Category: ugandan media

keeping up with the blogren

I wanted to bring your attention to a few bloggers who just crossed (or re-crossed) my radar screen:

GayUganda
I am a gay blogger, blogging from Uganda, and willing to talk knowledgeably about my sexuality, my lover, and my personal life in Uganda. Strange. Very strange.
GayUganda covers issues concerning sexual minorities in Uganda and Africa. Check out the sidebar for news about the Ugandan GLBTI community.

Building the Nation
i am jose acadio buendia. or pip in sons & lovers. prince kung in the last empress. xuma in mine boy. ekwueme in the concubine. i am.
Degstar switched from Blogger to WordPress in March, and I missed it. His most recent post is a letter to fellow blogger Dennis Matanda.

Daniel Kalinaki
Just an ordinary bloke.
Not sure how I missed this one. Daniel writes about media and communications in Uganda. Check out his post on bloggers versus mainstream media.

GVO: Uganda: Bloggers Respond to Controversial Daily Monitor Articles

My next piece is up at Global Voices Online:

Uganda’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) community has gotten a lot of press recently in the form of a number of articles written by Katherine Roubos, a 22-year-old Stanford student from the United States. Most recently, Roubos covered the first ever LGBTI press conference, a story that prompted an anti-gay rally in Kampala.

Read more»

horror, in pictures

My strongest support goes to my friend Katherine Roubos, whose courageous coverage of the GLBT community in Uganda has garnered this:


I went to the rally to be a part of a team of white female decoys (Katherine’s editor sent her to cover it, which theoretically gave her some sort of journalistic immunity, but the purpose of the rally already nullified that. Better safe than sorry, not so?) and to exercise my own curiousity: the event was organized by Martin Ssempa, a conservative Ugandan religious activist with whom I recently exchanged words.

Wow. Martin Ssempa is undeniably charismatic. He is also undeniably creepy. For all you Lawrencians: imagine Fred Phelps shaking your hand. I came home and took a very long shower.

P.S. Aga Khan, if you fire her, that’s it. We’re done.

saleh: so not on my good side

I haven’t been great about updating lately — I’ve been busy planning the July Student Global Ambassador Immersion and watching The L Word with my housemates. But then Salim Saleh went and gave me the push I needed to start writing again:

State minister for finance Gen. Caleb Akandwanaho [Salim Saleh, brother of President Yoweri Museveni] has lashed out at scholars for failing to invent solutions to eradicate poverty and corruption in Africa.

“We need to blame you the academia for failing to conceptualise our problems and get solutions to our people’s problems. You just talk, then write a few sentences and blame everybody else except yourselves,” the minister told a three-day conference organised by a network of Black American policy specialists and the Makerere University Business School in Kampala yesterday.

— “Uganda: Saleh Attacks Scholars Over Graft Solutions,” Alfred Wasike

I have to think about this for a second. Salim Saleh, who has been implicated in scandals in the UPDF and the Uganda Commercial Bank and the DRC, who then went on to become Uganda’s Minister of Microfinance thanks to his sweet family connections, is blaming students for corruption in Uganda.

The only way reporters at the New Vision must be able to keep a straight face is the constant threat of firing, arrest and/or deportation, courtesy Robert Kabushenga.

Press freedom, my ass.