1 - Hegemonic Regime Survival and Legitimation in Uganda: A Review Essay

Abstract

Uganda has been of immense interest to what Mahmood Mamdani uncharitably refers to as ‘stargazing academics in distant
ivory towers’2 who produce a plethora of commentaries and scholarly work on the country’s politics, culture, economy, etc. At the peak of political decay and societal dysfunction – especially in the 1970s and 1980s – the country suffered stupendous deficiency of long-term intellectual commitment on the part of its citizens, leaving the task of knowledge production to foreign nationals in the ivory towers of the Western (especially the American) academe. To fill this void, a few initiatives came to the fore in the mid/late 1980s, including the founding of Fountain Publishers to support and promote local scholarly publishing, and the Centre for Basic Research (CBR). Both Fountain Publishers and CBR are based in the Ugandan capital, Kampala...