a rally. In this way, the more social and interactive culture of online communication that developed with the emergence of the Web2.0 holds potential for the democratization of political engagement.71

This quotation emphasises the interactive nature of online communication, which makes it possible for the author to dialogue with his/her 71

Breuer et. al., ‘Social Media and Protest Mobilization’, 765.

Rudeness/Incivility and the Poetics and Politics of Stella Nyanzi’s Facebook Work

readers. In the posts I have discussed, this interaction is in the form of comments that readers make on Nyanzi’s work, to some of which she replies. But the readers themselves reply to each other, engaging one another as they discuss the key points raised by the posts, making Nyanzi’s posts both initiators of and occasions for political debate. Perhaps the greatest advantage that comes with using social media is that Nyanzi is able to elude censorship, both by the government (who do not want her to say particular things about President Museveni and his government) and by the Ugandan community (some of whom do not want her to use language in the manner she does, which they consider obscene or vulgar). On Facebook, Nyanzi can say anything she wishes to, using any language she finds appropriate for the message she is delivering as long as her readers do not flag it as vulgar or hate speech. In her newsfeeds, she is able to perform freedom in a world that curtails free speech. She is also able to commune with like-­m inded people who consider Museveni an autocrat, a community ‘with a sense of in-group solidarity and an oppositional consciousness of “us” versus “them”’ – the ‘them’ being those people who support President Museveni and his regime, that is, people whose discourse is located in the relative peace and economic prosperity that his regime has accorded Uganda and its citizens.72

Conclusion

In a ground-breaking work on decolonisation published in 2020, Sylvia Tamale argues that ‘[f]or the colonized, decolonization of the mind is really about returning to the annals of history to find ourselves, to become fluent in our cultural knowledge systems, to cultivate critical consciousness and to reclaim our humanity’.73 In this chapter, I have argued that Nyanzi uses her position as a Nnalongo to claim a space for herself from which she critiques President Museveni’s abuse of power, using robust, energetic language that her critics call obscene or vulgar. This is her way of finding herself, cultivating critical consciousness and reclaiming her identity as a rational subject in a regime that persecutes its opponents into silence and reduces its supporters into zombies – a people incapable of seeing the moral, cultural, political, and economic devastation that abuse of power leaves in its wake. I have also argued that Nyanzi’s use of what her critics consider shameful language is motivated by the fact that critiques which use shocking language, like hers, meet with swift reprisals in the form of arrests and prosecutions – proof that they are noticed and are effective in ruffling the feathers of the dominant men and women in power. 72

73

Ibid., 769. Tamale, ‘Nudity, Protest and the Law’.

355

356

Part III: Making Publics

The vulgarity of power she sees around her – the blatant theft of public funds and shameless employment of relatives to the extent of appointing one’s wife as a cabinet minister, to mention just two – forces her to resort to what Okello Oculi calls ‘a brutal economy of mockery and contempt’ to articulate her protest against the status quo.74 This explains, I suggest, why her criticism gets more brutal with time – from Museveni being imagined as a man very easy to seduce into sin in a Facebook post entitled ‘I Want to Make Love to the President’ authored in 2015, to him being called a pair of buttocks (authored in 2017), to him being compared to an overused, drenched sanitary pad and ‘a big old poop / enlarged in the bowels of Uganda’ in her book, No Roses from My Mouth (published in 2020). By calling Museveni a pair of buttocks Nyanzi deflates him, depriving him of what Sahana Udupa calls ‘intangible markers of self and personhood – respect, honour, reputation, legitimacy, and authenticity’, and effectively imagines him as an impostor who has no credentials to govern a state.75 Since Nyanzi’s work creates a buzz in Uganda, at least, with the thousands of people who like each post of hers, comment on it, and share it, we can say that her use of what her critics call vulgar language serves the purpose of ‘noising out’ her criticism of Museveni, to use a sonic metaphor of Sahana Udupa’s, who observes that looking at social media work from a sonic perspective emphasises the ‘reiteration and reverberation’ of its messages.76 Nyanzi’s work continues to reverberate far and wide for it remains active on the internet, performing its resistance to state power. Even when she was imprisoned, the two posts I have discussed here were opportunities for her views to travel far and wide as journalists referred to them in their covering of court proceedings for newspapers, radios, and television stations. This brings to mind Robert V. Kozinets, PierreYann Dolbec, and Amanda Earley’s view that the distinction usually made ‘between online and offline “social worlds”’ is a false and misleading one since ‘in a rapidly computerized and mobile Internet world – many social activities cut across both online and offline worlds’.77 Okello Oculi, ‘A Narrative on ‘Shame’’, Social Research, 70.4 (2003), 1277–1296, 1279. I am drawing this phrase ‘vulgarity of power’ from Achille Mbembe’s book, On the Postcolony, whose third chapter is appropriately entitled ‘The Aesthetics of Vulgarity’, in which Mbembe talks of the postcolonial leaders’ tendency to ‘pursue wrongdoing to the point of shameless’ (115). 75 Sahana Udupa, ‘Gaali Cultures: The Politics of Abusive Exchange on Social Media’, New Media and Society, 20:4 (2018), 1506–22 (1516). 76 Ibid., 1519. 77 Robert V. Kozinets, Robert V., Pierre-Yann Dolbech and Amanda Earley, ‘Netnographic Analysis: Understanding Culture through Social Media Data’, in Uwe Flick (ed.) Sage Handbook of Qualitative Data Analysis (Sage: London, 2014), pp. 262–75 (264–65). 74

Select Bibliography Aasland, Tertit, ‘On the Move to the Left in Uganda 1969–1971: The Common Man’s Charter – dissemination and attitude’, Research Report No. 26 (1974), The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies. Abantu Ba Lumumba Banaasonderwa Ensimbi’, Munno 63:16 (Kampala: Marianum Press) 19 January 1973. Abdoumaliq, Simone, ‘African migration and the remaking of innercity Johannesburg’, in A. Morris & A. Bouillon (eds.), African Immigration to South Africa: Francophone Migration of the 1990s (Pretoria: Protea & Ifas, 2001), 150–70. Abidi, S., ‘The Return of Indians to Uganda’, Africa Quarterly, 36:3 (1996), 45–58. Abrams, M.H. and Geoffrey Galt Harpharm, A Glossary of Literary Terms (Boston, MA: Wadsworth, 2012). ACARM Annual General Meeting, ‘The ‘Migrated Archives’: ACARM Position Paper’, adopted by unanimous vote at the ACARM Annual General Meeting, Mexico City, 25 November 2017. Acemoglu, D., S. Johnson and James A. Robinson. ‘Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation’, The American Economic Review, 91 (2001), 1369–1401. ——, ‘Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117 (2002), 1231–94. Adhola, Yoga, UPC and National-Democratic Liberation in Uganda (Bloomington: Xlibris, 2015). Adimola, A.B., ‘The Lamogi Rebellion 1911–12’, The Uganda Journal 18:2 (1954), 166–77. African Education Commission, Education in East Africa (New York and London: Phelps-Stokes Fund and Edinburgh House Press, 1925). Akita, J.M., ‘Uganda: Development of the National Archives and the National Documentation Centre’, Paris: UNESCO, 1979, https:// unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000036237 [accessed 18 July 2022]. Akugizibwe, Moses, Digitization and Sustainability of Archives of Knowledge Resources (Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2017). Alava, Henni, ‘Homosexuality, the Holy Family and a Failed Mass Wedding in Catholic Northern Uganda’, Critical African Studies, 9:1 (2017), 32–51.

358

Select Bibliography

Alderman, Derek H, ‘Street Names as Memorial Arenas: The Reputational Politics of Commemorating Martin Luther King Jr in a Georgia County’, Historical Geography, 30 (2002), 99–120. Allman, Jean, ‘Academic reparation and stepping aside’, Africa Is a Country, November 17, 2020, https://africasacountry.com/2020/11/ academic-reparation-and-stepping-aside. ——, ‘#HerskovitsMustFall? A Meditation on Whiteness, African Studies, and the Unfinished Business of 1968’, African Studies Review 62:3 (2019). Allman, Jean, Susan Geiger and Nakanyike Musisi. ‘Women in African Colonial Histories: An Introduction’, in Women in African Colonial Histories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 1–18. Amin Dada, Al-Hajji Field Marshal Dr Idi, The Shaping of Modern Uganda and Administrative Divisions: Documents 1900–76 (Entebbe: Government Printer, 1976). Amin, Samir, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World (London: Zed Books, 1990). ——, Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or Ending Capitalism? trans. Victoria Bawtree (Bangalore: Books for Change, 2011). ——, Eurocentrism: Modernity, Religion and Democracy, A critique of Eurocentrism and Culturalism (New York: Monthly Press Review, 2009). Angopa, Barbara, ‘Ugandan Campaigners Seek to Decolonise Kampala’s Streets’, Al Jazeera (Kampala), 25 June 2020, www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/6/25/ugandan-campaigners-seek-to-decolonise-kampalas-streets [accessed 13 March 2021]. Anywar, Reuben S., ‘The Life of Rwot Iburaim Awich’, trans. J.V. Wild, The Uganda Journal, 12.1 (1948), 72–86. Appiah, Kwame Anthony, ‘The Case for Capitalizing the B in Black’, The Atlantic, 18 June 2020, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ archive/2020/06/time-to-capitalize-blackand-white/613159 [accessed 6 August 2021]. Apter, David, The Political Kingdom in Uganda: A Study in Bureaucratic Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961). Asad, Talal, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Asiimwe, B. Godfrey, ‘From Monopoly Marketing to Coffee Magendo; Responses to Policy Recklessness and Extraction in Uganda, 1971– 79’ Journal of Eastern African Studies, 7 (2013), 104–24. Asiimwe, Godfrey B. ‘Migrations and Identity of Indian-Pakistani Minorities in Uganda’, in Adam Michel (ed.), Indian Africa: Minorities of Pakistani Origin in Eastern Africa (Dar-es-Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, 2015), pp. 317–50.

Select Bibliography

——, (Mis)management of Sub-Nationalism and Diversity in ‘Nations’: The case of Buganda in Uganda, 1897–1980 (Kampala: Makerere University Press, 2022). ——, ‘The Impact of Neoliberal Reforms on Uganda’s Socio-economic Landscape’, in J. Wiegratz, G. Martinello and E. Greco (eds), Uganda: The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation (London: Zed Books, 2018), pp. 145−62. ——, The Impact of Post-Colonial Policy Shifts in Coffee Marketing at Local Level in Uganda: A Case Study of Mukono District, 1962–1998 (Maastricht: Shaker Publishing, 2002). Awortwi, Nicholas and A.H.J. (Bert) Helmsing, ‘Behind the façade of bringing services closer to people’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 48:2 (2014), 297–314. Baker, Nsamba Gonzaga, Modern African Nationalism 1935 to Present: National Movements & the New States (Kampala: publisher unlisted, 2014). Baker, Samuel W., The Albert N’Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile (London: Macmillan & Co, 1866). Banégas, Richard, ‘Entre guerre et démocratie: l’évolution des imaginaires politiques en Ouganda’, in Denis-Constant Martin (ed.), Nouveaux langages du politique en Afrique orientale (Nairobi: IFRA, Paris: Karthala, 1998), pp. 187–262. Bangura, Yusuf, ‘Public Sector Restructuring: The Institutional and Social Effects of Fiscal, Managerial and Capacity Building Reforms’, Occasional Paper No. 3, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (2000). Barber, James, Imperial Frontier (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1968). ——, ‘The Karamoja District of Uganda’, Journal of African History, 3 (1962), 111–24. Barber, Karin, I Could Speak until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women, and the Past in a Yoruba Town (London: Edinburgh University Press, 1991). Barber, William, The Economy of British Central Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1961). Barya, John-Jean, Reconstituting Ugandan Citizenship under the 1995 Constitution: A Conflict of Nationalism, Chauvinism, and Ethnicity (Kampala: Centre for Basic Research, 2000). Becker, Howard S., ‘Art as Collective Action’, American Sociological Review, 39:6 (1974), 767–76. Behrend, Heike, Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits: War in Northern Uganda, 1985–97 (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1999). ——, ‘Power to Heal, Power to Kill: Spirit Possession and War in Northern Uganda (1986–1994)’, in Heike Behrend and Ute Luig (eds), Spirit Possession: Modernity and Power in Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), pp. 20–33.

359

360

Select Bibliography

Benson, Peter, Black Orpheus, Transition, and Modern Cultural Awakening in Africa, part II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Betts, Raymond F., Decolonization (New York: Routledge, 2004). Biehl, João, ‘The Judicialization of Biopolitics: Claiming the Right to Pharmaceuticals in Brazilian Courts’, American Ethnologist, 40 (2013), 419–36. Bienen, Henry, ‘Kenya and Uganda: When does Dissent Become Sedition?’ Africa Report, 14:3 (1969), https://search.proquest.com/ docview/1304056292?pq-origsite=gscholar [accessed 29 August 2019]. Bigsten, A. and Steve Kayizzi-Mugerwa, Is Uganda an Emerging Economy? A Report for the OECD Project ‘Emerging Africa’, Research Report No. 118 (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2001). Bourriaud, Nicolas, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 1998). Bond, Natalie, ‘Documenting a Nation’s Turbulent Past: Archives in Uganda’, presentation at the Society of American Archivist’s Annual Meeting, 6–11 August 2012, San Diego, http://files.archivists.org/ conference/sandiego2012/P03-Bond.pdf [accessed 8 February 2022]. Bowd, Kathryn, ‘Social Media and News Media: Building New Publics or Fragmenting Audiences?’ in Mary Griffiths and Kim Barbour (eds), Making Publics, Making Places (Barr Smith Library: University of Adelaide Press, 2016), pp. 129–144. Boyd, Lydia, ‘Ugandan Born-Again Christians and the Moral Politics of Gender Equality’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 44 (2014), 333354. Bradley, John and Amanda Kearney, ‘“Too Strong to Ever Not Be There”: Place Names and Emotional Geographies’, Social & Cultural Geography 10 (2009), 77–94. Branch, Adam, Displacing Human Rights: War and Intervention in Northern Uganda (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Bray, Mark, ‘Examinations Councils and Geopolitical Change: Commonality, Diversity, and Lessons from Experience’, International Journal of Educational Development, 18:6 (1998). Breckenridge, Keith and Simon Szreter, ’Recognition and Registration: The Infrastructure of Personhood in World History’, in Keith Breckenridge and Simon Szreter (eds), Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp.1–36. Breuer, Anita, Todd Landman and Dorothea Farquhar, ‘Social Media and Protest Mobilization: Evidence from the Tunisian Revolution’, Democratization, 22 (2015), 764–92. Brisset-Foucault, Florence, Talkative Polity: Radio, Domination, and Citizenship in Uganda (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019). ——, ‘What Do People Do When They Riot’, presented at the African Studies Association Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, 2012.

Select Bibliography

Brittain, Victoria, ‘The Liberation of Kampala’, New Left Review 156 (1986), 51–61. Browne, Adrian J., ‘Classificatory Violence: Difference, Discipline, and (De)Gradation in Uganda’s Northern Albertine Rift, c.1860 to c.1991’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Durham University, 2020). ——, ‘The Alur-ization of Aidan Southall – Contested Ethnonymic Traditions in North-Western Uganda’, History in Africa, 45 (2018), 221–44. ——, ‘Uganda’s Revolutionary Left: Politics and Pedagogy Between London and Mbale, c. 1958–1971’, unpublished paper, Rosa Luxemburg-­Stiftung Dakar Symposium on Revolutionary Left in Sub-­Saharan Africa, 2019. Bruce-Lockhart, Katherine, Carceral Afterlives: Prisons, Detention, and Punishment in Postcolonial Uganda (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2022) Bukenya, Austin, ‘An Idiom of Blood: Pragmatic Interpretations of Terror and Violence in the Ugandan Novel’, Uganda Journal, 46 (2004), 17–38. Burke, Fred G., Local Government and Politics in Uganda (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1964). ——, ‘Public Administration in Africa: The Legacy of Inherited Colonial Institutions’, paper presented at the World Congress of International Political Science Association, Brussels, 18–23 September, 1967. Burke, Roland, ‘“The Compelling Dialogue of Freedom”: Human Rights at the Bandung Conference’, Human Rights Quarterly, 28 (2006), 947–65. Burke, Timothy, ‘Academia: The Trouble with Kinship’, Eight By Seven, 10 February 2022, https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/academia-the-trouble-with-kinship [accessed 2 March 2022]. Burrill, Emily, ‘Legislating Marriage in Postcolonial Mali: A History of the Present’, in Lydia Boyd and Emily Burrill (eds), Legislating Gender and Sexuality in Africa: Human Rights, Society and the State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), pp. 25–41. Burton, Richard F., First Footsteps in East Africa (London: Darf Publishers, 1986 [1894]). Butamanya, Isaabaruuli Isaabarongo Mwogezi, The History of Baruuli/ Banyala (Kampala: Earnest Publishers, 2004). Byaruhanga, Frederick Kamuhanda, Student Power in Africa’s Higher Education: A Case of Makerere University (New York: Routledge, 2006) Byenkya, Ivan, ‘Sente Ekaaye Luno’, in Danson Kahyana, Bob G. Kisiki and Beatrice Lamwaka (eds), As I Stood Dead Before the World: Creative Writing from Luzira Prison (Kampala: Ugandan PEN, 2018). Cameron, John. The Development of Education in East Africa (New York: Teachers College Press, 1970).

361

362

Select Bibliography

Campbell, Horace, Four Essays on Neo-Colonialism in Uganda: The Barbarity of Idi Amin (Toronto: Afro-Carib Publications, 1975). ——, ‘The Political Struggles of Africans to Enter the Market Place in Uganda 1900–1970’, unpublished MA Thesis, Makerere University, Kampala, 1975. Cannadine, David, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (London: Penguin, 2002). Carswell, Grace, Cultivating Success in Uganda: Kigezi Farmers and Colonial Policies (Nairobi and Oxford: The British Institute in Eastern Africa and James Currey, 2007). Castellano, Carlos Garrido, ‘Institutionalism, Public Sphere, and Artistic Agency: A Conversation on 32° East Ugandan Arts Trust’, Critical Interventions 11: 2 (2017): 116–31. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Chantiluke, Roseanne, Brian Kwoba and Athinangamso Nkopo (eds), Rhodes Most Fall: The Struggle to Decolonise the Racist Heart of Empire (London: Zed Books, 2018). Chhotray, Vasudha and Fiona McConnell, ‘Certifications of Citizenship: The History, Politics and Materiality of Identity Documents in South Asian States and Diasporas’, Contemporary South Asia 26:2, 111–26, 2018. Chidester, David, Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Chrétien, Jean-Pierre, The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History, trans. Scott Straus (New York: Zone Books, 2003). Christensen, Tom and Per Laegreid, ‘New Public Management: The Effects of Contractualism and Devolution on Political Control’, Public Management Review, 3 (2001), 73–94. ‘Chronology of the Expulsion of Indians from Uganda, 5 August – 8 November 1972’, www.Indiansfromuganda.org/1972/chronology/ chronology.html [accessed 15 November 2004]. Cobain, Ian. History Thieves (London: Granta Publications, 2016). Cohen, D.L. and J. Parson, ‘The Uganda Peoples Congress Branch and Constituency Elections of 1970’, Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies, 11(1973), 46–66. Cook, Terry, ‘What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift’, Archivaria, 43 (Spring 1997), 17–63. Coton, Christel and Laurence Proteau, ‘Introduction: La division sociale du travail d’écriture’, in Christel Coton and Laurence Proteau (eds), Les paradoxes de l’écriture (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2012), pp. 9–15. Court, Elsbeth, ‘Margaret Trowell and the Development of Art Education in East Africa’, Art Education 38:6 (1985), 35–41.

Select Bibliography

Cross, Charlotte, ‘Community Policing and the Politics of Local Development in Tanzania’, The Journal of Modern African Studies, 52:4 (2014), 517–40. Cross-Cultural Foundation of Uganda, The Cultural Rights of Ethnic Minorities in Uganda – A Call for Action (Kampala: Cross-Cultural Foundation of Uganda, 2015) Dale, Ivan R. and Harold B. Thomas, ‘Uganda Place Names: Some European Eponyms’, Uganda Journal, 17:2 (1953), 101–23. Das, Ritanjan, ‘Producing Local Neoliberalism in a Leftist Regime: Neoliberal Governmentality and Populist Transition in West Bengal, India’, Contemporary South Asia, 27:3 (2019), 373–91. Datzberger, Simone. ‘Peacebuilding through Non-formal Education Programmes: A Case Study from Karamoja, Uganda’, International Peacekeeping, 24 (2017), 326–49. Davis, Paula Jean, ‘On the Sexuality of “Town Women” in Kampala’, Africa Today, 47:3/4 (2000), 29–60. Ddungu, Expedit, ‘Popular Forms and the Question of Democracy. The Case of Resistance Councils in Uganda’, in Mahmood Mamdani and Joe Oloka-Onyango (eds), Uganda Studies in Living Conditions, Popular Movements and Constitutionalism (Vienna: JEP; Kampala, CBR: 1994), pp. 365–404. ——, ‘Some Constitutional Dimensions of Military Politics in Uganda’, Working Paper No. 41 (Kampala: Centre for Basic Research, 1994). de Haas, Michiel, ‘Moving Beyond Colonial Control? Economic Forces and Shifting Migration from Rwanda-Urundi to Buganda, 1920–60’, Journal of African History, 60:3 (2019), 379–406. de Jong, Ferdinand, ‘At Work in the Archive: Introduction to Special Issue’, World Art, 6:1 (2016), 3–17. de Sousa Santos, Boaventura, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (New York: Routledge, 2014). ——, The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). Decalo, Samuel, ‘African Personal Dictatorships’, The Journal of Modern African Studies, 23 (1985), 209–37. Decker, Alicia C., In Idi Amin’s Shadow: Women, Gender and Militarism in Uganda (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014). Denhardt, Janet V. and Robert B. Denhardt, The New Public Service: Serving, not Steering (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2003). Diabate, Naminata, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020). Dicklitch, Susan and Doreen Lwanga, ‘The Politics of Being Non-­ Political: Human Rights Organizations and the Creation of a Positive Human Rights Culture in Uganda’, Human Rights Quarterly, 25 (2003), 482–509. Dipio, Dominica, ‘African Motherhood Proverbs and Worldview: A Matriarchal Perspective’, Legon Journal of Humanities, 30 (2019), 3–23.

363

364

Select Bibliography

Dirks, Nicholas, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Dolan, Chris, Social Torture: The Case of Northern Uganda, 1986–2006 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009). Doornbos, Martin, The Rwenzururu Movement in Uganda: Struggling for Recognition (London: Routledge, 2018). Douglas-Home, Alec, British Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary, Draft Note with Confidential Letter within the FCO, 13 December 1972; Confidential and Secret Documents of the British Government, Public Records Office, UK. Doyle, Shane, ‘Parish Baptism Registers, Vital Registration and Fixing Identities in Uganda’, in Keith Breckenridge and Simon Szreter (eds), Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 277–298. ——, ‘Population decline and delayed recovery in Bunyoro, 1860 1960’, Journal of African History, 41:3 (2000), 429–58. ——, ‘“The Child of Death”: Personal Names and Parental Attitudes towards Mortality in Bunyoro, Western Uganda, 1900–2005’, Journal of African History, 49 (2008), 361–83. Drito, Alice, Unveiling the Female Faces in Labour Union Politics in Uganda (Uganda: Self-published, 2018) Duara, Prasenjit, Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then (London: Routledge, 2004). DuFrene, Debbie D. and Carol M. Lehman, ‘Persuasive Appeal for Clean Language’, Business Communication Quarterly, 65 (2002), 48–55. Dyson-Hudson, Neville, Karimojong Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). Earle, Jonathon L., Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire: Political Thought and Historical Imagination in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Earle Jonathon L. and J.J. Carney, Contesting Catholics: Benedicto Kiwanuka and the Birth of Modern Uganda (Oxford: James Currey, 2021). Eaton, D, ‘The Business of Peace: Raiding and Peace Work along the Kenya-Uganda Border, part I’, African Affairs, 107 (2008), 89–110. ——, ‘The Rise of the “Traider”’, Nomadic Peoples, 14 (2010), 106–22. Edel, May M., The Chiga of Uganda, 2nd edn (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1996). Ehrich, C., ‘The Uganda Economy, 1903–1945’, in V. Harlow and E.M. Chilver (eds), History of East Africa, Vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). el Nabolsy, Zeyad, ‘Lenin and East African Marxism’, in Robert Maclean and Alla Ivanchikova (eds), The Future of Lenin: Power, Politics, and Revolution in the 21st Century (Albany: SUNY Press, 2022), 205–34. Engelke, Matthew, A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

Select Bibliography

English, Patrick T. ‘Archives of Uganda’, American Archivist, 18:3 (1955), 225–230. Englund, Harri, Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). Escobar, Arturo, Designs for the Pluriverse (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). Fallers, Lloyd and Audrey Richards, The King’s Men: Leadership and Status in Buganda on the Eve of Independence (London: Oxford University Press on behalf of the East African Institute of Social Research, 1964). Falola, Toyin, Nationalism and African Intellectuals (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2001). Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1968). Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004). Felde, Kronstad, Tor Halvorsen, Anja Myrtveit and Reidar Øygard, Democracy and the Discourse on Relevance Within the Academic Profession at Makerere University (Cape Town: African Minds, 2021). Felski, Rita, The Uses of Literature (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008). Ferguson, James, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Finnström, Sverker, Living with Bad Surroundings: War, History, and Everyday Moments in Northern Uganda (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). ——, ‘Wars of the Past and Wars of the Present: The Lord’s Resistance Movement/Army in Uganda’, Africa, 76:2 (2006), 200–220. Fisher, William F., ‘Doing Good? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGO Practices’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 26 (1997), 439−64. Fleming, G., William, ‘Authority, Efficiency, and Role Stress: Problems in the Development of East African Bureaucracies’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 11 (1966), 386–404. Furley, Oliver and James Katalikawe, ‘Constitutional Reform in Uganda: The New Approach’, African Affairs, 96 (1997), 243–60. Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). George Padmore Institute Archives/LRA/08/10/UNLF(A-D), ‘Statement on the “Peace Agreement” between the Ugandan Military Council and the National Resistance Movement of 17th December, 1985’, 18 December 1985. Gershenberg, Irving, ‘Slouching towards Socialism: Obote’s Uganda’, African Studies Review, 15 (1972), 79–95.

365

366

Select Bibliography

Gertzel, Cherry, ‘Uganda after Amin: The Continuing Search for Leadership and Control’, African Affairs, 79 (1980), 461–89. Ghaddar, J.J., and Michelle Caswell, ‘“To Go Beyond”: Towards a Decolonial Archival Praxis’, Archival Science 19:2 (2019), 71–85. Gheytanchi, Elham and Valentine N. Moghadam, ‘Women, Social Protests, and the New Media Activism in the Middle East and North Africa’, International Review of Modern Sociology, 40 (2014), 1–26. Gilliland, Anne, ‘Networking Records in their Diaspora: A Reconceptualisation of “Displaced Records” in a Postnational World’, in James Lowry (ed.), Displaced Archives (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 180–95. Glentworth, G. and Ian Hancook. ‘Obote and Amin: Change and Continuity in Modern Uganda Politics’, African Affairs, 72 (1973), 237–55. Goetz, Anne Marie, ‘Women in Politics & Gender Equity in Policy: South Africa & Uganda’, Review of African Political Economy, 25 (1998), 241–62. Göpfert, Mirco, ‘Bureaucratic Aesthetics: Report Writing in the Nigérien Gendarmerie’, American Ethnologist, 40:2 (2013), 324–34. Government of Uganda, Constitution of the Republic of Uganda, 1995, w w w.i lo.org /dy n /nat lex /docs/ EL ECT RON IC/44038/9 0 491/ F206329993/UGA44038.pdf [accessed 15 July 2022]. ——, Report of the Commissioners for Africanisation (Entebbe: Government Printer, 1962). Grant, Andrea Mariko and Yolana Pringle (eds), Anxiety in and about Africa: Multidisciplinary Perspectives and Approaches (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2021). Green, Elliott D., ‘Decentralisation and Conflict in Uganda’, Conflict, Security and Development, 8:4 (2008), 427–50. Greene, Ashley L. ‘Creating a Nation Without a Past: Teaching National History in Uganda’s Secondary Schools’, in Jim Williams and Michelle Bellino (eds), (Re)Constructing Memory: Education, Identity and Conflict (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2016). ——, ‘Dialogue in the Trenches: Confronting Political Narratives in Secondary Schools’, in Elezar Barkan, Constantin Goschler and James Waller (eds), Historical Dialogue and the Prevention of Mass Atrocities (New York: Routledge, 2020). Grosfoguel, Ramón, ‘The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political-­ economy Paradigms’, in Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar (eds), Globalization and the Decolonial Option (London: Taylor & Francis, 2010), pp. 65−77. ——, ‘The Epistemic Decolonial Turn’, Cultural Studies, 21:2−3 (2007), 211−23. Grosfoguel, Ramón, Roberto Hernández and Ernesto Rosen Velásquez, Decolonizing the Westernized University: Interventions in Philosophy of Education from Within and Without (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Little­field, 2016).

Select Bibliography

Guesmi, Haythem, ‘The Gentrification of African Studies’, Africa is a Country, 22 December 2018, https://africasacountry.com/2018/12/ the-gentrification-of-african-studies [accessed 6 August 2021]. Gwyn, M., Idi Amin: Death-Light of Africa (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1977). Gyekye, K., An Essay on African Philosophical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Hailey, W.M. (Lord), Native Administration in the British African Territories (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1950). Hansen, Holger Bernt, Ethnicity and Military Rule in Uganda (Upsala: The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1977). ——, ‘Uganda in the 1970s: A Decade of Paradoxes and Ambiguities’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 7 (2013), 83–103. Hansen, Holger Bernt and Michael Twaddle, ‘Introduction’, in Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle (eds), Uganda Now: Between Decay and Development (London: James Currey, 1988). ——, Changing Uganda: The Dilemma of Structural Adjustment & Revolutionary Change (London: James Currey, 1991). ——, Developing Uganda (Oxford: James Currey, 1998). ——, From Chaos to Order: The Politics of Constitution-Making in Uganda (London: James Currey, 1995). ——, Uganda Now: Between Decay and Development (London: James Currey, 1988). Hanson, Holly E., Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003). ——, To Speak and Be Heard: Seeking Good Government in Uganda, ca. 1500–2015 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2022). Harrison, Brian, ‘Politics’, in Trevor Henry Aston (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford: Volume VIII: The Twentieth Century 8 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 377–412. Hartter, Joel, Sadie J. Ryan, Catrina A. MacKenzie, Abe Goldman et al., ‘Now There is No Land: A Story of Ethnic Migration in a Protected Area Landscape in Western Uganda’, Population Environment, 36 (2015), 452–79. Heady, Ferrel, Public Administration: A Comparative Perspective (New York: Marcel Dekker, 2001). Herbst, Jeffrey, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Herzfeld, Michael, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the National-State, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2005) Heussler, Robert, Yesterday’s Rulers: The Making of the British Colonial Service (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1963). Hindmarsh, Roland, ‘Uganda’, in David G. Scanlon (ed.), Church, State, and Education in Africa (New York: Teachers College Press, 1966).

367

368

Select Bibliography

Hochschild, Adam, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998). Hodgson, Dorothy, Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous: Postcolonial Politics in a Neoliberal World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). Hoesing, Peter, ‘Kusamira: Singing Rituals of Wellness in Southern Uganda’, African Music, 9:2 (2012), 94–127. Hoffman, Stefan-Ludwig, ‘Human Rights and History’, Past & Present, 232 (2016), 279–310. Hollan, Douglas W., ‘Setting a New Standard: The Person-Centred Interviewing and Observation of Robert I. Levy’, Ethos, 33:4 (2005), 459–66. Holmes, Brian (ed.), Educational Policy and the Mission Schools: Case Studies from the British Empire (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967). Hope, Stanley, The Degrading of Human Dignity – A Short History of British Immigration Acts, 1962–1996 (Glasgow: Wild Goose Publications, 1997). Howe, John, ‘“Filling the middle”: Uganda’s Appropriate Transport Services’, Transport Reviews, 23:2 (2003), 161–76. Hull, Matthew S., ‘Documents and Bureaucracy’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 41:1 (2012), 251–67. Human Rights Watch, ‘Uprooted and Forgotten: Impunity and Human Rights Abuses in Northern Uganda’, 17:12 (2005). Hunt, Nancy Rose, A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). Hundle, Anneeth Kaur, ‘1970s Uganda: Past, Present, Future’, Journal of Asian and African Studies 53: 3 (2018), 455–75. ——, Insecurities of Expulsion: Emergent Citizenship Formations and Political Practices in Postcolonial Uganda’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 39:1 (2019), 8–23. ——, ‘Postcolonial Patriarchal Nativism, Domestic Violence and Transnational Feminist Research in Contemporary Uganda’, Feminist Review 121:1 (2019), 27–52. Hunter, Emma, ‘Dutiful Subjects, Patriotic Citizens and the Concept of “Good Citizenship” in Twentieth-Century Tanzania’, The Historical Journal, 56 (2013), 257–77. ——, ‘Languages of Freedom in Decolonising Africa’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 27 (2017), 253–69. Huntington, Samuel, P., The Soldier and the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957). Hypotheses (2021–22), ‘Uganda’s Past, Ugandan Futures: Debates over Government, Equality and Justice 1979–1980’, https://uganda1979. hypotheses.org [accessed 16 June 2022].

Select Bibliography

Ibingira, Grace, The Forging of an African Nation (New York: Viking Press, 1973). Idowu, Bolaji E., African Traditional Religion: A Definition, 2nd edn (New York: Orbis Books, 1975). Ingham, Kenneth, A History of East Africa (London: Longmans, 1962). ——, Obote: A Political Biography (London: Routledge, 1994). International Council on Archives, ‘ICA: 70 Years of International Influence’, 2016, www.ica.org/en/international-council-archives0/ica-70–years-of-international-influence-timeline [accessed 30 January 2019]. Isegawa, Moses, Abyssinian Chronicles (London: Picador, 2000). Jamal, Vali, ‘Indians in Uganda, 1880–1972: Inequality and Expulsion’, The Economic History Review, Second Series, xxix:4 (1976), 602–16. Jansen, Jonathan D. (ed.), Decolonisation in Universities: The Politics of Knowledge (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2019). Jeater, Diana, ‘Academic Standards or Academic Imperialism? Zimbabwean Perceptions of Hegemonic Power in the Global Construction of Knowledge’, African Studies Review, 61:2 (2018), 8–27. Jenkinson, Hilary, Manual of Archive Administration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922). Jørgensen, Jan J., Uganda: A Modern History (London: Croom Helm, 1981). Jones, Ben, Beyond the State in Rural Uganda (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). Jost, John T., Pablo Barberá, Richard Bonneau, Melanie Langer et al., ‘How Social Media Facilitates Political Protest: Information, Motivation, and Social Networks’, Advance in Political Psychology, 39 (2018), 85–118. Kaba, Mariame, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2021). Kabwegyere, Tarsis B., The Politics of State Formation and Destruction in Uganda, revised and expanded (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1995 [1974]). Kaggwa, Apolo, Empisa za Baganda (Kampala: Crane Publishers, 1993). Kaggwa, Apollo and M.S.M. Semakula Kiwanuka, The Kings of Buganda (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1971). Kakande, Angelo, ‘Contemporary Art in Uganda: A Nexus between Art and Politics’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 2008). Kalema, Rhoda, My Life is but a Weaving: An Autobiography (Nairobi: Moran Publishers, 2021) Kalinaki, Daniel K., Kizza Besigye and Uganda’s Unfinished Revolution (Kampala: Dominant Seven, 2014). Kanyeihamba, George W., Reflections on the Muslim Leadership Question in Uganda (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1998).

369

370

Select Bibliography

Karlström, Mikael, ‘Modernity and Its Aspirants: Moral Community and Developmental Eutopianism in Buganda’, Current Anthropology, 45 (2004), 595–619. ——, ‘On the Aesthetics and Dialogics of Power in the Postcolony’, Africa, 73:1 (2003), 57–76. ——, ‘The Cultural Kingdom in Buganda: Popular Royalism and the Restoration of the Buganda Kingship’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 1999). Karp, Ivan and D.A. Masolo (eds), African Philosophy as Cultural Inquiry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). Karugire, Samwiri R., A Political History of Uganda (Nairobi and London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1980). ——, The Roots of Instability in Uganda (Kampala: The New Vision Printing and Publishing Corporation, 1988). Kasfir, Nelson, ‘Guerrillas and Civilian Participation: The National Resistance Army in Uganda, 1981–86’, Journal of Modern African Studies 43 (2005), 271–96. ——, ‘“No-Party Democracy” in Uganda’, Journal of Democracy, 9:2 (1998). ——, The Shrinking Political Arena: Participation and Ethnicity in African Politics, with a Case Study of Uganda (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). Kasfir, Sidney L., Contemporary African Art (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1999). ——, ‘Lacuna: Uganda in a Globalizing Field’, in M.B. Visonà and G. Salami (eds), Companion to Modern African Art (Oxford 2013), pp. 507−27. ——, ‘Nnaggenda: Experimental Ugandan Artist’, African Arts, 3:1 (1969), 8−13. ——, ‘Up Close and Far Away: Renarrating Buganda’s Troubled Past’, African Arts, 45:3 (2012), 56–69. Kasozi, A.B.K., The Bitter Bread of Exile: The Financial Problems of Sir Edward Muteesa II During His Final Exile, 1966–1969 (Kampala: Progressive Publishing House, 2013). ——, ‘The Impact of Governance on Research in Ugandan Universities’, MISR Working Paper No. 31 (Kampala: Makerere Institute of Social Research, 2017). ——, The Social Origins of Violence in Uganda, 1964–1985 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994). ——, The Spread of Islam in Uganda (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1986). Kasozi, A.B.K. and Mahmood Mamdani, ‘MISR Views on the National Discussion of Makerere’, Working Paper No. 29 (Kampala: Makerere Institute for Social Research, 2016).

Select Bibliography

Kasozi, Ferdinand M., Introduction to an African Philosophy: The Ntu’ology of the Baganda (Freiburg im Breisgau: Verlag Karl Alber, 2011). Kassimir, Ronald, ‘Reading Museveni: Structure, Agency and Pedagogy in Ugandan Politics’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 33:2/3 (1999), 649–73. Kasule, Kizito M., ‘The Renaissance of Contemporary Art at Makerere University Art School’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Makerere University, 2003). Katorobo, James, Education for Public Service in Uganda (New York: Vantage Press, 1982). Katsakioris, Constantin, ‘Socialist Federalism as an Alternative to Nationalism: The Leninist Solution to the National Question in Africa and Its Diaspora’, Humanities 8:3 (2019). Kautsky, John H., The Political Consequences of Modernization (New York: John Wiley, 1972). Kawamara-Mishambi, Sheila and Irene Ovonji-Odida, ‘The “Lost Clause”: The Campaign to Advance Women’s Property Rights in the Uganda 1998 Land Act’, in Anne-Marie Goetz and Shireen Hassim (eds), No Shortcuts to Power: African Women in Politics and Policy Making (London: Zed Books, 2003), pp. 160–87. Ketelaar, Eric, ‘Archival Temples, Archival Prisons: Modes of Power and Protection’, Archival Science 2:3–4 (2002), 221–38. Khadiagala, Gilbert M., ‘Review of Sowing the Mustard Seed: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in Uganda by Yoweri Kaguta Museveni’, Foreign Policy, 111 (1998), 141–44. Khanakwa, Pamela, ‘Reinventing Imbalu and Forcible Circumcision: Gisu Political Identity and the Fight for Mbale in Late Colonial Uganda’, Journal of African History 59, 3 (2018), 357–79. Ki-Zerbo, Joseph, ‘African Intellectuals, Nationalism, and Pan-Africanism: A Testimony’, in Thandika Mkandawire (ed.), African Intellectuals: Rethinking Politics, Language, Gender, and Development (Dakar and London: CODESRIA and Zed Books, 2005), 78–93. Kigongo-Bukenya, I.M.N. ‘Education and Training of Archivists at the East African School of Librarianship in the 19990s and Beyond’, American Archivist, 56 (1993), 358–65. Kihangire, Nicholas, ‘Land Tenure in Colonial and Post Colonial Uganda’, NISH’s Law School Guide (blog), 1 March 2011, http://lawschoolguide.blogspot.com/2011/03/land-tenure-in-colonial-andpost.html [accessed 30 January 2019]. King, William Ross, ‘On the Names of Places in Geography’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of London, 19:2 (1874–1875), 134–36. Kingdon, D., Report on the Commission of Inquiry into the Disturbances in Uganda during April 1949 (Entebbe: Government Printer, April 1949).

371

372

Select Bibliography

Kirk-Greene, A. Britain’s Imperial Administrators, 1885–1966 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Kirunda Kivejinja, A.M., Uganda: The Crisis of Confidence second print (Petaling Jaya: Excel Vision Education, 1995). Kiyimba, Abasi, ‘The Ghost of Idi Amin in Ugandan Literature’, Research in African Literatures, 29:1 (1998), 124–38. Kizza, Immaculate N., The Oral Tradition of the Baganda of Uganda: A Study and Anthology of Legends, Myths, Epigrams and Folktales (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Company, 2010). Kodesh, Neil, ‘History from the Healer’s Shrine: Genre, Historical Imagination, and early Ganda History’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 493 (2007), 527–52. ——, Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010). Kohn, Margaret, and Keally D. McBride, Political Theories of Decolonization: Postcolonialism and the Problem of Foundations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Kozinets, Robert V., Pierre-Yann Dolbech and Amanda Earley, ‘Netnographic Analysis: Understanding Culture through Social Media Data’, in Uwe Flick (ed.), Sage Handbook of Qualitative Data Analysis (London: Sage, 2014), pp. 262–75. Kyamulesire, A. R., A History of the Uganda Co-operative Movement 1913–1988 (Kampala: Uganda Co-operative Alliance, 1988). Kyamutetera, Muhereza. ‘Ugandan Newspapers struggle to find readers; revenues weaken as advertisers look for cheaper alternatives. Can our newspapers survive the next 10 years?’ Company News 14 April, 2019. https://www.ceo.co.ug/ugandan-newspapers-struggleto-find-readers-revenues-falter-as-advertisers-look-for-cheaperalternatives-can-our-newspapers-survive-the-next-10-years/ [accessed 29 April 2019]. Kyemba, Henry, A State of Blood: The Inside Story of Idi Amin (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1997). Kyeyune, George, ‘Art in Uganda in the 20th Century’ (unpublished PhD thesis, SOAS, University of London, 2003). Kyomuhendo, Grace Bantebya and Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Women, Work and Domestic Virtue in Uganda 1900-2003 (Oxford: James Currey, 2006). Lalu, Premesh, ‘The Virtual Stampede for Africa: Digitisation, Postcoloniality and Archives of the Liberation Struggles in Southern Africa’, Innovation, 34 (2007), 28–44. Lambek, Michael, ‘Provincializing God? Provocations from an Anthropology of Religion’, in Hent de Vries (ed.), Religion: Beyond a Concept (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 120–38. Lange, M.K., ‘British Colonial Legacies and Political Development’, World Development, 32 (2004), 905–22.

Select Bibliography

Lange, M., J. Mahoney and Matthias vom Hau, ‘Colonialism and Development: A Comparative Analysis of Spanish and British Colonies’, The American Journal of Sociology, 111 (2006), 1412–62. Langseth, Peter and Justus Mugaju, Post-Conflict Uganda: Towards an Effective Civil Service (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1996). Laruni, Elizabeth, ‘From the Village to Entebbe: The Acholi of Northern Uganda and the Politics of Identity, 1950–1985’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Exeter, 2014). Leopold, Mark, Idi Amin: The Story of Africa’s Icon of Evil (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). Letcher, Diana, ‘Online Political Participation, Collective Action Events, and Meaningful Citizen Engagement’, Geopolitics, History, and International Relations, 10 (2018), 70–75. Levy, Robert I., and Douglas W. Hollan, ‘Person-Centered Interviewing and Observation’, in H.R. Bernard (ed.), Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 1998). Lewis, Janet I., ‘When Decentralization Leads to Recentralization: Subnational State Transformation in Uganda’, Regional & Federal Studies, 24:5 (2014), 571–88. Lie, Jon H. Sande, ‘Donor-driven State Formation: Friction in the World Bank-Uganda Partnership’, in J. Wiegratz, G. Martinello and E. Greco (eds), Uganda: The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation (London: Zed Books, 2018), pp. 43−59. Lienhardt, Godfrey, ‘“High Gods” among some Nilotic Peoples’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, 28:1 (1997), 40–49. Lonsdale, John, ‘Unhelpful Pasts and a Provisional Present’, in E. Hunter (ed.), Citizenship, Belonging and Political Community in Africa: Dialogues between Past and Present (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2016), pp. 17–40. Low, D.A. (ed.), The Mind of Buganda: Documents in the Modern History of an African Kingdom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). Low, D.A. and R. Cranford Pratt, Buganda and British Overrule 1900– 1955: Two Studies (London, New York, and Nairobi: Oxford University Press on behalf of the East African Institute of Social Research, 1960). Lowry, James, ‘Radical Empathy, the Imaginary and Affect in (Post) Colonial Records: How to Break Out of International Stalemates on Displaced Archives’, Archival Science, 10 (2019), 185–203. Lubega, Henry, ‘How Amin Announced Plans to Return Muteesa’s Remains’, Daily Monitor (Kampala), 13 March 2017 www.monitor. co.ug/Magazines/PeoplePower/How-Amin-announced-plan-toreturn-Muteesa-s-remains/689844-3845486-15tatgs/index.html [accessed 13 January 2020]. Lyons, Maryinez, ‘Foreign Bodies: The History of Labour Migration as a Threat to Public Health in Uganda’, in Paul Nugent and A.I. Asiwaju

373

374

Select Bibliography

(eds), African Boundaries: Barriers, Conduits, and Opportunities (London and New York: Pinter, 1996), pp. 131–44. MacArthur, Julie, Cartography and the Political Imagination: Mapping Community in Colonial Kenya (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2016). Machyo w’Obanda, Chango B., ‘The World Bank, IMF and Deepening Misery in Uganda (The Mbale Experience)’, Mawazo, 6:1 (1985), 27–49. MacKenzie, John M., ‘Empire and Metropolitan Culture’, in Andrew Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), III, pp. 270–93. Magara, Elisam, ‘Building Capacity for Archives and Dissemination of Information in Uganda: A Case Study of Uganda Broadcasting Corporation and Directorate of Information’, presentation at the First International Conference on African Digital Libraries and Archives (ICADLA-1), Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1–3 July 2009, https://core. ac.uk/download/pdf/39667856.pdf [accessed 30 January 2019]. Magara, Elisam, ‘Personal identity systems and the role of the state in democratic national elections’, in Joseph Oloka-Onyango and Josephine Ahikire (eds), Controlling Consent: Uganda’s 2016 Elections (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2017), pp. 455–76. Mageo, Jeannette Marie, ‘On Memory Genres: Tendencies in Cultural Remembering’, in Jeannette Marie Mageo (ed.), Cultural Memory: Reconfiguring History and Identity in the Postcolonial Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001). Maine, Henry, Ancient Law, Its Connection with the Early History of Society and its Relation to Modern Ideas (London: John Murray, 1861). Mair, Lucy, Primitive Government: A Study of Traditional Political Systems in Eastern Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977). Makerere University, ‘Projects and Proposals for the Rehabilitation and Development of Makerere University: Donor’s Conference’, 6–10 July 1987, Kampala. Makubuya, Apollo N., ‘Petition to Decolonise and Rename Streets in Kampala and Other Landmarks in Uganda’, Change.org, www. change.org/p/president-museveni-petition-to-decolonise-and-rena me -st reet s-i n-ka mpa la-a nd- ot he r-la nd ma rk s-i n-uga nda [accessed 6 August 2021]. ——, Protection, Patronage, or Plunder? British Machinations and (B) uganda’s Struggle for Independence (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2018). Mamdani, Mahmood, ‘African States, Citizenship and War: A Case Study’, International Affairs, 78:3 (2002), 493–506. ——, ‘Between the Public Intellectual and the Scholar: Decolonization and Some Post-Independence Initiatives in African Higher Education’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 17:1 (2016), 68–83.

Select Bibliography

——, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). ——, ‘Decolonising Universities’, in Jonathan D. Jansen (ed.), Decolonisation in Universities: The Politics of Knowledge (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2019), 15–28. ——, ‘Disaster Prevention: Defining the Problem’, Review of African Political Economy, 12:33 (1985), 92–96. ——, Imperialism and Fascism in Uganda (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1983). ——, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). ——, Politics and Class Formation in Uganda (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1999). ——, Scholars in the Marketplace: The Dilemmas of Neo-Liberal Reforms at Makerere University, 1989–2005 (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2007). ——, ‘The African University’, London Review of Books, 40:19 (2018). ——, ‘The Importance of Research in a University’, MISR Working Paper No. 3 (Kampala: Makerere Institute of Social Research, 2011). ——, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). Mamdani, Mahmood, P.M.B. Kasoma and A.B. Katende, Karamoja: Ecology and History (Kampala: Centre for Basic Research, 1992). Mangat, J.S., The History of Indians in East Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). Margetts, Helen, Peter John, Scott Hale and Taha Yasseri, Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). Martin, D., General Idi Amin (London: Faber & Faber 1974). Marx, Karl ‘Letters from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher: Marx to Ruge’, trans (Cologne, 1843), trans. Progress Press, www.marxists. org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_05.htm [accessed 9 July 2022]. Matembe, Miria R.K., Miria Matembe: Gender, Politics, and Constitution Making in Uganda (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2002). ——, The Struggle for Freedom & Democracy Betrayed: Memoirs of Miria Matembe as an Insider in Museveni’s Government (Kampala, 2019). Matera, Marc, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). Matovu, Muhamad, ‘President Museveni Directs Makerere University to Phase out Humanitities Courses’, Ugandan Mirror, 12 November 2019, https://ugmirror.com/index.php/2019/11/12/president-museveni-directs-makerere-university-to-phase-out-humanities-courses [accessed 9 March 2020].

375

376

Select Bibliography

Mavhunga, Clapperton Chakanetsa, The Mobile Workshop: The Tsetse Fly and African Knowledge Production (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018). Mawby, Spencer, The End of Empire in Uganda: Decolonisation and Institutional Conflict, 1945-79 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). Mazrui, Ali A., ‘Between Domestic Policy and Regional Power: The Role of Ideology in Uganda’, in Justus Mugaju and J. Oloka-Onyango (eds), No-Party Democracy in Uganda: Myths and Realities (Kampala: Fountain, 2000), pp. 127–40. ——, ‘Nkrumah, Obote and Vietnam’, Transition, 43 (1973), 36–39. ——, ‘Privatization Versus the Market: Cultural Contradictions in Structural Adjustment’ in Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle (eds), Changing Uganda: The Dilemma of Structural Adjustment & Revolutionary Change (London: James Currey, 1991). ——, Soldiers and Kinsmen in Uganda: The Making of a Military Ethnocracy (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1975). ——, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Philosopher King in East Africa: The View from Uganda’, Ufahamu, 15:3 (1987), 98–108. Mbembe, Achille, ‘African Modes of Self-Writing’, Public Culture, 14:1 (2002), 239–73. ——, African Religions and Philosophy (London: Heinemann, 1990 [1969]). ——, Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive, WISER public lectures (Johannesburg and Stellenbosch 2015). ——, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). ——, ‘The Idea of a Borderless World’, Africa is a Country, November 2018, https://africasacountry.com/2018/11/the-idea-of-a-borderlessworld [accessed 29 March 2021]. ——, ‘The Power of the Archive and Its Limits’, in Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover et al., Refiguring the Archive (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2002), pp. 19–26. Mbiti, John S., Introduction to African Religion, 2nd edn (Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1975). Mbodj-Pouye, Aïssatou, Le fil de l’écrit: Une anthropologie de l’alphabétisation au Mali (Paris: ENS Editions, 2017). Mbowa, Rose, ‘Theatre and Political Repression in Uganda’, Research in African Literatures, 27 (1996), 87–97. ——, ‘Theatre for Development: Empowering Ugandans to Transform their Condition’, in Holger B. Hansen and Michael Twaddle (eds), Developing Uganda (Oxford: James Currey, 1998). McCann, Gerard, ‘Rajat Neogy (1938–95)’, Another World? East Africa and the Global 1960s, https://globaleastafrica.org/global-lives/ rajat-neogy [accessed 26 July 2022]. Mettrick, H., Aid in Uganda: Agriculture (London: Overseas Development Institute, 1967).

Select Bibliography

Meyer, Birgit, Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). Meyers, Genevieve E., ‘Decentralization in Uganda: Towards Democratic Local Governance or Political Expedience?’ in Gedeon M. Mudacumura and Göktuğ Morçöl (eds), Challenges to Democratic Governance in Developing Countries (New York: Springer, 2014), pp. 95–110. Mignolo, Walter D., The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). ——, ‘Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality’, in Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar (eds), Globalization and the Decolonial Option (London: Taylor & Francis, 2010), pp. 303–68. ——, ‘Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom’, Theory, Culture & Society 26:7−8 (2010), 159−81. ——, ‘Introduction: Coloniality of Power and De-colonial Thinking’, Cultural Studies, 21 (2007), 155−67. Mignolo, Walter D., and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). Mika, Marissa, Africanizing Oncology: Creativity, Crisis, and Cancer in Uganda (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2021); ——, ‘Living Archives and Dying Wards: Reflections on Medical Archives in Eastern Africa’, British Medical Journal Medical Humanities Blog, 30 January 2019, https://blogs.bmj.com/medicalhu ma n it ies/2019/01/30/ l iv i ng-a rch ives-a nd-dy i ng-wa rdsreflections-on-medical-archives-in-eastern-africa [accessed 1 March 2019]. Milford, Ismay, Gerard McCann, Emma Hunter and Daniel Branch, ‘Another World? East Africa, Decolonisation, and the Global History of the Mid-Twentieth Century’, Journal of African History 62:3 (2021), 394–410. Mills, David, Difficult Folk? A Political History of Social Anthropology (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008). Ministry of Public Service and Cabinet Affairs, The Public Service Review and Reorganisation Commission, 1989–1990 Report, Kampala, Uganda Printing and Publishing Corporation. Mirzeler, Mustafa, Remembering Nayeche and the Gray Bull Engiro (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014). Mittelman, J.H., Ideology and Politics in Uganda: From Obote to Amin (London: Cornell University Press, 1975). Mkandawire, Thandika (ed.), African Intellectuals: Rethinking Politics, Language, Gender, and Development (Dakar and London: CODESRIA and Zed Books, 2005). Mnjama, Nathan, ‘Migrated Archives: The African Perspectives’, Journal of the South African Society of Archivists, 48 (2015), 45–54.

377

378

Select Bibliography

Morcillo, Celia Murias, ‘Feminist Activisms in Africa: Trends and Strategies of the New Movements,’ in Itxaso Domínguez de Olazábal and Elsa Aimé González (eds.), Africa Report: Ransformations, Mobilization and Continuity (Madrid: Fundación Alternativas, 2020), pp. 59–69. Morris, H.S., The Indians in Uganda: Caste and Sect in a Plural Society (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968). Motani, Nizar, On His Majesty’s Service in Uganda: The Origins of Uganda’s African Civil Service, 1912–1940. Foreign and Comparative Studies/Africa (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University, 1977). ——, ‘The Ugandan Civil Service and the Asian Problem’, in Michael Twaddle (ed.), Expulsion of a Minority: Essays on Ugandan Indians (London: Athlone Press, 1975), pp. 98–111. Moyn, Samuel, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in Histories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Mpanga, Joyce R., ‘It’s a Pity She’s Not a Boy!’ (Kampala: self-published, 2019). Mudimbe, Valentin-Yves, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). Mudoola, Dan M., Religion, Ethnicity and Politics in Uganda, 2nd edn (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1996). Mugenyi, Joshua B., ‘IMF Conditionality and Structural Adjustment under the National Resistance Movement’, in Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle (eds), Changing Uganda: The Dilemmas of Structural Adjustment & Revolutionary Change (London: James Currey, 1991), pp. 61–77. Mujaju, Akiki, ‘The Demise of UPCYL and the Rise of NUYO in Uganda’, African Review, 3: 2 (1973), 291–307. ——, ‘Youth Action and Political Development in Uganda’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Columbia University, 1972). Mukherjee, Ramkrishna, The Problem of Uganda: A Study in Acculturation, (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1956). Muller, S., J.A. Feith and R. Fruin, Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives, 2nd edn, translation Arthur H. Leavitt (New York, 1968 [1898]). Musembi, Musila, Archives Management: The Kenyan Experience (Nairobi: Africa Book Services, 1985). Museveni, Yoweri, ‘Fanon’s Theory on Violence: Its Verification in Liberated Mozambique’, in Nathan M. Shamuyarira (ed.), Essays on the Liberation of Southern Africa (Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1971), pp. 1–24. ——, ‘My Three Years in Tanzania: Glimpses of the Struggle between Revolution and Reaction’, Cheche, 2 (1970).

Select Bibliography

——, Sowing the Mustard Seed: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in Uganda (Oxford: Macmillan Education, 1997). ——, What is Africa’s Problem? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Musisi, Nakanyike, ‘Gender and Sexuality in African History: A Personal Reflection’, Journal of African History 55:3 (2014), 303–15. ——, ‘Morality as Identity: The Missionary Moral Agenda in Buganda, 1877–1945’, The Journal of Religious History, 23:1 (1999), 51–74. ——, ‘The Performative Concept of Refusal’, unpublished paper, Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, 2018. ——, ‘The Politics of Perception or Perception as Politics? Colonial and Missionary Representations of Baganda Women, 1900–1945’, in Jean Allman, Susan Geiger, and Nakanyike Musisi (eds), Women in African Colonial Histories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 95–115. ——, ‘Women, ‘Elite Polygyny’, and Buganda State Formation’, Signs, 16 (1991), 757–86. Musoke, Theresa, ‘Anguish’, Transition 15 (1964), 49. Muteesa II, Kabaka Edward, Desecration of My Kingdom (London: Constable and Co., 1967). Mutibwa, Phares Mukasa, The Buganda Factor in Uganda Politics (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2008). ——, Uganda since Independence: A Story of Unfulfilled Hopes (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992). Mutungi, Emmanuel and Tony Ghaye, ‘Enhancing Well-Being at the Household Level: The Impact of Informal Economy Activity on Poverty Reduction in the Traditional Ankole Kingdom of S.W. Uganda’, in M.T.T. Thai and E. Turkina (eds), Entrepreneurship in the Informal Economy: Models, Approaches and Prospects for Economic Development (New York: Routledge, 2013), 241–55. Muyanda-Mutebi, Peter, ‘The History Curricula for Uganda Secondary Schools, 1940–1970: A General Evaluative Study’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of California Los Angeles, 1973). Nabudere, Dani Wadada, Imperialism and Revolution in Uganda (London: Onyx Press, 1981). ——, ‘The New Military Dictators in Uganda’ (unpublished manuscript, 1980). ——, ‘The Uganda Crisis: What Next?’ Ufahamu, 15:3 (1987), 54–78. ——, ‘Towards the Establishment of a Pan-African University: A Strategic Concept Note’, African Journal of Political Science, 1 (2003), 1–30. Nabulime, Lilian M., ‘The Role of Sculptural Forms as a Communication Tool in Relation to the Lives and Experiences of Women with HIV/ AIDS in Uganda’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Newcastle University, 2007).

379

380

Select Bibliography

Nagawa, Margaret, ‘Beyond the Gallery: Interactions between Audiences, Artists, and their Art through the Kampala Art Tour 2007−2010’, Art Education: The Journal of the National Art Education Association, 65:2 (2012), 16−19. ——, ‘Conveying the Mallet: Barkcloth Renewal and Connectedness in Fred Mutebi’s Art Practice’, Critical Interventions, 12:3 (2018), 340–55. Nakayiza, Judith, ‘Luganda in Uganda’, in Corinne A. Seals and Sheena Shah (eds.), Heritage Language Policies around the World (London and New York, Routledge, 2018), pp. 148–62. Nakazibwe, Venny, ‘Bark-Cloth of the Baganda People in Southern Uganda: A Record of Continuity and Change, 18th to Early 21st Century’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Middlesex University, 2005). Nakisanze, Sarah and Deepa Pullanikkatil, ‘Ugandan Bark Cloth: From Coffins to Handbags’, in D. Pullanikkatil and C.M. Shackleton (eds), Poverty Reduction through Non-Timber Forest Products, Personal Stories (Cham: Springer, 2018), pp. 143–46. Namhila, Ellen Ndeshi, ‘Content and Use of Colonial Archives: An Under-researched Issue’, Archival Science, 16:2 (2014), 111–23. Namono, Catherine, ‘Resolving the Authorship of the Geometric Rock Art of Uganda’, Journal of African Archeology, 8:2 (2019), 239–57. Namubiru, Rose K., ‘Reconfiguring the Omweso Board Game: Performing Narratives of Buganda Material Culture’, African Arts 52:2 (2019), 52–65. ——, ‘The Formation of Contemporary Visual Artists in Africa: Revisiting Residency Programmes’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Makerere University, 2010). Namubiru, Rose K., and Sidney L. Kasfir, ‘An Artist’s Notes on the Triangle Workshops, Zambia and South Africa’, in S.L. Kasfir and T. Förster (eds), African Art and Agency in the Workshop, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), pp. 111–22. Namukasa, Jacqueline, ‘Territorial Conflicts in East Africa: Uganda-­ Kenya Contestation over Migingo Island’, PhD Thesis, Makerere University, 2022. Namusoke, Eva, ‘Church and State in Post-Colonial Uganda, 1962-1981’. PhD diss (unpublished). University of Cambridge, 2015. Nannyonga-Tamusuza, Sylvia and Andrea N. Weintraub, ‘The Audible Future: Reimagining the Role of Sound Archives and Sound Repatriation in in Uganda’, Ethnomusicology, 56:2 (2012), 206–33. Narayan, John, and Leon Sealey-Huggins, ‘Whatever Happened to the Idea of Imperialism?’ Third World Quarterly, 38:11 (2017), 2387–95. National Curriculum Development Centre, The Republic of Uganda Ministry of Education and Sports History Teaching Syllabus Uganda Certificate of Education Senior 1–4 (Kyambogo, Kampala: National Curriculum Development Centre, 2008).

Select Bibliography

‘The National Population and Housing Census 2014 – Main Report’ (Kampala: Uganda Bureau of Statistics, 2016). National Resistance Movement, Towards a Free and Democratic Uganda: The Basic Priciples and Policies of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) (National Resistance Movement: Kampala, 1987). Natocho, Annette and Consodyne Buzabo, Art Fest (Kampala 2005). Nazareth, Peter, ‘Waiting for Amin: Two Decades of Ugandan Literature’, in G.D. Killam (ed.), The Writing of East and Central Africa (Nairobi: Heinemann, 1984), pp. 7–35. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. ‘Revisiting Marxism and Decolonisation through the Legacy of Samir Amin’, Review of African Political Economy, 48:167 (2021), 50–65. ——, Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonization (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2013). Neocosmos, Michael, ‘Thinking Political Emancipation and the Social Sciences in Africa: Some Critical Reflections’, Africa Development, 39:1 (2014), 125–58. Neogy, Rajat, ‘Rajat Neogy on the CIA’, The Anniversary Issue: Selections from Transition, 1961–1976, Transition, 75/76 (1997). Ngendo-Tshimba, David, ‘Transgressing Buyira: An Historical Inquiry into Violence Astride a Congo Uganda Border’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Makerere University, 2020). Ngorogoza, Paul, Kigezi and Its People (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1968). Nkuubi, James, ‘Of “Yellow” Police, A Cadre Army and the Liberation War Psychosis: The Question of Electoral Security’, in J. Oloka-­ Onyango and Josephine Ahikire (eds), Controlling Consent: Uganda’s 2016 Elections (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2017), pp. 401–30. Nsamba, M.A., ‘Decentralization and Territorial Politics: The Dilemma of Constructing and Managing Identities in Uganda’, Critical African Studies, 5:1 (2013), 48–60. Nsibambi, Apolo, ‘Resistance Councils and Committees: A Case study from Makerere’, in Holger B. Hansen and Michael Twaddle (eds), Changing Uganda (London: James Currey, 1991), pp. 279–96. Nyachae, Wanjiku, ‘Francis Nnaggenda interviewed by Wanjiku Nyachae’, in C. Deliss (ed.), Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa (Paris and New York: Flammarion, 1995), 272–73. Nyakatura, J.W., Anatomy of an African Kingdom: A History of Bunyoro-­ Kitara, edited by G.N. Uzoigwe (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1973). Nyamnjoh, Francis, ‘“Ever Diminishing Circles”: The Paradoxes of Belonging in Botswana’, in Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn (eds), Indigenous Experience Today (Oxford: Berg, 2007), pp. 305–32. Nyanzi, Stella, No Roses from My Mouth: Poems from Prison (Kampala: Ubuntu Reading Group, 2020).

381

382

Select Bibliography

Nyanzi, Stella, ‘Personal Narrative: Bloody Precarious Activism in Uganda’, in Chris Bobel et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 551–59. Nzewi, Ugochukwu-Smooth C., ‘Performing Pan-Africanism: The Pan-African Circle of Artists’ Overcoming Maps, 2001−Present’, African Studies Association 2013 Annual Meeting Paper, https:// ssrn.com/abstract=2237014 [accessed 26 July 2019]. Obbo, Christine, African Women: Their Struggle for Economic Independence (London: Zed Press, 1980). ——, ‘Healing, Cultural Fundamentalism and Syncretism in Buganda’, Africa, 66:2 (1996), 183–201. ——, ‘Village Strangers in Buganda Society’, in William E. Shack and Elliott P. Skinner (eds), Strangers in African Societies (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 227–41. Obote, A. Milton, ‘The Common Man’s Charter: First Steps for Uganda to Move to the Left’ (Kampala: Uganda People’s Congress, 1969). Ocan, Charles, ‘Pastoral Crisis and Social Change in Karamoja’, in Mahmood Mamdani and Joe Oloka-Onyango (eds), Uganda: Studies in Living Conditions, Popular Movements, and Constitutionalism (Kampala: Centre for Basic Research, 1994), pp. 97–142. Ocaya-Lakidi, Dent, ‘Black Attitudes to the Brown and White Colonisers of East Africa’, in Michael Twaddle (ed.), Expulsion of a Minority: Essays on Ugandan Indians (London: Athlone Press, 1975) pp. 93–97. Oculi, Okello, ‘A Narrative on “Shame”’, Social Research, 70 (2003), 1277–96. Oded, Arye, Islam in Uganda: Islamization through a Centralized State in Pre-Colonial Africa (Tel Aviv University, Israel: Israel Universities Press, 1974). Odoki, Benjamin, The Search for Consensus: The Making of the 1995 Uganda Constitution (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2005). Odongo, Ronald, ‘MP Ogwal wants Obote, Oyite Ojok Reburied at Kololo’, 4 February 2013, Uganda Radio Network, https:// ugandaradionetwork.com/story/mp-ogwal-wants-obote-oyiteojok-reburied-at-kololo [accessed 10 March 2020]. Ofcansky, T.P. Uganda: Tarnished Pearl of Africa (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003). Official Report of the Proceedings of the National Assembly, First Session, Fifth Meeting, 28 April 1967 Uganda Parliamentary Debates (Hansard) Second Series, vol. 69. Ojo, Olusola and Amadu Sesay, ‘The O.A.U. and Human Rights: Prospects for the 1980s and Beyond’, Human Rights Quarterly, 8 (1986), 89–103. Okello, Isaac, ‘A Look at the History of Uganda’s Parliament’, https:// parliamentwatch.ug/blogs [accessed 12 July 2022].

Select Bibliography

Okello-Obura, Constant, ‘Records and Archives Legal and Policy Frameworks in Uganda’, Library Philosophy and Practice (2011). Okello-Obura, Constant, and I.M.N. Kigongo-Bukenya, ‘Review Article: Library and Information Science Education and Training in Uganda: Trends, Challenges, and the Way Forward’, Education Research International, (2011), 1–9. Okoth, Kevin Ochieng, ‘Decolonisation and its Discontents: Rethinking the Cycle of National Liberation’, Salvage 10 (2020), 20–43. Okoth, P. Godfrey, Manuel Muranga and Ernesto Okello Ogwang (eds), Uganda: A Century of Existence (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1995). Okuku, Juma, ‘Ethnicity, State Power and the Democratization Process in Uganda’, Discussion Paper 17 (Uppsala: Nordic African Institute, 2002). Okwenje, Bathsheba, ‘Nile Mansions Hotel: Archive, Uganda, 2014’, www.bathshebaokwenje.com/nile-mansions-hotel [accessed 30 January 2019] Oloka-Onyango, Joe, ‘Constitutional Transition in Museveni’s Uganda: New Horizons or Another False Start?’ Journal of African Law, 39:2 (1995). ——, ‘From Expulsion to Exclusion; Revisiting the Citizenship Conundrum for Migrant Communities in Uganda’. Kampala: Paper for the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) Symposium on Citizenship and Constitutionalism in Uganda, 18 July 2015. ——, ‘“New-Breed” Leadership, Conflict, and Reconstruction in the Great Lakes Region of Africa: A Sociopolitical Biography of Uganda’s Yoweri Kaguta Museveni’, Africa Today, 50 (2004), 29–52. ——, ‘Police Powers, Human Rights and the State in Kenya and Uganda: A Comparative Analysis’, Third World Legal Studies, 9 (1990), 1–36. ——, Politics, Democratization and Academia in Uganda: The Case of Makerere University (Ottawa: Daraja Press, 2021). Oloka-Onyango, Joe, and Josephine Ahikire (eds), Controlling Consent: Uganda’s 2016 Elections (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990). Oloka-Onyango, Joe, Gariyo Zie and Frank Muhereza, Pastoralism, Crisis, and Transformation in Uganda (Kampala: Centre for Basic Research, 1993). Omara-Otunnu, Amii, Politics and the Military in Uganda, 1890–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987). ——, ‘The Currency of Militarism in Uganda’, in Eboe Hutchful and Abdoulaye Bathily (eds), The Military and Militarism in Africa (Dakar: CODESRIA, 1998). Onen, P.M.O., The Diary of an Obedient Servant During Misrule (Kampala: JANyeko Publishing Centre, 2000). Oonk, Gijsbert, Indians in East Africa: Images, Histories and Portraits (Amersfoort: SCA Producties, 2004).

383

384

Select Bibliography

Otim, Patrick, ‘Local Intellectuals: Lacito Okech and the Production of Knowledge in Colonial Acholiland’, History in Africa 45 (2018), 275– 305. Ottemoeller, Daniel, ‘Institutionalization and Democratization: The Case of the Ugandan Resistance Councils’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Florida, 1996). Ottoh-Agede, Blossom Shimayam, ‘Sexual Objectification and Genital Cursing Metaphors for Socio-political Activism in Stella Nyanzi’s Online Poem to President Museveni and Select-Social Media Comments,’ International Journal of Humanitatis Theoreticus, 4:1 (2020), 26–38 Owachi, Gerald and Sandrine Perrot, ‘L’enregistrement biométrique des « autres ». Indigénéité négociée, citoyenneté et lutte pour les papiers de la communauté maragoli en Ouganda’, Genèses, 113 (2018), 122–43. p’Bitek, Okot, Africa’s Cultural Revolution (Nairobi: Macmillan Books for Africa, 1973). ——, Decolonizing African Religions: A Short History of African Religions in Western Scholarship (New York: Diasporic Africa Press, 2011). ——, Religion of the Central Luo (Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1971). Paige, John Rhodes, Preserving Order amid Chaos: The Survival of Schools in Uganda, 1971–1986 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000). Park, Sun-Joon. ‘IRBs as Traveling Technologies: Between Regulation and Virtues’, in Ulf Engel, Claudia Gebauer and Anna Hüncke (eds), Notes From Within and Without – Research Permits Between Requirements and ‘Realities’ (Leipzig and Halle: Working Papers of the Priority Programme 1448 of the German Research Foundation, 2015), 23–26. Parsons, Timothy H., The 1964 Army Mutinies and the Making of Modern East Africa (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003). Patel, H.H. 1972. ‘General Amin and the Indian Exodus from Uganda’, A Journal of Opinion, 2 (1972), 12–22. Peters-Klaphake, Katrin, ‘Art in Kampala at Work 012’, in K. Pinther, U.-S.C. Nzewi and B. Fischer (eds), New Spaces for Negotiating Art and Histories in Africa (Berlin 2015), pp. 52–71. Peterson, Derek R., ‘Archive Catalogues’, https://derekrpeterson.com/ archive-work [accessed 2 February 2019]. ——, Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004). ——, Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent, c. 1935–1972 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). ——, ‘Idi Amin Exhibit’, https://derekrpeterson.com/idi-amin-exhibit [accessed 5 May 2020].

Select Bibliography

——, ‘Introduction: Heritage Management in Colonial and Contemporary Africa’, in Derek R. Peterson, Kodzo Gavua and Ciraj Rassool (eds), The Politics of Heritage in Africa: Economies, Histories, and Infrastructures (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). ——, ‘States of Mind: Political History and the Rwenzururu Kingdom in Western Uganda’, in Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola (eds), Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009).——, ‘The Politics of Archives in Uganda’, in Thomas Spear (ed.) Oxford Research Encyclopedias: African History (Oxford University Press, 2021). ——, ‘The Work of Time in Western Uganda’, Citizenship Studies, 16 (2012), 961–77. Peterson, Derek R., and Edgar C. Taylor, ‘Rethinking the State in Idi Amin’s Uganda: The Politics of Exhortation’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 7 (2013), 65–66. Peterson, Derek R. and Giacomo Macola, ‘Introduction: Homespun Historiography and the Academic Profession’, in Derek Peterson and Giacomo Macola (eds), Recasting the Past: Historical Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009). Pier, David G., ‘Song for a King’s Exile: Royalism and Popular Music in Postcolonial Uganda’, Popular Music and Society, 40 (2017), 5–21. ——, The Branded Arena: Ugandan Music in the Marketing Era (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). ——, ‘The Transformation of National Performance Arts in Neoliberal Uganda’, in J. Wiegratz, G. Martinello and E. Greco (eds), Uganda. The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation (London: Zed Books, 2018), pp. 349−64. Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, and Bhikhu C. Parekh (eds), The Decolonization of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power (London: Zed Books, 1995). Pike, William, Combatants: A Memoir of the Bush War and the Press in Uganda (Wroclaw: Independently published, 2019). Pitcher, M. Anne, ‘Conditions, Commitments, and the Politics of Restructuring in Africa’, Comparative Politics, 36:4 (2004), 379–98. Pollitt, C. and G. Bouckaert, Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Powesland, P., ‘The History of the Migration’ in Audrey I. Richards (ed.), Economic Development and Tribal Change: A Study of Immigrant Labour in Buganda, 2nd edn (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp.17–50. Prieto del Campo, Carlos, ‘Archives of the Commons: Knowledge Commons, Information and Memory’, www.internationaleonline.org/research/decolonising_practices/62_archives_of_the_ com mons _ k nowledge_com mons _ i n for mat ion _ a nd _ memor y [accessed 2 February 2019].

385

386

Select Bibliography

Pringle, Yolana, Psychiatry and Decolonisation in Uganda (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Quijano, Aníbal, ‘Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad’, Perú Indígena, 13:29 (1992), 11−21. ——, ‘Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality’, Cultural Studies, 21:2–3 (2007), 177. ——, ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America’, Nepantla, 3 (2000), 533–580. ——, ‘Constraints: The Un-Doing of the Ugandan Truth Commission’, Human Rights Quarterly, 26:2 (2004). Radcliffe-Brown, A.R., ‘Preface’, in Meyer Fortes and E.E. EvansPritchard (eds), African Political Systems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940). Ramchandani, R.R., Uganda Asians: The End of an Enterprise (Bombay: United Asia Publications, 1976). Ramose, M.B., African Philosophy through Ubuntu (Harare: Mond Books, 1999). Ranajit, Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Ray, Benjamin, Myth, Ritual, and Kingship in Buganda (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Reeves, Mark, ‘Manila, 1918: The Freedom of Information’, Online Atlas on the History of Humanitarianism and Human Rights, http:// hhr-atlas.ieg-mainz.de/articles/reeves-manila [accessed 12 July 2019]. Reid, Richard J., A History of Modern Africa: 1800 to the Present (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). ——, A History of Modern Uganda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). ——, ‘Ghosts in the Academy: Historians and Historical Consciousness in the Making of Modern Uganda’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 56:2 (2014), 351–80. ——, ‘States of Anxiety: History and Nation in Modern Africa’, Past and Present, 229 (2015). Reiter, Bernd (ed.), Constructing the Pluriverse: The Geopolitics of Knowledge (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). Republic of Uganda, Proceedings of the Constituent Assembly: Official Report (Entebbe, 1995). ——, Report of the Commission of Inquiry (Constitutional Review) (Kampala, 2003). ——, ‘The Uganda National Cultural Policy: A Culturally Vibrant, Cohesive and Progressive Nation’, December 2006. Reuss, Anna, ‘Forever Vanguards of the Revolution: The Uganda People’s Defence Forces’ Liberation Legacy, 30 Years On’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 14:2 (2020), 250–69.

Select Bibliography

Reuss, Anna, and Kristof Titeca, ‘When Revolutionaries Grow Old: The Museveni Babies and the Slow Death of the Liberation’, Third World Quarterly, 38:10 (2017), 2347–66. Richards, Audrey I. (ed.), Economic Development and Tribal Change: A Study of Immigrant Labour in Buganda (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1973). ——, The Changing Structure of a Ganda Village, East African Studies 24 (Nairobi: East African Institute of Social Research and East African Publishing House, 1966). Richards, Thomas, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 2011). Roberts, Andrew D., ‘The Sub-Imperialism of the Baganda’, Journal of African History, 3:3 (1962), 435–50. Roberts, George, ‘The Uganda-Tanzania War, the Fall of Idi Amin, and the Failure of African Diplomacy, 1978–1979’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 8:4 (2014), 692–709. Robertson, A.F., ‘An Analysis of the Social Change Processes Resulting from the Migration of Diverse Tribal Groups to Bugerere, Buganda, Uganda’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1967). ——, Community of Strangers: A Journal of Discovery in Uganda (London: Scolar Press, 1978). Rockenbach, Ashley B., ‘Contingent Homes, Contingent Nation: Rwandan Settlers in Uganda, 1911–64’ (PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2018). Rose, Tricia, Black Noise (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994). Roseman, Philipp W., ‘An Ambiguity in the 1995 Constitution Concerning the Creation of New Districts in Uganda’, Uganda Journal, 44 (1997), 47–57. Rowe, John A. ‘Myth, Memoir and Moral Admonition: Luganda Historical Writing, 1893–1969’, Uganda Journal, 33:1 (1969). Rubongoya, Joshua B., Regime Hegemony in Museveni’s Uganda: Pax Musevenica (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Ruel, Malcolm, Belief, Ritual and the Securing of Life: Reflexive Essays on a Bantu Religion (Leiden: Brill, 1997). Rukikaire, Matthew, 70 Years a Witness: From Colonialism to Resistance and Beyond: An Autobiography (Kampala: Dominant Seven Publishers, 2019). Rukundo, Solomon, ‘“My President is a Pair of Buttocks”: The Limits of Online Freedom of Expression in Uganda’, International Journal of Law and Information Technology, 26:3 (2018), 252–71. Russell, J. Keith, Men Without God? A Study of the Impact of the Christian Message in the North of Uganda (London: The Highway Press, 1966). Rweyemamu, A. and G. Hyden, A Decade of Public Administration in Africa (Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1975).

387

388

Select Bibliography

Said, Edward. W., Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Random House, 1994). Sanyal, Sunanda K., ‘“Being Modern”: Identity Debates and Makerere’s Art School in the 1960s’, in Gitti Salami and Monica Blackmun Visona (eds), A Companion to Modern African Art (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 255–75. ——, ‘Imaging Art, Making History: Two Generations of Makerere Artists’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Emory University, 2000). ——, ‘The Local and Beyond: Francis Nnaggenda’s Sculptural Innovations’, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 18:1 (2003), 76–79. Sathyamurthy, T.V., The Political Development of Uganda: 1900–1986 (Aldershot, UK: Gower, 1986). Sato, Shohei, ‘“Operation Legacy”: Britain’s Destruction and Concealment of Colonial Records Worldwide’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 45:4 (2017), 697–719. Saul, John, S., The State and Revolution in Eastern Africa (New York: Montly Review Press, 1979). Schoenbrun, David L., A Green Place, a Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender, and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th Century (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998). Schumaker, Lynn, Africanizing Anthropology: Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). The Secretariat for Patriotism Clubs, Office of the President. Development of Patriotism in Schools: A Guide Text Book (Kampala: SPC, 2010). The Secretariat for Patriotism Clubs, Office of the President. Revised Guidelines for Patriotism Clubs in Secondary and Other Post Primary Institutions (Kampala: SPC, 2011). Sefa Dei, George J. and Meredith Lordan, Anti-Colonial Theory and Decolonial Praxis (New York: Peter Lang, 2016). Sembuya, C.C., The Other Side of Idi Amin Dada (Kampala: Set Holdings, 2009). Serumaga, Mary, ‘The National Identity Card’, Transition, 117 (2015), 182–91. Shai, Donna, ‘Public Cursing and Social Control in a Traditional Jewish Community’, Western Folklore, 37 (1978), 39–46. Shaw, Rosalind, ‘The Invention of “African Traditional Religion”’, Religion, 20 (1990), 339–53. Shepherd, George, The Early Struggle for Freedom and Unity in Uganda: I.K. Musazi and the Farmer’s Cooperative Movement (New York: John Day, 1955). Sicherman, Carol, Becoming an African University: Makerere 1922–2020 (Trenton NJ: Africa World Press, 2005).

Select Bibliography

——, ‘Building an African Department of History at Makerere, 1950– 1972’, History in Africa, 30 (2003), 253–82. Siegenthaler, Fiona, ‘Art Practice as a Field of Articulatory Engagements: Fred Mutebi’s Promotion of Barkcloth in Local and Global Networks’, Basel Papers on Political Transformations 18/19 (2019), 35–57. ——, ‘Co-optation as an Imaginative Act: Art-related Initiatives and Social Space in Kampala’, Social Dynamics, 44:3 (2018), 526−44. Siegenthaler, Fiona, and Marie-laure Allain Bonilla, ‘Introduction: Decolonial Processes in Swiss Academia and Cultural Institutions’, Tsantsa, 24 (2019), 4−13. Simpson, Audra, ‘Consent’s Revenge’, Cultural Anthropology, 31 (2016). ——, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). ——, ‘On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, “Voice” and Colonial Citizenship’, Junctures, 9 (2007), 67–80. Singh, Julietta, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanizing and Decolonial Entanglements (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). Smith, Etienne and Céline Labrune Badiane, Les Hussards noirs de la colonie: Instituteurs africains et ‘petites patries’ en AOF (Paris: Karthala, 2018). Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London and New York: Zed Books, 1999). Somé, Patrice Malidoma, The Healing Wisdom of Africa: Finding Life Purpose Through Ritual, and Community (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putman, 1998). Southall, Aidan, ‘General Amin and the Coup: Great Man or Historical Inevitability?’ The Journal of Modern African Studies, 13 (1975), 85–105. ——, ‘Spirit Possession and Mediumship among the Alur’, in John Beattie and John Middleton (eds), Spirit Mediumship and Society in Africa (London: Routledge, 1969), pp. 232–72. Southwold, Martin, Bureaucracy and Chiefship in Buganda: The Development of Appointive Office in the History of Buganda, East African Studies no. 14 (Kampala: East African Institute of Social Research, 1961). ——, ‘Leadership, Authority and the Village Community’, in Martin Fallers (ed.), The Kings’ Men: Leadership and Status in Buganda on the Eve of Independence (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 211–55. Spear, Thomas, ‘Indirect Rule, the Politics of Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention’, in Gregory H. Maddox and James L. Giblin (eds), In Search of a Nation: Histories of Authority and Dissidence in Tanzania (Oxford: James Currey, 2005). Ssekamwa, J.C., History and Development of Education in Uganda (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1997).

389

390

Select Bibliography

Ssentongo, Jimmy Spire, Spire ’20: Uncomfortable Laughter (Kampala, 2021). ——, What I Saw When I Died (Kampala: Makerere University Press, 2021). ——, ‘“Which Journal is That?” Politics of Academic Promotion in Uganda and the Predicament of African Publication Outlets’, Critical African Studies 12:3 (2020), 283–301. Sseremba, Yahya, ‘Ethnic Emancipation and Conflict Escalation’, Third World Quarterly, 41:12 (2020), 2030–47. ——, The State and the Puzzle of Ethnicity: Rethinking Mass Violence in Uganda’s Rwenzori Region (Kampala: Makerere Institute of Social Research, 2021). Stanley, Henry, Through the Dark Continent, vol. 1 (Hamburg: Karl Gardener, 1878). ‘Stewardship’, Section 2.4 in ‘The Ethics of Cultural Heritage’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 12 July 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/ethics-cultural-heritage/#Stew [accessed 24 March 2021]. Stoler, Ann Laura, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). ——, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). Stultiens, Andrea, Kaddu Wasswa John and Arthur C. Kisitu, The Kaddu Waswa Archive: A Visual Biography (Rotterdam: Post Editions, 2010). Summers, Carol, ‘Adolescence versus Politics: Metaphors in Late Colonial Uganda’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 78:1 (2017), 117–36. ——, ‘Catholic Action and Ugandan Radicalism: Political Activism in Buganda, 1930–1950’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 39:1 (2009), 60–90. ——, ‘Grandfathers, Grandsons, Morality, and Radical Politics in Late Colonial Buganda’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 38 (2005), 427–47. ——, ‘Radical Rudeness: Ugandan Social Critiques in the 1940s’, Journal of Social History, 39:3 (2006), 741–70. ——, ‘“Subterranean Evil” and “Tumultuous Riot” in Buganda: Authority and Alienation at King’s College, Budo, 1942’, The Journal of African History, 47 (2006), 93–113. ——, ‘Whips and Women: Forcing Change in Eastern Uganda during the 1920s’, Paper presented in the Development and Change in East Africa seminar, University of Nairobi, Kenya, July 2000. Syahuka-Muhindo, A., The Rwenzururu Movement and the Democratic Struggle (Kampala: Centre for Basic Research, 1991). Tamale, Sylvia, Decolonization and Afro-Feminism (Ottawa: Daraja Press, 2020). ——, ‘Nudity, Protest and the Law’, Inaugural lecture, Kampala, Makerere University, 28 October 2006.

Select Bibliography

——, When Hens Begin to Crow: Gender and Parliamentary Politics in Uganda (New York: Routledge, 1998). Tandon, Yash, ‘Problems of a Displaced Minority: The New Position of East Africa’s Indians’, Report 16, London, Minority Rights Group, 1973. Tangri, R. and A. Mwenda, ‘Change and Continuity in the Politics of Government-Business Relations in Museveni’s Uganda’, The Journal of Eastern African Studies, 13:4 (2019), 678–97. Tapscott, Rebecca, Arbitrary States: Social Control and Modern Authoritarianism in Museveni’s Uganda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). Taylor, Edgar C., ‘Affective Registers of Postcolonial Crisis: the Kampala Tank Hill party’, Africa, 89 (2019), 541–61. ——, ‘Asians and Africans in Ugandan Urban Life, 1959–1972’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2016). ——, ‘Claiming Kabale: Racial Thought and Urban Governance in Uganda’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 7:1 (2013), 143–63. ——, Risk and Labour in the Archives: Archival Futures from Uganda’ Africa 91:4 (2021), 532–52. Taylor, Edgar C., Ashley Brooke Rockenbach and Natalie Bond, ‘Archives and the Past: Cataloguing and Digitisation in Uganda’s Archive’, in Terry Barringer and Marion Wallace (eds), African Studies in the Digital Age: DisConnects (Leiden: Brill, 2014). Terretta, Meredith, ‘From Below and to the Left? Human Rights and Liberation Politics in Africa’s Postcolonial Age’, Journal of World History, 24 (2013), 389–416. Tilley, Elizabeth and Marc Kalina, ‘“My Flight Arrives at 5 am, Can You Pick Me Up?” The Gatekeeping Burden of the African Academic’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 33:4 (2021), 538–48. Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa, Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo-­ Colonial Kenya (London and Port of Spain: New Beacon Books, 1983). ——, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Kampala: East African Publishers, 2005). ——, ‘Enactments of Power: The Politics of Performance Space’, The Drama Review, 41 (1997), 1–30. Thomas, Nicholas, ‘We Need to Confront Uncomfortable Truths’, University of Cambridge Museums & Botanic Garden blog, 4 December 2017, www.museums.cam.ac.uk/blog/2017/12/04/we-need-to-confrontuncomfortable-truths [accessed 30 January 2019]. Thompson, Gardner, ‘Colonialism in Crisis: The Uganda Disturbances of 1945’, African Affairs, 91:365 (1992), 605–23. ——, Governing Uganda: British Colonial Rule and Its Legacy (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2003).

391

392

Select Bibliography

Tidemand, Per, ‘The Resistance Councils in Uganda: A Study of Rural Politics and Popular Democracy in Africa’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Roskilde Universitet, 1994). Till, Karen E, ‘Wounded Cities: Memory-Work and a Place-Based Ethics of Care’, in Alastair Fraser (ed.), Anniversary Essays: Forty Years of Geography in Maynooth (National University of Ireland Maynooth, 2012), 253–283. Tlostanova, Madina V. and Walter D. Mignolo, Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012). Todd, Cecil, ‘Modern Sculpture and Sculptors in East Africa’, African Music, 2:4 (1961), 72–76. Toivo, Wilhelmiina ‘Bad language: why being bilingual makes swearing easier’, The Guardian 27 March 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2017/mar/27/bad-language-why-being-bilingual-makes-swearing-easier [accessed 29 April 2019]. Tordoff, W., Government and Politics in Africa, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1993). Tripp, Aili Mari, Museveni’s Uganda: Paradoxes of Power in A Hybrid Regime (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2010). ——, ‘The Politics of Constitution Making in Uganda’, in Laurel E. Miller (ed.), Framing the State in Times of Transition: Case Studies in Constitution Making (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2010), pp. 158–75. ——, Women & Politics in Uganda (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). ——, ‘Women’s Mobilization in Uganda: Nonracial Ideologies in European-African-Asian Encounters, 1945–1962’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 34:3 (2001), 543–64. Trowell, Margaret, African Tapestry (London 1957). Tuck, Eve and K.W. Yang, ‘Decolonization is not a Metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1:1 (2012), 1–40. Tuck, Michael W. and John A. Rowe, ‘Phoenix from the Ashes: Rediscovery of the Lost Lukiiko Archives’, History in Africa, 3 (2005), 403–14. Tuck, William, ‘The Rupee disease: Taxation, Authority, and Social Conditions in Early Colonial Uganda’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 39:2 (2006), 221–45. Tukahebwa, Geoffrey B., ‘Privatization as a Development Policy’, in Holger B. Hansen and Michael Twaddle (eds), Developing Uganda (Oxford: James Currey, 1998), pp. 64–78. Tumusiime, Amanda E., ‘Art and Gender: Imag(in)ing the New Woman in Contemporary Ugandan Art’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of South Africa, 2010).

Select Bibliography

Turyahikayo-Rugyema, Benoni, Philosophy and Traditional Religions of the Bakiga in South West Uganda (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1983). Twaddle, Michael (ed.), Expulsion of a Minority: Essays on Ugandan Indians (London: Athlone Press, 1975). Twagira, Benjamin, ‘“The Men Have Come”: Gender and Militarisation in Kampala, 1966–86’, Gender & History 28:3 (2016), 813–32. Udupa, Sahana, ‘Gaali Cultures: The Politics of Abusive Exchange on Social Media’, New Media and Society, 20:4 (2018), 1506–22. Uganda Bureau of Statistics, Uganda Population and Housing Census: Analytical Report – Population Composition (Kampala, 2006). Uganda Constitutional Commission, Interim Report of the Uganda Constitutional Commission, (Kampala, 1990). Uganda Government, Constitution of the Republic of Uganda (Entebbe: Uganda Printing and Publishing Corporation, 1995). ——, Local Administration Ordinance 1962 (Entebbe: Government Printer). ——, Uganda Local Administration Act 1967 (Entebbe: Government Printer). Uganda Human Rights Commission, The 21st Annual Report – 2018 (Kampala: Uganda Human Rights Commission, 2019). Uganda Legal Information Institute, ‘The National Records and Archive Act, 2001’, https://media.ulii.org/files/legislation/akn-ug-act-200112-eng-2001-06-15.pdf [accessed 15 July 2022].. Uganda National Examination Board (UNEB), U.A.C.E. ARTS: History, Economics, IRE & CRE (Kampala: UNEB, 2013). ——, UACE ARTS 1992–2007 (Kampala: UNEB, 2007). UNESCO, Outline of a plan for African Educational Development: Conference of African States on the Development of Education in Africa, Addis Ababa, 15–25 May 1961. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, ‘Expert Meeting on National Planning of Documentation and Library Services in Africa’, Kampala, Uganda, 7–15 December 1970 https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED057818.pdf [accessed 30 January 2019]. UNLF(A-D), The New Uganda We Want (Mbale, 1982). Uzoigwe, G.N. (ed.), Uganda: The Dilemma of Nationhood (New York: NOK Publishers International, 1982). Verhoeven, Harry, ‘The Party and the Gun: African Liberation, Asian Comrades and Socialist Political Technologies’, Third World Quarterly, 42:3 (2021), 560–81. Victor, Letha, ‘Death Does Not Rot: Women of the Lord’s Resistance Army’, unpublished M.A. thesis, McGill University, 2011.

393

394

Select Bibliography

——, ‘Ghostly Vengeance: Spiritual Pollution, Time, and Other Uncertainties in Acholi’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2018). Vokes, Richard ‘The Chairman’s Photographs: The Politics of an Archive in South-Western Uganda’, in Christopher Morton and Darren Newbury (eds), The African Photographic Archive: Research and Curatorial Strategies (London, Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 95–112. Vokes, Richard, Derek R. Peterson, Edgar C. Taylor and Nelson Abiti, ‘The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin’, Africa is a Country, 11 July 2019, https://africasacountry.com/2019/07/the-unseen-archive-of-idiamin [accessed 20 July 2019]. Wairama, Baker, ‘Uganda: The Marginalisation of Minorities’, Report, Minority Rights Group International, 2001. Walji, Parveen, ‘The Indians: A Minority in Transition’, Nairobi University, Department of Sociology, Seminar Paper No. 40, 1980. Wamba-dia-Wamba, E., Experience of Democracy in Africa: Reflections on Practices of Communalist Palaver as a Social Method of Resolving Contradictions among the People (Dar es Salaam: University of Dar es Salaam Press, 1985). Wangusa, Timothy, Africa’s New Brood: Poems 1985–2005 (Kampala: Bow and Arrow Publishers, 2006). Webber, J., M. Momen, J. Finley, R. Krefting et al. ‘The Political Force of the Comedic’, Contemporary Political Theory 20 (2021), 419–46. Weitzberg, Keren, We Do Not Have Borders (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017). West, Henry W., Land Policy in Buganda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). Whitehead, Neil, ‘Are We There Yet?’ in Neil Whitehead and Michael Wesch (eds), Human No More, (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2012), pp.217–230. ——, Dark Shamans (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). ——, ‘Introduction’, in Neil Whitehead (ed.), Violence (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2004), pp. 1–23. Whitehead, Neil and Sverker Finnström, ‘Introduction: Virtual War and Magical Death’, in Neil Whitehead and Sverker Finnström (eds), Virtual War and Magical Death (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 1–25. Whitley, N.H.P., Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Disturbances Which Occurred in Uganda During January 1945 (Entebbe: The Protectorate Government Printer, 1954). Whyte, Susan Reynolds, Questioning Misfortune: The Pragmatics of Uncertainty in Eastern Uganda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Select Bibliography

Wiegratz, Jörg, and E. Cesnulyte, ‘Money Talks: Moral Economies of Earning a Living in Neoliberal East Africa’, New Political Economy, 21 (2016), 1–25. Wiegratz, Jörg, Giuliano Martiniello and Elisa Greco (eds), Uganda: The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation (London: Zed Books, 2018). Willerslev, Rane and Lotte Meinert, ‘Understanding Hunger with Ik Elders and Turnbull’s The Mountain People’, Ethnos, 82:5 (2017), 820–45. Williams, Randall, The Divided World: Human Rights and Its Violence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Wion Anaïs, Sébastien Barret and Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye, ‘Introduction: L’écrit pragmatique en Afrique’, Afriques. Débats, méthodes et terrains d’histoire, 07 (2016). Wolukau-Wanambwa, Emma, ‘Margaret Trowell’s School of Art: A Case Study in Colonial Subject Formation’, in S. Stemmler (ed.), Wahrnehmung, Erfahrung, Experiment, Wissen: Objektivität und Subjektivität in den Künsten und den Wissenschaften (Zürich, Berlin 2004), pp. 101–22. Woodward, P., ‘Ambiguous Amin’. African Affairs, 77 (1978), 153–64. Yesufu, Tijani M. (ed.), Creating the African University: Emerging Issues in the 1970s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). Young, Crawford, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). ——, ‘The Obote Revolution’, Africa Report, XI:6 (1966). ——, The Postcolonial State in Africa: Fifty Years of Independence, 1960– 2010 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2012). Zeleza, Paul T., Manufacturing African Studies and Crises (Dakar: CODESRIA,1997). Zeitlyn, David, ‘The Documentary Impulse: Archives in the Bush’, History in Africa, 32 (2005), 415–34. Zubovich, Gene, ‘For Human Rights Abroad, Against Jim Crow at Home: The Political Mobilization of American Ecumenical Protestants in the World War II Era’, Journal of American History, 105 (2018), 267–90.

395

Index Acholi (people) chieftaincy, 65, 70 insurgency, 67–68 Lamogi uprising, 70 ritual life, 67, 69–72 Roman Catholicism, 65–68, 70 spirituality, 59–61, 66, 70–71, 75 Amin, Idi, 10, 65, 113 border disputes, 1 economic reform, 159–61 expulsion of Indians see Asians militarism, 158–66 rise to power, 85, 110, 131, 133–34, 158 Tanzanian relations, 11 Amin, Samira, 130 anti-colonialism British responses, 37, 40 military resistance, 29 archives under Amin, 205–06 Busoga University, 208 colonial archives, 199–202 High Court, 197 Jinja District Archives, 198, 210–11 Lukiiko, 205 Mountains of the Moon, 204 under Museveni, 206–08 precolonial, 203 Asians (Indians), 58, 82, 124, 155 colonial administration, 271–77 expulsion, 283–86

during Museveni’s administration, 289–93 during Obote II’s administration, 287–89 postcolonial state building, 10, 279–83 protest against, 251–63, 277–79

Baganda (people) colonial protest, 251–63 history writing, 102–03 politics at independence, 103, 105 Bakiga (people) ideas about death, 31, 38 naming practices, 25–26, 34–37 spirituality, 29–30, 32, 38–39 Banyoro (people) ideas about death, 28 Lost Counties, 105 Batooro (people), 104, 178–79, 181, 193, 202, 260, 303 Besigye, Kizza, 5 Bible see Christianity

Centre for Health, Human Rights, and Development, 93–96 chiefs, 176–77, 248–51, 266 Christianity: Anglicanism (Church of Uganda), 62, 66, 70, 73 Bible, 31, 35, 58, 59, 66, 75 Catholicism, 29, 58, 63, 70, 73 conversion, 27, 33, 35, 37, 40–41 naming practices, 26, 34–37 Pentecostalism, 61, 63

398

Index

civil society, 78–79, 163 colonialism British policy, 37, 151–52 indirect rule, 151, 176 legacies, 148–58, 153–58 violence, 123, 129 Common Man’s Charter see Milton Obote Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa, 130 Daily Monitor (newspaper), 5 death, 35 decolonization historical memory, 101–06, 247–48 institutional reform, 149–50, 158–61 knowledge, 126–28, 223–26 religious reform, 337–38 South Africa, 5

education, 68 under Amin, 110, 117–18 art curriculum, 226–33, 234–40 colonial policy, 99, 108 East African Examinations Council, 108–11 under Museveni, 114, 138–42 National Curriculum Development Centre, 110–11 national examinations, 98 under Obote, 100–01, 104, 106, 112–13 postcolonial universities, 222 secondary school curricular, 99 University of East Africa (UEA), 101, 108, 228 healing, 59, 69–70 herbal medicine, 27 HIV/AIDS, 73 human rights, 78, 85, 96 history of the idea, 79

Uganda Commission of Inquiry into Violations of Human Rights, 114

immigration, 177 Indians see Asians International Monetary Fund see World Bank Islam, 62 conversion, 32, 40 Uganda Muslim Education Association, 99 Kabaka Yekka, 81, 281, 323 Kaggwa, Apolo, 102, 322 Kakonge, John, 154, 298, 326 Kakungulu, Semei, 211, 322 Karamojong (people), 167 cattle raiding, 42 chiefdoms, 44 colonial policy, 43–44 environmental practices, 44 military culture, 45 music, 48–54 pastorialism, 44–45 political ideology, 48–56 King’s African Rifles, 45, 65, 260 Kony, Josephy see Lord’s Resistance Army Kyambogo University, 223, 227, 232–34, 238 Lakwena, Alice see Lord’s Resistance Army Lango (people), soldiers, 65 Local Councils, 170, 182–95 Lord’s Resistance Army, 69, 74–76, 114 Lost Counties see Banyoro Lukiiko, 103, 174, 176, 203, 254, 261–62, 265 Makerere University, 6–7, 101, 108, 125–26, 152 art curriculum, 277–33 colonial demographics, 100

Index

funding and administrative politics, 136–41 Mamdani, Mahmood, 12, 124, 127, 289, 303, 314, 322–23, 334 Mau Mau, 176, 326 Mazrui, Ali, 12, 160, 297, 312 Mbiti, John S., 35–36 migrant labourers see immigration military violence, 129–36 missionaries, 36–37, 39, 46, 63, 66, 70–71, 99–100, 103, 150–51, 226, 317, 321 Mudimbe, Valentin-Yves, 129 Musaszi, I.K., 251, 257, 261 Museveni, Yoweri, 80, 92, 96–97 attitude toward public history, 115–18 on ethnologies, 312–15 opposition toward, 339–40 policies see National Resistance Movement religious practices, 115 Muteesa II, Ssekabaka early education, 263–67 exile of 1966, 10, 81, 84, 105, 132–33, 156

naming practices, 318 during colonialism, 34–37, 318–20 during the Museveni administration, 328–33 postcolonial, 322–28 National Resistance Movement anti-imperialism, 300–01 ‘Bush’ War, 11, 67, 134–36, 162 constitutional reform, 86–92, 295–96 on cultural institutions, 301–08 district administration, 308–12 economic development, 4 education policies see Yoweri Museveni

ideologies, 125 National Resistance Army, 125, 162 policies in northern Uganda, 73–74 village administration, 182–95 natural world, 27–28 Nekyon, Adoko, 154 Neogy, Rajat, 9, 131, 145, 228 New Public Service, 166–69 newspapers, vernacular press, 258–60, 266 Non-Governmental Organization, 46, 57, 58, 72, 92, 192–93, 216, 226, 233, 241 Nyanzi, Stella activism, 335, 337 general biography, 334 political poetry, 349–52 protest language, 340–48 on social media, 336, 340, 352–55

Obote, Milton, 10–11, 45, 105, 112, 131–32 administrative strategies, 153–58, 181 Common Man’s Charter, 81–85, 156 Move to the Left, 81, 113, 156, 162 Omara-Otunnu, Amii, 125 Organization of African Unity, 85 see also Pan-Africanism Pan-Africanism, 71, 81–85, 98, 106–10, 257 Charter of the Organization of African Unity, 108 Conference of African States, 107 Summit Conference of Independent African States, 107 p’Bitek, Okot, 77, 342 Pokot, 42, 46–47, 50–56

399

400

Index

post-colonial state, 123–24, 146 neoliberalism, 161–69, 241–43 publishing, local, 142–44 Qu’ran, 75

radio, 144 Rodney, Walter, 130 Rwenzururu, 104, 179

Said, Edward, 127 sectarianism, 5 slavery, 66 Speke, John Hanning, 98, 119, 320 students, Ugandan students abroad, 8–9, 227–33, 257 taxation, 148, 151, 160–62, 164, 174–76, 178, 181, 190, 254, 256, 274, 284 Transition magazine see Rajat Neogy

Ubuntu, 147, 166, 168 Uganda, Agreement of 1900, 14, 102, 175, 209, 265, 341 colonial Protectorate, 1, 320–22 creation of, 1–4 Uganda Broadcasting Corporation, 219

Uganda Museum, 214, 219, 235–36, 255 Uganda People’s Congress, 132 anti-imperialism, 298–300 internal factions, 155 Uganda People’s Defence Force, 114 see also, military violence Ugandan public service, colonial, 150–53 postcolonial, 148–50 Uganda studies, 4, 6, 12–19, 32, 60 Centre for Basic Research, 45–46 East African Institute for Social Research, 174–75 Makerere Institute of Social Research, 334 UNESCO, 205–06, 234, 238 Unions (labour), anticolonial protest, 251–57

Whitehead, Neil, 42–43, 47, 56–57 women’s activism, 14–15, 86–92 reproductive rights, 92–96 World Bank, 137, 149, 161, 206–07, 221, 280

Eastern Africa Series Women’s Land Rights & Privatization in Eastern Africa BIRGIT ENGLERT & ELIZABETH DALEY (EDS)

War & the Politics of Identity in Ethiopia KJETIL TRONVOLL

Moving People in Ethiopia ALULA PANKHURST & FRANÇOIS PIGUET (EDS) Living Terraces in Ethiopia ELIZABETH E. WATSON

Eritrea GAIM KIBREAB

Borders & Borderlands as Resources in the Horn of Africa DEREJE FEYISSA & MARKUS VIRGIL HOEHNE (EDS) After the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Sudan ELKE GRAWERT (ED.)

Land, Governance, Conflict & the Nuba of Sudan GUMA KUNDA KOMEY

Ethiopia JOHN MARKAKIS

Resurrecting Cannibals HEIKE BEHREND

Pastoralism & Politics in Northern Kenya & Southern Ethiopia GŰNTHER SCHLEE & ABDULLAHI A. SHONGOLO

Islam & Ethnicity in Northern Kenya & Southern Ethiopia GŰNTHER SCHLEE with ABDULLAHI A. SHONGOLO

Foundations of an African Civilisation DAVID W. PHILLIPSON

Regional Integration, Identity & Citizenship in the Greater Horn of Africa KIDANE MENGISTEAB & REDIE BEREKETEAB (EDS)

Dealing with Government in South Sudan CHERRY LEONARDI The Quest for Socialist Utopia BAHRU ZEWDE

Disrupting Territories JÖRG GERTEL, RICHARD ROTTENBURG & SANDRA CALKINS (EDS)

The African Garrison State KJETIL TRONVOLL & DANIEL R. MEKONNEN

The State of Post-conflict Reconstruction NASEEM BADIEY Gender, Home & Identity KATARZYNA GRABSKA

Women, Land and Justice in Tanzania HELEN DANCER Remaking Mutirikwi JOOST FONTEIN

The Oromo & the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia MOHAMMED HASSEN Lost Nationalism ELENA VEZZADINI

Darfur CHRIS VAUGHAN

The Eritrean National Service GAIM KIBREAB

Ploughing New Ground GETNET BEKELE

Hawks & Doves in Sudan’s Armed Conflict SUAD M. E. MUSA

Ethiopian Warriorhood TSEHAI BERHANE-SELASSIE

Land, Migration & Belonging JOSEPH MUJERE Land Tenure Security SVEIN EGE (ED.)

Tanzanian Development DAVID POTTS (ED.)

Nairobi in the Making CONSTANCE SMITH

The Mission of Apolo Kivebulaya EMMA WILD-WOOD

The Crisis of Democratization in the Greater Horn of Africa KIDANE MENGISTEAB (ED.)

The Struggle for Land & Justice in Kenya AMBREENA MANJI Imperialism & Development: The East African Groundnut Scheme and its Legacy NICHOLAS WESTCOTT

Kamba Proverbs from Eastern Kenya JEREMIAH M. KITUNDA

Sports & Modernity in Late Imperial Ethiopia KATRIN BROMBER

Contested Sustainability: The Political Ecology of Conservation and Development in Tanzania* STEFANO PONTE, CHRISTINE NOE, DAN BROCKINGTON (EDS)

Reimagining the Gendered Nation: Citizenship and Human Rights in Postcolonial Kenya* CHRISTINA KENNY

Kenya and Zambia’s Relations with China: Encounters and Conflicts during the Cold War and its Aftermath* JODIE YUZHOU SUN

* forthcoming

EASTERN AFRICAN STUDIES

These titles published in the United States and Canada by Ohio University Press

Revealing Prophets Edited by DAVID M. ANDERSON & DOUGLAS H. JOHNSON East African Expressions of Christianity Edited by THOMAS SPEAR & ISARIA N. KIMAMBO

The Poor Are Not Us Edited by DAVID M. ANDERSON & VIGDIS BROCH-DUE Potent Brews JUSTIN WILLIS

Swahili Origins JAMES DE VERE ALLEN

Being Maasai Edited by THOMAS SPEAR & RICHARD WALLER Jua Kali Kenya KENNETH KING

Control & Crisis in Colonial Kenya BRUCE BERMAN Unhappy Valley Book One: State & Class Book Two: Violence & Ethnicity BRUCE BERMAN & JOHN LONSDALE Mau Mau from Below GREET KERSHAW

The Mau Mau War in Perspective FRANK FUREDI

Squatters & the Roots of Mau Mau 1905–63 TABITHA KANOGO Economic & Social Origins of Mau Mau 1945–53 DAVID W. THROUP Multi-Party Politics in Kenya DAVID W. THROUP & CHARLES HORNSBY Empire State-Building JOANNA LEWIS

Decolonization & Independence in Kenya 1940–93 Edited by B.A. OGOT & WILLIAM R. OCHIENG’ Eroding the Commons DAVID ANDERSON

Penetration & Protest in Tanzania ISARIA N. KIMAMBO Custodians of the Land Edited by GREGORY MADDOX, JAMES L. GIBLIN & ISARIA N. KIMAMBO Education in the Development of Tanzania 1919–1990 LENE BUCHERT

The Second Economy in Tanzania T.L. MALIYAMKONO & M.S.D. BAGACHWA Ecology Control & Economic Development in East African History HELGE KJEKSHUS

Siaya DAVID WILLIAM COHEN & E.S. ATIENO ODHIAMBO

Uganda Now • Changing Uganda Developing Uganda • From Chaos to Order • Religion & Politics in East Africa Edited by HOLGER BERNT HANSEN & MICHAEL TWADDLE Kakungulu & the Creation of Uganda 1868–1928 MICHAEL TWADDLE Controlling Anger SUZETTE HEALD

Kampala Women Getting By SANDRA WALLMAN

Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda RICHARD J. REID

Alice Lakwena & the Holy Spirits HEIKE BEHREND

Slaves, Spices & Ivory in Zanzibar ABDUL SHERIFF Zanzibar Under Colonial Rule Edited by ABDUL SHERIFF & ED FERGUSON

The History & Conservation of Zanzibar Stone Town Edited by ABDUL SHERIFF Pastimes & Politics LAURA FAIR

Ethnicity & Conflict in the Horn of Africa Edited by KATSUYOSHI FUKUI & JOHN MARKAKIS Conflict, Age & Power in North East Africa Edited by EISEI KURIMOTO & SIMON SIMONSE

Property Rights & Political Development in Ethiopia & Eritrea SANDRA FULLERTON JOIREMAN Revolution & Religion in Ethiopia ØYVIND M. EIDE Brothers at War TEKESTE NEGASH & KJETIL TRONVOLL

From Guerrillas to Government DAVID POOL

Mau Mau & Nationhood Edited by E.S. ATIENO ODHIAMBO & JOHN LONSDALE

A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1991(2nd edn) BAHRU ZEWDE

Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia BAHRU ZEWDE Remapping Ethiopia Edited by W. JAMES, D. DONHAM, E. KURIMOTO & A. TRIULZI

Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia Edited by DONALD L. DONHAM & WENDY JAMES A Modern History of the Somali (4th edn) I.M. LEWIS

Islands of Intensive Agriculture in East Africa Edited by MATS WIDGREN & JOHN E.G. SUTTON Leaf of Allah EZEKIEL GEBISSA

Dhows & the Colonial Economy of Zanzibar 1860–1970 ERIK GILBERT African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya TABITHA KANOGO African Underclass ANDREW BURTON

In Search of a Nation Edited by GREGORY H. MADDOX & JAMES L. GIBLIN A History of the Excluded JAMES L. GIBLIN

Black Poachers, White Hunters EDWARD I. STEINHART Ethnic Federalism DAVID TURTON

Crisis & Decline in Bunyoro SHANE DOYLE

Emancipation without Abolition in German East Africa JAN-GEORG DEUTSCH

Women, Work & Domestic Virtue in Uganda 1900–2003 GRACE BANTEBYA KYOMUHENDO & MARJORIE KENISTON McINTOSH Cultivating Success in Uganda GRACE CARSWELL War in Pre-Colonial Eastern Africa RICHARD REID

Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa Edited by HENRI MÉDARD & SHANE DOYLE The Benefits of Famine DAVID KEEN