Articles by Edgar C Taylor
History and Anthropology, 2024
Tasha Rijke-Epstein and Edgar Taylor
Expulsions remake knowledge and experience of time, space... more Tasha Rijke-Epstein and Edgar Taylor
Expulsions remake knowledge and experience of time, space and the body. However, they have largely been studied and theorized through histories of Europe or within contemporary global racial capitalism, sheared of its longer global histories. This special issue anchors the study of expulsions in historical experiences and conceptualizations from a variety of African contexts over time. Expulsions are tightly entwined with the formation of knowledge and power - including area studies and academic disciplines, national citizenship and the making of nation-states. This introduction charts the ways expulsions as time-bending and chronology-blurring processes are integral to the naturalization of communities, groups and the body as subjects of scholarly and political work. At the same time, it argues that expulsions are relational, violent processes that defy temporal bounding, move across spatial scales and unsettle epistemologies. Material landscapes are key sites through which expulsive processes are mediated, embedded and remembered, even as they are impinged upon by violence. This special issue argues that the study of expulsions opens conceptual questions about how knowledge, time and material forms are constituted.
Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 2021
Edgar C. Taylor
The history of archival management in Uganda reveals the foundational relatio... more Edgar C. Taylor
The history of archival management in Uganda reveals the foundational relationship between austerity and colonial archival institutions. This article discusses how impoverishment and self-interested editing were central to the bureaucratization of colonial archives at their founding. Extreme austerity in the wake of structural adjustment in the 1980s accelerated archival decay while adding new uncertainties to archivists’ work. Postcolonial archivists’ strategies of risk management and repair work have helped to preserve archives from potentially nefarious editing by partisan officials and publics. However, neglect and decay have also constrained the circulation of archives in public life and have reinforced colonial institutional violence. These conditions of postcolonial institutions require continuous hazardous labour from individuals embedded in the margins of state bureaucracy. This article emphasizes the backstage of archival labour and the risks that archivists navigate in preserving – and managing the public life of – relics of contentious pasts.
History in Africa, 2021
Edgar C. Taylor, Nelson A. Abiti, Derek R. Peterson and Richard Vokes
This report describes t... more Edgar C. Taylor, Nelson A. Abiti, Derek R. Peterson and Richard Vokes
This report describes the official photographic archives of Idi Amin's government held by the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (UBC). During his reign from 1971 to 1979, Idi Amin embraced visual media as a tool for archiving the achievements of populist military rule as his government sought to reorient Ugandans' relationship with the state. Only a handful of the resulting images were ever printed or seen, reflecting the regime's archival impulse undergirded by paranoia of unauthorized ways of seeing. The UBC's newly opened collection of over 60,000 negatives from Amin's photographers, alongside files at the Uganda National Archives, offers the first comprehensive opportunity to study the Ugandan state under Amin's dictatorship through the lens of its own documentarians.
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2021
Derek R. Peterson, Richard Vokes, Nelson Abiti and Edgar C. Taylor
In May 2019 we launched a spe... more Derek R. Peterson, Richard Vokes, Nelson Abiti and Edgar C. Taylor
In May 2019 we launched a special exhibition at the Uganda Museum in Kampala titled “The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin.” It consisted of 150 images made by government photographers in the 1970s. In this essay we explore how political history has been delimited in the Museum, and how these limitations shaped the exhibition we curated. From the time of its creation, the Museum's disparate and multifarious collections were exhibited as ethnographic specimens, stripped of historical context. Spatially and organizationally, “The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin” turned its back on the ethnographic architecture of the Uganda Museum. The transformation of these vivid, evocative, aesthetically appealing photographs into historical evidence of atrocity was intensely discomfiting. We have been obliged to organize the exhibition around categories that did not correspond with the logic of the photographic archive, with the architecture of the Museum, or with the experiences of the people who lived through the 1970s. The exhibition has made history, but not entirely in ways that we chose.
History of Photography, 2020
Richard Vokes, Derek R. Peterson and Edgar C. Taylor
This article examines a photographic archiv... more Richard Vokes, Derek R. Peterson and Edgar C. Taylor
This article examines a photographic archive that has been recently identified in the stores of the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation in Kampala. The archive consists of some eighty-five thousand black and white negatives that were taken by various official photographic units, government information officers and commercial photographers – all of whom worked under the umbrella of the Ministry of Information – most of them during the years of President Idi Amin’s rule (1971–79). Significantly, the vast majority of these negatives appear never to have been used to make prints. As a result, their images have been literally never seen before. The archive significantly extends our understanding of official photography in Uganda, and in postcolonial Africa. In particular, it shows how infrastructures of administrative photography that were established during the colonial era, and which resulted in the medium becoming central to an imagined ‘exhibitionary complex’, continued to hold into the 1970s. The archive also highlights how these same infrastructures became increasingly complicated during the Amin years, both as the regime became more invested in photography as a potential tool for increasing the ‘momentum’ of its development agenda and as it became more reliant on other forms of mass media as a means for projecting its – increasingly imaginary – forms of governance to Uganda and to the world. Finally, however, the fact that the majority of the negatives were never printed suggests that whatever were the intended effects of official photographs in Amin’s Uganda, in practice, the performance of photographic techniques and archiving may have been equally politically significant.
Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 2019
Edgar C. Taylor
A drinking party in 1963 precipitated a crisis over postcolonial Uganda’s sove... more Edgar C. Taylor
A drinking party in 1963 precipitated a crisis over postcolonial Uganda’s sovereignty and the respectability of a new postcolonial ruling elite. Under Kampala’s multiracial veneer in the early 1960s lurked bawdy British youth culture and radical African youth politics. When Europeans at a party in the elite suburb of Tank Hill allegedly mocked African aspirations for urban respectability and political sovereignty, Youth Wing activists used the affair to elicit public expressions of anger at the collusion of conservative politicians and racist former colonisers. Prime Minister Milton Obote attempted to channel that anger into nationalist unity but soon found common cause with British diplomats in expelling intemperate youth from Uganda’s governing bureaucracy. The affair points to both the power and the limits of the affective politics of decolonisation as well as the relationship between youth wings and the politics of respectability in early postcolonial Africa.
Journal of Eastern African Studies, Feb 2013
Edgar C. Taylor
As Uganda’s postcolonial leaders Milton Obote and Idi Amin sought to pin down ... more Edgar C. Taylor
As Uganda’s postcolonial leaders Milton Obote and Idi Amin sought to pin down Asians as legal and discursive subjects between 1969 and 1972, they invoked a contested administrative, political and social history to promote Africanisation initiatives. Traders targeted by the 1969 Trade Licensing Act in small towns such as Kabale reshaped malleable racial and legal categories in local administrative struggles over the control of urban space that did not map neatly onto policy-makers’ visions. Nevertheless, the perceived decisiveness of Milton Obote’s legislation and of Idi Amin’s subsequent expulsion decrees has obscured from subsequent narratives the messy politics of Uganda’s urban spaces. This article draws attention to the opportunities and limits of legal claim-making at the intersection of racial thought and urban governmentality during the Trade Licensing Act’s uneven implementation.
Journal of Eastern African Studies , 2013
Derek R. Peterson and Edgar C. Taylor
This essay—the introduction to a collection of essays on... more Derek R. Peterson and Edgar C. Taylor
This essay—the introduction to a collection of essays on Idi Amin’s Uganda—illuminates the infrastructure of Amin’s dictatorship. It was through the technology of the news media that Amin’s officials found it possible to summon and direct the actions of Uganda’s people. The news media’s apparently extensive audience made it possible for the authorities to address particular demographic groups who would otherwise fall outside the reach of government bureaucracy. When government officials did actually engage with the real people they addressed, they did so with measuring tapes and typewriters close at hand. In the paper reports they filed, Amin’s bureaucrats tidied up complicated social situations, generating statistics that illuminated a particular constituency’s adherence to—or deviation from—the official directive. Uganda’s command economy was constituted through exhortations, inflated statistics, and other fictions on paper.
Chapters by Edgar C Taylor
![Research paper thumbnail of Introduction [Decolonising State & Society in Uganda: The Politics of Knowledge & Public Life]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/117922075/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Decolonising State & Society in Uganda: The Politics of Knowledge & Public Life (James Currey), 2022
by Edgar C. Taylor, Katherine Bruce-Lockhart, Jonathon L. Earle and Nakanyike Musisi
Born out of... more by Edgar C. Taylor, Katherine Bruce-Lockhart, Jonathon L. Earle and Nakanyike Musisi
Born out of contested conditions, Uganda was not granted the right to define itself in scholarly imaginations. 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’. 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’. Such assessments helped to perpetuate 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.
More than three decades later, this volume suggests that the terrain of debate has changed significantly. Rather than questioning the possibility of national unity, the contributors wrestle with how Ugandans have mobilised knowledge and social solidarity in what are often tense relationships with state power and ethno-national imaginations. The contributions show how the guiding imperative for many Ugandans has been 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. In so doing, they show how movements toward the decolonisation of knowledge and power in Uganda have not aimed toward a single spatial or temporal horizon.
The chapters in this volume constitute a provocation for scholars to find novel connections across the geographic, thematic, disciplinary, and institutional grooves through which so much academic knowledge usually flows.
Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South, edited by Dilip M. Menon, 2022
Edgar C Taylor
This chapter examines how Luganda speakers used the English word ‘freedom’ in ... more Edgar C Taylor
This chapter examines how Luganda speakers used the English word ‘freedom’ in contestations over what a postcolonial social and political order should look like in Buganda Kingdom during the boycott movement of 1959-1960. Nationalist politicians, ethnic patriots, and ordinary subjects all employed a similar vocabulary of freedom, which was often translated with the Luganda word 'eddembe'. Charismatic activists with the backing of Kingdom Ministers pursued a populist campaign to redefine what freedom from colonial rule could mean in Buganda. However, populist activists, like their nationalist adversaries, failed to enforce a hegemonic meaning of freedom as they attempted to redirect Kiganda ideals of social well-being to fit their aspirations for individual capitalist accumulation. Activists hoped to marshal a combination of new media and disciplinary violence in order to direct how Ugandans would imagine freedom at a moment when British colonialism appeared to be in crisis. As the UNM’s boycott campaign grew and Kingdom officials prepared a unilateral declaration of independence, their followers subtly unsettled leaders' claims to a monopoly on political authority. In so doing, they drew on Buganda’s multilingual conceptual landscape as one of contestation rather than fixed meanings.
African Studies in the Digital Age, 2014
Edgar C. Taylor, Ashley Brooke Rockenbach and Natalie Bond
For decades, scholars of East Afric... more Edgar C. Taylor, Ashley Brooke Rockenbach and Natalie Bond
For decades, scholars of East Africa have lamented the disordered state of Uganda’s government archives, often assuming that a history of military coups, public disinterest and bureaucratic neglect has decimated much of the coun- try’s historical records. As this chapter will demonstrate, however, such fears are largely unfounded and in fact distort a far more interesting and uneven history of archives management and historical thought.
While it is true that archives in Uganda have not found sustenance in an enduring official conviction that the national past holds edifying, inspirational lessons for the present and future, much of the country’s government archives have escaped systematic destruction. Public attitudes, moreover, cannot be easily defined in terms of interest or disinterest, for the role of archives in offi- cial and popular appreciations of the past has been dynamic and subject to change. Over the past few years a cadre of dedicated librarians, archivists and records officers has been cataloguing and preserving archival documents across the country at a time when public discussion of post-colonial history has been gaining new valence in prominent forums. As the cataloguing, and in some cases digitisation, of records proceeds in national and district archives, scholars, the Ugandan government, donors and Ugandan publics face new dynamics of control over, and access to, historical documents in a changing relationship with a contested past.
The present authors have had the opportunity to participate in cataloguing efforts at the Uganda National Archives (una) in Entebbe and the Kabarole District Archives (kda) in Fort Portal, and this chapter draws from both on-site observations and archival research. It begins with a critical review of the history of archives in Uganda, before turning to a description of current cata- loguing projects at the una and kda. It concludes with some reflections on Uganda’s changing archival landscape.
Other Articles by Edgar C Taylor
Books by Edgar C Taylor
Edited by Katherine Bruce-Lockhart, Jonathon L. Earle, Nakanyike B. Musisi and Edgar C. Taylor
D... more Edited by Katherine Bruce-Lockhart, Jonathon L. Earle, Nakanyike B. Musisi and Edgar C. Taylor
Decolonization of knowledge has become a major issue in African Studies in recent years, brought to the fore by social movements such as #RhodesMustFall and #BlackLivesMatter. This timely book explores the politics and disputed character of knowledge production in colonial and postcolonial Uganda, where efforts to generate forms of knowledge and solidarity that transcend colonial epistemologies draw on long histories of resistance and refusal. Bringing together scholars from Africa, Europe and North America, the contributors in this volume analyse how knowledge has been created, mobilized, and contested across a wide range of Ugandan contexts. In so doing, they reveal how Ugandans have built, disputed, and reimagined institutions of authority and knowledge production in ways that disrupt the colonial frames that continue to shape scholarly analyses and state structures. From the politics of language and gender in Bakiga naming practices to ways of knowing among the Acholi, the hampering of critical scholarship by militarism and authoritarianism, and debates over the names of streets, lakes, mountains, and other public spaces, this book shows how scholars and a wide range of Ugandan activists are reimagining the politics of knowledge in Ugandan public life.
Nakanyike B. Musisi and Edgar C. Taylor
This booklet is one in a series of resources that we h... more Nakanyike B. Musisi and Edgar C. Taylor
This booklet is one in a series of resources that we have termed the Makerere Success Series. This series is designed to provide students and faculty at Makerere and beyond with accessible, concise and affordable resources on a dozen essential skills for succeeding in academia. The first booklet in the series covers Critical Thinking. It is followed by booklets on Academic Writing and Plagiarism. Great care has been taken to ensure that the publications in this series are relevant, interesting and accessible. They are designed with the needs and interests of Ugandan university students and faculty in mind. However, they may be equally useful to scholars, authors, journalists and other professionals outside of the academy.
Nakanyike B. Musisi and Edgar C. Taylor
This booklet is one in a series of resources that we h... more Nakanyike B. Musisi and Edgar C. Taylor
This booklet is one in a series of resources that we have termed the Makerere Success Series. This series is designed to provide students and faculty at Makerere and beyond with accessible, concise and affordable resources on a dozen essential skills for succeeding in academia. The first booklet in the series covers Critical Thinking. It is followed by booklets on Academic Writing and Plagiarism. Great care has been taken to ensure that the publications in this series are relevant, interesting and accessible. They are designed with the needs and interests of Ugandan university students and faculty in mind. However, they may be equally useful to scholars, authors, journalists and other professionals outside of the academy.
Nakanyike B. Musisi and Edgar C. Taylor
This booklet is one in a series of resources that we h... more Nakanyike B. Musisi and Edgar C. Taylor
This booklet is one in a series of resources that we have termed the Makerere Success Series. This series is designed to provide students and faculty at Makerere and beyond with accessible, concise and affordable resources on a dozen essential skills for succeeding in academia. The first booklet in the series covers Critical Thinking. It is followed by booklets on Academic Writing and Plagiarism. Great care has been taken to ensure that the publications in this series are relevant, interesting and accessible. They are designed with the needs and interests of Ugandan university students and faculty in mind. However, they may be equally useful to scholars, authors, journalists and other professionals outside of the academy.
Conferences, Workshops by Edgar C Taylor
![Research paper thumbnail of Makerere History and Archaeology Seminar [2024]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/119947807/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Makerere History and Archaeology Seminar schedule (2024)
Presented by the Makerere University D... more Makerere History and Archaeology Seminar schedule (2024)
Presented by the Makerere University Department of History, Archaeology and Heritage Studies
31st January Dr A.B.K. Kasozi
2:00-4:00 pm
Abu Mayanja, MP: The Intellectual Star of Uganda's "Struggle" for Independence and the Search for a Liberal Democratic State, 1929-2005
Discussants: Prof Samwiri Lwanga-Lunyiigo and Dr Joseph Kasule (Makerere University)
6th March Gaku Moriguchi (Toyo University)
3:00-5:00pm
Urban Riots as “the Reality of the Virtual”: Politics and Historicity in Kampala, 2007-2011
Discussant: Dr Jacob Katumusiime (Makerere University)
13th March Dr Rhiannon Stephens (Columbia University)
2:00-4:00 pm
Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Book Talk
20th March Dr Rebecca Glade (Makerere University)
2:00-4:00pm
Striking Judges, Shari’a, and the Limits of Military Rule in Sudan, 1983-1985
Discussant: Anatoli Lwassampijja (Makerere University)
26th April M.A. Student Writing Workshop
10:00am-4:00pm
14th June Nelson Abiti (Uganda Museum); Mark Elliot, Rachel Hand, Dr Eva Namusoke (University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology); Derek R. Peterson (University of Michigan)
2:00-4:00 pm
Repositioning the Uganda Museum: A Report on Work in Progress
19th June Ph.D. Student Writing Workshop
10:30am-5:00pm
8th August Arif Elsaui (Sudan Facts Center for Journalism, Atar Magazine), Amar Jamal (Atar Magazine), Ahmed Nashadir (Atar Magazine), Dr Rebecca Glade (Makerere University)
2:00-4:00 pm
Contextualizing Sudan: Journalism in Wartime
21th Sept Dr Derek R. Peterson (University of Michigan)
2:00-4:00 pm
Making Revolutionary Film in Idi Amin’s Uganda: propaganda and peril
Discussant: Dr Anna Adima
20th Nov Dr Charlotte Mafumbo (Makerere University)
4:00-6:00 pm
Women in the Peace and Security landscape of the East African Region: Operationalization of the UNSCR 1325
Discussant: Dr Aili Mari Tripp (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
![Research paper thumbnail of Makerere History and Archaeology Seminar [2023]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/119947741/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Makerere History and Archaeology Seminar schedule (January-June 2023)
Presented by the Makerere... more Makerere History and Archaeology Seminar schedule (January-June 2023)
Presented by the Makerere University Department of History, Archaeology and Heritage Studies
18 January
Dr Nicholas Tunanukye and Dr Simon Rutabajuuka (Makerere University)
Landmarks of Migrant Labour Along the Western Route in Uganda since the 1920s
Discussant: Prof Derek Peterson (University of Michigan)
22 February
Prof Hansjörg Dilger (Freie Universität Berlin)
Learning Morality, Inequalities, and Faith: Christian and Muslim Schools in Tanzania. Book Discussion
Discussant: Anatoli Lwassampijja (Makerere University)
1 March
Prof Jonny Steinberg (Yale University)
The Courtship of Winnie and Nelson Mandela
Discussant: Dr Florence Ebila (Makerere University)
10 March
Prof Emma Wild-Wood (University of Edinburgh) and George Mpanga (Independent Scholar)
Preparing the Archives of Apolo Kivebulaya for Publication
Discussant: Dr Deo Kannamwangi (Kyambogo University)
15 March
Esther Ginestet (Sciences Po Paris and Northwestern University)
Kisumu Ndogo: Kenya Luo Social and Intellectual Life in Kampala in Times of Decolonization, 1950s-1970
Discussant: Christopher Muhoozi (Makerere University)
22 March
Dr Kevin Donovan (University of Edinburgh)
The Making of Credible Citizenship in Decolonizing East Africa
Discussant: Dr Nicholas Tunanukye (Makerere University)
29 March
Prof Godfrey Asiimwe (Makerere University)
(Mis)management of Sub-Nationalism and Diversity in "Nations" The Case of Buganda in Uganda, 1897-1980. A Book Discussion
Discussants: Prof Edward Wamala (Makerere University), Dr Kabugo Merit (Makerere University), Dr Edgar Taylor (Makerere University)
31 March
Prof ABK Kasozi
The Politics of Higher Education in a Colonial Setting: The Controversial Sending of Abu Mayanja to King’s College, Cambridge by Sir Andrew Cohen
Discussant: Dr Simon Rutabajuuka and Dr Zaid Sekito
12 April
Dr Abudul Mahajubu (Mountains of the Moon University)
Colonial Tax Policy and the Reshaping or the Nubian Identity in Uganda: Unpacking the 1940 Luwalo Tax Riots in Buganda
Discussant: Prof Holly Hanson (Mount Holyoke College, emeritus)
26 April
Prof David Anderson (University of Warwick) and Prof Katherine Bruce-Lockhart (University of Waterloo)
Penal Legacies and Afterlives in East Africa: Histories of State Punishment in Kenya and Uganda since 1950
Discussant: Dr David Ngendo-Tshimba (Uganda Martyrs University)
28 April (with Department of Development Studies)
Prof Howard Stein (University of Michigan)
Institutionalizing Neoclassical Economics in Africa: Instruments,
Ideology and Implications
Discussant: Dr Susan Namirembe Kavuma
3 May
Dr Jacqueline Namukasa (Makerere University)
Gender and Representation: Uganda National Consultative Council 1979-80
Discussant: Prof Alicia Decker (Pennsylvania State University)
10 May
Dr Anusa Daimon (University of Malawi)
African Union Border Re-Affirmation Exercise and the Resultant Malawi/Mozambique Border Crisis in Makanjira: 2011 to the present
Discussant: TBA
21 June
Dr Jonathan Luke Melchiorre (Universidad de los Andes) and Dr Adrian Browne (Independent Scholar)
‘Spectres of the CIA’: Vietnam, US Imperialism, and Milton Obote’s Uganda, 1962-1971
Discussant: Dr Edgar Taylor (Makerere University)
![Research paper thumbnail of Makerere History and Archaeology Seminar [2022]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/119947713/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Makerere History and Archaeology Seminar schedule (June-September 2022)
Presented by the Maker... more Makerere History and Archaeology Seminar schedule (June-September 2022)
Presented by the Makerere University Department of History, Archaeology and Heritage Studies
8th June - Dr Catherine Namono (University of the Witwatersrand) 'Rock
Art Heritage of Uganda: Understanding, Conservation and Management'.
Discussant: Dr Elizabeth Kyazike (Kyambogo University)
15th June - Dr Jochen Lingelbach (Universität Bayreuth) 'On the Edges of
Whiteness: Polish refugees from World War Two in Uganda'. Discussant:
Prof Samwiri Lwanga-Lunyiigo
29th June - Dr John Baligira (Makerere University) 'The Use and Abuse of
Local and National Citizenship in Kagadi District Since 1996'.
Discussant: Dr David Ngendo Tshimba (Uganda Martyrs University)
6th July - Dr Asmeret Mehari (Independent Scholar) 'African Communities,
Field Archaeology and Pedagogy'. Discussant: Herman Muwonge (Makerere
University)
20th July - Dr Pamela Khanakwa (Makerere University) 'History,
Nationalism and Power'. Discussant: Dr Benedito Machava (Yale
University)
3rd August - Dr Olutayo C. Adesina (University of Ibadan) 'Beyond
Imperial Eyes: Ibadan School of History and the Crossroads of
Knowledge'. Discussant: Dr Pamela Khanakwa (Makerere University)
23rd-26th August - CHUSS International Humanities Conference
https://chuss.mak.ac.ug/cic2022
7th September - Dr Henri Médard (Université Aix-Marseille) 'Beer, Boats
and Flies: Contested Property and Political Protest on Bussi Island,
1885-1925'. Discussant: Christopher Muhoozi (Makerere University)
21st September - Dr Michiel de Haas (Wageningen University) 'Cotton
imperialism in Africa: A Failed Colonial Ambition in Comparative
Perspective'. Discussant: Dr Simon Rutabajuuka (Makerere University)
28th September - Dr Charlotte Mafumbo (Makerere University) '"Rescuers"
The Uncelebrated and Unsung Heroes of the Civil War in Northern Uganda'.
Discussant: TBA
![Research paper thumbnail of Makerere History and Archaeology Seminar [2020-2021]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/119947695/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Makerere History and Archaeology Seminar schedule
Presented by the Makerere Department of History... more Makerere History and Archaeology Seminar schedule
Presented by the Makerere Department of History, Archaeology and Heritage Studies School of Liberal and Performing Arts, College of Humanities and Social Sciences
September–December 2021
The Makerere History and Archaeology Seminar is hosted by the Department of History, Archaeology and Heritage Studies at Makerere University. The Seminar meets by Zoom on Wednesdays from 2:00 to 4:00 PM or from 3:00 to 5:00 PM (Kampala time). Zoom links will be made available one week prior to each seminar. For more information, contact Dr Edgar Taylor at [email protected]
29th September Dr Pamela Khanakwa (Makerere University)
2:00-4:00 pm To Relocate or Not?: Landslides and Risk Management in Bududa, Eastern Uganda
Discussant: Dr Andrew Ivaska (Concordia University)
13th October Dr Rhiannon Stephens (Columbia University)
*3:00-5:00 pm Motherhood Beyond Mothering in Uganda: A Political and Social History, c.700-1900
Discussant: Christopher Muhoozi (Makerere University)
27th October Dr Christopher Tounsel (Pennsylvania State University)
*3:00-5:00 pm Christianity is Now Your Tribe: Christian and Ethnic Politics in South Sudan
Discussant: Dr Christine Mbabazi Mpyangu (Makerere University)
10th November Dr Doreen Kembabazi (Ghent University)
2:00-4:00 pm The Afterlives of Slavery in Uganda
Discussant: Dr Abudul Mahajubu (Makerere University)
17th November Dr ABK Kasozi (Independent)
2:00-4:00 pm The Impact of the 1952 Makerere College Students' Strike on Higher Education Management in East Africa Up to 2000
Discussant: Dr Pamela Khanakwa (Makerere University)
8th December Dr Deogratius Kannamwangi (Kampala International University)
*3:00-5:00 pm From Education to Mis-Education: Reimagining the (Mis)Direction of the Catholic School System In Uganda, 1963–2007
Discussant: Dr Jay Carney (Creighton University)
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Articles by Edgar C Taylor
Expulsions remake knowledge and experience of time, space and the body. However, they have largely been studied and theorized through histories of Europe or within contemporary global racial capitalism, sheared of its longer global histories. This special issue anchors the study of expulsions in historical experiences and conceptualizations from a variety of African contexts over time. Expulsions are tightly entwined with the formation of knowledge and power - including area studies and academic disciplines, national citizenship and the making of nation-states. This introduction charts the ways expulsions as time-bending and chronology-blurring processes are integral to the naturalization of communities, groups and the body as subjects of scholarly and political work. At the same time, it argues that expulsions are relational, violent processes that defy temporal bounding, move across spatial scales and unsettle epistemologies. Material landscapes are key sites through which expulsive processes are mediated, embedded and remembered, even as they are impinged upon by violence. This special issue argues that the study of expulsions opens conceptual questions about how knowledge, time and material forms are constituted.
The history of archival management in Uganda reveals the foundational relationship between austerity and colonial archival institutions. This article discusses how impoverishment and self-interested editing were central to the bureaucratization of colonial archives at their founding. Extreme austerity in the wake of structural adjustment in the 1980s accelerated archival decay while adding new uncertainties to archivists’ work. Postcolonial archivists’ strategies of risk management and repair work have helped to preserve archives from potentially nefarious editing by partisan officials and publics. However, neglect and decay have also constrained the circulation of archives in public life and have reinforced colonial institutional violence. These conditions of postcolonial institutions require continuous hazardous labour from individuals embedded in the margins of state bureaucracy. This article emphasizes the backstage of archival labour and the risks that archivists navigate in preserving – and managing the public life of – relics of contentious pasts.
This report describes the official photographic archives of Idi Amin's government held by the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (UBC). During his reign from 1971 to 1979, Idi Amin embraced visual media as a tool for archiving the achievements of populist military rule as his government sought to reorient Ugandans' relationship with the state. Only a handful of the resulting images were ever printed or seen, reflecting the regime's archival impulse undergirded by paranoia of unauthorized ways of seeing. The UBC's newly opened collection of over 60,000 negatives from Amin's photographers, alongside files at the Uganda National Archives, offers the first comprehensive opportunity to study the Ugandan state under Amin's dictatorship through the lens of its own documentarians.
In May 2019 we launched a special exhibition at the Uganda Museum in Kampala titled “The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin.” It consisted of 150 images made by government photographers in the 1970s. In this essay we explore how political history has been delimited in the Museum, and how these limitations shaped the exhibition we curated. From the time of its creation, the Museum's disparate and multifarious collections were exhibited as ethnographic specimens, stripped of historical context. Spatially and organizationally, “The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin” turned its back on the ethnographic architecture of the Uganda Museum. The transformation of these vivid, evocative, aesthetically appealing photographs into historical evidence of atrocity was intensely discomfiting. We have been obliged to organize the exhibition around categories that did not correspond with the logic of the photographic archive, with the architecture of the Museum, or with the experiences of the people who lived through the 1970s. The exhibition has made history, but not entirely in ways that we chose.
This article examines a photographic archive that has been recently identified in the stores of the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation in Kampala. The archive consists of some eighty-five thousand black and white negatives that were taken by various official photographic units, government information officers and commercial photographers – all of whom worked under the umbrella of the Ministry of Information – most of them during the years of President Idi Amin’s rule (1971–79). Significantly, the vast majority of these negatives appear never to have been used to make prints. As a result, their images have been literally never seen before. The archive significantly extends our understanding of official photography in Uganda, and in postcolonial Africa. In particular, it shows how infrastructures of administrative photography that were established during the colonial era, and which resulted in the medium becoming central to an imagined ‘exhibitionary complex’, continued to hold into the 1970s. The archive also highlights how these same infrastructures became increasingly complicated during the Amin years, both as the regime became more invested in photography as a potential tool for increasing the ‘momentum’ of its development agenda and as it became more reliant on other forms of mass media as a means for projecting its – increasingly imaginary – forms of governance to Uganda and to the world. Finally, however, the fact that the majority of the negatives were never printed suggests that whatever were the intended effects of official photographs in Amin’s Uganda, in practice, the performance of photographic techniques and archiving may have been equally politically significant.
A drinking party in 1963 precipitated a crisis over postcolonial Uganda’s sovereignty and the respectability of a new postcolonial ruling elite. Under Kampala’s multiracial veneer in the early 1960s lurked bawdy British youth culture and radical African youth politics. When Europeans at a party in the elite suburb of Tank Hill allegedly mocked African aspirations for urban respectability and political sovereignty, Youth Wing activists used the affair to elicit public expressions of anger at the collusion of conservative politicians and racist former colonisers. Prime Minister Milton Obote attempted to channel that anger into nationalist unity but soon found common cause with British diplomats in expelling intemperate youth from Uganda’s governing bureaucracy. The affair points to both the power and the limits of the affective politics of decolonisation as well as the relationship between youth wings and the politics of respectability in early postcolonial Africa.
As Uganda’s postcolonial leaders Milton Obote and Idi Amin sought to pin down Asians as legal and discursive subjects between 1969 and 1972, they invoked a contested administrative, political and social history to promote Africanisation initiatives. Traders targeted by the 1969 Trade Licensing Act in small towns such as Kabale reshaped malleable racial and legal categories in local administrative struggles over the control of urban space that did not map neatly onto policy-makers’ visions. Nevertheless, the perceived decisiveness of Milton Obote’s legislation and of Idi Amin’s subsequent expulsion decrees has obscured from subsequent narratives the messy politics of Uganda’s urban spaces. This article draws attention to the opportunities and limits of legal claim-making at the intersection of racial thought and urban governmentality during the Trade Licensing Act’s uneven implementation.
This essay—the introduction to a collection of essays on Idi Amin’s Uganda—illuminates the infrastructure of Amin’s dictatorship. It was through the technology of the news media that Amin’s officials found it possible to summon and direct the actions of Uganda’s people. The news media’s apparently extensive audience made it possible for the authorities to address particular demographic groups who would otherwise fall outside the reach of government bureaucracy. When government officials did actually engage with the real people they addressed, they did so with measuring tapes and typewriters close at hand. In the paper reports they filed, Amin’s bureaucrats tidied up complicated social situations, generating statistics that illuminated a particular constituency’s adherence to—or deviation from—the official directive. Uganda’s command economy was constituted through exhortations, inflated statistics, and other fictions on paper.
Chapters by Edgar C Taylor
Born out of contested conditions, Uganda was not granted the right to define itself in scholarly imaginations. 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’. 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’. Such assessments helped to perpetuate 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.
More than three decades later, this volume suggests that the terrain of debate has changed significantly. Rather than questioning the possibility of national unity, the contributors wrestle with how Ugandans have mobilised knowledge and social solidarity in what are often tense relationships with state power and ethno-national imaginations. The contributions show how the guiding imperative for many Ugandans has been 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. In so doing, they show how movements toward the decolonisation of knowledge and power in Uganda have not aimed toward a single spatial or temporal horizon.
The chapters in this volume constitute a provocation for scholars to find novel connections across the geographic, thematic, disciplinary, and institutional grooves through which so much academic knowledge usually flows.
This chapter examines how Luganda speakers used the English word ‘freedom’ in contestations over what a postcolonial social and political order should look like in Buganda Kingdom during the boycott movement of 1959-1960. Nationalist politicians, ethnic patriots, and ordinary subjects all employed a similar vocabulary of freedom, which was often translated with the Luganda word 'eddembe'. Charismatic activists with the backing of Kingdom Ministers pursued a populist campaign to redefine what freedom from colonial rule could mean in Buganda. However, populist activists, like their nationalist adversaries, failed to enforce a hegemonic meaning of freedom as they attempted to redirect Kiganda ideals of social well-being to fit their aspirations for individual capitalist accumulation. Activists hoped to marshal a combination of new media and disciplinary violence in order to direct how Ugandans would imagine freedom at a moment when British colonialism appeared to be in crisis. As the UNM’s boycott campaign grew and Kingdom officials prepared a unilateral declaration of independence, their followers subtly unsettled leaders' claims to a monopoly on political authority. In so doing, they drew on Buganda’s multilingual conceptual landscape as one of contestation rather than fixed meanings.
For decades, scholars of East Africa have lamented the disordered state of Uganda’s government archives, often assuming that a history of military coups, public disinterest and bureaucratic neglect has decimated much of the coun- try’s historical records. As this chapter will demonstrate, however, such fears are largely unfounded and in fact distort a far more interesting and uneven history of archives management and historical thought.
While it is true that archives in Uganda have not found sustenance in an enduring official conviction that the national past holds edifying, inspirational lessons for the present and future, much of the country’s government archives have escaped systematic destruction. Public attitudes, moreover, cannot be easily defined in terms of interest or disinterest, for the role of archives in offi- cial and popular appreciations of the past has been dynamic and subject to change. Over the past few years a cadre of dedicated librarians, archivists and records officers has been cataloguing and preserving archival documents across the country at a time when public discussion of post-colonial history has been gaining new valence in prominent forums. As the cataloguing, and in some cases digitisation, of records proceeds in national and district archives, scholars, the Ugandan government, donors and Ugandan publics face new dynamics of control over, and access to, historical documents in a changing relationship with a contested past.
The present authors have had the opportunity to participate in cataloguing efforts at the Uganda National Archives (una) in Entebbe and the Kabarole District Archives (kda) in Fort Portal, and this chapter draws from both on-site observations and archival research. It begins with a critical review of the history of archives in Uganda, before turning to a description of current cata- loguing projects at the una and kda. It concludes with some reflections on Uganda’s changing archival landscape.
Other Articles by Edgar C Taylor
https://www.awaazmagazine.com/volume-19/issue-2-volume-19/cover-story-issue-2-volume-19/1959-and-1972-boycott-expulsion-and-memory
As Uganda, Ugandan Asians and the world mark fifty years since Idi Amin’s expulsion decrees in 1972, it is important to remember other moments of dislocation and rupture such as the 1959 boycott of Asian owned shops in Buganda. Revisiting these histories can direct attention away from the mythologised figure of Idi Amin, and toward the contexts of British colonialism and capitalism that Africans and Asians navigated in tense times.
Books by Edgar C Taylor
Decolonization of knowledge has become a major issue in African Studies in recent years, brought to the fore by social movements such as #RhodesMustFall and #BlackLivesMatter. This timely book explores the politics and disputed character of knowledge production in colonial and postcolonial Uganda, where efforts to generate forms of knowledge and solidarity that transcend colonial epistemologies draw on long histories of resistance and refusal. Bringing together scholars from Africa, Europe and North America, the contributors in this volume analyse how knowledge has been created, mobilized, and contested across a wide range of Ugandan contexts. In so doing, they reveal how Ugandans have built, disputed, and reimagined institutions of authority and knowledge production in ways that disrupt the colonial frames that continue to shape scholarly analyses and state structures. From the politics of language and gender in Bakiga naming practices to ways of knowing among the Acholi, the hampering of critical scholarship by militarism and authoritarianism, and debates over the names of streets, lakes, mountains, and other public spaces, this book shows how scholars and a wide range of Ugandan activists are reimagining the politics of knowledge in Ugandan public life.
This booklet is one in a series of resources that we have termed the Makerere Success Series. This series is designed to provide students and faculty at Makerere and beyond with accessible, concise and affordable resources on a dozen essential skills for succeeding in academia. The first booklet in the series covers Critical Thinking. It is followed by booklets on Academic Writing and Plagiarism. Great care has been taken to ensure that the publications in this series are relevant, interesting and accessible. They are designed with the needs and interests of Ugandan university students and faculty in mind. However, they may be equally useful to scholars, authors, journalists and other professionals outside of the academy.
This booklet is one in a series of resources that we have termed the Makerere Success Series. This series is designed to provide students and faculty at Makerere and beyond with accessible, concise and affordable resources on a dozen essential skills for succeeding in academia. The first booklet in the series covers Critical Thinking. It is followed by booklets on Academic Writing and Plagiarism. Great care has been taken to ensure that the publications in this series are relevant, interesting and accessible. They are designed with the needs and interests of Ugandan university students and faculty in mind. However, they may be equally useful to scholars, authors, journalists and other professionals outside of the academy.
This booklet is one in a series of resources that we have termed the Makerere Success Series. This series is designed to provide students and faculty at Makerere and beyond with accessible, concise and affordable resources on a dozen essential skills for succeeding in academia. The first booklet in the series covers Critical Thinking. It is followed by booklets on Academic Writing and Plagiarism. Great care has been taken to ensure that the publications in this series are relevant, interesting and accessible. They are designed with the needs and interests of Ugandan university students and faculty in mind. However, they may be equally useful to scholars, authors, journalists and other professionals outside of the academy.
Conferences, Workshops by Edgar C Taylor
Presented by the Makerere University Department of History, Archaeology and Heritage Studies
31st January Dr A.B.K. Kasozi
2:00-4:00 pm
Abu Mayanja, MP: The Intellectual Star of Uganda's "Struggle" for Independence and the Search for a Liberal Democratic State, 1929-2005
Discussants: Prof Samwiri Lwanga-Lunyiigo and Dr Joseph Kasule (Makerere University)
6th March Gaku Moriguchi (Toyo University)
3:00-5:00pm
Urban Riots as “the Reality of the Virtual”: Politics and Historicity in Kampala, 2007-2011
Discussant: Dr Jacob Katumusiime (Makerere University)
13th March Dr Rhiannon Stephens (Columbia University)
2:00-4:00 pm
Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Book Talk
20th March Dr Rebecca Glade (Makerere University)
2:00-4:00pm
Striking Judges, Shari’a, and the Limits of Military Rule in Sudan, 1983-1985
Discussant: Anatoli Lwassampijja (Makerere University)
26th April M.A. Student Writing Workshop
10:00am-4:00pm
14th June Nelson Abiti (Uganda Museum); Mark Elliot, Rachel Hand, Dr Eva Namusoke (University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology); Derek R. Peterson (University of Michigan)
2:00-4:00 pm
Repositioning the Uganda Museum: A Report on Work in Progress
19th June Ph.D. Student Writing Workshop
10:30am-5:00pm
8th August Arif Elsaui (Sudan Facts Center for Journalism, Atar Magazine), Amar Jamal (Atar Magazine), Ahmed Nashadir (Atar Magazine), Dr Rebecca Glade (Makerere University)
2:00-4:00 pm
Contextualizing Sudan: Journalism in Wartime
21th Sept Dr Derek R. Peterson (University of Michigan)
2:00-4:00 pm
Making Revolutionary Film in Idi Amin’s Uganda: propaganda and peril
Discussant: Dr Anna Adima
20th Nov Dr Charlotte Mafumbo (Makerere University)
4:00-6:00 pm
Women in the Peace and Security landscape of the East African Region: Operationalization of the UNSCR 1325
Discussant: Dr Aili Mari Tripp (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Presented by the Makerere University Department of History, Archaeology and Heritage Studies
18 January
Dr Nicholas Tunanukye and Dr Simon Rutabajuuka (Makerere University)
Landmarks of Migrant Labour Along the Western Route in Uganda since the 1920s
Discussant: Prof Derek Peterson (University of Michigan)
22 February
Prof Hansjörg Dilger (Freie Universität Berlin)
Learning Morality, Inequalities, and Faith: Christian and Muslim Schools in Tanzania. Book Discussion
Discussant: Anatoli Lwassampijja (Makerere University)
1 March
Prof Jonny Steinberg (Yale University)
The Courtship of Winnie and Nelson Mandela
Discussant: Dr Florence Ebila (Makerere University)
10 March
Prof Emma Wild-Wood (University of Edinburgh) and George Mpanga (Independent Scholar)
Preparing the Archives of Apolo Kivebulaya for Publication
Discussant: Dr Deo Kannamwangi (Kyambogo University)
15 March
Esther Ginestet (Sciences Po Paris and Northwestern University)
Kisumu Ndogo: Kenya Luo Social and Intellectual Life in Kampala in Times of Decolonization, 1950s-1970
Discussant: Christopher Muhoozi (Makerere University)
22 March
Dr Kevin Donovan (University of Edinburgh)
The Making of Credible Citizenship in Decolonizing East Africa
Discussant: Dr Nicholas Tunanukye (Makerere University)
29 March
Prof Godfrey Asiimwe (Makerere University)
(Mis)management of Sub-Nationalism and Diversity in "Nations" The Case of Buganda in Uganda, 1897-1980. A Book Discussion
Discussants: Prof Edward Wamala (Makerere University), Dr Kabugo Merit (Makerere University), Dr Edgar Taylor (Makerere University)
31 March
Prof ABK Kasozi
The Politics of Higher Education in a Colonial Setting: The Controversial Sending of Abu Mayanja to King’s College, Cambridge by Sir Andrew Cohen
Discussant: Dr Simon Rutabajuuka and Dr Zaid Sekito
12 April
Dr Abudul Mahajubu (Mountains of the Moon University)
Colonial Tax Policy and the Reshaping or the Nubian Identity in Uganda: Unpacking the 1940 Luwalo Tax Riots in Buganda
Discussant: Prof Holly Hanson (Mount Holyoke College, emeritus)
26 April
Prof David Anderson (University of Warwick) and Prof Katherine Bruce-Lockhart (University of Waterloo)
Penal Legacies and Afterlives in East Africa: Histories of State Punishment in Kenya and Uganda since 1950
Discussant: Dr David Ngendo-Tshimba (Uganda Martyrs University)
28 April (with Department of Development Studies)
Prof Howard Stein (University of Michigan)
Institutionalizing Neoclassical Economics in Africa: Instruments,
Ideology and Implications
Discussant: Dr Susan Namirembe Kavuma
3 May
Dr Jacqueline Namukasa (Makerere University)
Gender and Representation: Uganda National Consultative Council 1979-80
Discussant: Prof Alicia Decker (Pennsylvania State University)
10 May
Dr Anusa Daimon (University of Malawi)
African Union Border Re-Affirmation Exercise and the Resultant Malawi/Mozambique Border Crisis in Makanjira: 2011 to the present
Discussant: TBA
21 June
Dr Jonathan Luke Melchiorre (Universidad de los Andes) and Dr Adrian Browne (Independent Scholar)
‘Spectres of the CIA’: Vietnam, US Imperialism, and Milton Obote’s Uganda, 1962-1971
Discussant: Dr Edgar Taylor (Makerere University)
Presented by the Makerere University Department of History, Archaeology and Heritage Studies
8th June - Dr Catherine Namono (University of the Witwatersrand) 'Rock
Art Heritage of Uganda: Understanding, Conservation and Management'.
Discussant: Dr Elizabeth Kyazike (Kyambogo University)
15th June - Dr Jochen Lingelbach (Universität Bayreuth) 'On the Edges of
Whiteness: Polish refugees from World War Two in Uganda'. Discussant:
Prof Samwiri Lwanga-Lunyiigo
29th June - Dr John Baligira (Makerere University) 'The Use and Abuse of
Local and National Citizenship in Kagadi District Since 1996'.
Discussant: Dr David Ngendo Tshimba (Uganda Martyrs University)
6th July - Dr Asmeret Mehari (Independent Scholar) 'African Communities,
Field Archaeology and Pedagogy'. Discussant: Herman Muwonge (Makerere
University)
20th July - Dr Pamela Khanakwa (Makerere University) 'History,
Nationalism and Power'. Discussant: Dr Benedito Machava (Yale
University)
3rd August - Dr Olutayo C. Adesina (University of Ibadan) 'Beyond
Imperial Eyes: Ibadan School of History and the Crossroads of
Knowledge'. Discussant: Dr Pamela Khanakwa (Makerere University)
23rd-26th August - CHUSS International Humanities Conference
https://chuss.mak.ac.ug/cic2022
7th September - Dr Henri Médard (Université Aix-Marseille) 'Beer, Boats
and Flies: Contested Property and Political Protest on Bussi Island,
1885-1925'. Discussant: Christopher Muhoozi (Makerere University)
21st September - Dr Michiel de Haas (Wageningen University) 'Cotton
imperialism in Africa: A Failed Colonial Ambition in Comparative
Perspective'. Discussant: Dr Simon Rutabajuuka (Makerere University)
28th September - Dr Charlotte Mafumbo (Makerere University) '"Rescuers"
The Uncelebrated and Unsung Heroes of the Civil War in Northern Uganda'.
Discussant: TBA
Presented by the Makerere Department of History, Archaeology and Heritage Studies School of Liberal and Performing Arts, College of Humanities and Social Sciences
September–December 2021
The Makerere History and Archaeology Seminar is hosted by the Department of History, Archaeology and Heritage Studies at Makerere University. The Seminar meets by Zoom on Wednesdays from 2:00 to 4:00 PM or from 3:00 to 5:00 PM (Kampala time). Zoom links will be made available one week prior to each seminar. For more information, contact Dr Edgar Taylor at [email protected]
29th September Dr Pamela Khanakwa (Makerere University)
2:00-4:00 pm To Relocate or Not?: Landslides and Risk Management in Bududa, Eastern Uganda
Discussant: Dr Andrew Ivaska (Concordia University)
13th October Dr Rhiannon Stephens (Columbia University)
*3:00-5:00 pm Motherhood Beyond Mothering in Uganda: A Political and Social History, c.700-1900
Discussant: Christopher Muhoozi (Makerere University)
27th October Dr Christopher Tounsel (Pennsylvania State University)
*3:00-5:00 pm Christianity is Now Your Tribe: Christian and Ethnic Politics in South Sudan
Discussant: Dr Christine Mbabazi Mpyangu (Makerere University)
10th November Dr Doreen Kembabazi (Ghent University)
2:00-4:00 pm The Afterlives of Slavery in Uganda
Discussant: Dr Abudul Mahajubu (Makerere University)
17th November Dr ABK Kasozi (Independent)
2:00-4:00 pm The Impact of the 1952 Makerere College Students' Strike on Higher Education Management in East Africa Up to 2000
Discussant: Dr Pamela Khanakwa (Makerere University)
8th December Dr Deogratius Kannamwangi (Kampala International University)
*3:00-5:00 pm From Education to Mis-Education: Reimagining the (Mis)Direction of the Catholic School System In Uganda, 1963–2007
Discussant: Dr Jay Carney (Creighton University)
Expulsions remake knowledge and experience of time, space and the body. However, they have largely been studied and theorized through histories of Europe or within contemporary global racial capitalism, sheared of its longer global histories. This special issue anchors the study of expulsions in historical experiences and conceptualizations from a variety of African contexts over time. Expulsions are tightly entwined with the formation of knowledge and power - including area studies and academic disciplines, national citizenship and the making of nation-states. This introduction charts the ways expulsions as time-bending and chronology-blurring processes are integral to the naturalization of communities, groups and the body as subjects of scholarly and political work. At the same time, it argues that expulsions are relational, violent processes that defy temporal bounding, move across spatial scales and unsettle epistemologies. Material landscapes are key sites through which expulsive processes are mediated, embedded and remembered, even as they are impinged upon by violence. This special issue argues that the study of expulsions opens conceptual questions about how knowledge, time and material forms are constituted.
The history of archival management in Uganda reveals the foundational relationship between austerity and colonial archival institutions. This article discusses how impoverishment and self-interested editing were central to the bureaucratization of colonial archives at their founding. Extreme austerity in the wake of structural adjustment in the 1980s accelerated archival decay while adding new uncertainties to archivists’ work. Postcolonial archivists’ strategies of risk management and repair work have helped to preserve archives from potentially nefarious editing by partisan officials and publics. However, neglect and decay have also constrained the circulation of archives in public life and have reinforced colonial institutional violence. These conditions of postcolonial institutions require continuous hazardous labour from individuals embedded in the margins of state bureaucracy. This article emphasizes the backstage of archival labour and the risks that archivists navigate in preserving – and managing the public life of – relics of contentious pasts.
This report describes the official photographic archives of Idi Amin's government held by the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (UBC). During his reign from 1971 to 1979, Idi Amin embraced visual media as a tool for archiving the achievements of populist military rule as his government sought to reorient Ugandans' relationship with the state. Only a handful of the resulting images were ever printed or seen, reflecting the regime's archival impulse undergirded by paranoia of unauthorized ways of seeing. The UBC's newly opened collection of over 60,000 negatives from Amin's photographers, alongside files at the Uganda National Archives, offers the first comprehensive opportunity to study the Ugandan state under Amin's dictatorship through the lens of its own documentarians.
In May 2019 we launched a special exhibition at the Uganda Museum in Kampala titled “The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin.” It consisted of 150 images made by government photographers in the 1970s. In this essay we explore how political history has been delimited in the Museum, and how these limitations shaped the exhibition we curated. From the time of its creation, the Museum's disparate and multifarious collections were exhibited as ethnographic specimens, stripped of historical context. Spatially and organizationally, “The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin” turned its back on the ethnographic architecture of the Uganda Museum. The transformation of these vivid, evocative, aesthetically appealing photographs into historical evidence of atrocity was intensely discomfiting. We have been obliged to organize the exhibition around categories that did not correspond with the logic of the photographic archive, with the architecture of the Museum, or with the experiences of the people who lived through the 1970s. The exhibition has made history, but not entirely in ways that we chose.
This article examines a photographic archive that has been recently identified in the stores of the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation in Kampala. The archive consists of some eighty-five thousand black and white negatives that were taken by various official photographic units, government information officers and commercial photographers – all of whom worked under the umbrella of the Ministry of Information – most of them during the years of President Idi Amin’s rule (1971–79). Significantly, the vast majority of these negatives appear never to have been used to make prints. As a result, their images have been literally never seen before. The archive significantly extends our understanding of official photography in Uganda, and in postcolonial Africa. In particular, it shows how infrastructures of administrative photography that were established during the colonial era, and which resulted in the medium becoming central to an imagined ‘exhibitionary complex’, continued to hold into the 1970s. The archive also highlights how these same infrastructures became increasingly complicated during the Amin years, both as the regime became more invested in photography as a potential tool for increasing the ‘momentum’ of its development agenda and as it became more reliant on other forms of mass media as a means for projecting its – increasingly imaginary – forms of governance to Uganda and to the world. Finally, however, the fact that the majority of the negatives were never printed suggests that whatever were the intended effects of official photographs in Amin’s Uganda, in practice, the performance of photographic techniques and archiving may have been equally politically significant.
A drinking party in 1963 precipitated a crisis over postcolonial Uganda’s sovereignty and the respectability of a new postcolonial ruling elite. Under Kampala’s multiracial veneer in the early 1960s lurked bawdy British youth culture and radical African youth politics. When Europeans at a party in the elite suburb of Tank Hill allegedly mocked African aspirations for urban respectability and political sovereignty, Youth Wing activists used the affair to elicit public expressions of anger at the collusion of conservative politicians and racist former colonisers. Prime Minister Milton Obote attempted to channel that anger into nationalist unity but soon found common cause with British diplomats in expelling intemperate youth from Uganda’s governing bureaucracy. The affair points to both the power and the limits of the affective politics of decolonisation as well as the relationship between youth wings and the politics of respectability in early postcolonial Africa.
As Uganda’s postcolonial leaders Milton Obote and Idi Amin sought to pin down Asians as legal and discursive subjects between 1969 and 1972, they invoked a contested administrative, political and social history to promote Africanisation initiatives. Traders targeted by the 1969 Trade Licensing Act in small towns such as Kabale reshaped malleable racial and legal categories in local administrative struggles over the control of urban space that did not map neatly onto policy-makers’ visions. Nevertheless, the perceived decisiveness of Milton Obote’s legislation and of Idi Amin’s subsequent expulsion decrees has obscured from subsequent narratives the messy politics of Uganda’s urban spaces. This article draws attention to the opportunities and limits of legal claim-making at the intersection of racial thought and urban governmentality during the Trade Licensing Act’s uneven implementation.
This essay—the introduction to a collection of essays on Idi Amin’s Uganda—illuminates the infrastructure of Amin’s dictatorship. It was through the technology of the news media that Amin’s officials found it possible to summon and direct the actions of Uganda’s people. The news media’s apparently extensive audience made it possible for the authorities to address particular demographic groups who would otherwise fall outside the reach of government bureaucracy. When government officials did actually engage with the real people they addressed, they did so with measuring tapes and typewriters close at hand. In the paper reports they filed, Amin’s bureaucrats tidied up complicated social situations, generating statistics that illuminated a particular constituency’s adherence to—or deviation from—the official directive. Uganda’s command economy was constituted through exhortations, inflated statistics, and other fictions on paper.
Born out of contested conditions, Uganda was not granted the right to define itself in scholarly imaginations. 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’. 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’. Such assessments helped to perpetuate 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.
More than three decades later, this volume suggests that the terrain of debate has changed significantly. Rather than questioning the possibility of national unity, the contributors wrestle with how Ugandans have mobilised knowledge and social solidarity in what are often tense relationships with state power and ethno-national imaginations. The contributions show how the guiding imperative for many Ugandans has been 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. In so doing, they show how movements toward the decolonisation of knowledge and power in Uganda have not aimed toward a single spatial or temporal horizon.
The chapters in this volume constitute a provocation for scholars to find novel connections across the geographic, thematic, disciplinary, and institutional grooves through which so much academic knowledge usually flows.
This chapter examines how Luganda speakers used the English word ‘freedom’ in contestations over what a postcolonial social and political order should look like in Buganda Kingdom during the boycott movement of 1959-1960. Nationalist politicians, ethnic patriots, and ordinary subjects all employed a similar vocabulary of freedom, which was often translated with the Luganda word 'eddembe'. Charismatic activists with the backing of Kingdom Ministers pursued a populist campaign to redefine what freedom from colonial rule could mean in Buganda. However, populist activists, like their nationalist adversaries, failed to enforce a hegemonic meaning of freedom as they attempted to redirect Kiganda ideals of social well-being to fit their aspirations for individual capitalist accumulation. Activists hoped to marshal a combination of new media and disciplinary violence in order to direct how Ugandans would imagine freedom at a moment when British colonialism appeared to be in crisis. As the UNM’s boycott campaign grew and Kingdom officials prepared a unilateral declaration of independence, their followers subtly unsettled leaders' claims to a monopoly on political authority. In so doing, they drew on Buganda’s multilingual conceptual landscape as one of contestation rather than fixed meanings.
For decades, scholars of East Africa have lamented the disordered state of Uganda’s government archives, often assuming that a history of military coups, public disinterest and bureaucratic neglect has decimated much of the coun- try’s historical records. As this chapter will demonstrate, however, such fears are largely unfounded and in fact distort a far more interesting and uneven history of archives management and historical thought.
While it is true that archives in Uganda have not found sustenance in an enduring official conviction that the national past holds edifying, inspirational lessons for the present and future, much of the country’s government archives have escaped systematic destruction. Public attitudes, moreover, cannot be easily defined in terms of interest or disinterest, for the role of archives in offi- cial and popular appreciations of the past has been dynamic and subject to change. Over the past few years a cadre of dedicated librarians, archivists and records officers has been cataloguing and preserving archival documents across the country at a time when public discussion of post-colonial history has been gaining new valence in prominent forums. As the cataloguing, and in some cases digitisation, of records proceeds in national and district archives, scholars, the Ugandan government, donors and Ugandan publics face new dynamics of control over, and access to, historical documents in a changing relationship with a contested past.
The present authors have had the opportunity to participate in cataloguing efforts at the Uganda National Archives (una) in Entebbe and the Kabarole District Archives (kda) in Fort Portal, and this chapter draws from both on-site observations and archival research. It begins with a critical review of the history of archives in Uganda, before turning to a description of current cata- loguing projects at the una and kda. It concludes with some reflections on Uganda’s changing archival landscape.
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As Uganda, Ugandan Asians and the world mark fifty years since Idi Amin’s expulsion decrees in 1972, it is important to remember other moments of dislocation and rupture such as the 1959 boycott of Asian owned shops in Buganda. Revisiting these histories can direct attention away from the mythologised figure of Idi Amin, and toward the contexts of British colonialism and capitalism that Africans and Asians navigated in tense times.
Decolonization of knowledge has become a major issue in African Studies in recent years, brought to the fore by social movements such as #RhodesMustFall and #BlackLivesMatter. This timely book explores the politics and disputed character of knowledge production in colonial and postcolonial Uganda, where efforts to generate forms of knowledge and solidarity that transcend colonial epistemologies draw on long histories of resistance and refusal. Bringing together scholars from Africa, Europe and North America, the contributors in this volume analyse how knowledge has been created, mobilized, and contested across a wide range of Ugandan contexts. In so doing, they reveal how Ugandans have built, disputed, and reimagined institutions of authority and knowledge production in ways that disrupt the colonial frames that continue to shape scholarly analyses and state structures. From the politics of language and gender in Bakiga naming practices to ways of knowing among the Acholi, the hampering of critical scholarship by militarism and authoritarianism, and debates over the names of streets, lakes, mountains, and other public spaces, this book shows how scholars and a wide range of Ugandan activists are reimagining the politics of knowledge in Ugandan public life.
This booklet is one in a series of resources that we have termed the Makerere Success Series. This series is designed to provide students and faculty at Makerere and beyond with accessible, concise and affordable resources on a dozen essential skills for succeeding in academia. The first booklet in the series covers Critical Thinking. It is followed by booklets on Academic Writing and Plagiarism. Great care has been taken to ensure that the publications in this series are relevant, interesting and accessible. They are designed with the needs and interests of Ugandan university students and faculty in mind. However, they may be equally useful to scholars, authors, journalists and other professionals outside of the academy.
This booklet is one in a series of resources that we have termed the Makerere Success Series. This series is designed to provide students and faculty at Makerere and beyond with accessible, concise and affordable resources on a dozen essential skills for succeeding in academia. The first booklet in the series covers Critical Thinking. It is followed by booklets on Academic Writing and Plagiarism. Great care has been taken to ensure that the publications in this series are relevant, interesting and accessible. They are designed with the needs and interests of Ugandan university students and faculty in mind. However, they may be equally useful to scholars, authors, journalists and other professionals outside of the academy.
This booklet is one in a series of resources that we have termed the Makerere Success Series. This series is designed to provide students and faculty at Makerere and beyond with accessible, concise and affordable resources on a dozen essential skills for succeeding in academia. The first booklet in the series covers Critical Thinking. It is followed by booklets on Academic Writing and Plagiarism. Great care has been taken to ensure that the publications in this series are relevant, interesting and accessible. They are designed with the needs and interests of Ugandan university students and faculty in mind. However, they may be equally useful to scholars, authors, journalists and other professionals outside of the academy.
Presented by the Makerere University Department of History, Archaeology and Heritage Studies
31st January Dr A.B.K. Kasozi
2:00-4:00 pm
Abu Mayanja, MP: The Intellectual Star of Uganda's "Struggle" for Independence and the Search for a Liberal Democratic State, 1929-2005
Discussants: Prof Samwiri Lwanga-Lunyiigo and Dr Joseph Kasule (Makerere University)
6th March Gaku Moriguchi (Toyo University)
3:00-5:00pm
Urban Riots as “the Reality of the Virtual”: Politics and Historicity in Kampala, 2007-2011
Discussant: Dr Jacob Katumusiime (Makerere University)
13th March Dr Rhiannon Stephens (Columbia University)
2:00-4:00 pm
Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Book Talk
20th March Dr Rebecca Glade (Makerere University)
2:00-4:00pm
Striking Judges, Shari’a, and the Limits of Military Rule in Sudan, 1983-1985
Discussant: Anatoli Lwassampijja (Makerere University)
26th April M.A. Student Writing Workshop
10:00am-4:00pm
14th June Nelson Abiti (Uganda Museum); Mark Elliot, Rachel Hand, Dr Eva Namusoke (University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology); Derek R. Peterson (University of Michigan)
2:00-4:00 pm
Repositioning the Uganda Museum: A Report on Work in Progress
19th June Ph.D. Student Writing Workshop
10:30am-5:00pm
8th August Arif Elsaui (Sudan Facts Center for Journalism, Atar Magazine), Amar Jamal (Atar Magazine), Ahmed Nashadir (Atar Magazine), Dr Rebecca Glade (Makerere University)
2:00-4:00 pm
Contextualizing Sudan: Journalism in Wartime
21th Sept Dr Derek R. Peterson (University of Michigan)
2:00-4:00 pm
Making Revolutionary Film in Idi Amin’s Uganda: propaganda and peril
Discussant: Dr Anna Adima
20th Nov Dr Charlotte Mafumbo (Makerere University)
4:00-6:00 pm
Women in the Peace and Security landscape of the East African Region: Operationalization of the UNSCR 1325
Discussant: Dr Aili Mari Tripp (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Presented by the Makerere University Department of History, Archaeology and Heritage Studies
18 January
Dr Nicholas Tunanukye and Dr Simon Rutabajuuka (Makerere University)
Landmarks of Migrant Labour Along the Western Route in Uganda since the 1920s
Discussant: Prof Derek Peterson (University of Michigan)
22 February
Prof Hansjörg Dilger (Freie Universität Berlin)
Learning Morality, Inequalities, and Faith: Christian and Muslim Schools in Tanzania. Book Discussion
Discussant: Anatoli Lwassampijja (Makerere University)
1 March
Prof Jonny Steinberg (Yale University)
The Courtship of Winnie and Nelson Mandela
Discussant: Dr Florence Ebila (Makerere University)
10 March
Prof Emma Wild-Wood (University of Edinburgh) and George Mpanga (Independent Scholar)
Preparing the Archives of Apolo Kivebulaya for Publication
Discussant: Dr Deo Kannamwangi (Kyambogo University)
15 March
Esther Ginestet (Sciences Po Paris and Northwestern University)
Kisumu Ndogo: Kenya Luo Social and Intellectual Life in Kampala in Times of Decolonization, 1950s-1970
Discussant: Christopher Muhoozi (Makerere University)
22 March
Dr Kevin Donovan (University of Edinburgh)
The Making of Credible Citizenship in Decolonizing East Africa
Discussant: Dr Nicholas Tunanukye (Makerere University)
29 March
Prof Godfrey Asiimwe (Makerere University)
(Mis)management of Sub-Nationalism and Diversity in "Nations" The Case of Buganda in Uganda, 1897-1980. A Book Discussion
Discussants: Prof Edward Wamala (Makerere University), Dr Kabugo Merit (Makerere University), Dr Edgar Taylor (Makerere University)
31 March
Prof ABK Kasozi
The Politics of Higher Education in a Colonial Setting: The Controversial Sending of Abu Mayanja to King’s College, Cambridge by Sir Andrew Cohen
Discussant: Dr Simon Rutabajuuka and Dr Zaid Sekito
12 April
Dr Abudul Mahajubu (Mountains of the Moon University)
Colonial Tax Policy and the Reshaping or the Nubian Identity in Uganda: Unpacking the 1940 Luwalo Tax Riots in Buganda
Discussant: Prof Holly Hanson (Mount Holyoke College, emeritus)
26 April
Prof David Anderson (University of Warwick) and Prof Katherine Bruce-Lockhart (University of Waterloo)
Penal Legacies and Afterlives in East Africa: Histories of State Punishment in Kenya and Uganda since 1950
Discussant: Dr David Ngendo-Tshimba (Uganda Martyrs University)
28 April (with Department of Development Studies)
Prof Howard Stein (University of Michigan)
Institutionalizing Neoclassical Economics in Africa: Instruments,
Ideology and Implications
Discussant: Dr Susan Namirembe Kavuma
3 May
Dr Jacqueline Namukasa (Makerere University)
Gender and Representation: Uganda National Consultative Council 1979-80
Discussant: Prof Alicia Decker (Pennsylvania State University)
10 May
Dr Anusa Daimon (University of Malawi)
African Union Border Re-Affirmation Exercise and the Resultant Malawi/Mozambique Border Crisis in Makanjira: 2011 to the present
Discussant: TBA
21 June
Dr Jonathan Luke Melchiorre (Universidad de los Andes) and Dr Adrian Browne (Independent Scholar)
‘Spectres of the CIA’: Vietnam, US Imperialism, and Milton Obote’s Uganda, 1962-1971
Discussant: Dr Edgar Taylor (Makerere University)
Presented by the Makerere University Department of History, Archaeology and Heritage Studies
8th June - Dr Catherine Namono (University of the Witwatersrand) 'Rock
Art Heritage of Uganda: Understanding, Conservation and Management'.
Discussant: Dr Elizabeth Kyazike (Kyambogo University)
15th June - Dr Jochen Lingelbach (Universität Bayreuth) 'On the Edges of
Whiteness: Polish refugees from World War Two in Uganda'. Discussant:
Prof Samwiri Lwanga-Lunyiigo
29th June - Dr John Baligira (Makerere University) 'The Use and Abuse of
Local and National Citizenship in Kagadi District Since 1996'.
Discussant: Dr David Ngendo Tshimba (Uganda Martyrs University)
6th July - Dr Asmeret Mehari (Independent Scholar) 'African Communities,
Field Archaeology and Pedagogy'. Discussant: Herman Muwonge (Makerere
University)
20th July - Dr Pamela Khanakwa (Makerere University) 'History,
Nationalism and Power'. Discussant: Dr Benedito Machava (Yale
University)
3rd August - Dr Olutayo C. Adesina (University of Ibadan) 'Beyond
Imperial Eyes: Ibadan School of History and the Crossroads of
Knowledge'. Discussant: Dr Pamela Khanakwa (Makerere University)
23rd-26th August - CHUSS International Humanities Conference
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7th September - Dr Henri Médard (Université Aix-Marseille) 'Beer, Boats
and Flies: Contested Property and Political Protest on Bussi Island,
1885-1925'. Discussant: Christopher Muhoozi (Makerere University)
21st September - Dr Michiel de Haas (Wageningen University) 'Cotton
imperialism in Africa: A Failed Colonial Ambition in Comparative
Perspective'. Discussant: Dr Simon Rutabajuuka (Makerere University)
28th September - Dr Charlotte Mafumbo (Makerere University) '"Rescuers"
The Uncelebrated and Unsung Heroes of the Civil War in Northern Uganda'.
Discussant: TBA
Presented by the Makerere Department of History, Archaeology and Heritage Studies School of Liberal and Performing Arts, College of Humanities and Social Sciences
September–December 2021
The Makerere History and Archaeology Seminar is hosted by the Department of History, Archaeology and Heritage Studies at Makerere University. The Seminar meets by Zoom on Wednesdays from 2:00 to 4:00 PM or from 3:00 to 5:00 PM (Kampala time). Zoom links will be made available one week prior to each seminar. For more information, contact Dr Edgar Taylor at [email protected]
29th September Dr Pamela Khanakwa (Makerere University)
2:00-4:00 pm To Relocate or Not?: Landslides and Risk Management in Bududa, Eastern Uganda
Discussant: Dr Andrew Ivaska (Concordia University)
13th October Dr Rhiannon Stephens (Columbia University)
*3:00-5:00 pm Motherhood Beyond Mothering in Uganda: A Political and Social History, c.700-1900
Discussant: Christopher Muhoozi (Makerere University)
27th October Dr Christopher Tounsel (Pennsylvania State University)
*3:00-5:00 pm Christianity is Now Your Tribe: Christian and Ethnic Politics in South Sudan
Discussant: Dr Christine Mbabazi Mpyangu (Makerere University)
10th November Dr Doreen Kembabazi (Ghent University)
2:00-4:00 pm The Afterlives of Slavery in Uganda
Discussant: Dr Abudul Mahajubu (Makerere University)
17th November Dr ABK Kasozi (Independent)
2:00-4:00 pm The Impact of the 1952 Makerere College Students' Strike on Higher Education Management in East Africa Up to 2000
Discussant: Dr Pamela Khanakwa (Makerere University)
8th December Dr Deogratius Kannamwangi (Kampala International University)
*3:00-5:00 pm From Education to Mis-Education: Reimagining the (Mis)Direction of the Catholic School System In Uganda, 1963–2007
Discussant: Dr Jay Carney (Creighton University)
Expulsions: Histories, Geographies, Memories
17-18 August 2017
Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA), University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
Expulsion implies an unrealizable project of both physical and conceptual erasure. The forced removal of a person or people from territorial boundaries by a state or people who claim to control that territory (cf. Henkaerts 1995) is an old expression of sovereignty and racial differentiation that has found wide use in the postcolonial world. The word implies the identification and removal of particular people or groups who are already inside or constitutive of a society and whose embededness must be violently dismantled. In the broadest terms, expulsions may be the result of state action or precipitated by collective violence in which people identify and seek to remove particular groups from their communities. Expulsions are thus often accompanied by other forms of violence and incomplete efforts to remove an internal other.
This conference will examine relationships between the physical expulsion of people and the expulsion of conceptual worlds, knowledge, or memory from understandings of shared pasts. Expulsions may appear to produce ruptures with the past and to dramatically transform the geographies through which places and communities are imagined. However, expulsions do not redefine categories such as insider and outsider in a historical, cultural, or political vacuum. Our approach considers multiple geographies and temporalities of expulsions across contexts while reflecting on the forms of knowledge that expulsions generate and suppress. The conference will be an occasion to reflect on the conceptual work that the idea of expulsion does in framing the displacement of people, ideas, and histories in the postcolonial world.
What are the relationships between physical and conceptual expulsions? Why do they incite or not incite one another in different contexts? How do different approaches to scale shape understandings of the global geographies of expulsion? Do other forms of violence, such as genocide or internment, require different provocations from those that spur expulsions? What are the relationships between histories of African political thought, colonialism, and neo-liberalism in shaping postcolonial expulsions? How do people mould their material, social, and intellectual worlds after expulsions?
Papers may focus on, but are not limited to, the following themes:
1. Forms of forgetting and remembering that accompany expulsions
2. Relationships between intellectual and institutional histories of race and exclusion
3. Distinctions between expulsions and other expressions of sovereignty
4. Expulsions and the reconfiguration of space and landscape
5. Global geographies of racial exclusion and their histories
6. Temporalities of expulsion, including histories of expulsion in colonial and precolonial pasts
7. Colonialism, nationalism, and racial hierarchies in the framing of expulsions
Reframing Knowledge Production on 1970s Uganda
February 5, 2011; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
Hosted by the African History and Anthropology Workshop
Scholars of Africa regularly cast the 1970s in Uganda as a transitional period in the country's history as well as a symbol of Africa's postcolonial ruination and failed struggle for cultural and economic independence. Transnational mythologies of Idi Amin in film, music, and literature have produced a rich, if highly questionable, body of knowledge on his rule. However, the 1970s have produced remarkably little scholarly consensus. Scholars struggle to move beyond worn-out chronologies and seemingly contradictory generalizations of social fragmentation, state collapse, and economic decline alongside cultural self-assertion, national pride, and economic empowerment.
However, Ugandans had remarkably diverse experiences in and of the 1970s that they have documented, commemorated, and remembered in different ways. Recent work has shown that the 1970s saw novel opportunities for Ugandans to re-imagine gender relations, conjure political constituencies, develop trading networks, and reframe racial knowledge. These works have equally shown the challenges faced toward such ends as well as the violence that characterized so many spheres of social life during these years. Likewise, Ugandans have constructed the 1970s as an object of knowledge through a multiplicity of forms that contribute to an array of competing historical projects.
This conference will consider creative work Ugandans have pursued in and on the 1970s. We welcome papers from faculty and graduate students that examine issues pertinent to this important period, including those that may not be strictly bounded temporally or geographically to 1970s Uganda but that consider how we have come to know about this decade. Scholars from all disciplines and those working across disciplinary boundaries are encouraged to apply.