The article examines the use of the metaphor of war in political communication on the novel COVID-19 pandemic in Uganda using two analytical tools of the social representation theory, anchoring and objectification. Drawing data for analysis from six widely televised presidential addresses to the nation on COVID-19 made by Uganda’s president, H.E. Yoweri Kaguta Museveni during the months of March 2020 to September 2020, the article argues that during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a persistent dominant use of the metaphor of war by government representatives as a rhetorical device to communicate about and to make intelligible an emerging unknown virus as a threat that should be managed through combat behavior. In so doing, the use of the war metaphor and its implied call for combat behavior to control, manage, and eradicate the virus spread engendered consequences such as standardizing hegemonic understanding of the nature and causes of the virus as well as normalizing and legitimizing interventions that the government adopted to manage it.

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The over conspicuousness of Uganda’s homophobia in international media of the twenty-first century is highly commendable for foregrounding the severe abuse of human rights of homosexuals in Uganda. Although this medium establishes its space as an agent of human rights activism and as a record of what happened to homosexuals in Uganda, it is important to interrogate the process involved in producing it, as well as what this mediated index forecloses as it signifies the severe abuse of human rights of homosexuals in Uganda. Focusing on three filmic documentaries on Uganda’s homophobia, I argue this media hypervisibility is a global phenomenon – a transnational media collective implicated in rebranding and networking historical transnational processes, tropes and ideologies that have not only produced conditions necessary for homophobia to thrive in Uganda, but also established Uganda’s anti-homosexuality violence as the new signature of Africa’s ‘Darkness’.

With illustrations drawn from Ilja Kok and Willem Timmers’s documentary Framing the Other (2012), this article rethinks media representation of the contact between Mursi lip-plated women of Ethiopia and Western tourists who come to sightsee and photograph their traditionally modified bodies. The film Framing the Other represents this contact as a destructive force that has not only enabled Mursi women’s victimhood as objects of the tourist gaze, but one that has contributed negative cultural change and loss of tradition. In this article, I provide an alternative, if not oppositional, interpretation that only attends to the nuanced ways Mursi women negotiate cultural loss and change, and recognizes modalities of agential tactics they deploy to negotiate cultural exchange and perform identity work within a cross-cultural contact zone marred with significant inequalities that work to their (dis)advantage. I do not imply that my reading will provide a definitive reading; rather, I reexamine the vanishing tradition and victimhood narratives portrayed in Framing the Other, showing that its multiple layers of meaning in fact motivate an oppositional and alternative reading.

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