Senior Research Seminar 24th October with Professor Richard Vokes (University of Western Australia)
The Road to Tweheyo’s House: Infrastructure, Auto-construction and State-making in Post-development Uganda
Recently, the Government of Uganda has embarked on the largest road building programme in the country’s history. Over 8000km of new highways are being constructed, using all kinds of development finance, including the world’s most expensive road: the China-funded Kampala-Entebbe Expressway. For the Government, these public works programmes are justified in terms of an official aspiration for Uganda to achieve middle-income economic status by 2040, and to eventually become ‘the Dubai of Africa’. Following a major programme of political advertising, such technocratic aspirationalism has become infectious among Ugandan publics, and has become a source for political mobilisation in its own right. However, as my multi-year ethnographic study of one of the country’s largest highway projects – the Mbarara-Kabale Road (MKR), in South-western Uganda – shows, for people living alongside these construction projects, their experiences are more often characterised by all kinds of socio-political disruptions, including the reordering of their living worlds. For these people, official aspirationalism may be also tempered by social memory. After all, it was along the same thoroughfare on which the new MKR sits that in the past: criminal gangs have mobilized; armies have marched and met in battle; and the HIV/AIDS and Covid-19 epidemics have travelled. The main aim of this paper is to explore how people work out these contradictions. It will show that one response has been for people to form collectives to build their own, alternative ‘roads’. The practices of these collectives in some ways mirror those of the national highway schemes. Yet in other respects, they re-order economic, social-political, and living relations, and engage social memory, on their own terms.
Richard Vokes is Professor of Anthropology and International Development at the University of Western Australia; Director of the Ethnography Lab of Western Australia; Research Associate of the Western Australian Museum Boola Bardip, and; Research Affiliate of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford. His research focuses primarily on the African Great Lakes region, especially on the societies of South-western Uganda, where he has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork since 2000. He has published extensively, including on: development (governance, education, and natural resource management), the HIV/AIDS epidemic, new religious movements, and the history of photography, media and social change.
His recent publications include:
- ‘(Re)sounding Photographs: The Politics of Silence and the Cacophony of Memory from Idi Amin’s Uganda’, in Visual Anthropology Review, 2025.
- ‘Transition, Transformation and the Politics of the Future in Uganda’, in Journal of Eastern African Studies, 2024. [with Sam Wilkins].
- ‘The Presidential Rally in Uganda; Ritual, Drama and Multiple Axes of Communication’, in Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 2023. [with Sam Wilkins].
- ‘Shifting States: New Perspectives on Security, Infrastructure and Political Affect’, ASA Monograph, London: Routledge, 2021. [edited with Alison Dundon].
- ‘The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin’, Munich: Prestel, 2021. [with Derek R. Peterson].