Rethinking the state in Idi Amin's Uganda: the politics of exhortation

Peterson, Derek R.; Taylor, Edgar C.

doi:10.1080/17531055.2012.755314

Cited by 25 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Later, the British authorities, in 1947, set up a dedicated Photographic Section, whose job it was both to coordinate and to expand this kind of exhibition photography, and also to visually document the government's then rapidly growing industrial ‘modernization’ programmes (see especially Vokes 2010a; 2018). Uganda's first postcolonial administration, that of Milton Obote, continued to employ what remained of the section in similar ways, while the following regime, of Idi Amin, vastly expanded its operations as a way of documenting his administration's future goals (although under Amin's rule, the relationship between the state and imagery/media in general also became more complicated in various ways; see Peterson and Taylor 2013). 6…”

Section: Signs Of Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Signs of development: photographic futurism and the politics of affect in Uganda

Vokes¹

2019

Africa

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This article contributes to recent scholarship on an emergent public political visual culture in Africa. Through an ethnographic study of political billboards and other government-sponsored public political imagery in Uganda, it argues that this new visual culture is primarily characterized by African states’ extensive use of post-photographic techniques as a means for projecting fantastic visions of their future development goals. However, drawing on recent insights from the ‘material turn’ in visual theory, it finds that – in Uganda's case at least – the potency of these new public visual artefacts may stem less from what they show than from how they invoke in their citizen-viewers an embodied sense of future possibilities. Once generated, this affective response can be mobilized by the state and its agents in the ‘here and now’, for political gain. The article looks at how this worked in the run-up to Uganda's 2016 presidential elections, when, in the context of major new spending on national infrastructure projects, the images and artefacts of this new visual culture served to greatly amplify the sense that all citizens would benefit from an emergent global capitalism. This inflated aspiration was mobilized in turn by the National Resistance Movement government as an integral part of its election campaign, and played a key role in returning the government to power.

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Section: Signs Of Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Signs of development: photographic futurism and the politics of affect in Uganda

Vokes¹

2019

Africa

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“…118 The photograph, which shows German mid-conversation, appears at first glance to be innocuous, but it could be read as an attempt at the kind of intimidation Amin became notorious for; as a sign that German, and by extension all of Uganda's psychiatrists, had come to the attention of Amin, and into a new political climate. 119…”

Section: Mental Health Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Psychiatry of Poverty

Pringle

2018

Psychiatry and Decolonisation in Uganda

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of Psychiatry, declared that the 'major feature distinguishing psychiatry in Africa from psychiatry in the Western world is poverty'. 1 Poverty and 'associated ignorance' determined 'many of the peculiarities of clinical states', resulted in inadequate treatment facilities, and interfered both with the use of facilities by patients and with patient follow-up. For German, the 'psychiatry of poverty' entailed a focus not on the types of disorders patients might suffer as a result of poverty, but the ways in which an understanding of poverty might determine the development of mental health services in a particular context. Due to constraints on resources and a lack of manpower in many African contexts, he contended, efforts to develop mental health services needed to focus on the training of non-psychiatrists, whether psychiatric nurses, psychiatric social workers (PSWs), or psychiatric clinical officers. These 'psychiatric auxiliaries' were not only more likely to be drawn from the same areas as their patients, and so speak their languages, but could be trained to take on some of the responsibility for mental health care at minimal cost. 2 Arguments for the rapid expansion of psychiatry in the late 1960s and early 1970s appeared entirely logical in light of research within transcultural psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology that was suggesting that the overall incidence and clinical picture of mental illness in Africa CHAPTER 5

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“…Moreover, in Uganda's case at least, this nexus between state power and photography further deepened in the postcolonial era, reaching its zenith during Idi Amin's rule (1971–79). Reflecting Amin's fascination both with his own image and with all things media (Peterson and Taylor 2013), following his accession to power he expanded the state's official photographic section in order to document his every move, and he also encouraged a cadre of international photojournalists to document the state's activities as widely as possible. Following the expulsion of the Ugandan Asians in 1972, many previously Asian-owned photographic studios were handed over to military men, while the central Kodak agency – which, in theory at least, had a monopoly over the processing of all colour film – was placed in the hands of a senior army officer (Vokes 2012b; this issue).…”

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confidence: 99%

Photographies in Africa in the digital age

Vokes¹

2019

Africa

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In recent years, all kinds of African photographies, both on the continent and in the diaspora, have undergone a digital ‘revolution’ (Ekine and Manji 2012). Without doubt, the key driver of this trend has been the rapid, and massive, influx to practically all African countries of ever more affordable third generation/advanced mobile phone handsets, or smartphones. Even compared with earlier technological revolutions on the continent, both the speed and the scale of this spread have been simply breathtaking. For example, the establishment of transistor radio sets – the process through which personal radios became ubiquitous across Africa – occurred over the period of at least a decade and a half (between roughly the late 1950s and the early 1970s). Similarly, the original mobile phone revolution – i.e. the process through which early generation/low functionality mobile phones went from being a source of novelty, to a domain for experimentation, to technologies that were routinized in everyday life, throughout the continent – took more than a decade to unfold (the crucial years being those between roughly 1999 and 2010) (Vokes 2018b). Against both of those earlier processes, the emergence of smartphones occurred over a much shorter timeframe. Between 2011 and mid-2015 alone, the number of smartphones being imported into Africa – the majority of them sub-US$100 Android-based systems – jumped from around 10 million units per annum to almost 100 million (Tshabalala 2015), as a result of which these devices became quickly established as a common feature of everyday life. Today, more than one-third of all mobile phones in Africa are smartphones, and this percentage is set to rise to two-thirds by 2020 (GSMA Intelligence 2017).

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Rethinking the state in Idi Amin's Uganda: the politics of exhortation

Cited by 25 publications

References 23 publications

Signs of development: photographic futurism and the politics of affect in Uganda

Signs of development: photographic futurism and the politics of affect in Uganda

The Psychiatry of Poverty

Photographies in Africa in the digital age

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