Category: global voices

GVO: Uganda: political heroes and the challenges of development work

My return to colonialism and raising the possibility of a “violent end” to the current regime. Recently he published the first half of a two-part series on why Idi Amin is the “Greatest Ugandan who ever lived.”
Dennis, Joshi, Moses Odokonyero, Minega, Moments of Pleasure and Star of Bethelehem all feature.

jackfruit of the week: 2007.05.29

Writing for the Daily Monitor, Lucy Hannan has a chilling account of life inside a Lord’s Resistance Army camp in the DRC: “Unlike former abductees who have horrific tales of escape and fear, or children who have been murdered and tortured in the bush, these are the kids who will kill for the mystical, militarised cult.”

Country Boyi wonders what would happen if Ugandans blogged in local languages. All of the Ugandan blogs I’ve found so far have been in English — why is that? Is there a whole sector of the blogren I’m missing?

Owera responds to recent controversy over whether or not bloggers are afforded the same legal protection as journalists: “I am not a journalist. I am a blogger. I blog. I run an online diary. Period.” (Particularly interesting is the AP article he quotes, in which a blogger is defined as “some hack who offers half-baked commentary on the news of the day.”)

The news is already out, but I’m taking over from Josh as the Global Voices Uganda Author. My first post, “Self-reflection and the search for meaning in the Ugandan blogosphere,” was published on May 17, and you can keep track of my biweekly blogren roundups here.

GVO: Self reflection and the search for meaning in the Ugandan Blogosphere

My first piece is up at Global Voices Online:

The Ugandan bloggers are having an existential crisis of sorts. The self-examination among the Blogren, as they’ve started calling each other, began in January when several bloggers objected to the establishment of Uganda Bloggers Happy Hour and the Uganda Best of Blog awards.

Read more»

th-th-throw your (…) hands up

Last week Reuters launched a new Africa-focused news site called (what else?) Reuters Africa. The site features pages for each country (check out Uganda’s) that, in addition to regular and business-focused news content, include this:


Yep. You know what that means? We just got ourselves an audience. Global Voices Online already gets 300,000 readers each month, but the new partnership will expose GVO content to about 7.6 million more.

A lot of you have already been featured on GVO — in the last month, Degstar, Inktus, Dennis Matanda, Baz, Pernille, Ivan, Mr. Magoo and Zack and Joshi have all been mentioned. The Uganda section, which Josh edits, follows the big stories and conversations coming out of our part of the blogosphere — our stories. And now, those stories are going to be shown to over 200,000 people each day.

I wrote earlier about the importance of blogging in Uganda and why I think UBHH and the awards are a good idea — it’s important that we talk and argue, laugh and listen. Not just among ourselves, but to the rest of the world.

Well, the world’s listening. What are we going to say?

Other intriguing articles about Reuters Africa: