R Vokes
Biographic Data
| ID | 18390 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R Vokes |
| GIVEN NAMES | R |
| FAMILY NAME | Vokes |
| SIGNATURE | VOKES R |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Western Australia |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2862-7203 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 201 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
(Re)Sounding images: Part one: (Re)Sounding archival images
The first of two special sections exploring the relationships between sound and the photographic image. The section's articles by Darren Newbury, Richard Vokes, and Paul Basu are concerned with issues of sound, voice, and silence in relation to archival photographs. The introductory essay discusses these visual anthropologies of silence and voice, both acknowledging their debt to Elizabeth Edward's theorizing of the “orality of photographs,” but …
(Re)sounding photographs: The politics of silence and the cacophony of memory from Idi Amin's Uganda
Anthropologists are showing a growing interest in silence, both as a phenomenon of ethnographic enquiry and as a category for theorizing. Silence manifests in ways that are inherently relational and exerts a force that may be more or less emollient or severe in its effects. Photographs are often deeply implicated in all of this, given that they too are essentially relational, and they too exert an affective force upon their viewers. Photographs m…
The presidential rally in Uganda: Ritual, drama and multiple axes of communication
This article analyses the rally practices of President Yoweri Museveni and opposition presidential candidates Kizza Besigye and Robert Kyagulanyi (better known as ‘Bobi Wine’) in Uganda. Drawing on literatures on political ritual, social drama and rallies, the article illustrates the multiple forms and axes of communication that take place between various actors–both present and absent–who are involved in these rallies. Based on ethnographic rese…
Transition, transformation, and the politics of the future in Uganda
While the framing of the past remains a critical terrain of political discourse in Uganda, competing political visions oriented towards the future have emerged as equally salient as the country undergoes significant social and economic changes. Against the image of gridlock that characterises Ugandan politics after President Yoweri Museveni’s latest controversial re-election in 2021, the aim of this article is to highlight these currents of chang…
Using suitability analysis, informed by Co-Design, to assess contextually appropriate urban growth models in Gulu, Uganda
Uganda has one of Africa’s fastest urban growth rates, compounding urban challenges, including urban sprawl, the proliferation of informal settlements, decrepit housing, and the privatization of urban development without providing public open space and transport connectivity. In response, this paper tests generic models of urbanization that could be applied in Uganda. This evaluation is conducted through a suitability analysis, informed through C…
(Re)constructing the Field through Sound: Actor-networks, Ethnographic Representation and 'Radio Elicitation' in South-western Uganda
This chapter demonstrates that all ethnographic fieldwork involves the mobilization of both people and things into networks of relations that actor-network theorists would term hybrids. It explores the argument through a detailed discussion of the history of &s;elicitation&s; research techniques in ethnographic fieldwork: those interviewing methods in which objects are used as a means of focusing responses around a given topic or issue. Latour’s …
Fieldwork through the Zoomiverse: Sensing Uganda in a Time of Immobility
We have been conducting collaborative ethnographic research together for over 20 years. Over the past 12 months, this collaboration has included face-to-face encounters, both in Kampala, Uganda, and in Perth, Australia. However, since the advent of COVID-19-related ‘lockdowns’ in our respective countries, our engagements have been conducted exclusively over online platforms, including WhatsApp, Facebook and – increasingly – Zoom. In this article,…
Middle-class’ Africans in Australia: Choosing Hillsong as a global home
Much of the literature on Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity (Pc/C) and African diasporas in the Global North has focused upon African-Majority or -Initiated churches that are either branches of African churches or were created in the diaspora. This focus often frames the appeal of Pc/C to African migrants in terms of: a) its emphasis upon the ‘Prosperity Gospel’ offering a path not only to salvation, but also to earthly riches; b) its opportun…
Archives of Idi Amin
This report describes the official photographic archives of Idi Amin’s government held by the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (UBC). During his reign from 1971 to 1979, Idi Amin embraced visual media as a tool for archiving the achievements of populist military rule as his government sought to reorient Ugandans’ relationship with the state. Only a handful of the resulting images were ever printed or seen, reflecting the regime’s archival impulse …
Briefing: Contextualizing the Bobi Wine factor in Uganda’s 2021 elections
A year out from the 2021 ugandan election, opposition supporters had a lot to worry about. After four straight presidential elections in which the non-incumbent vote was remarkably concentrated in the candidacy of Kizza Besigye of the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), political developments were suggesting that this coalescence would not survive into the upcoming campaign season. At the centre of the FDC, Besigye’s long-time rival for the party …
Marcus Banks (1960-2020)
The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin: Making History in a Tight Corner
In May 2019 we launched a special exhibition at the Uganda Museum in Kampala titled 'The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin.' It consisted of 150 images made by government photographers in the 1970s. In this essay we explore how political history has been delimited in the Museum, and how these limitations shaped the exhibition we curated. From the time of its creation, the Museum's disparate and multifarious collections were exhibited as ethnographic spe…
Photography, Evidence and Concealed Histories from Idi Amin’s Uganda, 1971–79
This article examines a photographic archive that has been recently identified in the stores of the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation in Kampala. The archive consists of some eighty-five thousand black and white negatives that were taken by various official photographic units, government information officers and commercial photographers – all of whom worked under the umbrella of the Ministry of Information – most of them during the years of Preside…
In and Out of Sight: The Afterlife of Official Photography from Idi Amin's Uganda
This article examines the output of Uganda's official Photographic Section from the years of the Idi Amin regime (1971-9), an archive of 60,000 black and white images from which have recently come to light in the stores of the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation in Kampala. Drawing on recent developments in African visual studies, the article focuses in particular upon what this archive reveals about photographic circulations in and from Amin's Ugand…
Signs of development: Photographic futurism and the politics of affect in Uganda
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, drawi…
Photographies in Africa in the digital age
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 sp…
Photography and African futures
Editorial introduction by guest editors
Photography, exhibitions and embodied futures in colonial Uganda, 1908–1960
This article seeks to complicate our understanding of the relationship between the camera and colonial rule in Africa. Based on a case study of the Uganda Protectorate between the years 1908 and 1960, it argues that photography was in fact more deeply embedded within processes of imperial governance than we may have previously appreciated. It substantiates this claim by focusing not upon the more coercive practices of photography, or the more der…
Chronotopes of Media in Sub-Saharan Africa
This article is an introduction to the special issue. The four articles collected here - which trace the movements of media and persons from the bedrooms of young women in Nigerian Calabar (Gilbert), through the living rooms of Kinshasa's elderly (Pype), to the taxis of rural Uganda (Vokes), and to the virtual spaces of a live radio show in Uganda (Brisset-Foucault) - offer rich ethnographic case studies of the temporalizing and spatializing work…
Before the Call: Mobile Phones, Exchange Relations, and Social Change in South-western Uganda
This article contributes to recent attempts to provide ethnographically and historically nuanced accounts of Africa's mobile phone 'revolution'. It does so by examining the coming of mobile phones in one particular place and time: Bugamba Sub-County, in rural Mbarara District, South-western Uganda, between the years 2000 and 2012. In so doing, it extends recent anthropological scepticism regarding the transformative potential of mobile communicat…
Ten years of Jeas
Looking back at its first 10 years, we are happy to see that the Journal of Eastern African Studies has established itself as a major Area Studies journal. As our readership has broadened – in addi
Party, patronage and coercion in the NRM'S 2016 re-election in Uganda: Imposed or Embedded
In the wake of President Museveni’s latest election victory in Uganda, this article provides a critical review of the current literature on his National Resistance Movement (NRM) regime and seeks to affect a paradigm shift. We find that much of this scholarship has tended to track the regime’s increasing authoritarianism over the years with an implicit assumption of social detachment, as if the NRM’s successful electoral machine is one imposed on…
Primaries, patronage, and political personalities in South-western Uganda
This paper is an ethnographic study of the National Resistance Movement Party primaries that took place in the constituency of Rwampara County, Mbarara District, between mid and late 2015. Based on fieldwork carried out during the primary campaigns, it offers a detailed examination of the five candidates’ campaign strategies in the run-up to the polls. It focuses in particular upon the ways in which they all sought to secure votes through making …
Time for School'? School fees, savings clubs and social reciprocity in Uganda
The past 25 years have witnessed sweeping educational reforms in Uganda. The introduction of 'free' Universal Primary Education (UPE, in 1998) and Universal Secondary Education (USE, in 2007) has raised social expectations about access to quality education. Over the same period the population of young people in Uganda has also grown dramatically. As a result hundreds of new primary and secondary schools have been established across the country. T…
The Many Histories of Anthropology
Anthropologists have long demonstrated an interest in the origins of, and the historical development of, their own discipline.1 However, it was not until the early 1960s that "the history of anthro
Introduction: Anthropology, Photography and the Archive
Since the publication of Anthropology and Photography (Edwards 1992) almost two decades ago, there has been an explosion of anthropological interest in historical ethnographic photography and other
Party, patronage and coercion in the NRM'S 2016 re-election in Uganda: Imposed or Embedded
In the wake of President Museveni’s latest election victory in Uganda, this article provides a critical review of the current literature on his National Resistance Movement (NRM) regime and seeks to affect a paradigm shift. We find that much of this scholarship has tended to track the regime’s increasing authoritarianism over the years with an implicit assumption of social detachment, as if the NRM’s successful electoral machine is one imposed on…
Chronotopes of Media in Sub-Saharan Africa
This article is an introduction to the special issue. The four articles collected here - which trace the movements of media and persons from the bedrooms of young women in Nigerian Calabar (Gilbert), through the living rooms of Kinshasa's elderly (Pype), to the taxis of rural Uganda (Vokes), and to the virtual spaces of a live radio show in Uganda (Brisset-Foucault) - offer rich ethnographic case studies of the temporalizing and spatializing work…
Before the Call: Mobile Phones, Exchange Relations, and Social Change in South-western Uganda
This article contributes to recent attempts to provide ethnographically and historically nuanced accounts of Africa's mobile phone 'revolution'. It does so by examining the coming of mobile phones in one particular place and time: Bugamba Sub-County, in rural Mbarara District, South-western Uganda, between the years 2000 and 2012. In so doing, it extends recent anthropological scepticism regarding the transformative potential of mobile communicat…
Primaries, patronage, and political personalities in South-western Uganda
This paper is an ethnographic study of the National Resistance Movement Party primaries that took place in the constituency of Rwampara County, Mbarara District, between mid and late 2015. Based on fieldwork carried out during the primary campaigns, it offers a detailed examination of the five candidates’ campaign strategies in the run-up to the polls. It focuses in particular upon the ways in which they all sought to secure votes through making …
Time for School'? School fees, savings clubs and social reciprocity in Uganda
The past 25 years have witnessed sweeping educational reforms in Uganda. The introduction of 'free' Universal Primary Education (UPE, in 1998) and Universal Secondary Education (USE, in 2007) has raised social expectations about access to quality education. Over the same period the population of young people in Uganda has also grown dramatically. As a result hundreds of new primary and secondary schools have been established across the country. T…
On Ancestral Self-Fashioning: Photography in the Time of Aids
This article looks at a series of photographic practices that emerged in Southwestern Uganda in the 1990s, in response to an emergent AIDS epidemic. In particular, it looks at the albums AIDS patients made in the final months of their lives. The article argues that these albums are an outcome both of a modernist, realist register and of an alternative set of locally meaningful dispositions toward the photograph. It is by keeping both of these fra…
Charisma, creativity, and cosmopolitanism: A perspective on the power of the new radio broadcasting in Uganda and Rwanda
From the mid-1980s onwards, the number of charismatic leaders operating in the Great Lakes region of Eastern-Central Africa has risen dramatically. This article draws a connection between this rapid expansion of charismatic authority and the concurrent proliferation of new radio broadcasting cultures across the zone. It notes that practically every new leader who has emerged over the last two decades has engaged in some form of radio broadcasting…
Reflections on a Complex (and Cosmopolitan) Archive: Postcards and Photography in Early Colonial Uganda,c.1904-1928
This article examines a collection of picture postcards that were published in Uganda between c. 1904 and 1928. Drawing upon recent developments in the anthropology of photography, the article attempts to reconstruct the extended "social archive" of this collection, by exploring the range of relationships through which these image-objects were produced, and through which they have been subsequently circulated and consumed. The approach reveals so…
Briefing: Contextualizing the Bobi Wine factor in Uganda’s 2021 elections
A year out from the 2021 ugandan election, opposition supporters had a lot to worry about. After four straight presidential elections in which the non-incumbent vote was remarkably concentrated in the candidacy of Kizza Besigye of the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), political developments were suggesting that this coalescence would not survive into the upcoming campaign season. At the centre of the FDC, Besigye’s long-time rival for the party …
The politics of oil in Uganda
Journal Article The politics of oil in Uganda Get access Richard Vokes Richard Vokes * *Richard Vokes ([email protected]) is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. I thank David Anderson, Sara Rich Dorman, and Jason Mosley for their comments on a previous draft, and Marney Brosnan for preparing the map. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Vol…
Photographies in Africa in the digital age
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 sp…
Introduction: Haunting Images
Transition, transformation, and the politics of the future in Uganda
While the framing of the past remains a critical terrain of political discourse in Uganda, competing political visions oriented towards the future have emerged as equally salient as the country undergoes significant social and economic changes. Against the image of gridlock that characterises Ugandan politics after President Yoweri Museveni’s latest controversial re-election in 2021, the aim of this article is to highlight these currents of chang…
The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin: Making History in a Tight Corner
In May 2019 we launched a special exhibition at the Uganda Museum in Kampala titled 'The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin.' It consisted of 150 images made by government photographers in the 1970s. In this essay we explore how political history has been delimited in the Museum, and how these limitations shaped the exhibition we curated. From the time of its creation, the Museum's disparate and multifarious collections were exhibited as ethnographic spe…
Signs of development: Photographic futurism and the politics of affect in Uganda
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, drawi…
Arsenal in Bugamba: The rise of English Premier League football in Uganda (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
This article documents the recent upsurge of interest in English Premier League (EPL) football in one village in rural South‐western Uganda. It argues that this new fandom stems from the media reforms that were introduced in Uganda after 1986, and that the craze has already produced a range of unexpected, and in some ways profound, social effects
Rethinking the Anthropology of Religious Change: New Perspectives on Revitalization and Conversion Movements
This article reviews the history of anthropological engagements with religious change. Anthony Wallace made one of the most important contributions to this work by developing the first comprehensive model of revitalization movements. In recent years, contributions to the field have burgeoned in response to a renewed anthropological interest in globalization and transnational religious and social forms. Wallace's work has an ongoing relevance for …
Middle-class’ Africans in Australia: Choosing Hillsong as a global home
Much of the literature on Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity (Pc/C) and African diasporas in the Global North has focused upon African-Majority or -Initiated churches that are either branches of African churches or were created in the diaspora. This focus often frames the appeal of Pc/C to African migrants in terms of: a) its emphasis upon the ‘Prosperity Gospel’ offering a path not only to salvation, but also to earthly riches; b) its opportun…
The Many Histories of Anthropology
Anthropologists have long demonstrated an interest in the origins of, and the historical development of, their own discipline.1 However, it was not until the early 1960s that "the history of anthro
The presidential rally in Uganda: Ritual, drama and multiple axes of communication
This article analyses the rally practices of President Yoweri Museveni and opposition presidential candidates Kizza Besigye and Robert Kyagulanyi (better known as ‘Bobi Wine’) in Uganda. Drawing on literatures on political ritual, social drama and rallies, the article illustrates the multiple forms and axes of communication that take place between various actors–both present and absent–who are involved in these rallies. Based on ethnographic rese…
Archives of Idi Amin
This report describes the official photographic archives of Idi Amin’s government held by the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (UBC). During his reign from 1971 to 1979, Idi Amin embraced visual media as a tool for archiving the achievements of populist military rule as his government sought to reorient Ugandans’ relationship with the state. Only a handful of the resulting images were ever printed or seen, reflecting the regime’s archival impulse …
Photography, Evidence and Concealed Histories from Idi Amin’s Uganda, 1971–79
This article examines a photographic archive that has been recently identified in the stores of the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation in Kampala. The archive consists of some eighty-five thousand black and white negatives that were taken by various official photographic units, government information officers and commercial photographers – all of whom worked under the umbrella of the Ministry of Information – most of them during the years of Preside…
The Arusha tribunal: Whose justice
(Re)sounding photographs: The politics of silence and the cacophony of memory from Idi Amin's Uganda
Anthropologists are showing a growing interest in silence, both as a phenomenon of ethnographic enquiry and as a category for theorizing. Silence manifests in ways that are inherently relational and exerts a force that may be more or less emollient or severe in its effects. Photographs are often deeply implicated in all of this, given that they too are essentially relational, and they too exert an affective force upon their viewers. Photographs m…
The Arusha tribunal: Whose justice
Social Exclusion and Church in the Experiences of Korean Migrant Families in Christchurch
This article documents the experiences of new migrant families from South Korea to Christchurch, New Zealand. It is an empirically derived account of these experiences based upon research conducted in Christchurch between March and April 2006 which was funded by the Families Commission/Komihana a Whanau. In this paper we detail Korean Migrant accounts of social exclusion and harassment and explore how Koreans make sense of, and respond to, these …
Rethinking the Anthropology of Religious Change: New Perspectives on Revitalization and Conversion Movements
This article reviews the history of anthropological engagements with religious change. Anthony Wallace made one of the most important contributions to this work by developing the first comprehensive model of revitalization movements. In recent years, contributions to the field have burgeoned in response to a renewed anthropological interest in globalization and transnational religious and social forms. Wallace's work has an ongoing relevance for …
Charisma, creativity, and cosmopolitanism: A perspective on the power of the new radio broadcasting in Uganda and Rwanda
From the mid-1980s onwards, the number of charismatic leaders operating in the Great Lakes region of Eastern-Central Africa has risen dramatically. This article draws a connection between this rapid expansion of charismatic authority and the concurrent proliferation of new radio broadcasting cultures across the zone. It notes that practically every new leader who has emerged over the last two decades has engaged in some form of radio broadcasting…
On Ancestral Self-Fashioning: Photography in the Time of Aids
This article looks at a series of photographic practices that emerged in Southwestern Uganda in the 1990s, in response to an emergent AIDS epidemic. In particular, it looks at the albums AIDS patients made in the final months of their lives. The article argues that these albums are an outcome both of a modernist, realist register and of an alternative set of locally meaningful dispositions toward the photograph. It is by keeping both of these fra…
Introduction: Haunting Images
Arsenal in Bugamba: The rise of English Premier League football in Uganda (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
This article documents the recent upsurge of interest in English Premier League (EPL) football in one village in rural South‐western Uganda. It argues that this new fandom stems from the media reforms that were introduced in Uganda after 1986, and that the craze has already produced a range of unexpected, and in some ways profound, social effects
Introduction: Anthropology, Photography and the Archive
Since the publication of Anthropology and Photography (Edwards 1992) almost two decades ago, there has been an explosion of anthropological interest in historical ethnographic photography and other
Reflections on a Complex (and Cosmopolitan) Archive: Postcards and Photography in Early Colonial Uganda,c.1904-1928
This article examines a collection of picture postcards that were published in Uganda between c. 1904 and 1928. Drawing upon recent developments in the anthropology of photography, the article attempts to reconstruct the extended "social archive" of this collection, by exploring the range of relationships through which these image-objects were produced, and through which they have been subsequently circulated and consumed. The approach reveals so…
The politics of oil in Uganda
Journal Article The politics of oil in Uganda Get access Richard Vokes Richard Vokes * *Richard Vokes ([email protected]) is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. I thank David Anderson, Sara Rich Dorman, and Jason Mosley for their comments on a previous draft, and Marney Brosnan for preparing the map. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Vol…
The house unbuilt: Actor-networks, social agency and the ethnography of a residence in south-western Uganda
Anthropological theory has always shown a particular fascination for the subject of the house. However, Latour's work offers a significant challenge for previous theorising in this area. Latour challenges the very idea of what a house is, and encourages us to see ‘the house’ as not a coherent form at all, so much as a multitude of (more or less stable) assemblages. He also forces us to re‐examine the relationship between constructed dwellings and…
New Guinean Models in the East African Highlands
This article responds to Michael Herzfeld's call for anthropologists to develop a new form of 'reflexive comparison' by imaginatively casting the peoples of the African Great Lakes as part of Melanesia. Specifically, it explores how notions of personhood and sociality in this African setting might be understood through interpretative approaches developed in the New Melanesian Ethnography of the 1970s and 1980s. It finds that this sort of thought …
The Many Histories of Anthropology
Anthropologists have long demonstrated an interest in the origins of, and the historical development of, their own discipline.1 However, it was not until the early 1960s that "the history of anthro
Time for School'? School fees, savings clubs and social reciprocity in Uganda
The past 25 years have witnessed sweeping educational reforms in Uganda. The introduction of 'free' Universal Primary Education (UPE, in 1998) and Universal Secondary Education (USE, in 2007) has raised social expectations about access to quality education. Over the same period the population of young people in Uganda has also grown dramatically. As a result hundreds of new primary and secondary schools have been established across the country. T…
Party, patronage and coercion in the NRM'S 2016 re-election in Uganda: Imposed or Embedded
In the wake of President Museveni’s latest election victory in Uganda, this article provides a critical review of the current literature on his National Resistance Movement (NRM) regime and seeks to affect a paradigm shift. We find that much of this scholarship has tended to track the regime’s increasing authoritarianism over the years with an implicit assumption of social detachment, as if the NRM’s successful electoral machine is one imposed on…
Primaries, patronage, and political personalities in South-western Uganda
This paper is an ethnographic study of the National Resistance Movement Party primaries that took place in the constituency of Rwampara County, Mbarara District, between mid and late 2015. Based on fieldwork carried out during the primary campaigns, it offers a detailed examination of the five candidates’ campaign strategies in the run-up to the polls. It focuses in particular upon the ways in which they all sought to secure votes through making …
Ten years of Jeas
Looking back at its first 10 years, we are happy to see that the Journal of Eastern African Studies has established itself as a major Area Studies journal. As our readership has broadened – in addi
Photography and African futures
Editorial introduction by guest editors
Photography, exhibitions and embodied futures in colonial Uganda, 1908–1960
This article seeks to complicate our understanding of the relationship between the camera and colonial rule in Africa. Based on a case study of the Uganda Protectorate between the years 1908 and 1960, it argues that photography was in fact more deeply embedded within processes of imperial governance than we may have previously appreciated. It substantiates this claim by focusing not upon the more coercive practices of photography, or the more der…
Chronotopes of Media in Sub-Saharan Africa
This article is an introduction to the special issue. The four articles collected here - which trace the movements of media and persons from the bedrooms of young women in Nigerian Calabar (Gilbert), through the living rooms of Kinshasa's elderly (Pype), to the taxis of rural Uganda (Vokes), and to the virtual spaces of a live radio show in Uganda (Brisset-Foucault) - offer rich ethnographic case studies of the temporalizing and spatializing work…
Before the Call: Mobile Phones, Exchange Relations, and Social Change in South-western Uganda
This article contributes to recent attempts to provide ethnographically and historically nuanced accounts of Africa's mobile phone 'revolution'. It does so by examining the coming of mobile phones in one particular place and time: Bugamba Sub-County, in rural Mbarara District, South-western Uganda, between the years 2000 and 2012. In so doing, it extends recent anthropological scepticism regarding the transformative potential of mobile communicat…
Signs of development: Photographic futurism and the politics of affect in Uganda
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, drawi…
Photographies in Africa in the digital age
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 sp…
Photography, Evidence and Concealed Histories from Idi Amin’s Uganda, 1971–79
This article examines a photographic archive that has been recently identified in the stores of the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation in Kampala. The archive consists of some eighty-five thousand black and white negatives that were taken by various official photographic units, government information officers and commercial photographers – all of whom worked under the umbrella of the Ministry of Information – most of them during the years of Preside…
In and Out of Sight: The Afterlife of Official Photography from Idi Amin's Uganda
This article examines the output of Uganda's official Photographic Section from the years of the Idi Amin regime (1971-9), an archive of 60,000 black and white images from which have recently come to light in the stores of the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation in Kampala. Drawing on recent developments in African visual studies, the article focuses in particular upon what this archive reveals about photographic circulations in and from Amin's Ugand…
Sociology (27 works) · Political science (23 works) · History (21 works) · Law (20 works) · History (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (15 works) · Media studies (13 works) · African history and culture studies (11 works) · Art (11 works)