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- Convenors:
-
Florence Brisset-Foucault
(IMAF)
Justin Willis (Durham University)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Pamela Khanakwa
(Makerere University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Streams:
- History (x) Futures (y)
- Location:
- Neues Seminargebäude, Seminarraum 24
- Sessions:
- Saturday 3 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
This panel accounts for the multiple visions of a Ugandan future which were expressed and discussed after the fall of Idi Amin in April 1979. It seeks to showcase the ways in which marginalized actors made sense of this period and embraced political change in the pursuit of their own agendas.
Long Abstract:
On 11th April 1979, a broadcast went out on Radio Uganda announcing that Kampala had been "liberated" and now in the hands of the Uganda National Liberation Front. Seventeen years after independence - years that had seen the abrogation of the constitution, a military coup and terrifying violence - Ugandans had the opportunity to start again. The unhappy end to those turbulent months - the deeply flawed elections of December 1980 that brought president Obote back to power - has meant that the period has been largely ignored in scholarship and remembered as a time of wasted opportunities. This panel seeks to challenge that presentation, and to decenter our gaze away from ruling elites and Kampala's politics to account for the ways in which marginalized actors - women, "stayees" who had remained in the country under Amin, local leaders from other parts of Uganda, religious actors and ordinary people - made sense of this period and embraced political change in the pursuit of their own social and political agendas. For a few months, ideas about what the nation was, what it should be, and how it should be governed, were open for discussions. Ugandans pondered and argued - and took action - in pursuit of multiple visions of a Ugandan future. But not everyone had an equal voice. This panel aims to contribute more widely to a reflection on the meaning of political change and offer an unusual window into the breadth and richness of political thought in post-independence Africa.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Saturday 3 June, 2023, -Anatoli Lwassampijja (Makerere University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the patterns of gender exclusion in the exile politics that defined Uganda’s institutional future after Amin’s fall. Women were silenced in the foundational Moshi conference, despite their part in the liberation struggle. Some rationalized this exclusion while others resisted it.
Paper long abstract:
With over ninety delegates attending the Moshi Unity conference, there were no women- amazingly for what was supposed to be a key event which would bring Ugandans together to discuss the national future. Yet despite that exclusion, in the 1980s male politicians often instrumentalised the plight of voiceless women and claimed political legitimacy by presenting themselves as the benefactors of women who had been widowed in the war. This paper focusses on the role of women and the gender dynamics of transitional politics. Drawing on oral interviews, archival documents and newspaper /radio reports, this paper asks why it was that no women were present at this crucial conference, what the apparent absence of women at Moshi meant and how their concerns, views and positions were represented (or ignored) by the men present. It further argues that while prominent women at the time willingly rationalised their own marginalisation, not all women accepted this exclusion. Sources show that some women actually partook in the liberation struggle - however their activities seem to be have been silenced (or forgotten) in scholarship about this time, and have vanished from the recollection of prominent men who now recall this as a time of elite partisan politics which were all about men generically referred to as “men of substance”. I argue that the exclusion of women from key meetings and institutions was symptomatic of a process of consultation and state-building that was profoundly elitist and exclusive – dominated by the voices of an exile male elite.
Jacqueline Namukasa (Makerere University)
Paper short abstract:
Little scholarly attention has been given to women representation in Uganda’s pre-1986 legislatures; to redress that, I explain how and why women were excluded from negotiations and state-building structures in post-Amin transitional government (1979-1980).
Paper long abstract:
This paper exemplifies how and why women exclusion occurred in discourse and practice in post-Amin’s transitional government (1979-1980). With Idi Amin’s fall in April 1979, Ugandans got an opportunity to start again. 1979-80 was a period of opportunities, a state-building moment that forged institutional and political pathways for the years to come. The formation of the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF) and the National Consultative Council (NCC) were attempts at state building guided by the famous “Moshi spirit” of unity and democracy. However, despite the UNLF rhetoric that extended to women, all the NCC members selected at Moshi were men. Moreover, when it came to expanding the NCC, both the process of the nomination and the attitudes of the “electorates” who chose new members ensured that all but one of the 60 were men. Building on evidence from primary and secondary sources, the chapter argues that apart from espousing women representation, UNLF structures did not create space for women’s opinion, as unity and democracy were imagined in terms of consensus among elite men. It concludes that women played a very limited role in the NCC legislature despite the UNLF members plans for special representation of women in their interim government.
Key words: Gender, NCC, Exclusion, Representation, UNLF
Evarist Ngabirano (Mountains of the Moon University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how the elites in politics of the 1979/80 periods debated and mobilized in ways that reflected personal and foreign interests. It argues that this can be understood from the political context of the time.
Paper long abstract:
Towards the end of the liberation war of 1979, Uganda’s elites gathered at Moshi in Tanzania to form a government of national unity. The legislative arm of government was constituted in the National Consultative Council (NCC), which debated issues of national unity. However, while the elites debated and mobilized fellow countrymen, the Moshi ideals got compromised in favor of personal gains and foreign interests. This inclination could be explained from the political context of the time in which returnees looked beyond Uganda for legitimacy and support. The existence of rival factions based on ethnicity, religion and ideology upon which the elites derived their rhetoric and mobilizing power compounded this situation. The returnees were not the only elites in politics, later the NCC would expand to include various shades of representation that did not relate with the exilic experience. However, in a similar fashion than the exiles, the expanded membership continued to reproduce factional politics driven by personal and foreign interests.
I deploy social sciences methodologies to study primary and secondary sources to answer the following questions: What were the dynamics within the NCC? Who set the agenda? What was the background of those who were NCC members, in terms of education, experience and political orientation? Did the expansion of the NCC under Binaisa significantly change its composition, or the dynamics within it? How were decisions made by the NCC, and did this change over time? Was the NCC able to implement its decisions?
Florence Brisset-Foucault (IMAF)
Paper short abstract:
After the fall of Amin, Catholic and Ganda intellectuals entered a struggle to define the meaning of political change. This talk showcases alternative visions of Uganda’s fate in circulation at the time and calls for a more precise analysis of the parameters of voice in moments of liberalization.
Paper long abstract:
This talk is focused on some of the actors who were marginalized in the process of the political reinvention of Uganda that took place after the fall of Idi Amin, despite their centrality in colonial and postcolonial politics: the Catholic Church and Buganda intellectuals. It analyses the ways in which these activists and intellectuals, most of them “stayees”, used the press in order to enter a struggle to redefine the nature and implications of this major moment of political change. These actors saw 1979 as a moment of opportunity to retake the mantle of political agendas that had been pursued in the early 1960s but more or less abandoned under Obote and Amin. The political, social and economic conditions, however, had changed; and a new generation of intellectuals had come to age under the hardship but also the opportunities opened under Amin. This talk thus advocates for a sociological approach of moments of “liberalization”, that observes with a finer grain the social conditions of voice. Not everyone was in a position to print and publish ideas at the time, and not everyone’s ideas were recognized in the same way. Based on press archives and interviews, this research asks: how can we explain these inequalities, and what do they reveal on the social structure in existence in Uganda at a time of major political disruption? It also aims at showcasing the plurality of the visions of Uganda’s past and future in circulation at this period and interrogates their history.
Justin Willis (Durham University)
Paper short abstract:
Multiple, rival, Ugandan actors sought to to draw on external support in their attempts to remake Uganda’s future in the months after Amin’s fall. This paper argues that this was a politics of extraversion and was also characterized by misunderstandings and disappointment on all sides.
Paper long abstract:
When an assortment of exiled Ugandans gathered briefly in the Tanzanian town of Moshi in March 1979, the focus of their discussion was apparently on Uganda. Yet the conference was in many ways a foreign policy exercise, aimed at an international audience - both for the exiles who organized it and attended, and for those non-Ugandans who in various ways helped to produce the conference as an event: it was part of a politics that was extraverted, as well as exilic.
The meeting at Moshi set the tone for a period of politics that was rhetorically focussed on the idea of Ugandan unity but constantly looked beyond Uganda for resources and legitimacy. Rival factions and individuals constantly sought the approval and support of governments and organizations beyond Uganda as they vied for power within Uganda.
Their manoeuvrings were characterised by misjudgements as well as by ambition; and their relations with potential external allies and sponsors appear as a story of mutual misunderstandings, not least because of a chronic tendency on all sides to misunderstand both their own power and that of others. External involvement in Uganda in 1979-80 might be seen as a vindication for a ‘realist’ view of foreign policy – those in Uganda, and external actors, were all primarily concerned with their own direct political interests. But this paper also asks whether their ‘realism’ was confused or based on miscalculations – for ‘interests’, whether national, factional, or individual were often contested and unclear.
Agatha Alidri (Gulu University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the role of women, authority and employment under the Uganda National Liberation Front in Acholiland in the period 1979-1980. It attempts to explain how despite their invisibility in politics, they continued to exhibit resilience during this period of political uncertainty.
Paper long abstract:
This talk aims at interrogating and documenting women in politics, authority, and employment in Acholiland under the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF) Government (1979-80). Women's affairs were not a national priority, and given limited scholarly and media coverage as Government focused on national rehabilitation. No government affirmative institutional arrangement was available for the inclusion of women politics and employment. In Acholiland, women, authority, and government employment under the UNLF was not widely documented. Empirical material for this work is majorly from the interview materials, newspapers, archival materials and secondary sources covering the period 1979-1980 collected between April and November 2022 to retell women’s experiences. Minimal participation of women in national and local politics, and employment was generally observed as a trend in post-colonial Uganda. Despite this general trend, some women in exile were visible in politics and employment abroad and on return home. Women used political and social networks, and family connections as social capital to maneuver public space, civil society and cultural space. They had influence as household roles shifted with the disappearance and the exiling of their husbands during Idi Amin’s regime. The after-effects of Amin's regime changed things, rather than the UNLF which had no national agenda for women. Shift in the social and political dynamics due to the Amin’s military regime, and the way elite men were affected by the regime, pushed women into the public sphere.
Julius Kaka (Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.)
Paper short abstract:
This study describes Acholi leaders' strategies for shaping political leadership and attempts to delineate its impact on the nation's political development. It contends that the usage of several agents at the time allowed for agreement on unification and a workable framework of leadership.
Paper long abstract:
Following Idi Amin's demise in 1979, creating and re-configuring Uganda's political framework in the interests of all Ugandans became a national priority. Every region had difficulties left over from the previous administration with each imagining different means to dealing with them. For Acholi leaders, mechanisms of aggregating unity and a working framework of leadership were; first, putting together Acholi leaders' unified front to maintain neutrality in this period's power struggles. Second, mobilizing and backing Lule and later Binaisa to take leadership of the NCC and presidency. This way, they sought to have credible leadership to save the nation from the violent political system that Obote and Amin left behind, one that also violated human rights.
Acholi leaders utilized multiple agents -the police, military, DP, liberal UPC members and leaders in Buganda Kingdom, to covertly influence decision making on leadership at the Moshi Conference. And, to assure the strategy's success, Semei Nyanzi discreetly contributed monies to conduct Lule's political activities. Calculations to negotiate and shape NCC and national leadership is an important dimension of Acholi politics and intellectual history that is overshadowed by narratives of war and violence. Nevertheless, Acholi leaders’ efforts to mobilize for unity were short lived. But how could dialectical tensions in negotiations and a political context marked by elite politics and ethnicity result in unity? Based on interviews with former NCC members in Acoliland, the paper discusses strategies used to produce convergence of ideas of unity and peace among the Acholi, DP, Buganda and liberal UPC members.
Moses Akugizibwe (Mountain of the Moon University)
Paper short abstract:
What kind of government structures did the UNLF create at local level around Uganda – and what did those structures do? This paper discusses what was called the District Executive Committee in Tooro, western Uganda – asking who its members were, what they sought to do, and what they achieved.
Paper long abstract:
The District Executive Committee (DEC) was the key structure of the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF) in what was then called Tooro District, in western Uganda. At a national level, the UNLF government was dominated by an elite of educated men, many of them former exiles, and was characterized by factional rivalries that undermined its capacity to govern This paper asks whether local structures like the DEC were similar in their composition and also explores the concerns – and effectiveness – of district-level authority. Tooro, like other parts of Uganda, faced multiple challenges in the wake of Amin’s rule and the conflict that had ended it: among which were looting of the business centers and homes of key figures, and a chronic lack of essential commodities. Tooro also faced particular a challenge - the divisions resulting from ethnic tensions which had seen persistent unrest since the early 1960s which called for renaming the district to Kabarole. Drawing on primary material from newspapers and the archives at the Mountains of the Moon University and National Archives, as well as interviews with former DEC members and others, this paper explores how people at a local level sought to make a new future for Uganda in the brief months of UNLF rule.
Kabasiita Jessica (Mountains of the Moon University)
Paper short abstract:
In the months following the fall of Idi Amin, Ugandans sought to rebuild the state. This paper explains how women in Tooro, in western Uganda, took part in debates over this effort: asking which women were involved, the positions they held and whether women had a significant role in government.
Paper long abstract:
By the 1950s women in Tooro - especially educated women – were an active presence in public life in Tooro. But surprisingly, there is little evidence of women in public life in the period 1979-1980 - especially those outside the monarchy grouping. This could be as a result of the violent politics at the time or dynamics of exile politics that pushed women from leadership.
The voices of women are not always easy to find in the record of the period, but this paper uses interviews and newspaper archives to explore the role of women in politics in Tooro in the period 1979-80 – looking particularly at women, authority and education. I explain their opportunities in power (if any) and how these were often linked to their experience and role in the education system, as well as challenges in quest for women empowerment, independence amidst struggles of insecurity and societal contradictions on women leadership.
Some scholars have argued that power in most forms has been dominated by men in Uganda, causing women to sink out of public life; but this paper argues that despite this, some women were engaged in politics from the bottom-up. Formal education enabled some, and domestic and household debates provided a forum for others. Women tried to swim amidst the political and marginalizing storm to position themselves for better representation in different spheres of government.
Yusra Abdullahi (Leiden University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how the Somali-Ugandan community recovered agency in the post-Amin era as they galvanized around the shared agenda of building businesses successful enough to accrue political leverage. They also imagined a future in which they could have an impact on the country's ongoings.
Paper long abstract:
Somalis have been living in Uganda since the late 1800s, initially settling in smaller numbers in Karamoja and eventually transforming Kisenyi in Kampala into a fully-fledged ‘little Mogadishu.’ The burgeoning community, whose presence in Uganda is often overlooked in scholarship, had longstanding ties with Idi Amin. Amin was aided by his Somali counterpart, Siad Barre, in 1972, to fight off the threat from Tanzania, which culminated in Amin’s perception of expanding Somali-Ugandan businesses as less threatening than Asian-led businesses, despite the Somali-Ugandan community’s continued political isolation. Oral history interviews conducted with elders in Uganda show the fall of Amin signified a new beginning for this community. In late 1979, Somali-Ugandans from all parts of the nation gathered in Kisenyi to discuss how to cope with the political turmoil. It was decided then that going forward, business would be used as a tool to influence legislation. As evidenced by what are now recognized as successful commercial empires in several arenas, including Café Javas, Hass Petroleum, the Oasis Shopping Mall, and hundreds of smaller businesses, Ugandans from the Somali community laid the groundwork for their socio-economic as well as political traction. The purpose of this paper is thus to investigate how Somali-Ugandans, as they steadily rose to positions of power in both politics and business, rejected marginalization and envisioned a future in Uganda where they would be able to influence national affairs while still being recognized as Ugandans.