I am indecisive (as usual) regarding what function this blog should serve - observations of Uganda? Social/political commentary? An update of my work? The first of these would likely be more interesting for most of you, while the second is one of my favorite pastimes. I will leave the broader question of the blog's purpose unresolved, but for this entry I am following the third strategy.
Since my update, the university has been closed due to the unresolved lecturers' strike. It will likely reopen in early January when students will have exams and then move immediately into the next term. The closure was sudden and harsh, though in retrospect a reasonable decision by the university council. At one o'clock on a Sunday afternoon they announced that all Ugandan students living in undergraduate residences on campus must pack up and leave by six o'clock the same day. The police presence was heavy so there weren't many disturbances, but the resulting scene was slightly chaotic to say the least. Foreign students were allowed to stay in order to make arrangements for getting home, and I understand that other graduate students were unaffected. I am staying at a private residence on campus that was also not affected. The council argued (with fair reason) that if they had given students extra time to move out there would have been riots on campus. As things stand, the student guild is planning a protest today downtown, as the strike is still unresolved. A member of the guild leadership announced on the news yesterday that some students would go naked in protest - I have other plans, so will neither be participating in said action or providing any pictures of it. (The protest has not been approved by the police.)
My own work hasn't been affected except for the closure of the library and the quiet atmosphere on campus. Today I submitted an application for a government "research permit" along with my research proposal about "Idi Amin's regime, state media and rumour". The research permit seems like a form of big brother government control, but it does create a sense of official sanction for researchers, meaning (at least in theory) better access to official sources. The woman processing my application, though pleasant and very helpful, seemed confused as to what research I am actually doing. While I sometimes wonder the same thing, I am broadly studying the way in which Idi Amin's government portrayed itself and the Ugandan state to Ugandans through state media. [Feel free to skip this as well as the following paragraph] Inherent in this is how the regime approached political rumour, which challenged the state's version of "the news". My two subthemes, which may take on greater importance as the project grows, are: 1) the state's manipulation of the politics of belonging. As state media stressed Amin's success in making Uganda a controversial leader in the global community, political rumour stressed Uganda's international isolation and even questioned Amin's own identity as a Ugandan (he was born in a region that borders the Congo and Sudan). Amin's expulsion of the Asian, Kenyan and other communities was a calculated use of the politics surrounding "Ugandan" identity. And 2) the tension between the ideals of freedom of speech and the coercion necessary to reproduce state authority. Amin congratulated himself for inaugurating freedom of the press but issued repressive decrees while arresting and murdering many prominent journalists. The colonial state showed a similar tension by simultaneously promoting the African press while harshly restricting it.
Aside from some archival work on old newspapers, radio, television and government decrees, most of my "research" is theoretical, and certainly not scientific. My impression from other graduate students, professors and old theses at the library is that most postgraduate work at Makerere emphasises positivist quantitative research. This is based on "hard" data often taken from surveys or censuses that usually seeks to provide an "answer" to a "problem". As an old entry in this blog indicates, I find such approaches irritating and unproductive. Relying on "hard" data often obscures the assumptions on which the criteria for those data are based. The results are often self-fulfilling prophecies that say more about the presuppositions of the researcher than what is actually being studied. The "solutions" to this problem in which the University of Toronto indoctrinated me involve restoring "historicity" to African societies, accounting for one's own subject position, and asserting that everything is about representation - the signifier replaces the signified in importance, thus my own research: "discourse of power in the post-colony does not produce signs and narratives as mere objects of representation, but as the instrument of power itself." (Gikandi 1997)
Today I went to the Uganda People's Congress party headquarters to try and set an interview with a Mr. Bob Astles in London. The UPC was the party of Milton Obote who led Uganda to independence and declared a one-party state before Amin took over. After Amin, the UPC returned to power before being toppled by Museveni. They now have very little support within the country and are seriously at risk of falling out of existence. Bob Astles is a British man who worked under Obote in the 1960s. After a few weeks of detention he wound up working under Amin. There are no definitive accounts of what he did and under what circumstances, but he was known by many as "the second most hated man in Uganda" (next to Amin). Some say he was a British spy, many that he was involved in some of Amin's most gruesome atrocities. He maintains that he was forced into Amin's service and did what he could to survive and protect his staff. He was acquitted by the subsequent UPC regime of any wrongdoing and moved back to the U.K. He is now a supporter of the UPC and wrote a strongly worded editorial before the election supporting Miria Obote (Milton Obote's widow and current UPC leader) for president. For my purposes, he is believed to have orchestrated many of Amin's more flamboyant performances such as having him carried to the 1975 Organisation of African Unity conference in Kampala by four British businessmen. He will thus potentially have some insight into the imagery surrounding Amin's regime.
I leave in a few days for London to see my parents and maybe interview Mr. Astles. Perhaps some more interesting entries will follow.
