Rethinking the state in Idi Amin's Uganda: the politics of exhortation

Abstract

This article – the introduction to a collection of articles on Idi Amin's Uganda – illuminates the infrastructure of Amin's dictatorship. It was through the technology of the news media that Amin's officials found it possible to summon and direct the actions of Uganda's people. The news media's apparently extensive audience made it possible for the authorities to address particular demographic groups who would otherwise fall outside the reach of government bureaucracy. When government officials did actually engage with the real people they addressed, they did so with measuring tapes and typewriters close at hand. In the paper reports they filed, Amin's bureaucrats tidied up complicated social situations, generating statistics that illuminated a particular constituency's adherence to – or deviation from – the official directive. Uganda's command economy was constituted through exhortations, inflated statistics, and other fictions on paper.

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