Signs of development: photographic futurism and the politics of affect in Uganda

Abstract

This article contributes to recent scholarship on an emergent public political visual culture in Africa. Through an ethnographic study of political billboards and other government-sponsored public political imagery in Uganda, it argues that this new visual culture is primarily characterized by African states’ extensive use of post-photographic techniques as a means for projecting fantastic visions of their future development goals. However, drawing on recent insights from the ‘material turn’ in visual theory, it finds that – in Uganda's case at least – the potency of these new public visual artefacts may stem less from what they show than from how they invoke in their citizen-viewers an embodied sense of future possibilities. Once generated, this affective response can be mobilized by the state and its agents in the ‘here and now’, for political gain. The article looks at how this worked in the run-up to Uganda's 2016 presidential elections, when, in the context of major new spending on national infrastructure projects, the images and artefacts of this new visual culture served to greatly amplify the sense that all citizens would benefit from an emergent global capitalism. This inflated aspiration was mobilized in turn by the National Resistance Movement government as an integral part of its election campaign, and played a key role in returning the government to power.

Using suitability analysis, informed by Co-Design, to assess contextually appropriate urban growth models in Gulu, Uganda

“…The combined effect has been that many African governments were effectively forced to adopt new 'urban master plans', from roughly 2010 onwards -in response to their accelerating urbanization and the demands of the new economy and its nouveau riche. These were more often than not designed and implemented, not by African institutions and companies, but by international commercial agencies (Vokes 2019;Watson 2014). Much of current African property investment has been inspired by Asian or Middle Eastern examples (Bolleter 2019;Bolleter and Cameron 2021) in which entirely new cities are built on the periphery of existing cities (Van Noorloos and Kloosterboer 2017, 2).…”

Fieldwork through the Zoomiverse

“…This has included the building of the new Chinese-funded Entebbe-Kampala Expressway, which at a cost of US$476 million for its 51.5 km length, is offi cially the most expensive road in the world, calculated on a per-kilometre basis (The East African 2016). Begun in 2015, the purpose of our own project has been to develop an ethnography both of the road-building programme and of its broader social eff ects with the aim of understanding what kinds of new movements (both of people and of things) the programme has enabled and constrained, and how these have altered both relations with the state and 'cultures of mobility' across Uganda (Vokes 2019). However, within just a few weeks of that meeting, a er Vokes had returned to Australia, it had become obvious that that next period's fi eldwork would have to be postponed, and that any further research on roads, the state, and mobilities in Uganda would, for the foreseeable future, have to be carried out using predominantly online methods.…”