This article is part of the following series: Contested Truths
On March 12th, 2021, students at Uganda’s Mbarara University of Science andTechnology (MUST) organised a strike. The strike, the students argued, was both a protest against online lectures and a demand for physical lectures. Notably, science and technology students protested a learning technology that was meant to ameliorate the coronavirus health crisis. One could easily interpret the strike …
This article is part of the following series: Contested Truths
Few published works of creative non-fiction exist on COVID-19 in Africa. With the publication of QUARANTINED, Ugandan intellectual and philosopher, Jimmy Spire Ssentongo has painted a behind-the-scenes picture of how the Ugandan state handled the coronavirus disease. While the Ugandan president praised self and staff for putting the coronavirus in check through the state’s isolation centres, the people under …
This article is part of the following series: Contested Truths
“This is a people’s war”, declared President Museveni after the country’s first COVID-19 case, adding, “I have come here to lead the war of the wananchi [against Covid-19]”[1]. When COVID-19 became a reality in Uganda, the government announced ‘a war of the wananchi’[2](“a people’s war”) against the virus through a series of incremental measures. …
This article is part of the following series: Histórias of Zika
For Luganda click here.
In early 2016, people across the United States became aware of a new threat—Zika virus. A New York Times article that April featured a description of the discovery of Zika virus in “a remote Ugandan lab” in the 1940s.[1] But while that story acknowledged the contributions of scientists in Uganda, it mistook the laboratory …