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.