Editor’s Note: This article contains descriptions of police abuse, abduction and torture. The soldiers arrived at the Kampala home of Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, the award-winning Ugandan novelist, on a mid-afternoon in late December. Armed with machine guns and sledgehammers, they beat him and dragged him out, shoving him into the backseat of an unmarked car. The writer, desperate, attempted to call a lawyer, but his phone was swiftly confiscated by his captors. Rukirabashaija spent the next two weeks in the bowels of a detention facility, where he was tortured daily. He emerged 26 pounds lighter and unable to walk on his own, [...]
In March 2020, before the first COVID-19 case was even recorded in Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni went on national television to announce a country-wide closure of schools. Calling schools the “perfect grounds for new infections,” he said he was making the “move early to avoid the stampede.” Most of the country’s classrooms would remain closed for 22 months, one of the longest COVID-related shutdowns in the world. They finally reopened in January, and educators are still assessing the fallout. First-year primary school classrooms are overflowing with three-years’ worth of pupils, while secondary school campuses have been drained of students who found jobs or got [...]
At a virtual summit held Tuesday, the leaders of the East African Community’s member states approved the Democratic Republic of Congo’s admission into the bloc. Congo joins Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda as the trade bloc’s seventh member, giving a significant boost to the country’s trade and security prospects, as well as to regional and continental integration efforts. Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, who serves as the EAC’s rotating chairperson, described the occasion as “historic” for the bloc and the continent at large, pointing to its potential to increase trade and investment opportunities for the EAC’s citizens, while providing its [...]
