Remembering Kenneth Kaunda

Zambia’s former president Kenneth Kaunda has died. He led the southern African nation from 1964 until 1991. A teacher, activist, and anti-colonial leader, Kaunda assumed the presidency of Zambia at the age of forty as the country transitioned from British colonial rule as Northern Rhodesia to a nation that Kaunda sought to define through his philosophy of Zambian humanism and the slogan “One Zambia, One Nation.”





I started my academic career as an environmental historian of the British Empire in eastern Africa, but find myself currently working on political history of eastern and southern Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, meaning that Kaunda looms over much of what I think about on a daily basis.

Across Africa, Kaunda, who headed the United National Independence Party (UNIP) is understandably best remembered for his opposition to apartheid South Africa and settler Rhodesia. While most of Africa experienced decolonization between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s, the political terrain looked very different in southern Africa. Apartheid South Africa was joined by white settlers’ rogue decolonization in Rhodesia. Two recalcitrant Portuguese colonies in what became Mozambique and Angola, along with a South African colony in present-day Namibia rounded out the region. Most African states were critical of these violently segregated societies, but Zambia shared a border with Rhodesia, lay within easy reach of South Africa’s powerful military, and was bound by economic orientation and transit infrastructure to both states. This meant that Kaunda’s rejection of their models as a threat to African decolonization writ large, and the material actions that his government took, carried real weight.

Kaunda declared his country willing to bear any sacrifice so that international sanctions could force Rhodesia toward a democratic decolonization. He hosted South African and Rhodesian liberation movements in Zambia, despite the dangers that large, well-armed communities of fighters posed, despite the commando and bombing raids these invited from the South African Defence Force, and in spite of the way this committed Zambia to intensive and costly diplomatic entanglements. Lusaka became the headquarters of the ANC’s External Mission which, by the 1980s, was treated by most of the world’s nations as a government in waiting.

What Kaunda’s hospitality did for the ANC--led in exile by Oliver Tambo, and dependent on the symbolic power of imprisoned figures like Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu--is hard to quantify. A daughter of ANC exiles recalls how in Kaunda’s Lusaka, ANC and other exile figures became “a new breed of Africans...determined that they would shine and shine and shine. They were possessed of the secret of freedom, a sort of inner spirit that propelled them forward and made them look--to my wide eyes at least--as though they were soaring” (Msimang, Always Another Country, 35). Kaunda, that daughter of exiles recalled, “was a dreamer...who said that independent Africa had a responsibility towards the parts of Africa that were still in chains.” The significance of Kaunda’s stance became clear when exiles travelled elsewhere in Africa. In Zambia, they were privileged refugees in a country “whose entire foreign policy was built around our protection and emancipation.” Elsewhere, they were mere sojourners (Msimang, Always Another Country, 35, 80).

Life in exile for some became corroded by rivalries, insecurities, and fatigue. But South Africans were grateful, and among Mandela’s first acts on release from prison was to travel to Lusaka to pay homage to Kaunda.

In British archives documenting this period, Kaunda comes across as a figure who deeply frustrated his British interlocutors in the government, diplomatic service, and intelligence world. Kaunda embraced a kind of dependency on Britain that his government believed would ultimately yield more benefits than costs. But Kaunda also positioned Zambia more broadly in the world through his outsized presence in the Commonwealth and roles in the Non-Aligned Movement. The RAF and British trucking firms supported the Zambian economy during the early months of Rhodesia’s rogue independence, British military training teams entered the country to build its British-commanded armed forces, and Kaunda sent young Zambian soldiers to British military academies for military education. He also committed the country to purchasing British-manufactured weapons that young officers believed locked the country into indefensible dependence on the former colonial power.

But through these actions, and the way in which they temporarily ceded Zambian freedom of movement on the Rhodesian issue, Kaunda secured substantial British security guarantees at a moment when the Zambian government lived in real fear of being drawn into an unwinnable war with the Rhodesian military that had armed itself during the colonial era in part through acquiring the wealth of Zambia’s copper mines through an aborted British experiment in imperial federation that temporarily bound Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

By the early 1970s Kaunda sent British training teams packing, replacing them with Italians. He cut off arms contracts with Britain, signing new ones with Yugoslavia. Zambian soldiers still went to train at Mons and Sandhurst, but still more went to India’s military academies. And Tanzania’s defence forces provided political education to Zambia’s military. Just a few years earlier the British government was convinced that it could continue to dominate Zambia’s military, intelligence, and national security apparatus for years to come, but suddenly found themselves powerless. And Zambia gained a rail outlet to the Indian Ocean due to its cooperation with Tanzania and China.

Kaunda’s commitment to liberation in southern Africa translated into a series of lasting images: Kaunda meeting with South African Prime Minister John Vorster in a railway carriage on the Victoria Falls Bridge; Kaunda squiring Olof Palme to the Rhodesian frontier, which the Swedish prime minister described as “the border of human decency” before unleashing massive funds for the ANC and other liberation movements; Kaunda dancing with Margaret Thatcher as part of a Commonwealth diplomatic offensive to bring down the rogue Rhodesians.

The British were intensely frustrated by what they saw as the two faces of Kaunda: his willingness to publicly flay them for their inability and unwillingness to successfully confront Rhodesia and South Africa; and his private willingness to compromise. The former saw him threaten by turns to leave the Commonwealth or to move to evict Britain from the organization that it regarded as an extension of its empire. The latter saw him broker deals in Angola with the South African government and its clients there that put him opposite more radical African liberation movements and their Cuban supporters.

Kaunda’s constant moralizing, however much it infuriated the British and others, was successful both in shifting global opinion, and in constructing a lasting image of Kaunda as a flawed but upright statesman. When he condemned South Africa in a widely distributed Commonwealth pamphlet on the regional costs of apartheid, he wrote that he wore several hats: “as president of one of the victim states; as the Chairman of the six Frontline States for which this report is about; as a member of the Commonwealth or simply as an ordinary mortal appalled” by what apartheid had wrought. “The ideology of apartheid,” he declared, was “hitting its neigbhours back into the stone age” (Apartheid Terrorism: the Destabilization Report, 1989, xi-xii). In a comparison designed to stir the global conscience, Kaunda compared the physical and structural violence of apartheid, and its relentless plundering of its neighbors, to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

Best known for his stance against Rhodesia and South Africa, Kaunda also admitted South Asian refugees from eastern Africa at a time when other African nations were closing their doors to these stateless families. Kaunda cast a wide net with his diplomacy, and used the spectacular national parks his government helped to create as a backdrop for diplomacy, one day hosting Indira Gandhi, another brokering South African diplomatic deals, at a government lodge in the South Luangwa National Park.

On the home front, Kaunda sought to construct a developmental state that conveyed benefits to Zambians long denied by the uneven structures of colonial rule. Building a national economy to replace the extractive one that preceded it required dealing with a white-dominated mining sector, the managers of which resisted Africanization. Nationalization and planning were key tools of Kaunda’s early governments, and as the “One Zambia, One Nation” slogan demonstrated, Kaunda was deeply concerned with bridging the gaps that separated Zambians.

Some of these gaps were racial or tribal--legacies of colonial rule, competing nationalisms, and the diversity of the vast territory that Zambia contained. In western Zambia, the Lozi kingdom chafed when promised autonomy failed to materialize. Europeans on the Copperbelt--the powerhouse of the Zambian economy--not only dragged their feet when it came to training and promoting African employees, but publicly impugned Africans’ abilities, indicting not just their employees, but Kaunda and his cabinet. At least as much as these divisions, the ones between urban and rural Zambians preoccupied Kaunda, who worried that Zambians inhabited two worlds.

His squishy philosophy of Zambian humanism--and the symbols of industry and agriculture, tradition and modernity, on the national seal where it resided--sought to bridge these worlds. Like Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa, humanism sought to rehabilitate an African past and to graft it onto the promise of socialism. Less ideological than Nyerere, Kaunda’s humanism was more malleable. But far from this fact rendering it inconsequential, it gave it a different, potentially demotic kind of power. Letters from Zambians to their government officials on a host of policy issues during the 1960s and 1970s invoked Kaunda’s humanism--subtly or otherwise. The power they recognized these invocations as giving their claims is a testament to the multiple, unpredictable lives of Kaunda’s political thought.

Kaunda’s Zambia, it should be said, was not all brotherly love. A new generation of historians has moved beyond the uncritically sympathetic portrayals of earlier generations, and is exploring more complex dynamics of Kaunda’s legacy. Kaunda and his government were distinctly intolerant of rival forms and sources of authority in Zambia, or of challenges to their rule and governing prerogatives.

UNIP had joined the rival ANC liberation party in encouraging Africans to poach in late colonial Northern Rhodesia as an expression of their discontent with the injustices of colonial rule, which extended to restricting Africans’ access to wildlife resources. But when UNIP assumed power, Kaunda was unforgiving in his persecution of poachers, and baffled by the chiefs who sought to protect them. Members of Alice Lenshina’s Lumpa Church were killed in their scores for challenging state authority, and dissenting members of Kaunda’s government were dealt with harshly, some of them experiencing a kind of permanent internal exile. Kaunda ultimately engineered the creation of a one-party state. He argued, in common with figures like Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, that multi-party democracy left young African nations vulnerable to predatory superpowers and their clients in the context of the Cold War, and that partisan divisions could too neatly map onto the ethno-linguistic divisions produced by the country’s diversity. This was true, but also self-serving.

In government, Kaunda was a micromanager. His nation confronted by massive economic and social challenges, and enormous foreign policy conundrums, Kaunda nonetheless found time to send dozens of missives to central and local government officials on the distinctly tangential topic of wildlife conservation. Did lechwe--a species of antelope--need a special preserve, Kaunda wondered? Could fertilizer be deployed in the game-rich Luangwa Valley without harming the fauna there? Could ideas he scratched out on the back of an envelope for translocating dangerous animals be successfully implemented by the wildlife department?

Zambia’s robust economy and growth, powered by development plans’ harnessing of wealth from the mining sector, plummeted during the 1970s as sudden global trends echoed through the country’s political economy. The strengths and pitfalls of Zambia’s economic management since the 1960s is receiving far more serious scholarly attention the past decade, but its dependence on the mining sector, and that sector’s dependence on the global economy, exposed its vulnerabilities during the 1970s and created a cycle of debt that frustrated the long-term goals of its development plans.

In the early 1990s, Kaunda’s lustre was gone. His compromises in Angola and with South Africa more broadly seemed out of step with more aggressive diplomacy and armed struggle. Facing considerable popular pressure in Zambia, Kaunda altered Zambia’s constitution to allow for multi-party elections. Voters gave Kaunda and his party a comprehensive thumping at the polls, and in the years that followed his departure, the new Zambian government introduced constitutional changes designed to bar his return to office.

Kaunda’s years as elder statesman saw his rehabilitation. And his moving speech at Nelson Mandela’s funeral in 2013 provided amusement and nostalgia--the sight of Kaunda taking frail steps from his seat, and then sprinting to the podium to the roar of the audience, and his typically staccato rebuke of “young man” in his fifties or sixties who sought to end his praise of Madiba and condemnation of the “Boers”, made him a figure who commanded respect without demanding absurd adoration.

But Kaunda became more than a figure of nostalgia and fun. For people uncomfortable with Nelson Mandela’s dance with De Klerk at the end of apartheid in South Africa, Kaunda could be celebrated for his publicly-uncompromising stance against that regime. For Zambians concerned about the destruction that ethnic divisions seemed to threaten in the nation, Kaunda could be admired for his Zambian humanism. For those frustrated with Robert Mugabe’s brutal suppression of his political opponents, Kaunda could be admired for taking his cues from Zambian voters in 1991--although that required a certain amount of forgetting. For those frustrated by the neoliberalism underpinning the structural adjustment regimes and the damage they wrought on Africa, Kaunda’s national development plans and aspiration to build Zambia anew after colonialism could provide inspiration.

Historians and Zambians writ large will continue to debate Kenneth Kaunda’s presidency and political legacy--in some regards this process has only seriously begun recently--but his passing is more than an occasion for mourning in Zambia. It is an occasion for revising debates about how to fashion a good, just political economy. It is a moment for considering solidarity across borders in the face of profound racism. It is a reminder of the vitality of debates about how countries should make their way in the world. And it will hopefully spark new frameworks for thinking about the contributions and legacies of a figure who jovially and impatiently loomed over Zambia and Africa.

Book Review--We're Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire

“We’re here because you were there,” the words of a migrant in Britain explaining their presence in the heart of a declining empire in the mid-twentieth century, represent perhaps the most obvious and least interesting insight of Ian Sanjay Patel’s compelling account of Britain’s attempts to define citizenship and belonging in the nation amidst decolonisation. By those words, of course, the migrant meant that the presence of people from the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa in Britain was the result of British imperialism.

In We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire (Verso, 2021), Ian Sanjay Patel tells not just a story of migrants arriving to Britain in the twentieth century, sometimes fleeing crises of British making in new nations, but the manner in which decolonization sparked British attempts to define for nearly the first time the meaning of citizenship. Patel’s brilliant book is still more than these things, and serves as a fresh narrative for the trajectory of the British Empire after the Second World War.

Before the 1960s, British citizenship included many people in Britain’s colonies, even if in those colonies people were vulnerable to the extraordinary violence of the British colonial state. As Patel puts it, “the 1948 [British Nationality] Act turned out to be an explosive piece of legislation. The number of non-white people aroudn the world who had a right to migrate to Britain in the 1950s far outstripped the number of white British people already resident in Britain” (6). This was the moment when Britons were finally compelled to confront the rhetoric that had long served as a justification for empire-building: that they were created a global British family. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the physical and structural violence that defined daily life in that empire, much of it underpinned by deep racism, this “homecoming” of the rhetoric of empire was an unhappy one.

Of interest to a growing body of scholarship on settler colonialism, Patel documents how the innovations that led to British attempts to define citizenship in increasingly exclusive terms, came originally not from the British government in London, but from Britain’s settler colonies: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. Through race-based immigration quotas, and through mechanisms like apartheid in South Africa, these settler colonies began the process of defining membership in the political community in racial terms. And it was to their example that the British government itself turned from the 1940s onward. Originally its attempts to delimit Britishness so narrowly were frustrated or limited, but the pressures of decolonization, the ascendance of immigration as a political issue, and disenchantment with a Commonwealth that was less pliant than British elites had hoped, led to successes.

Patel rightly observes that Britain’s 1948 legislation “went against the trend of the post-1945 world towards national citizenship models in which membership was defined in more bounded ways (ethnicity, territory) around an imagined nation-state” (58). And so defining Britishness anew in response to populism and racism called for a retreat to the standard model of citizenship, using “immigration law rather than nationality law” to define belonging (79).

In developing this history, Patel explodes the widely popular and frequently cited myth that population, or the needs of the economy, rather than racism, were the driving forces behind the manner in which Britain sought to regulate immigration in the 1960s and beyond. His broad, analytical narrative of decolonization is matched by careful use of the archival record, which clearly demonstrates how British elites by turns responded to and stoked demands for the dramatic changes in the meaning of British citizenship (168-185, 193, 197, 204).

In the final chapters of the book, Patel focuses in particular on the fates of South Asians in Kenya and Uganda, where the trajectory of national-era politics rendered those communities vulnerable, respectively in 1968 and 1972. These “crises” exposed the fragility of British narratives about empire. Firstly, because the mechanisms national governments in Kenya and Uganda used to expel Asians were those bequeathed to them by colonial rule: so much for representative democracy and the treasured Westminster model being the primary governmental legacies of a supposedly benevolent British rule. And secondly because many of those being pushed from their homes laid claim to the British citizenship they had retained at independence. 

The agonizing frustrations of people rendered stateless, or illegally blocked from entry to Britain, and their convoluted paths across Europe or through the Commonwealth, which only sometimes ended with their settlement in a crueler, harsher Britain than that of their imaginations, are moving to hear recounted, and are one of many strengths of Patel’s book. I can easily imagine assigning this text when I next teach a course on the British Empire. We’re Here Because You Were There is a careful, compelling, and urgent book. Not least because the simplest of truths embodied in its title remains one about which a considerable number of Britons inhabit a state of denial today.

Book Review--The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

Compared to a country like the United States, where federal and state lands to which citizens can lay substantial if still fraught claim, the overwhelming majority of land in Britain is private. Even “national” parks in England and Wales comprise a patchwork of lands under different ownership regimes, to which people have overlapping, highly litigated claims, those of private landowners often retaining real force. The significance of this fact, the forms that it takes, and the background to the privatization of this land form the background to Nick Hayes’ The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us (Bloomsbury, 2020). In a book that blends nature writing, history, social commentary, and advocacy, and supplemented by beautiful black and white illustrations, Hayes takes readers along as he trespasses on a series of properties across England.

Each chapter in Hayes’ book is devoted to an account of a trespass he committed on a particular English property. Some of the trespasses are brazen, but Hayes goes to great lengths to demonstrate how the legal meanings of this term have been dramatically expanded, with implications not just for roamers and ramblers, but for political expression and dissent. Each episode is rich in its description of landscapes, its faunal and floral inhabitants, and the social dynamics that structure access. Readers can almost imbibe the smells of grassy fields and river embankments in summer, or feel leaves beneath their feet.

But more powerful than the descriptions of spaces from which the public are excluded are the accounts of how these properties and their borders, and the legal regimes which define them, came to be. From the fortunes gathered from the slave trade (Hayes delves into UCL’s Legacies of British Slavery project), to the marriages that cemented estates to the portfolios of current Members of Parliament, to the means--historic and current--that landowners deploy to defend their properties, Hayes leaves readers with much to consider.

Hayes reminds readers that there is nothing natural about England’s strict demarcation of property borders and intolerance of trespass. The earlier great era of enclosure--the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--with all the social strife they generated were followed by a second selling off of the public estate during the 1980s and 1990s. These dramatic processes, Hayes argues, remain under-considered when thinking about the meanings of space and democracy in England today.

Alternatives to England’s draconian laws of trespass (and it is important to emphasise that the property regime in question is an English and Welsh one) abound. Scotland’s public rights to lands, emerging from the devolution project of the late-1990s, are far more generous than those south of the border. If the creation of a massive federal estate--like that which exists in the United States--is geographically and legally impractical, Scandinavian nations that offer the public substantial rights of access to private property offer an alternative model.The Book of Trespass is written for a wide audience, and Hayes is as expert and gentle a guide through the legal and historical thicket of trespass in England as down the footpaths and over the fences of the nation’s countryside. I knew a bit of this history--both from studying British history and from having hiked quite a bit in the British Isles--but after reading Hayes’ powerful, amusing, and deeply thought-provoking book I will not view the British countryside in the same way.

Book Review--Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean

I generally post an end of year summary of some of the enjoyable things I’ve read during the year, but thought I would try writing short reviews here on the blog of some of the historical works (and maybe some fiction) as I finish them up.

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In recent decades, historians of the Americas, Western Europe, and West Africa have begun to study what they call the “Atlantic World.” This term stems from a recognition of how interconnected different places bordering the Atlantic became from the 1500s onward, and of how studying phenomena like slavery, migration, trade, ecological transformation, and the flow of political ideas requires scholars to step over the national borders that often make up the historian’s “unit” of analysis, and instead examine how these things played out across the Atlantic. It is also an approach that recognizes how oceans and bodies of water more generally are highways for people, products, and ideas.

Long before the Atlantic became this kind of interconnected space, the Indian Ocean functioned in a similar way for states and people in eastern Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeastern, and East Asia. Although some scholars have long agitated for this kind of approach to be applied to the Indian Ocean, there has been a particularly interesting boom in historical scholarship in the past years, and Thomas McDow’s Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean (Ohio University Press, 2018) is a book that is perhaps among the best examples of it that I have seen.

McDow studies nineteenth century movements between Oman and East Africa, while also observing how these interconnected regions also depended on wealth, expertise, and migrants from South Asia, other parts of the Middle East, and inner African states. To document the actions of Omani rulers (who also came to rule Zanzibar, and moved their capital to the island to firm up their interests along the East African coast), traders from Nyamwezi (the area south of Lake Victoria in present day Tanzania), and more “ordinary” migrants from Oman, and everyone in between, McDow studied legal contracts from archives in Zanzibar, and mapped out the connections they revealed.

His focus on these legal and economic transactions also reveals the power of kinship networks in facilitating people’s social and economic and physical mobility, their financial successes (or failures). I studied anthropology as an undergraduate and got some exposure to that discipline’s way of looking at kinship, which tended to be more rigid, and almost mathematical in calculating how structures of kin relations affected social and cultural life. Kinship as McDow brings it to life in the Indian Ocean was something altogether different. People were moving across this oceanic world at a time of tremendous social change--this was also the era when the British made their presence felt in the Indian Ocean, through anti-slavery campaigns, through their interest in the movement of Indian colonial subjects, and through their own colonialism in eastern Africa. The dynamism of the place and the period meant that kinship relations, as well as the identities associated with them (what did it mean to be Swahili? Or Zanzibari?) were fluid, complex, and unpredictable.

The book shifts scales very effectively, sometimes discussing large scale migration; sometimes focusing on Indian Ocean geopolitics; and also offering fascinatingly detailed portraits of historical actors. McDow also draws on some environmental history methodologies by documenting how environmental change and fluctuation in Oman was responsible for prompting some of the migration of people from coastal and interior Oman to coastal and interior eastern Africa.

This was a very complex but also rewarding piece of scholarship well worth a read for anyone interested in eastern Africa or the Indian Ocean world. As well as the contracts in Zanzibar’s archives that McDow mined to tell this elaborate story, and the complex peopling of the region, this period of history left behind material remains. Among the structures on Zanzibar that testify to the significance of this era was one of the Omani ruler’s palaces--Beit Al Ajaib. Sadly, after years of neglect and some apparent corruption amidst a refurbishment, this structure collapsed in December. It is telling, however, that from a recognition of its history in the region, the government of Oman has pledged funds to reconstruct the tower of the palace.

Uganda's election and crisis of democracy

Today, Ugandans have been voting in their country’s general elections, in which they will choose a president and elect parliamentarians. Incumbent president Yoweri Museveni, in power since 1986, is pulling out all the stops to ensure his victory, with catastrophically violent results. The Ugandan security services have brutally targeted the campaign of Bob Wine, a charismatic, politically-minded musician who is Museveni’s most formidable rival for the presidency. Museveni’s deployment of violence is nothing new, but this year he has the convenient excuse of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has given the state the thin cover it needs to terrorize Wine’s supporters as they rally around the country. Wine has been harassed, arrested, and injured, and his supporters and security have been killed. The Ugandan government has now blocked access to Facebook in the final 24-hour stretch.


I experienced, in a small way and from a comparatively safe distance, the violence of Museveni’s security state in 2012. I was living in Old Kampala, dividing my days between research at Makerere University, the National Library, the Uganda Wildlife Authority, and the Ugandan Parliament. In the shadow of what was then known as the Gaddafi National Mosque rival politico-religious factions engaged raucously in the street. Concerned less by any threat to the state, and more to establish its primacy in enforcing order, the security state showed up.

In the hostel where I was then the sole resident, I was sitting and reading in a spartan courtyard surrounded by dormitories and private rooms. I first heard tear gas being used, and the hostel manager careened from the front of the building into a refuge in the back. Tear gas canisters meant for demonstrators out on the road ricocheted around the courtyard, and within seconds my eyes felt afire. I hadn’t dealt with tear gas before, but I plunged my face under a faucet in the yard. The military police switched to live rounds, and my eyes took a back seat as I sprinted to my room and dove beneath the bed. It was all over in a few minutes, and the Daily Monitor issued a lugubrious report the following day on the violence by authorities and the handful of deaths that resulted.

Such has become politics in Museveni’s Uganda, a particular irony since the president was feted in the late-1980s as the figure to bring a decisive end to the chaos engendered by Idi Amin’s leadership and the violence that followed his deposition by Tanzanian armed forces after he pushed the otherwise-peaceful Julius Nyerere too far.

It is tempting to say that in other times Museveni’s violence might have drawn the ire of the U.S. government, curbing his ability to lash his opponent and his citizens with such impunity. But Museveni is on his sixth--perhaps soon seventh--U.S. president, and as Helen Epstein illustrates in her book Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda, and the War on Terror, the Ugandan president is skilled at wrapping American presidents around his little finger. Museveni’s “genius,” according to Epstein, was to “capitalize on Western ambivalence about Africa’s capacity for democracy and self-determination,” using “generous foreign aid to turn Uganda into a military dictatorship dressed up to look like a democracy” (22).

During the Cold War many African states manipulated U.S. and European governments by casting themselves as allies in the fight against Communism. The collapse of the Soviet Union coincided with a wave of democratization across the continent, in part due to long-running pro-democracy campaigners finally making headway, and in part due to the U.S. withdrawing its support from many authoritarian figures who were newly seen as an embarrassment rather than an anti-communist bulwark.

Museveni was among the first would-be authoritarians to realize that the “War on Terror” provided a golden opportunity for him to play a similar role. Ugandan soldiers fighting far afield against enemies of the U.S. have bought him extraordinary indulgence, and Museveni’s credentials as an elder statesman, political revolutionary, and ambitions for closer regional integration ensured that he maintains the respect of his political peers in East Africa and beyond.

Museveni manipulated the Bush administration with ease, given the zeal with which it sought to export raw American power. Obama and his officials discussed the so-called War on Terror less crudely, but prosecuted it with a similarly ruthless and frequently lawless vigor. The Trump administration didn’t even pretend to care about the preservation of global democracies in its conduct of foreign policy. And already Museveni is turning his eye toward the new dispensation.

Not for Museveni the fence-sitting of many of the other world’s authoritarians after Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump. Just a few days after the election, Museveni took to Twitter to congratulate Biden, emphasize the bonds that Christianity and the African American community forged with Uganda, and make a pitch to renew the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act. Biden is likely to be less interventionist in his foreign policy. But that could work in Museveni’s favor, should he be re-elected. Doing the dirty work of the U.S. in regional conflicts, and sending Ugandan soldiers where Americans wish to go but fear to tread, could earn him gratitude and a blind eye toward authoritarianism at home. During the Obama administration Biden was a voice of caution--partly about foreign intervention, but also about parting ways with America’s long-time “friends,” however viciously unsavoury those friends might be. Today in the world, the U.S. has fewer long-term security partners with boots on the ground on behalf of U.S. supposed security interests than Museveni and the Uganda People’s Defence Force.

Kenya’s Daily Nation has been reporting that voting materials have arrived late in some areas known to lean toward the opposition. The newspaper also outlined a host of technical glitches and personnel failures at polling stations around the country. This does not bode well for voters concerned about jobs, corruption, infrastructure, and healthcare, being able to change the country’s political course. If no candidate receives 50% of the vote, the top candidates continue to a second round. Museveni has never come close to having to compete in a second round. 

Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka observed the sad irony that threats to democracy in the U.S. are diverting media and governments’ attention, such as it ever was, from the ongoing crisis of Ugandan democracy.