African Studies Keyword: The Bush

Abstract

When Ugandan singer Geoffrey Oryema died in France in 2018 after forty-one years in exile, his wish was to be cremated, repatriated to Uganda, and dispersed on the wind. His wish implied improper burial and ignited a controversy due to varied meanings of the bush. The bush is a keyword with a painful past. Oryema’s experience and Acholi concepts of the bush suggest the bush is partly a discourse, inherited from one generation to the next, about the shifting space between home and wild. For this analysis, Lagace draws on songs, social media, Ugandan and French press, archives, scholarship, and correspondence with Ugandans.