Youth as a moral category

As cultural anthropologists have long highlighted (for example Mead Reference Mead1928), societies tend to take their own moral measure from the behaviours of their adolescents. Seismic social changes, such as those wrought by rapid capitalist development, spawn ideological elaborations on the ways in which youth are behaving or ought to behave (Bucholtz Reference Bucholtz2002). Youth themselves, of course, often seize upon the idea of youth identity for purposes of political mobilization. Recent instances of this in Africa may be found in the events of the Arab Spring, and in the hip-hop inspired Y'en a Marre movement of Senegal (Honwana Reference Honwana2019). In the early years of independent African nation building, the spotlight was often on youth – as, for example, in Guinea, where Sekou Touré's government pursued a ‘thorough transformation of the historical consciousness, cultural sensibilities, and future aspirations of local youth’ (Straker Reference Straker2009: 11; see also Coe Reference Coe2005 on the training of Ghanaian youth). While re-signifying its youth, Touré's regime was at the same time attempting to reimagine Guinea geographically, with politically obstinate rural parts of the country being construed as a ‘revolutionary forest’, and state-trained youth as forestiers. In this example, we see how the category ‘youth’ becomes a locus for the construction of other morally weighted categories, such as ‘rural’ or ‘urban’, ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’. Nsimbi's concerns about bayaaye were likewise linked to broader geographical concerns about urbanization in Uganda and the modern transformation of rural places.

In Uganda, as elsewhere in Africa (Kopytoff Reference Kopytoff1971), the morality of youth has traditionally been defined, in the first place, around deference to elders. This is symbolically maintained in asymmetric greetings between youth and elders, in the exclusion of youth from politically important beer-drinking circles (Heald Reference Heald1999: 79), in the deferential negotiation of bridewealth with fathers-in-law, and diverse other rituals. At the same time, youth have traditionally been expected to act in more self-interested and impulsive ways than are available to elders, who are more bound to ideals of kin and community responsibility. Richard Reid suggests that the Uganda region's deep history has been one of ‘armed entrepreneurialism’, with wilful male youth of each generation assembling armies to conquer new territories and win honour for themselves. Over the centuries, this has contributed expansive dynamism to cultures that are otherwise disposed towards the sharing of resources and maintenance of communal peace and order (Reid Reference Reid2017). On a smaller, domestic scale, young men have been similarly expected to obey their own centrifugal impulses, setting out to find new opportunities and, eventually, to establish their own homesteads (Richards Reference Richards1960). In sum, a certain degree of bayaaye-like behaviour has been considered normal and healthy among male youth. The moral question has been: how much? When does an excess of naturally impulsive, self-interested behaviour threaten to throw society out of its moral balance?

The life stage of youth has traditionally been delineated in Uganda not so much by years lived as by other attainments, especially marriage. In Baganda tradition, a person definitively ceases to be an adolescent (muvubuka/pl. bavubuka) after she or he gets married. In other Bantu languages, *vubuka means ‘to cross a river’ (Hopgood Reference Hopgood1953). Luganda kuvubuka may carry this original sense of crossing over, or perhaps the word is rooted in the verb ‘to fish’, kuvuba. An unmarried man in his late thirties may still be treated as a youth. Scholars have noted, in other parts of Africa, the importance of marriage for men's attainment of adult status, along with the frustrations young men often experience in having to delay marriage for financial or other reasons (see, for example, Douglas Reference Douglas2003 [1963]: 114; Meillassoux Reference Meillassoux1999 [1964]; Masquelier Reference Masquelier2005; Smith Reference Smith2020). Benjamin Ray has discussed the traditional Baganda moral imaginary of marriage and male social status as it is expressed in the cardinal myth of Kintu and Nnambi (Ray Reference Ray, Karp and Bird1980).

Under British colonial rule, rebellious youth played pivotal roles. In the 1940s, for example, youthful activists strategically deployed ‘radical rudeness’ to confront a British/Baganda elite power alliance, acting in ways historian Carol Summers has described as ‘disorderly, intemperate, and obnoxious’ (Reference Summers2006: 741). Summers elsewhere reminds us that this colonial-era construction of adolescence cannot be attributed to indigenous Ugandan social traditions alone: British administrators found much governmental value in the ‘metaphor of adolescence’, which they applied to the protectorate as a whole (Summers Reference Summers2017). A country that had not yet, in their view, attained its adulthood required continuing outside governance. Since the colonial era, notions of childhood and youth of foreign provenance have continued to shape Ugandan discourses on the subject. Anthropologist Kristen Cheney argues that, since the 1980s, Uganda has sought redemption in its youth to an exceptional degree, owing to the country's troubled postcolonial experience and to the advocacy of an international aid sector which focuses on youth (especially small children) as bellwethers of a society's development or dysfunction (Cheney Reference Cheney2007). In the wake of the economic collapse, political tyranny and war of the 1970s and 1980s, followed by the HIV and AIDS epidemic beginning in the 1980s, Ugandan public discourse became decidedly focused on children as agents of future transformation, who, it was hoped, would not be so weighed down by the traumas of the past. Other scholars exploring postcolonial Ugandan developments in the moral categorization of youth include Lydia Boyd (Reference Boyd2015) and Shanti Parikh (Reference Parikh2016), who have focused on evolving youth moralities regarding sex, romance and religion; Julia Vorhölter (Reference Vorhölter2014), whose ethnography considers discourses about changing youth behaviours in the wake of the northern Ugandan war; and Ben Jones (Reference Jones2020), who discusses underemployed rural youth's practices and conceptions of leisure and/or ‘killing time’. It should be noted that most ethnographic research carried out in contemporary Uganda will inevitably confront youth issues of one sort or another, if only because the great majority of Ugandans fall into the youth category, the country's median age in 2021 being estimated at 15.7 years (CIA 2021).

In my own ethnographic research in Uganda, the moral cultivation of youth has been a recurrent theme. Trained in ethnomusicology, my focus has been mainly on music and dance, particularly in pedagogical settings, and events informed by the procedures and ideologies of schooling (Pier Reference Pier2015; Reference Pier2016a).Footnote ³ In diverse situations, I have overheard arguments about youth morality, and how certain kinds of music consumption and practice may or may not be linked to certain kinds of youth behaviour and identity. Since 2017, discourse about the cultural and political agency of youth has intensified with the rise of Bobi Wine (real name Robert Kyagulanyi), the thirty-nine-year-old Ugandan reggae music star turned member of parliament and presidential candidate. In 2021, Wine unsuccessfully challenged seventy-six-year-old, five-term incumbent Yoweri Museveni, in what has been widely depicted as a contest between an entrenched gerontocrat and Uganda's restive youth – especially those of the Kampala slums. Both Wine's detractors and his supporters associate him with the bayaaye (Taylor and Namagembe Reference Taylor and Namagembe2020). One critic has called him ‘the king of rogues, the voice of rejects (bayaaye), the one-eyed prince of the blind city slum dwellers’ (Nuwagira Reference Nuwagira2017). Space in this article does not permit a thorough exploration of Wine's candidacy and his ‘ghetto’ political message, but my literary-historical consideration of the bayaaye trope in Kulyennyingi may shed light on how Wine and his movement are being framed today. I will return to some brief meditations on public discourse about youth and bayaaye in the wake of the Wine/Museveni contest.

Kulyennyingi: a muyaaye's progress

M. B. Nsimbi (1910–94) has been hailed as ‘the grand old man of Luganda linguistics’ (Nsimbi Reference Nsimbi1980) and ‘the father of Luganda literature’.Footnote ⁴ Over the course of his career as a teacher, academic researcher, government inspector of schools, and activist for the teaching of Luganda language and culture, Nsimbi authored sixteen short books, including a compendium of Baganda clan names and their meanings (Nsimbi Reference Nsimbi1980), a study of the traditional mancala-style board game omweso (Nsimbi Reference Nsimbi1970), and several short novels in the Luganda language, including Kulyennyingi. A short preface to the book by John Katende praises it as ‘extremely useful for teaching’, insofar as it adds ‘sugar to the dose of medicine which would otherwise be bitter’ (Nsimbi Reference Nsimbi1984: ii). More than the Luganda language, Kulyennyingi teaches ‘good and bad behaviors and the consequences of behaving badly, out of, e.g., greed; consorting with bad people; not paying respect to grandparents and elders; not helping those in need of help, etc.’ (ibid.).

The cultural heritage website buganda.com lists Kulyennyingi as one of twenty-five ‘well known literary works in Luganda’.Footnote ⁵ In my ethnographic research, however, I have not met many Ugandans who know the book, and those who are aware of it remember it only dimly from their schooldays. Katende's remark about ‘bitter medicine’ may speak to a certain enduring public resistance to the incorporation of Luganda-language learning in schools. Recently, Ugandan educational field researchers found little enthusiasm for teaching and learning Luganda, even in schools where a Luganda curriculum has been officially implemented (Mukasa and Masembe Reference Mukasa and Masembe2018: 135). Luganda is widely spoken; it is the home language of the Baganda, the country's largest ethnic group, and used as a trade language throughout the southern, predominantly Bantu-speaking, region of the country. It is, moreover, a common written language, used notably in the daily tabloid Bukedde. English, however, has been the main language of educational aspiration since the establishment of colonial rule, while Luganda has been discouraged or outright prohibited in schools. Some of my Ugandan acquaintances recall, as late as the 2000s, being rapped on the knuckles for having slipped into Luganda in the classroom.

This stigma against indigenous language learning is one that Nsimbi, as an advocate for Luganda-language pedagogy, likely had to grapple with his whole career. That said, there has long existed a countervailing discourse in Uganda that celebrates indigenous African languages and cultures, and the Luganda language in particular. Luganda was one of the first African languages into which scripture was translated, and it was a language of intellectual/theological collaboration between Ugandan speakers and European missionaries (Mojola Reference Mojola, West and Shomanah2000). In the 1910s and 1920s, missionaries fiercely defended Luganda as the primary language of proselytization, against colonial administrative attempts to establish Swahili in the protectorate (Kasozi Reference Kasozi1994: 228). Essential groundwork for this Christian espousal of Luganda had earlier been laid by Apollo Kaggwa, the powerful regent to child Kabaka Daudi Chwa II, who was a pioneering chronicler of Buganda's history and folklore in the language. One of Africa's great ‘inventors of tradition’ (Ranger Reference Ranger, Ranger and Hobsbawm1983), Kaggwa established a prestigious model for many future Ugandan scholars. By enshrining the kingdom's history and customs in print, he helped to cement Buganda in the colonial mind as an exceptional African civilization, and a worthy ally in a project of indirect rule (Reid Reference Reid2014). Many Baganda today claim that their language is especially ‘deep’, referring reverently to oluganda olw'obuwangwa, ‘traditional Luganda’, which is thought to contain much submerged, esoteric wisdom (Pier Reference Pier2017). This sense many Baganda have of possessing an especially rich linguistic and cultural heritage is attributable in part to the scholarly efforts of Kaggwa and those who followed in his footsteps, including and especially Nsimbi. The corpus of Luganda-language books is small, but there is enough of an audience of Luganda literature enthusiasts to support a steady trickle of new publications. Given Luganda's associations with a particular kingdom and ethnicity, in a multi-ethnic country, Luganda-language books automatically gesture towards a particular, rather than a national, audience. Most are explicitly or implicitly about Buganda culture and language, in addition to any other topics they may cover.

Musa Kulyennyingi, in Nsimbi's novel, is a young man who moves to Kampala and becomes a muyaaye, growing more and more corrupt and cruel as the story progresses. In the last chapters, he joins Amin's infamous goon squad, the State Research Bureau, before finally getting a taste of his own medicine when he is imprisoned, beaten, and left to live out the rest of his life without money or friends. The story of Kulyennyingi's decline provides Nsimbi with a narrative scaffold for recounting the daily deprivations and atrocities of the Amin era as he and others experienced them first-hand. It also enables him to lay out an aetiology of the country's problems, locating the seeds of cultural collapse in the early years of colonial rule. Male youth in the city, the bayaaye, are positioned at the centre of this moralistic analysis. It is their ambitious, acquisitive energies, no longer constrained by kinship, kingdom or cultural tradition, that are accelerating the country to its ruin. ‘Kulyennyingi’ is a name drawn from a proverb: Okulya ennyingi; ssi kuggwa maddu (Eating a lot; doesn't slake greed). Nsimbi's hero's name thus means something like ‘Eats a Lot’. Kulyennyingi's father also has a suggestive name, Lumiramwenge (‘Gulps beer’). Nsimbi was an aficionado of Luganda names, having written a book on the subject (Nsimbi Reference Nsimbi1980). Lumiramwenge is listed as a genuine clan name in his study; Kulyennyingi, too, may be a real name, or it may be Nsimbi's invention. These significant names demonstrate the pedagogical nature of Kulyennyingi: it is a novel that instructs, on one level, about the events of the Amin era, and, on another level, about the traditional ways of the Baganda – for example, the derivation of sometimes humorous-sounding names from proverbs.

Nsimbi was not the first to compose Luganda-language novels for moral as well as linguistic and cultural instruction. As early as the 1940s, E. M. K. Mulira, quoted above, wrote several such books, including Teefe, a story of a young Muganda man who goes on a kind of pilgrimage, encountering various corrupting urban temptations before finally finding peace and self-actualization in a committed return to agricultural village life (Mulira Reference Mulira1951; Earle Reference Earle2017: 105). Jonathan Earle notes that Mulira was inspired by the gospels, as well as by John Bunyan's morality tale The Pilgrim's Progress, which had been translated into Luganda in the 1920s (Earle Reference Earle2017: 86). Derek R. Peterson notes that Bunyan's seventeenth-century book, translated into African languages, was a main model for the East African Revival in the 1940s, and significantly shaped how African readers came to conceive of themselves as agents of Christianity (Peterson Reference Peterson2012). Mulira was also an admirer of James Aggrey, the Ghanaian missionary and disciple of Booker T. Washington (Earle Reference Earle2017: 92). The agricultural philosophy of Mulira's novel was perhaps shaped by Washington's rural vocational philosophy, by way of Aggrey. Nsimbi's own morality tale, Kulyennyingi, may have been modelled on Mulira's Teefe and on The Pilgrim's Progress, as well as on indigenous Ugandan traditions of moral storytelling. Like Teefe, Kulyennyingi is structured around a series of sequential episodes, each one presenting the hero with a moral choice to make. Unlike Teefe, who redeems himself with his choices, Kulyennyingi always chooses the wrong, morally corrupting path. Kulyennyingi is thus an anti-hero to Mulira's heroic pilgrim – one who becomes increasingly avaricious and cruel in his urbanity, rather than wending his way back to a morally stabilizing rural life. In the 1970s, novellas similar to Kulyennyingi – printed by African presses in Swahili, intended for use in schools, decrying urban depravity and promoting a return to rural traditions – were common in Tanzania, where they accorded with the government's project of Ujaama village-based socialism. Nsimbi may have been inspired by this regional ‘development fiction’ as well as by Ugandan literary models (Callaci Reference Callaci2017: 150).

The book begins with Kulyennyingi's birth in 1953. His father, Lumiramwenge, is a foreman of porters at a company in Jinja town, in the Busoga region to the east of Buganda. True to his name, Lumiramwenge is known for drinking, as well as for taking bribes from poor men who seek jobs with the company. The income from these bribes, combined with his regular salary, ought to be substantial, but he raises his family in squalor. This becomes public knowledge when his company transfers him to Kampala, sending a team to help load his shoddy possessions onto a truck. These are an assortment of the lowest-quality beds, chairs and oil lamps, all catalogued by Nsimbi with a lexicographer's relish for their slang names. Lumiramwenge is a man who, on the basis of his managerial job, should have achieved respectable middle-class status, but has failed to do so, owing to his flawed moral character. He lives with two women, only one of whom, Kulyennyingi's mother, he has married. He cares for three other children, two of whom were born to unnamed ‘Basoga women’ who do not live in the house.Footnote ⁶ The father's negligence is put forward as a cause of Kulyennyingi's eventual degeneration into a muyaaye, but the women in Kulyennyingi's childhood are painted as also being at fault:

These women, whom Nsimbi leaves unnamed, have a detrimental effect on the boy's development. Rather than waiting for marriage to exercise their reproductive powers, they have ignored the traditional threat of ‘disgrace’ (amawemuukirano) and have given birth to children out of wedlock. Mothers’ alleged straying from traditional sexual and reproductive norms has negatively shaped the character of youth of Kulyennyingi's generation.

If out-of-wedlock fecundity is the typical moral failing of women in Nsimbi's fallen world, rootless wandering (okubungeeta) is the failing of men. Both stereotypical behaviours run counter to an ideal of regulated, sustainable, convivial social reproduction. He writes: ‘Thieves and murderers were forced to run from their villages where they had built homes and wander like beggars throughout the land [babungeeta mu nsi], because people of good manners could not bear to be their neighbours’ (Nsimbi Reference Nsimbi1984: 5). Peter Geschiere has given lengthy consideration to the metaphor of autochthony (literally, ‘of the soil’) in African thought, as well as its opposite, rootlessness (Geschiere Reference Geschiere2009). European colonials, viewing African urbanization with alarm, promoted an ideal of autochthony. Colonial subjects rooted in rural places would continue to be reliable agricultural producers, and would not turn into a dangerous urban proletariat. Many Africans themselves found the autochthony ideal compelling for their own reasons, in an era of foreign appropriation of lands and geographical upheaval. Geschiere points out that it was often those Africans who had left their village homes to get an education and make their fortune in the city who became the strongest defenders of autochthony (Geschiere Reference Geschiere2009: 27). In Uganda, a famous poet of autochthony is Okot p'Bitek, whose Song of Lawino includes the repeated warning ‘The Pumpkin in the old homestead / must not be uprooted’ (p'Bitek Reference p'Bitek1995: 19). Nsimbi expands this theme in Kulyennyingi, a novel whose hero is constantly in motion yet going nowhere. Kulyennyingi becomes corrupt, the novel implies, in part because he remains always wandering, unceasingly looking for new opportunities, never settling down. Unlike Teefe in Mulira's novel, he never makes a rural home return, which might eventually redeem his wanderings. This is not, however, entirely Kulyennyingi's fault, since Nsimbi claims that Uganda's rural world was spoiled before his arrival. Even the lubaale – geographically anchored spirits who maintained moral order in the human world – had been uprooted long before Kulyennyingi's birth. Uganda's golden age was breached, in Nsimbi's historical analysis, specifically during the time of Kabaka Mwanga II (who ruled 1884–97), when French Catholic priests began to crusade against traditional African language and culture. The banning of traditional religion left Africans in a dangerous moral condition as they ‘had not yet fully grasped the new good religions of the foreigners’ – i.e. Christianity and Islam. With no guiding cultural or religious dogma, Ugandans ‘started to behave in whatever ways they liked, as though they had been freed from fetters which had prevented them from doing what they liked’ (Nsimbi Reference Nsimbi1984: 5).

Kulyennyingi and his brothers go to school, their fees paid not by Lumiramwenge but by their maternal uncle. Their story picks up in their years of adolescence, when Kampala is being overrun by brigands (bakkondo), and the abandoned bodies of their victims are to be seen on the streets (Nsimbi Reference Nsimbi1984: 9). This situates us in 1971, the year Amin seized power, and a year of much public outcry about bakkondo (Twaddle Reference Twaddle1973). In Nsimbi's narrative, the bakkondo have the particularly malign effect of causing people to hide in their houses behind barbed wire fences – thus interrupting the active, intimate communal networks that once ensured moral behaviour. Individually owned private property, once a matter of minor consequence, becomes a heated issue in the barricaded city, with people staking out their purchased urban plots with aggressive signage. Consumer goods, another ostentatious kind of private rather than communal property, have also become important. Kulyennyingi and his teenage friends crave bell bottoms, T-shirts and platform shoes, and, as their interest in these trophies grows, their humanity proportionally diminishes. Intoxicated by their desire for quick cash and numbed to the pain and suffering of others by the everyday spectacle of bakkondo brutality, they laugh when they see a man injure himself in a bicycle accident. To fund their increasingly extravagant lifestyle, they devise various scams to inflict on adult passers-by, some more successful than others. In the first of many such attempts, they try to lure a driver into a bypass which they know to be sodden and impassable, so that they can then extricate him from the mud for a steep price (Nsimbi Reference Nsimbi1984: 15). The driver, however, turns the tables on them: after permitting them to extricate his car, he guns his engine and races away without paying. Much of the novel unfolds in grotesque, sometimes funny, episodes like this, which demonstrate the corruption of both the boys and the city they live in.

While Kulyennyingi and his friends are acquiring consumer goods, they are also borrowing new words from English and other African languages – inventing the language variety known as luyaaye. Saudah Namyalo, a linguist who has devoted attention to luyaaye, cites Nsimbi's novel as a pioneering exploration of this street language (Namyalo Reference Namyalo, Nassenstein and Hollington2015). While Nsimbi lists the new slang terms with a certain relish (Nsimbi Reference Nsimbi1984: 24–5), he generally seems to disapprove of this English- and Swahili-inflected slang. Elsewhere in his writing, he bemoans the imperial imposition of English in the schools, and the readiness of Luganda speakers to adopt English words into their language willy-nilly, while neglecting the old lexicon with its rich cultural resources (Nsimbi Reference Nsimbi and Affairs1966; quoted in Roscoe Reference Roscoe1977: 5). He was, throughout his life, dedicated to the excavation and preservation of an older, pre-English, Luganda, along with the traditional culture it signified. In Kulyennyingi, the bayaaye's adoption of foreign words into a luyaaye dialect is portrayed as analogous to their flagrant, shallow adoption of Western consumer goods; both are symptomatic of a general moral and cultural decline of the Ugandan people.

As the story advances into the late 1970s and Kulyennyingi becomes a young man, he and his friends grow progressively greedier and more criminal in their behaviours, trying ever riskier schemes. Near the end of the novel, they are nearly caught and sent to jail when they attempt to forge a railroad transport claim check for bags of cement. Collecting money from their family members, they successfully bribe the police to let them go, while the shop owner, to whom they had tried to pass the bad claim check, ends up being beaten. After this incident, Kulyennyingi decides that his best prospects lie within the brutal state apparatus. With the help of an old friend, he joins Amin's State Research Bureau, where he finds a career well suited to his foul character. By now, Nsimbi writes, ‘he was truly corrupt. He was one of those people who rejoice in seeing other people in pain and suffering’ (Reference Nsimbi1984: 127). Roving the streets as thugs in the service of the regime, Kulyennyingi and his comrades waylay a rich trader, Lumbemusolo, who accidentally splashes them with his car as he swerves to avoid a pothole. They drag the innocent man into the forest, kill him, and repossess his car and the money he was transporting. Unlike their earlier crimes, this most heinous one takes place off camera. A bystander testifies that he heard pleas for help from the forest, but readers directly witness only the hijacking, not the murder. Kulyennyingi is now morally beyond the pale, his execrable acts hidden even from the story's narrator.

In the end, Kulyennyingi's new friends from the State Research Bureau turn on him. Drunk in a bar, he tells a funny story involving a tortoise and President Amin, prompting a colleague to inform the district commander: ‘The boy Kulyennyingi has insulted our good President, Field Marshal, VC, DSO, President for Life, Emperor of the Kingdom of England!’ Shortly thereafter, he is arrested and taken to Nakasero prison, where he is locked up with the very men he once victimized as a State Research Bureau operative. The imprisoned men take their revenge, beating him and blinding him in one eye. Kulyennyingi escapes from prison only when UNLF troops arrive from Tanzania, overthrowing Amin. Fearing punishment for his Bureau atrocities, he flees to the sparsely inhabited west of Buganda and adopts a false, ethnic Ankole name, Rwanchwende, finally surrendering his Muganda identity, which he has already defiled with his immoral behaviour. The novel leaves him to his wretched isolation: ‘he had no wife, he had no children, no money, house or friends’ (Nsimbi Reference Nsimbi1984: 138).

Nsimbi does not invest Kulyennyingi with much psychological depth: like Everyman, or Bunyan's Christian, he represents humanity in the abstract. He is greed personified, and the reader is unlikely to sympathize much with him in his inevitable punishment. We are meant to focus not on him, but on the ills of the world that produced him, and the ways in which these might be rectified. On the surface level, these are the ills of the brutal Amin regime, which Nsimbi, soon after the event, wished to document in detail. The deeper problem is the abandonment and deterioration of indigenous language and culture, which began almost a century earlier, in the early years of colonial rule and missionary intervention. The bayaaye are presented as the epitome of this moral deterioration, for they are greedy not just for money, but also for the cheap thrills of Western language and culture. Their youthful acquisitiveness and ambition, which might ordinarily be natural and healthy, run wild, especially when transplanted to the city, where there are no social or cultural bulwarks to contain them.

The Amin years were a time of not just terror and economic deprivation, but also social upheaval – and, for some, opportunity. Amin's expulsion of Asian traders, in particular, opened up new possibilities for Africans to get involved in urban trade, in some cases leaving behind the peasant labour of their parents. Alicia Decker has described how some rural women benefited especially from the collapse of the existing economic system (Decker Reference Decker2014). Those she interviewed expressed a surprising nostalgia for the Amin regime, as have some of the men of that generation I have spoken to. This was a time when a son or daughter of subsistence farmers, with little education, no useful connections and a disadvantaged ethnic background, might, by intrepid hustling, break into the urban cash economy. Hustlers from rural villages joined the motley urban youth who were collectively labelled bayaaye. As Mahmood Mamdani noted, even in the early days, these youth were sometimes celebrated rather than bemoaned in the media for their entrepreneurial pluck, which might be harnessed to build a new nation (Mamdani Reference Mamdani1983). It was the more established Kampala residents, especially middle-class educated Baganda, already feeling disenfranchised by political changes since the year of independence, who were more likely to be anxious about the new hooligans in the streets. While they were losing their economic security and status, the bayaaye were showing off their new, ill-gotten prosperity, in their Western clothes and accessories. Kulyennyingi, with its ‘Eats a Lot’ muyaaye main character, may be read as a literary expression of this middle-class grievance.

From ‘bayaaye’ to ‘ghetto’: urban youth and politics in the twenty-first century

As noted at the beginning of this article, ‘bayaaye’ is a term still very much in use today. One of the factors that prompted the original use of the term – the influx of young people from the country into the city – has vastly accelerated since the 1970s. In 1979, the last year of Amin's rule, Kampala's population was about 450,000; in 2021, it is projected to be 1,709,900, or 6,846,700, if one includes the surrounding urbanized districts that make up greater Kampala – a more than fifteen-fold increase (Uganda Bureau of Statistics 2020). The city has strained to cope with this increase in density, and many newcomers have ended up in packed and frequently flooded slums at the bottom of hills. There are few job opportunities, and chronic unemployment leads to anxiety and the kinds of social ills Wyrod describes in his ethnography – unsafe sex, alcohol and drug abuse, the manipulation of others for short-term gain (Wyrod Reference Wyrod2016). The simultaneous rise of a relatively prosperous class – the prime beneficiaries of Uganda's re-entry into the global economy on neoliberal terms – exacerbates a pervasive sense of disenfranchisement and futility. Walls topped with razor wire or broken bottles, which were first erected during the Amin years to keep out the bakkondo and bayaaye, have remained as the standard domestic architecture. With walls, security guards and air-conditioned vehicles, better-off Kampala residents are able to insulate themselves and their property from the surrounding slums. Urban space is a commodity in dwindling supply, and poorer city residents find themselves with few if any places where they can legitimately spend their time, as Lorraine Young observed in her study of Kampala street children (Young Reference Young2003). The kadongo kamu musicians I have researched, who used to go from bar to bar playing guitar for tips, or who would station themselves in a public area outside Nakivubo stadium, complain of having been forced out of all their old informal performance spaces.

It is in election seasons that rising urban tensions seem to be most openly expressed. In 2006, when I first visited the country, the presidential campaign of Kizza Besigye, then challenging Museveni, dominated the news. Besigye, a doctor and former rebel comrade of Museveni's, had the backing of many voters who felt neglected or abused by the regime, the urban poor in particular. His imprisonment on charges of treason and rape set off protests and riots around the city, spearheaded by urban youth. The government's violent suppression of these demonstrations set up a spectacle of militant opposition between an authoritarian, gerontocratic regime and the disaffected urban young. Under Besigye's banner, youth seemed to be awakening to a sense of their potential collective political agency, years later to be branded ‘People Power’ (Broadway Reference Broadway2019). These events would be echoed in 2011, when Besigye, after losing again to Museveni, staged a ‘walk to work’ strike through Kampala's streets, a symbolic reclaiming of urban space met by yet another violent police crackdown (Gallo Reference Gallo2011).

As I write this article, another acrimonious presidential election has just come to an end, this one between Museveni and the thirty-nine-year-old reggae star Robert Kyagulanyi, aka Bobi Wine. Even more than Besigye, Wine came to signify the political ambitions of urban youth. In January 2021, Museveni won his sixth term, claiming 58.6 per cent of the vote to Wine's 34.8 per cent – a spread suspiciously similar to that of Museveni's 2006 win over Besigye: 59 per cent to 37 per cent.Footnote ⁸ For eleven days before the election, police surrounded Wine's home, trapping him inside. State violence against Wine and his political movement had been going on for years before this, including, in 2017, the shooting of his driver by police, followed by Wine's arrest and alleged torture in prison. At the time of writing, Wine is still contesting the electoral results and petitioning the International Criminal Court to investigate abuses against his campaign. While Wine himself was defeated, his struggle has not been fruitless: his National Unity Platform (NUP) party won sixty-one parliamentary seats, making it Uganda's largest opposition party, just months after its formation.

Wine is particularly relevant for our consideration of the ‘bayaaye’ imaginary in that he, as a celebrity artist before he was a politician, did perhaps more than anyone else to craft a new self-image for poor urban youth. In 2005, Wine, famously proud of his roots in the slum part of Kampala's Kamwokya neighbourhood, released a hit song, ‘Ghetto’, with singer Nubian Li. The English word ‘ghetto’, hammered relentlessly through Wine's Luganda-language rap lyric, was drawn from American hip-hop and Jamaican reggae lingo, and seemed to signal a different, prouder and more defiant urban youth attitude:

‘Ghetto’, though sometimes eschewed in polite Western discourse as a demeaning term, in fact has a long history, predating reggae and hip-hop, of being used to highlight the structural causes of racial, religious and class disparity. It is unfair laws and economics that have forced people into ‘ghettos’, going back to the original Jewish ghettos of Europe (Rothstein Reference Rothstein2017). An attention to the economic and political causes of Ugandan youth's predicament runs through Wine's ‘Ghetto’ song and other songs in his oeuvre. If struggling urban youth have an identity to celebrate, it is, Wine suggests, one that they have developed by struggling against structurally imposed economic and political conditions. This account of a ‘ghetto’ urban youth identity diverges from the essentially cultural one attached to the term ‘bayaaye’. The bayaaye, in Nsimbi's telling, are a phenomenon caused mainly by a society-wide break with the moral moorings of tradition. When mothers abandoned the traditional behaviours of motherhood, when men's innate ambitions failed to be reined in, when people ceased to believe in the old spirits, bayaaye were the natural result. It is this culturalist pathologizing of bayaaye that Wine seems to have rejected with his importation of an alternative term, one that carries many of the same positive implications (toughness, entrepreneurial resourcefulness) while jettisoning the cultural conservative causality in favour of a more political-economic one. Wine's ‘Ghetto’ song made cultural waves; today, Ugandan music fans speak of a whole genre of music, ‘ghetto’, and a subculture to go along with it, with Wine as its progenitor. The ‘bayaaye’ appellation, long an insult in some situations and a term of admiration in others, seems increasingly to be being used with a sense of pride, as a knock-on effect of the celebratory ‘ghetto’ discourse. Wine's meteoric political career – and that of his NUP party – was certainly established on the foundation of his cultural work, and the sense of identity and political potential it has aroused among urban youth. To be sure, cultural arousal should not be expected to translate into effective political organization; indeed, it can distract from the details of NUP's actual political programme and the practicalities of bringing it to fruition (Broadway Reference Broadway2019). Nonetheless, it is certain that Wine, as an artist and a politician, has been effective in at least creating a moment in which long-simmering youth politics might make considerable advances.