Yahya Sseremba

Makerere University · Makerere Institute of Social Research

This book investigates the ways in which the war on terror has transformed the postcolonial state in Africa. Taking American intervention in Islamic education in Uganda as the entry point, the book demonstrates how state control over Islamic truth production and everyday Muslim life has increased. During the colonial period, the Muslims in Uganda...

Intervening in the enduring debate on the origins of the African state, this article examines the processes of producing custom in the Ugandan societies of precolonial Bunyoro and colonial Toro to trace the development of despotism. The participatory nature of generating customary truth in Bunyoro before European domination reflects the diffusion o...

Why does mass violence persist in Africa? Focusing on Uganda’s Rwenzori region where thousands have perished in a century of recurrent fighting between one ethnic group and another and between successive governments and the Bakonzo society, Yahya Sseremba examines how remedies advanced to address violence end up reproducing the institutional logic...

This article examines why the emancipation of ethnic groups has failed to address ethnic conflicts in Uganda. Successive Ugandan governments, especially the current regime of President Yoweri Museveni, have attempted to end the country’s history of ethnic strife by creating separate constituencies, separate districts and separate kingdoms for margi...

Shahab Ahmed shows that the magnitude of contradiction in Islam is far greater than modern analysts realize. Yet there is, he says, something in this contradiction that makes it coherent—something for which whoever seeks to understand Islam in its multifaceted entirety should look at. I propose that the insights of the book should be utilized to st...

When the notion of the tribe proved to be conceptually and analytically barren, scholars went for what they considered to be more productive concepts of ethnicity and nation. In his study of the Ndebele in Southern Africa, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni settles for the concept of nation. I show that the concepts tribe and nation have more similarities than...

When the Rwenzururu Movement realized that the Bakonzo and Bamba suffered discrimination in Toro because the law did not define them as “native tribes” of Toro, it demanded that the law should be amended to redefine the category “native of Toro” from one ethnic group—Batoro—to three—Batoro, Bakonzo, and Bamba. By calling for the reconstitution of “...