A spoken word artist performing under the moonlight by the bar of an artisan cocktail maker; a festival celebrating Ugandan filmmakers; an exhibition featuring the works of African women artists; public art on display in the city’s central business district: Having woken up from a standstill induced by COVID-19, Kampala’s cultural scene is thriving, in a way the city hasn’t experienced since the 1960s.
During the decade following Uganda’s independence in 1962, artistic life in Kampala bloomed, and the city was heralded as the cultural capital of East Africa. Today’s revival mirrors that of the postindependence era. In a similar context of political challenges and structural limitations, artists in Kampala are producing beautiful works. The parallels across time reveal the resilience of Ugandan artists over the course of generations.
For many contemporary artists and cultural practitioners in Uganda, the 1960s are a vital touchstone. Uganda gained its independence from Britain on Oct. 9, 1962. As a protectorate, rather than a colony, racial tensions were not felt as strongly as in other parts of the continent. Of course, racism played a part in much of public life in colonial Uganda, but it was not as acute as in neighboring Kenya, where Britain had established an apartheid regime. As a result of this relatively liberal rule, intellectuals and creators flourished: Cultural life blossomed in the first decade after independence as literature, drama and visual art entertained Kampala’s residents. The city became a destination for writers, artists and intellectuals from across Africa and the world. The Africanization of art and literature, in a bid to shake off colonial legacies, dominated cultural production.
This period in Kampala was formative for developments in African literature and literary theory. Seminal writers in the city included the poet and academic Okot p’Bitek, renowned for his ballad “Song of Lawino.” The epic narrates the laments of Lawino, an Acholi woman from rural northern Uganda, at the loss of her husband to a “Westernized” urban woman, and his general shunning of Acholi culture. The journalist and writer Barbara Kimenye gained fame that continues today with her “Moses” novels, a children’s book series following the adventures of Moses in a Ugandan boarding school.
This success was in large part due to the English department of Makerere University College (later Makerere University), which nurtured the minds of students who would later become East Africa’s literary greats.
Established in 1922, by the 1960s, the college had cemented its reputation for academic excellence through its affiliation with the University of London. Makerere’s singularity was spelled out in its diversity, in that it attracted students from across East Africa and the continent. For many students, this was the first time they were able to interact on a level of equal intellectual footing with students from other ethnic groups, races or nationalities.
The departmental literary magazine, Penpoint, later renamed Dhana, provided a space for students to hone their talents. Flicking through the pages of an issue shows now-familiar names in the East African literary canon. These include James Ngugi (now Ngugi wa Thiong’o), who wrote classic works such as “A Grain of Wheat” and “Petals of Blood,” or Micere Mugo, known for her plays “The Long Illness of Ex-Chief Kiti” and “The Trial of Dedan Kimathi,” written with Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Other writers included Elvania Zirimu, who would become one of Uganda’s leading dramatists, and John Ruganda, an influential playwright and professor.
The most skilled writers were published in Transition, the avant-garde literary magazine for politics and the arts that became a crucible of hope for independence and reflection on its meaning for intellectuals across Africa and the diaspora. The editor-in-chief was Rajat Neogy, a Ugandan journalist of Goan heritage, also known for the literary salons he hosted in his mansion in the wealthy Kampala suburb of Kololo. In addition to publishing some of the previously mentioned names, Transition also featured writers from across the continent, including Ama Ata Aidoo, Bessie Head, Christopher Okigbo and Benjamin Mkapa.
It is fitting, then, that the historic African Writers Conference took place in Kampala. Held in June 1962 at Makerere, the conference initiated debates that formed the basis of African literary theory for decades to come. Spanning all forms of Black and African literature, questions such as what defined an African writer, what constituted African literature, and what languages it should be written in formed the basis of the discussions.
Highlights from this influential gathering included Jay Saunders Redding delivering a presentation on “The Trends of American Negro Writing” and Arthur D. Drayton discussing “Sociohistorical Compulsion in the West Indian Novel.” The South African author Es’kia Mphahlele discussed the African novel, comparing works by authors from West and Southern Africa. Okigbo, a Nigerian writer, questioned how African literature should be defined, whether as literature by Black Africans or by any person living on the continent, and what demarcates literature as African.
The general consensus held that most African writers should “think and feel in [their] own language,” before finding an English approximation for their expression. Delegates also discussed the challenges of writing for Western publishers, with a primarily non-African readership, which forced a writer to become “bogged down in anthropological information.” Conference participants included Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Grace Ogot, Rebekka Njau, James Ngugi and Langston Hughes. Achebe later recounted the story of a young Ngugi knocking on his door and offering him a manuscript draft. This draft was later published in 1964 as “Weep Not, Child,” as part of the Heinemann African Writers Series.
The dramatic and performance arts were also strong, and also spearheaded by Makerere’s English department, through its theater troupe, the Makerere Free Travelling Theatre. Students wrote plays for the troupe, and traveled around Uganda and East Africa, performing these in the languages of each region. On occasion, they performed plays by European playwrights, either in English — such as Anton Chekov’s “The Bear” — or in Swahili, like the translation of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” by former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere. The troupe was popular in Uganda, receiving a warm welcome in the different regions where it performed.
The visual arts gained in prominence as well. The Nommo Art Gallery — the oldest in Kampala — was built in 1964, and the Makerere Art Gallery in 1968. Here too, Makerere played an important role, especially via its department of fine arts (known today as the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts), which educated some of East Africa’s greatest visual artists. The Kenyan artists Elimo Njau and Gregory Maloba, and the Tanzanian artist Sam Ntiro were students. Maloba’s legacy in Uganda is, most famously, the Independence Monument, a statue constructed for Uganda’s liberation, which remains in Kampala’s bustling city center.
Kampala’s role as a cultural center stems from its uniqueness in postcolonial Africa. Different races interacted relatively freely, though this rarely transcended elite class boundaries. For someone like Ngugi, whose family had felt the direct effects of British colonial violence through the state of emergency declared in reaction to the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, Kampala would have been a physical and intellectual haven.
The presence of the Buganda kingdom, where Kampala is located and for which Uganda is named, was also an important factor in the city’s special identity. The kingdom was long an object of fascination for British colonialists because of its recognizable monarchy and governmental structures. The kabaka (king) of Buganda and the first president of independent Uganda, Edward Muteesa II, was a Cambridge-educated monarch who ruled over a cosmopolitan court that regularly entertained dignitaries from Kenya, Burundi, Rwanda and beyond.
Artists from across Africa and the diaspora came to Kampala in the 1960s. Some were students at Makerere, while others, like South Sudanese writer Taban Lo Liyon, Malawian professor David Rubadiri and South African author Noni Jabavu, passed through or made the city their home, all contributing to the glittering cultural life of Kampala.
In spite of this rich cultural life, in the decade following Uganda’s independence, creators and artists faced immense structural challenges. Even with the efforts to Africanize art and literature, the specter of colonialism lingered.
The Makerere English department, lauded across the continent and beyond for its contribution to African literature for the first decade after Ugandan independence, had a white-majority academic staff. This was reflected in a Eurocentric and conservative syllabus, which, in turn, influenced the writing styles of its students. We see this in the play “Keeping Up With the Mukasas,” by Elvania Zirimu, then a student and later a renowned dramatist for the traveling theater troupe. Written as a Victorian-era drawing room play, it was performed in a traditional Western fashion, on a space demarcated as a stage with a fourth wall separating performers and the audience.
Inequalities along class, gender and racial lines — although far from eliminated today — were particularly prominent in this period. A typical background of the writers in the 1960s might have involved an elite colonial mission and later university education, followed by a postgraduate degree in either Britain or the United States. Certain forms of art and culture were therefore accessible only to an elite minority and via a colonial education, creating a hierarchy of what was deemed high versus mass culture. In the immediate postcolonial period, it was therefore a small minority of elite Western-educated Africans who determined what was — and was not — art.
Another feature of the 1960s cultural scene in Uganda was that it was overwhelmingly male. Comparatively few women were active in this period artistically, and there were deep structural gender inequalities. For example, Makerere University, which opened in 1922, only admitted women in 1945, meaning women were excluded from the elite educated networks that shaped the arts in Uganda. Networking in the creative sector also largely took place at bars and clubs in Kampala — something that hasn’t changed today. The prevailing respectability politics of femininity meant that a handful of women participated in this, with others losing access to potential creative opportunities. It is a refreshing change, therefore, to see that many creative projects and initiatives in Kampala today are spearheaded by women.
The political atmosphere in which artists operated in postindependence Uganda is hard to ignore. Although colonialism had ended, the regime of Apollo Milton Obote, then prime minister and later president, was becoming increasingly violent and authoritarian. The political disagreements between Obote and the Buganda kingdom over its degree of self-government came to a head with the 1966 Mengo crisis, when Obote and his army attacked the king’s palace, causing him to flee to Britain via Rwanda. After this, Obote abolished all kingdoms in Uganda — the cornerstone on which political identifications in the country were built — and the constitution, making himself president. From then on, he led an oppressive regime, closely monitoring all political writing and journalism. This is reflected in art produced in this period: The play “When the Hunchback Made Rain” by Zirimu, performed in Kampala’s National Theatre in 1970, is a commentary on the nepotism and corruption of Obote’s administration. All these factors meant that the vibrant cultural hub of 1960s Kampala slowly lost its edge, unable to withstand the political pressures or maintain itself given its association with a small elite.
In the decades since then, Kampala’s fortunes have fluctuated. Multiple civil wars and various regime changes meant that for decades the city was largely focused on survival. The vibrancy of the 1960s ebbed and artistic production dwindled. In the 2000s and 2010s Kampala’s creative sector began to grow once more, but then came COVID-19.
Just over three years ago, Uganda was in the midst of one of the world’s harshest lockdowns, entailing a ban on public gatherings, school closures and closed state borders. It was impossible to imagine then that things would ever return to something even resembling normalcy. In an economy that faced a downward spiral, the creative sector suffered immensely. Unable to create, network or interact with each other, artists in Uganda felt the immense toll of isolation.
Today, Uganda’s capital has moved on from this imposed inactivity and the arts have made a vigorous return to public life. There is hardly an unrepresented art form in the city, as Kampala’s creatives are forcibly shaking off the effects of lockdown. The current renaissance Kampala is experiencing is a beautiful echo of the city’s 1960s.
The visual arts are perhaps the most popular art form in Kampala now. Painters, sculptors, photographers and designers are making their mark, often combining multiple media in one artwork. A new exhibition opens every other week at different galleries around the city. Afriart Gallery, for instance, regularly exhibits local artists in both solo and group shows, with one recently interrogating different approaches to three-dimensionality. A newer player on the is the art organization Afropocene’s gallery, The Capsule, which features exhibitions by both Ugandan and Black diaspora artists. The public arts festival KLA ART, produced by the organization 32° East, returned this year for the first time since the pandemic ended. Displaying both African and diaspora artists, for three weeks the festival brought visual art to public spaces in Kampala, making it accessible to different communities.
As in the 1960s, the performing arts are equally prominent in Kampala’s cultural scene. Most famous, perhaps, is the annual Kampala International Theatre Festival, the first-ever theater festival in East Africa. Now in its 11th year, it includes performances by Ugandan and international theater troupes. The newly created theater company Yenze Theatre Conservatoire delights musical fans with its annual revivals of Broadway classics. It also provides training and workshops to professionals in the theater industry.
Uganda’s film industry is also up-and-coming. The screenwriter and filmmaker Loukman Ali brought Ugandan cinematography to the global stage with his films “The Girl in the Yellow Jumper” and “Katera of the Punishment Island,” both of which are on Netflix. Similarly, Ramon Film Productions, more popularly known as Wakaliwood, are famous for their low-budget productions, such as “Who Killed Captain Alex,” which, to date, has more than 9.6 million views on YouTube.
Many new creators have arrived in Kampala, bringing new life, excitement and optimism that is felt across the city. The thriving of contemporary art is also evidenced by the African and Black diaspora artists flocking to the city, as they did in the 1960s. Photographers, filmmakers and visual artists from Nigeria, Germany, the U.K. and Jamaica have found a home. A more diverse group of artists, including women, are active, and culture is no longer in the hands of an elite, university-educated minority.
We can see many parallels between Kampala in the 1960s and the 2020s, and in some ways the renaissance since the lockdowns ended mirrors the postcolonial bloom of arts and cultural life in the city. The echoes of the 1960s resonate to this day. Writing for The East African in July 2023, the journalist Charles Onyango Obbo celebrated the launch of the Ugandan literary journal The Weganda Review, lauding its potential as “a child from the Transition clan.”
The Africanization of art and literature that dominated creative discourse in the 1960s has become firmly grounded in 2024. Ugandan artists create art on their own terms — not necessarily for the white gaze — that communicates their observations of the society surrounding them. For example, the romance novel “Whispers From Vera,” by Goretti Kyomuhendo, is evidence of the author’s efforts to write commercial fiction for a Ugandan and African audience.
As much as this pride in various continental, national and ethnic identities is reflected in Ugandan art today, the effects of neoliberalism and neocolonialism are also felt in the country’s cultural sector. Ugandan artists receive close to no support from the government, which places its emphasis on support for STEM fields — science, technology, engineering and math — to the extent that science teachers are paid more than arts and humanities teachers in Ugandan schools. State efforts to support the cultural sector are reduced to notions of precolonial “heritage” and “tradition.” Ironically, because this is largely promoted for the tourism industry it tends to perpetuate a homogeneous idea of Ugandan culture, in line with colonial armchair anthropology. This dearth of support manifests as a lack of opportunities to develop skills for many talented artists in Uganda.
The lack of state support for culture and the arts also leaves a vacuum filled by cultural organizations from the Global North as part of their respective countries’ foreign missions in cultural diplomacy. Organizations such as the British Council, the Goethe-Zentrum and the Alliance Francaise are the primary players in Uganda, offering support to emerging artists and through regular cultural programming. As valuable as this support is, the neocolonial element is undeniable: The city’s cultural life is shaped on their terms and largely dependent on the interests of the incumbent directors. Emerging artists in Uganda are left fighting for proverbial financial scraps from Western organizations, with the realization of projects contingent on this funding.
Seeing contemporary Ugandan artists succeed, both in the local and international art scenes, is all the more reason for celebration given the immense structural limitations in place in the country. The visual artist Odur Ronald is one such example. Following a residency with Afropocene StudioLab in Kampala and Gasworks in London, his art was exhibited as part of the Uganda pavilion at the Venice Biennale earlier this year.
Between the 1960s and the 2020s, Uganda has lived many lives, politically, socially and economically. Under the Idi Amin dictatorship between 1971 and 1979, creative production dwindled almost to a complete halt, as many artists and intellectuals fled the country. The conflicts, regime changes and economic fluctuations that followed have meant that for almost half a century, Uganda has been focused on mere survival. Artists and creatives have been dismissed as irrelevant by Ugandan policymakers, as they neither till the land nor produce quantifiable economic benefits for the country.
And yet, Ugandan artists survive. This is true of Kampala as well, a site of contradictions and inequalities, and where, in the 1960s, some of the most radical works of art and literature in Africa were produced. Three generations later, this daring and resilience continue.
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