?New-Breed? Leadership, Conflict, and Reconstruction in the Great Lakes Region of Africa: A Sociopolitical Biography of Uganda's Yoweri Kaguta Museveni

Abstract

Although now a largely discredited idea, the notion that the period from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s generated a breed of African leadership captured popular imagination, official discourse, and academic writing. Leaders like Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia, Isias Aferworki in Eritrea, and Paul Kagame in Rwanda were young, dynamic, and willing to break discredited predecessors' taboos. Among this bretheren, no personality better exemplified the new breed than Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, President of Uganda. When the National Resistance Army/Movement (NRA/M) assumed power in the wake of Uganda's second civil war in the 1980s, the leadership of the Movement very quickly assumed an almost Guevaran posture in the discourse on African democratization and recovery. Nearly two decades later, Museveni still dominates Uganda's popular and intellectual imagination, but in many respects is beginning to look more and more like a scion of the old breed.