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It would not surprise me to see the emergence of a woman-led, woman-centred, or women-only political party in Uganda over the next few years, if not before the next election.
It would surprise me even less if such a party were to then fizzle out, after a brief moment of intense popularity, during which time a whole lot of new neoliberal schemes would be sold to the population as “liberation”.
Neoliberalism is basically the stage of capitalism where it seeks to return completely to its founding work methods. New governments are installed and encouraged to sweep aside all public policy aimed at shielding the vulnerable from the worst effects of those methods, and to instead facilitate a more thorough exploitation of labour and natural resources. Everything becomes a commodity.
Such a political project would simply be a more concentrated distillation of the plastic human rights revolution Uganda has undergone between 1986 and today. Because the performance of a human rights gospel was the thing that enabled the then-incoming National Resistance Movement (NRM) regime to sell and endear itself to a significant section of the Ugandan public after it seized power in 1986.
It would also be an attempt by the elite leadership of the women’s movement to hang onto the place of security and advantage they acquired through their historical strategic alliance with the NRM after it took power.
The plastic revolution grew out of the centring of human rights violations in the years of the political campaigns against the Amin regime, and the truly horrific further such violations meted out on civilians by the second Obote regime during the 1981–1986 civil war.
Such a focus on human rights violations suited the NRA/M well as it worked to divert political discourse away from the deeper and more critical questions of imperialist domination – and also infantilism politics – by centring on a very emotive issue.
Equally practically, the cohort of feminists did sterling service in helping the NRM regime consolidate itself between 1986 and 1996. Their “gains” were to have the career concerns of elite women hard-wired into national policy at the constitutional level.
It would be the last card played by the imperialists’ hand, and our arrival at the very heart of what has been the success in managing the social damage caused by the neoliberal economic project in Uganda: the Uganda women’s movement.
The revolution was plastic because it relied heavily on external funding; it absorbed external ideas quite uncritically; it was rooted in the understanding and aspirations of the Ugandan middle class; and it was self-contradictory in many aspects, the key contradiction being the idea that there would be prosperity under neoliberalism.
These realizations unfold from the recent drama in which elements of the security forces hunted down, abducted, and detained the celebrated veteran Ugandan feminist Miria Matembe.
This was no small matter. Matembe had been an activist since the days before the current government took power. She had been a parliamentarian for a long time and had even served as a minister in the government whose agents were now inconveniencing her.
Initially denied bail when she was finally brought before the courts, Matembe spent a night in remand prison before being released on bail the following day, leading to a spontaneous, energetic celebration by a gathering of Ugandan women activists singing their English-language “anthem”, while the main character in this drama walked triumphantly from court declaring, “Jesus is king.”
This journey to such a disparate mix of wrong destinations – from illegal detention to an unquestioning court, and thereafter to an eventual release attributed to the god well used by colonialism, all the while as the English-singing cohort of feminists misattribute the initial injustice to the oppression of women, despite there being many more male Ugandans still detained and disappeared – requires a map for sure.
Destination: opportunism
The immediate starting point was the government’s announcement of the intention to create a new law regulating the way in which funds from abroad could be received and spent. This was called the “Sovereignty Bill”. As the arguments behind it rested heavily on the ruling party’s now extremely threadbare “anti-imperialist” credentials, it was said to be about “preserving Uganda’s independence”.
Uganda’s Non-Governmental Organizations that cluster around human rights issues felt attacked. On the one hand, an enormous amount of “civil society” activism and visibility is quite heavily dependent on funding from abroad, and most especially, the West. On the other, the historic ideological romance between most Ugandan civil society and the previously assumed to be “enlightened” Ugandan government was now finally broken.
Being “ggulu-ggulu” (top-notch), human rights and security were used to frame the entire post-war discourse for thinking about everything else. This allowed gender activists to embed their arguments, a process which only began falling apart once they sought to extend the definitions and terms of reference to include rights around homosexuality and related activities, beginning with the HIV crisis which became a gateway for Western leftists to introduce their understandings of related conversations such as sexuality and gender identity.
Being among the éminences grises of the NGO/civil society movement, Matembe was among the big voices that came out to criticize the Sovereignty Bill. They labelled it as nothing more than a ploy to silence civil society by financially crippling it so as to shut down commentary on Uganda’s mounting political crisis.
In her broadsides, Matembe mixed in wider criticisms of the general conduct of the regime and touched on sensitive ethnic questions. Specifically, she accused the regime of a clever scheme in which, by appointing female regime loyalists to positions of authority, the government was playacting at gender representation, the key giveaway being that a lot of those loyalists were from the same ethnicity as the president’s inner circle. The hunt for her followed immediately after, and led to her being charged with tribalism.
In the ensuing drama, the essence of the debate was overlooked; namely, that what all this represented was a public parting of ways between the venerable women’s movement as it formally exists in Uganda, and the NRM government that did so much to befriend and promote it in all the previous decades.
The premise of the Bill (now a law) is itself nonsensical; the biggest foreign agent in Uganda is Uganda itself: it was created using foreign money, for foreign extraction; it did so against the wishes of the local peoples; it functions in a foreign language and within a foreign spirituality, culture, and agenda.
Uganda was established as a British economic project aimed at making money for the British elites at such a rate that they could also placate their very militant poor citizens with jobs and higher wages and social amenities. Uganda was never intended to solve the problems of the Africans living within it. In other words, Uganda came as a bundle of offloaded economic, political and human rights problems for the Africans who became trapped within it. Colonization came as an economic crisis, and infected us with it. This was the story for the building of nearly all the European colonies in Africa.
All human ideas belong to all humans. The only caveat is whether that society is free to decide if they want a particular set of ideas or not. However, it would be physically and intellectually impossible for the great thinkers and leaders of Uganda’s feminist movement to see this connection and make this point.
But the real issue is how this complete harmony between the civil society sector, the regime, the Western countries friendly to the regime, and the state came about, because they are not natural bedfellows.
The second starting point is the origin story of the contemporary women’s movement in Uganda. It has been quite successful in meeting public goals: affirmative action in electoral representation, access to credit, academic advancement, and public appointment. However, all these brought the historical leadership of the various strands of the Ugandan women’s movement in their entirety onside with the most openly pro-imperialist government Uganda has ever had, exactly at the moment it began to fully display its neoliberal colours.
Buttressed by, especially, Scandinavian donor money, a whole cohort and culture of forked-tongue ideological jerry-building, in which the language of “gender equality” has become a very effective insulation against blunt attacks on the government for its grand corruption, weaponization of the judiciary against the citizenry, election fraud, economic exploitation, and gross human rights violations in general.
In legal and civil society circles, this has been critiqued only by the maverick lawyer Isaac Ssemakadde whose very dramatic election to the leadership of the Ugandan bar association gave him a platform from which to take apart the cosy relationship between elite and corporate lawyers, legal state functionaries, and the community of women lawyers building careers within that ecosystem.
Issuing dismissive epithets like “stiletto lawyers”, this anti-feminist feminist has insisted that people must be understood as humans first, and judged on the basis of their actions within the context of any struggle. He has also insisted that a lot of what is being called “feminism” is simply middle-class careerism in a skirt. Merely being female, he says, does not automatically make you a champion for justice.
This has been seen repeatedly, and very much so among prominent Ugandan women who happen to be lawyers. Speakers Anita Among, and Rebecca Kadaga before her, oversaw serious violations of the constitution they are charged with protecting, while Mariam Wangadya, as head of the Uganda Human Rights Commission, rendered the organization toothless.
But there is more.
In 2019, a young father riding his motorbike to visit his daughter in boarding school found himself behind a minister’s convoy on the highway. The minister, Idah Erios Nantaba, was then also a member of parliament in a designated women’s seat. The motorcyclist was stopped, handcuffed, and then shot dead on her orders.
Agnes Nandutu, a broadcast journalist famous for her populist programming focused on public participation, was appointed a minister for Karamoja presumably for her demonstrated feel for the concerns of the ordinary person. She is currently serving a four-year sentence for her part in stealing roofing sheets meant for impoverished rural communities under her docket.
Lady Justice Lydia Mugambe, once a recipient of a human rights award based on some allegedly groundbreaking pro-family ruling she once made, is currently serving a six-year sentence in Britain having been convicted of enslaving a young Ugandan girl who had been trafficked over to be her nanny as she pursued further studies.
High Court Judge Julia Sebutinde, once celebrated for ably chairing a number of high-profile judicial probes, was later pilloried internationally for her ruling at the International Court of Justice in favour of Israel. In her ruling, Sebutinde had cited essentially Christian fundamentalist reasons in a case brought against Israel for war crimes.
The very Miria Matembe once enraged her elderly widowed father by legally blocking his impending remarriage. Her concern was reportedly about the “property of the orphans”, meaning herself and the other children of their deceased mother. Her father was in his eighties at the time while Matembe was forty-nine.
Just the other day, another female magistrate declined to spend a minute longer hearing the bail application of a civil society activist (also female) before her, because she was “rushing to go and collect my children from school”. The weaponization of the artefacts of womanhood by women against other women on behalf of the regime they all once praised is truly a sight to behold.
Since Ssemakadde was eventually speaking as the elected president of the Ugandan bar association, his posture scandalized the women activists’ community. Many women of note raised their voices in protest in an attempt to rescue the purity of the idea of gender equality in public representation from the debacle of the practical evidence.
In so doing, they were discovering the outer limits of what was always a limited ideology.
For example, a main line of defence was the principle that “an attack on one woman is an attack on all”. On the one hand, they were demanding that women be considered for any and all senior public positions. One, because they are women and it is their right, and two, because they are “also capable”, like men.
On the other hand, they sought to distance themselves from any woman occupying a senior public post who became caught up in a scandal. There, the argument was that the cause of women’s equality cannot be judged by the failings of individual women.
But what is clear is that when it comes to the failure to properly respect one’s office and govern well, the gender of the one in office makes absolutely no difference to the potential for making a mess. To argue otherwise is basically a form of chauvinism, and also intellectual dishonesty. Collective ownership of a right must also logically mean collective responsibility for failure.
It is now difficult to avoid the conclusion that all along these were imperialist schemes based on finding a constituency then isolating and using it as a populist gimmick; an attempt to breathe new life into the IBEAC project.
Personally, I always found it fascinating that the leading custodians of these various branches of the ideology have maintained decades-long marriages to men while the policies they have advocated have engineered the epidemic of domestic instability among two generations of ordinary Ugandan women.
The Ugandan middle class is a mess – men and women both. The great triumph of the Empire, and thus the curse for the Africans here, was the successful centring of the middle class in Uganda politics and in the wider public life. This was colonial Governor Andrew Cohen’s very successful strategy to defeat the anti-colonial mass movement and replace it with something more malleable. The middle class grew uniformly through the government-controlled mission-schools system. This is how and why Christian voices feature quite prominently within the Uganda women’s movement.
What we call “women’s empowerment” in Uganda is simply two things: first, women’s activism taking stewardship of Cohen’s middle-class centring; and second, the trickling down of the middle-class value system of such activism into other social groups to disruptive effect. The large number of female parliamentarians (most from the ruling party) did nothing to prevent the epic human rights violations in northern Uganda (during the first fifteen years of the regime); nor to prevent key violations of the constitution. Nor did their large number prevent the expanding neoliberal economic policy agenda, and it has not done much to prevent the widespread suffering and sexual exploitation of our youth who get shipped abroad as near-slaves in the Middle East.
In fact, in respect to that point as well as the earlier one made about disruptive middle-class values, a lot of why attempted Ugandan civil society campaigns against Arab abuse of (predominantly female) Ugandan migrant labour fizzle out is because the victims’ initial trip to Arabia was often done without domestic or family harmony; a lot of the women simply abandoned their marriages and left in secret. Furthermore, there is a large amount of domestic disharmony that often follows a successful deployment, even where it had been agreed to by all in advance.
An economy that is failing for the majority creates a problem of politics. The population demands political intervention. In most cases, the political leadership cannot provide a solution because they are under the control of the economic forces creating the problem. So, when that fails, the problem remains unsolved. So the population is led into more direct and increasingly non-legal forms of protest – strikes, demonstrations, riots, and even taking up arms against the established order. This creates a human rights crisis as the custodians of the state and its failed politics now focus on “restoring order”, which is the very order the population do not want. This creates a human rights crisis: politicized courts, unfair and hastily drafted bad laws, constitution violations, abductions, violent crowd dispersal, torture of the detained, mass killings, and more. This is where Uganda has repeatedly found itself, certainly since the 1940s. And it is where we now are.
So the solution to a human rights crisis is to recognize the political crisis that authored it, and address that by fixing the underlying economic woes.
The introduction of “gender” at the heart of that process enabled the most elaborate sidestep, creating a political population that, typical of the Western-academia-inspired leftists that inspired them, has never understood political economy as a concept, and nor has it, therefore, ever understood even the need to understand politics as an expression of economic pressures.
The neoliberal agenda
During its time (December 1980 to June 1985), and despite the mounting civil war, the Obote dictatorship began the process of liberalizing the economy, as dictated by the West. As I have written elsewhere, the arrival of neoliberalism as state policy was at first completely ignored by the bulk of the intelligentsia. They were instead fixated on exploiting the politics being generated by the human rights crisis created by the ongoing civil war.
The ’81-’86 war, which should therefore have been about resisting the West imposing a new bad economy through their new client, the Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) regime, instead degenerated into a circus about the politics of human rights violations.
This was the essence or the heart of the human rights revolution I describe. More studies will have to be undertaken to understand the extent to which it was a political development of style over substance, and of regression over actual material progress in social relations.
This is the third level of our complicated map.
Many of the key personalities, historically and today, defending this misgovernance, and the institutions put to this service, are these very intentionally selected women, some of whom have since fallen out with the regime but can on occasion still be heard praising it for “what it has done for Ugandan women”. I have seen one-time UPC stalwart Cecilia Ogwal say this directly to the president, as I have seen Miria Matembe herself do it.
Even Winnie Byanyima once got caught up in this; she once posted a tweet in praise of President Museveni on the matter of elevating women to positions of authority. The occasion was an encounter at the Entebbe Airport VIP lounge with one Jane Francis Abodo (whom the irrepressible Ssemakadde was to later dismiss as “a vagina from Karamoja”). At the time, Abodo was the Director of the Department of Pubic Prosecutions. This is the very office in charge of deciding which police suspect gets charged in court, and who will have their bail application opposed.
It was a very short journey from this point to when Winnie was back on Twitter appealing to the same Abodo to stop opposing the bail applications of her husband, veteran opposition figure Kizza Besigye, who had once again been arrested.
Even Matembe’s sense of appreciation came apart in the same way. “For the first time in my life, I am regretting why I have been supporting putting women in power,” she said to the media, or words to that effect, as she emerged from a court hearing where her pleas to yet another female magistrate to grant bail to some women activists had fallen on deaf ears. And this was before she herself was sent to jail by another female magistrate.
To start with, key elements of this revolution were the elevation of certain concerns to constitutional level; heavy external funding, advice and training; heavy over-representation of the highly educated Ugandan elite professional class.
This is an end point and a turning point. Because it was built with gender at the centre, and revolved around it.
The current state of the leadership of the women’s movement serves as a useful method of measuring the general state of the human rights movement in Uganda.
I recently had a brief social media exchange with a former leading voice in opposition politics who was out there performing wounded outrage over some smuggled images of an ailing political detainee. The trouble is that this opposition person used to be a regime mouthpiece back in the 1980s. I pointed out that my first high-profile engagement with the question of political detainees and torture was in 1986 and concerned a member of the UNLF-AD party who had been abducted, detained and tortured by this very same NRA regime (of which he then was a part). My point was not to seek to cause embarrassment. Rather, it was to request that we seek to elevate discourse around this political crisis some way above performative outrage and drama. We have been here a long time. Some of us used to even be, at best, indifferent and, at worst, supportive of such actions. As leaders, the challenge is to help reshape the mindset, starting with examining our own as it had been. Because the young men and women who are taking part in the current abductions and tortures today are who you once were, many years back, when you were defending the exact same things. He simply did not understand.
The art of the political hijack
This is the fourth map. Throughout history, it has been a common theme for an ambitious power, when worried about the smallness of its legitimacy, turns to popular but as yet not fully developed causes to bolster itself.
Let me give a few examples.
During a civil war against his rival Maxentia, the Roman Emperor Constantine (272–337 AD) refused to uphold a ban on Christianity, stopped the state persecution of Christians, and eventually converted to Christianity himself as a means of winning an organized political faction in Roman society to his side. He won the war against the Pagan political groups and this is how Rome eventually became the Holy Roman Empire.
When King Henry VIII of Britain found loyalty to Rome an obstacle to his political ambitions, he suddenly recognized Protestantism and made it the new state religion so as to have greater freedom of manoeuvre.
American president Abraham Lincoln declared the Emancipation – the 1863 abolition of the enslavement of Americans of African descent. This applied to the enslaved people found in the areas controlled by the side fighting him in the American Civil War. His purpose was to create instability in the slave-based economy of the rebelling South, to encourage enslaved Americans to flee to the North, and to prevent Western European powers from publicly supporting the South as they were now supposed to have abolished slavery.
When Britain’s rising trading and manufacturing class of the early 1700s found their operations increasingly hampered by the controls of feudal society (such as peasant workers being legally tied to their feudal lords’ farms, private road networks demanding toll fees on merchants’ goods passing through, etc.), they eventually started a bourgeois revolution which included offering ordinary British people freedoms from the feudal lords (like movement) that enabled them to overthrow feudalism and create proper capitalist states. Naturally, those same freedoms were then slowly taken back from the previously mobilized citizens.
Something similar happened when Britain – along with many countries of Western Europe – needed manpower to build their growing imperial conquests; they hijacked the natural patriotism of their ordinary citizens to turn them into empire workers and soldiers.
With the NRM, as I have said, it was Museveni and gender, and the various related issues that flow out of that, such as focusing on women and the “girl child”, and the “Good Governance” machine expected to underpin this.
The formal and official high point and culmination of this evolution was the creation and adoption of the 1995 Uganda Constitution, which, as I have written elsewhere, served as a massive sedative to the political class.
Gender activists became the de facto propaganda and social management foot soldiers of the regime. And NGO workers on the whole were basically just privatized civil servants.
Now the women thing is being recycled at a more refined level.
With the dramas related to the passing of the Sovereignty Bill, the NRA is returning to its constituent parts.
Its original roots are in the vague social democratic authoritarianism of the UPC party, mixed in with confused Western leftism as titrated into Ugandan “progressive” thinking by activists like Mahmood Mamdani and his Cha’ngombe Discussion Group, which incubated what passes for NRM thought.
Some women activists even took to social media to drag up an excerpt from Matembe’s memoir in which Matembe speaks of how despite her long-standing role as a regime critic, she had once received a personal assurance from President Museveni that he would never arrest her.
The gender activists were now using that to suggest that the recent arrest was a sign of Museveni’s treachery.
This is a very disturbing assembly of arguments and requires some particular comment.
In the first place, the arrest or protection from arrest of any citizen of Uganda is not supposed to be within the hands-on purview of a president. “Arrest” is a stage in the cycle of law enforcement. A person is apprehended on suspicion of breaking a given law. If the state cannot develop a case against such a person within 48 hours of the arrest, then they must release them. The role of arrest ultimately lies with law enforcement. In our case, this means the police. Even a person arrested by other branches of the state (the speaker’s office, the military, intelligence, etc.) must be brought to the police for processing. The same applies to any person arrested by an individual or a mob of ordinary citizens. The decision as to whether the state has a case against that person lies with the Attorney General’s office, not with the police, who simply present the case and give their arguments. And the decision as to whether the arrested, accused person is actually guilty of the charges levelled against them lies with a court, not with the police, nor the AG, nor the president.
All this should be very easy to understand. But the fact that Matembe was even entertaining assurances of her safety from someone whose office does not give him the power to arbitrarily deprive her of her liberty demonstrates her failure to grasp – despite being a lawyer and human rights activist – a basic tenet of legal statecraft.
Secondly, the fact that Matembe accepts such a “personal-to-holder” assurance, its constitutional soundness notwithstanding, shows up the interesting self-regard that has been a feature of feminist activism. Basically, the “favoured child” mindset in which it did not seem to have occurred to her to point out to the president during that meeting that rights are not a matter of individual selection. If he could not give the same assurance to all Ugandan activists and others, then his assurance was not one she should have been willing to accept.
In accepting the pledge as given, her feminist “favoured child” mindset really came out here.
The “favoured child” gambit is itself a long story. The Black American revolutionary movement that had grown out of the civil rights movement of decades earlier was eventually pulled apart by the clever deployment of state welfare benefits to Black American women as long as they abandoned their marriages and other domestic arrangements with Black men. This included cash payments, access to public housing, and even job training opportunities. It is where the stereotype of the “deadbeat dad” and the “baby mama” in American media come from. This had the effect of weakening the social base of the growing revolution, and the emergence of women-only “solutions” supported by feminist theory.
Something similar happened in the Third World, where the initially noble idea of microfinance institutions was coopted to become a conduit for donor funding aimed primarily at women.
Professor Dani Nabudere once told me the story of a women’s self-help group he had helped set up in the countryside. After a while, it was the members themselves who complained that the exclusive assistance to women was creating domestic problems because the menfolk had decided that since they were clearly not needed financially, they were not needed at all. A young man in Kampala told me something similar some years ago. He runs a self-help group for young men. He was perplexed to find that many of them did not see the need to support the women they had had a child with. When he probed, the standard response by the men was to say that having grown up without a man in the house, they had assumed that one was not necessary.
We need to understand this also as the origin of the average Ugandan activist’s economic illiteracy and, therefore, ignorance of political economy, starting with the bush-era NRA itself.
Neoliberalism is a formula for poverty. Ask the Chileans of the 1970s. Yes, the economy figures will balloon, and corporate ledgers will look healthy with either real or created money. But this comes at the expense of the ordinary people, the grassroots communities and their public and natural resources.
The policy partnership between the women’s movement and the NRM regime was based on the proposition that economic stability, survival and even prosperity is now possible, at least for the women in Ugandan society, even as the economically destructive neoliberal programme rolled out.
Perhaps the ultimate expression of this notion is found in the initiative called the Program for the Alleviation of Poverty and the Social Costs of Adjustment (PAPSCA). This was literally a 1989 World Bank project claiming to soften the pain being caused by the very same World Bank’s neoliberal Structural Adjustment Program.
It will be very interesting to study just how “gendered” PAPSCA was.
The regime wants to shut down the very civil society sector whose organizational model was encouraged by them. It seeks to do this by further alienating the external funding bodies that it has been harassing for some years now. It does not believe that Western governments (especially those in Europe) can do anything about this.
Real sovereignty would be to prevent the excessive flow of economic wealth out of the country. But their job as comprador has been to organize, protect, and justify that. This is literally what privatization and liberalization have done.
The regime does not understand that the money coming in is actually what increasingly sustains the population as the wealth we create is sucked out.
For their part, the human rights cadres never managed to reach the point of making the conceptual link between the hard-nosed cruelty necessary for the enforcement IMF/World Bank policies and the resultant human rights violations. They are two sides of the same coin. This is literally why colonial societies were not democracies; capital was doing what it needed to do then, as it is doing again now.
As executed, the feminist idea seems to be that one section of the society should be shielded or even prosper in the midst of the most intense and direct looting of African resources since the colonial conquest itself. Strange.
Progress became increasingly cosmetic and performative as it became celebrated: Africa’s first female vice-president, parliament Speaker, Commissioner for this and MD for that. Where such progress was taken to the grassroots, it consisted of artificially financially empowering one half of a household and neglecting the other. The underlying cohesions of ordinary community rights governing production roles, intergenerational transfers, home management and the like became increasingly blurred and disrupted by this artificial “empowerment,” which has now reached the end of its life.
These regime moves that the regime needed to build its power domestically have come into conflict with regime obligations towards the foreign imperial power that installed them in the first place. The regime is now trying to dismantle its own set-up.
I have focused on gender policy because previous iterations of human rights activism (for example during the Amin period) focused on the generally understood rights as contained in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) – the freedoms of assembly, expression, etc.
The new formula that comes with the ending of the Cold War, when American liberal thinking feels fully triumphant, comes organized differently. Gender concerns are placed at the heart of all matters, and all other rights and issues are seen through that primary lens. It was a revolution in how human rights were organized as a concept. “Everything is gendered” was the common phrase. This may have been the goal from the beginning.
Mission complete
Normal, mainstream, conventional civil society now faces a defeat and extinction of the model that has served its workers and leaders so well since the advent of the NRA government and the “opening up of civil society”. The one who gave them the power is now the one taking it away.
Meanwhile, Uganda’s long history of civic agitation based on actual and self-sustaining social bases (peasants, indigenous farmers, workers’ organizations, working-class women’s groups such as illicit brewers and sex workers, native institutions, independent media, and grassroots religious groups) was pushed to the side after the 1940s anti-colonial uprisings, and they were never able to regroup.
Where once there had been vibrant mass meetings under the Tree of Truth near Katwe and other places, we now had technical interfaces with Honourable Ministers, keynote speakers, in some plush hotel workshop.
So, the real challenge for those challenging the proposed provisions of the Sovereignty law is that if it makes “civil society” as we have come to know it disappear, will ordinary Uganda even notice that it has gone?
And the real challenge for civil society as a whole is to create awareness about Empire. In doing so, human rights should never be the starting point. The true starting point is economic justice. However, instead of allying itself with the anti-imperialist struggle, Ugandan feminism essentially chose to ally itself with a comprador regime.
All because they did not pay attention to the concept of production first. Social justice is a function of production, and should remain anchored to it.
Instead, the patterns and, therefore, the anxieties of the life of the average Western woman were grafted on to the concerns of African women in approaches mediated by the elite-educated African women and some men.
The result has been decades of conceptual and practical confusion within civil society activism and the political opposition. The arrival of the NRM to power essentially heralded a general collapse of the humanities as understood and taught in Uganda.
This is not to say that all those concerned have been cynical and operating with ill motives. On the contrary. The experience of, first, colonialism, and then two decades of war and repression had created entrenched poverty and a deep sense of frustration over the lack of individual and social progress.
At independence, the areas labelled most poor in Uganda were Karamoja (which still is), and Ankole (which then meant much of western Uganda). Karamoja’s status has not changed. Western Uganda has, in certain key areas.
Much of the key human resource that made up the NRM’s “revolution”, and has driven it ever since, comes from western Uganda. There was a genuine interest in social change among the NRM, if not revolution. The poorly thought-out ideas meant that this was never going to happen when hitched to the World Bank machine. A choice seems to have then been made between permanently resolving decades of intergenerational poverty and returning to the bush to implement the revolution properly; one would not be sacrificed for the other.
Apply the same analysis to the leadership of the women’s movement here, and you get the same result.
Real revolution, if possible, actual material comfort, if not.
