President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni – Africa’s fourth-longest-serving head of state in 2023 – has cemented his place in history. He brought an end to two tyrannies: in 1979 his militia helped to oust Idi Amin’s famously bloody regime; and in the 1980s his army won a guerrilla campaign against the brutal government of Milton Obote. When his men marched into Kampala in 1986, Museveni became the first leader of a popular insurrection to oust a sitting African government.
In recent years, media and public attention has focused on Museveni’s rough handling of political opponents and the deterioration of human rights under his watch. A petition before the International Criminal Court accuses him of sponsoring violence and abusing critics. Leading dissidents bear the scars of abuse inflicted by agents of the state.
For many Ugandans, however, Museveni remains essential. The president’s claim to power rests in large part on history, on the hold with which the country’s dark past grips the citizens of the present. The inhumanity of the 1970s and early 1980s – the casual and unpredictable brutality of Amin’s government, the mass killings of Obote’s regime – have passed out of the living memory of most Ugandans. Museveni’s government has had to create routines and institutions that remind Ugandans of their recent history. Keeping the politically instructive memory of the dark past vividly alive has been his enduring achievement.
