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.