BRIEFLY: THE HISTORICAL SETTING

Winston Churchill once called Uganda Africa's Pearl. The reason for this was that Uganda was (and still is) a land of great natural resources blessed with a climate verging on the perfect. Despite this, Uganda's recent history has led to it becoming one of the world's poorest countries. Uganda's independence in 1962 was followed by a period of dictatorship and civil war. Since 1986 the country has been led by president Yoweri Museveni, who has been democratically re-elected twice since then. A relatively stable political situation over the last fifteen years has made a gradual reconstruction of the social structure, which lay in ruins in the mid eighties, possible. However, tribal and regional contradictions, widespread corruption and an economy based mainly on farming alone has hindered and delayed this process. In addition, Uganda is one of the countries that has been the most hardest hit by HIV/AIDS. Never the less, there are many positive signs. Uganda has had an anual growth of around 6-7% over the last few years, and in 1998 Uganda was the first country in Africa to register a fall in the number of new AIDS outbreaks. However, there are still many factors that hinder a swift improvement of the quality of life of the majority of the population. In the North the so-called Lord's Resistance Army threaten the local people by continually carrying out raids from their bases in Sudan, killing civilians and kidnapping children. Uganda's long-time involvement in the mildly-put "unstable" situation of its neighboring country Kongo has led to an instability in the conditions in the western part of the country. Despite all these turbulent factors Uganda should eventually manage to pull through, given that war is avoided and that the country's political leaders manage to maintain and continue the democratic and economic developments that have taken place under president Museveni.
(Kjartan Andersen. Translated from Norwegian)



BRIEFLY: THE UGANDAN ART SCENE

Uganda has produced a host of famous artists in recent generations, despite experiencing a political rollercoaster and huge social upheaval. How did they do it? Uganda has a long history of formal art education. Under British colonial rule as a Protectorate, it was seen as being of less strategic importance than Kenya and this allowed the establishment of art as a school subject. By contrast, art was only taught in white-only schools in Kenya.

Art was extended to degree level through the efforts of Margaret Trowell, who founded the Fine Art school at Makerere University in Kampala. Her courses emphasised the importance of building on existing artistic practices, but introduced new techniques such as silkscreen printing. This echoed the British style of administration in protectorates, that of 'indirect rule' where colonial power structures used existing forms of government. Students came from all over eastern Africa, from the Sudan to Zimbabwe.

Early students at the Margaret Trowell Fine Art School include the sculptor Francis Nnaggenda, a Kenyan, and the painter Sam Ntiro from Tanzania. Exhibitions of outstanding students' work were held in prestigious London galleries. Some went on the study at London art schools or the Royal Academy. Many such students became lecturers at the school and helped nurture the talents of younger artists.
When the East African countries of Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania achieved independence in the early 1960s, they formed the East African Community. Part of this structure involved sharing university facilities. Uganda, with its fine art school, continued its tradition of providing art education for much of East Africa.

However, all this changed in 1971 when a coup d'état brought Idi Amin to power. Kampala had been the centre of Uganda's intellectual life, but in a very short time this fertile artistic environment had evaporated and all public debate was stifled. Many prominent artists went into exile and those that remained lived a very precarious life indeed. The University lost many outspoken tutors, included its Vice Chancellor who 'disappeared'. An entire generation was traumatised by fourteen years of civil war.

The Fine Art school miraculously stayed open throughout this dreadful time. The old patrons of Kampala's élite and middle-classes were replaced with new patrons from the military, producing not only medals and insignia but commissioned sculpture and paintings for those rising fast through the army ranks. It managed this by employing recent graduates as lecturers. In a way, this gave the school a new lease of life by providing opportunities for innovative young artists and breaking links with those whose training was based on the colonial system.
 

BREIFLY: BRIAN ENO'S THOUGHTS ABOUT POSSIBILITIES IN AFRICA

Africa is everything that something like classical music isn't. Classical - perhaps I should say "orchestral" - music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It's all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities. And the fact that orchestras play the same thing over and over bothers me. Classical music is music without Africa. It represents old-fashioned hierarchical structures, ranking, all the levels of control. Orchestral music represents everything I don't want from the Renaissance: extremely slow feedback loops.

If you're a composer writing that kind of music, you don't get to hear what your work sounds like for several years. Thus, the orchestral composer is open to all the problems and conceits of the architect, liable to be trapped in a form that is inherently nonimprovisational, nonempirical. I shouldn't be so absurdly doctrinaire, but I have to say that I wouldn't give a rat's ass if I never heard another piece of such music. It provides almost nothing useful for me.

But what is tremendously exciting to me is the collision of vernacular Western music with African music. So much that I love about music comes from that collision. African music underlies practically everything I do - even ambient, since it arose directly out of wanting to see what happened if you "unlocked" the sounds in a piece of music, gave them their freedom, and didn't tie them all to the same clock. That kind of free float - these peculiar mixtures of independence and interdependence, and the oscillation between them - is a characteristic of West African drumming patterns. I want to go into the future to see this sensibility I find in African culture, to see it freed from the catastrophic situation that Africa's in at the moment. I don't know how they're going to get freed from that, but I desperately want to see this next stage when African culture begins once again to strongly impact ours.

Do you have any guesses about what that reunited culture would look like?

Yes. Do you know what I hate about computers? The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them. This is why I can't use them for very long. Do you know what a nerd is? A nerd is a human being without enough Africa in him or her. I know this sounds sort of inversely racist to say, but I think the African connection is so important. You know why music was the center of our lives for such a long time? Because it was a way of allowing Africa in. In 50 years, it might not be Africa; it might be Brazil. But I want so desperately for that sensibility to flood into these other areas, like computers.

Whenever I hear a neat dichotomy between the fuzzy logic of Africa versus the digital logic of a white tribe, I always find it interesting to triangulate and introduce the Asians. Where do the Asians fit into this?

It could be that any strong infusion from another place would help greatly. The African one is just the one I understand well. But the Near East can show what happens. For instance, harmony is primarily a Western invention. There is no equivalent to harmonic interest in Arabic music. In the West, the orchestra was invented to play harmonies. But in the Near East, the whole orchestra plays the same thing. So Arabs take the orchestra, which was basically a machine for making harmony, and make it a machine for making texture, which is an Asian preoccupation. It plays one voice, always. But it's a voice that can have different and changing textures. So this is a perfect example of using a Western tool and linking it with what I think is an Asian sensibility, the interest in texture. And, bingo! There you have it, this huge texture-making machine, the orchestra.

So, how does one Africanize, or Brazilianize, or otherwise liberate a computer? Get mad with it. I ask myself, What is pissing me off about this thing? What's pissing me off is that it uses so little of my body. You're just sitting there, and it's quite boring. You've got this stupid little mouse that requires one hand, and your eyes. That's it. What about the rest of you? No African would stand for a computer like that. It's imprisoning.
(From Gossip is Philosophy, interview with Brian Eno by Kevin Kelly, Wired Magazine, May 03)