Over the course of his eight years as president of Uganda, Idi Amin was the subject of hundreds of thousands of photographs. A dedicated team of photographers under the Ministry of Information followed Amin’s every move, taking pictures as they did so. In 2015, Richard Vokes, working with Winston Agaba and Malachi Kabaale at the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation in Kampala, uncovered a filing cabinet full of (what turned out to be) around 60,000 photographic negatives from the 1970s. Further discoveries also unearthed thousands of vinyl records, hundreds of ¼-inch tapes, and dozens of 16mm film reels. This lecture will tell the story of how these archives were brought to light, and will explore what they tell us about the development of official media in colonial, and post-colonial, Uganda. It will examine how these archival media might be reconnected with new Ugandan publics, both in the country and in the Diaspora, in ethically responsible ways, and how they might be re-versioned in support of projects of memorialisation. Of greatest urgency, the lecture will also trace what lessons the study of Idi Amin’s media machine may hold for our current political moment, which feels everywhere characterised a growing nexus between autocracy and (all kinds of) new media. The lecture is dedicated to the memory of the up to 300,000 people who were killed by the Idi Amin regime.
Pitt Rivers Museum Research Seminar in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, Michaelmas Term 2025
Fridays, 12pm-1.30pm (Weeks 1-8)
In person at the Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Theatre (entry via Robinson Close).
Convened by Paul Basu and Elizabeth Hallam.
