Reading Museveni: Structure, Agency and Pedagogy in Ugandan Politics

Abstract

Introduction In an essay on the shifting fortunes of African intellectuals, the Burkinab6 historian Joseph Ki-Zerbo remarks upon the precarious situation of intellectuals during the rise of military regimes in the 1960s and 1970s. KiZerbo writes that there was something inevitable about this predicament: After all, here was a clash of opposites, with soldiers using the logic of force and intellectuals depending on the force of logic (KiZerbo 1994, 30-31). Such an image may very well hold true today. But, in at least one instance, Africa has produced a figure that bridges these opposites a synthesis of solider and intellectual Uganda's Yoweri Kaguta Museveni.1 Indeed, some observers have recently mused that Museveni is not simply a singular figure, but a model being emulated (and, more prescriptively, one that should be emulated) on the continent.2 Museveni himself is not a passive participant in all this; he has intervened in the neighboring countries of Rwanda and Zaire/Congo to assist guerrilla leaders who have self-consciously copied elements of his policies and discourse. In the debate over the Museveni model, it may be instructive to review how the man himself portrays it in his recently published autobiography, Sowing the Mustard Seed: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in Uganda (Museveni 1997, hereafter SMS).3 The career, and the myth, of Museveni son of poor peasant cattlekeepers, political science student at the University of Dar Es Salaam, guerrilla fighter and strategist, and currently President of Uganda and leader of the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) have been built upon the simultaneous assumption of the roles of military man of action and intellectual man of ideas. Anyone the least bit familiar with Museveni's writings and speeches knows that here is a soldier who reads, and reads