Yusuf Serunkuma - search results

In an interview with Yusuf Serunkuma, ROAPE asks him about his forthcoming book on oil, capitalists, and livelihoods in western Uganda. The book is a co-edited volume with Eria Serwajja and brings together six junior Ugandan scholars and activists.  Serunkuma details the struggles of rural people to confront and harmonise interests with oil explorers, with environmental destruction and compensation that has turned lives upside down  

Yusuf Serunkuma writes that Israeli’s occupation and murder of Palestinians in Gaza today is the British in Kenya, India, and Zimbabwe, Germany in Namibia, the French in Algeria, and the Americans in Vietnam. Notions such a democracy, or the so-called Universal Declaration of Human Rights, have been exposed, once again, as a sham and a lie, revealing nothing but western self-interest–which captures neither our realty nor aspirations.

In this blog post, Yusuf Serunkuma draws a compelling comparison between Bobi Wine of Uganda and Fela Kuti of Nigeria, both of whom are recognized as among Africa's most creative artists and courageous political activists for their resistance against dictatorship. Serunkuma emphasises that despite the possibility that Bobi Wine's music and activism may have surpassed Fela Kuti's, he remains underappreciated by Western observers.

There is a huge demand for forged documents in Uganda from academic documents, bank statements, birth certificates, to identification cards. In the capital Kampala these documents are commonly made on Nasser Road. Kristof Titeca and Yusuf Serunkuma write how in the context where the state, and private institutions are considered widely corrupt the delivery of various services and documents is regarded as indispensable. The power of political posters designed on the road is explored by the authors.

In this blogpost, Yusuf Serunkuma slams the cowardice of intellectuals today, who display self-censorship and contentment with the status quo, in contrast with an earlier generation of activists and subaltern scholars. Serunkuma argues that this did not happen overnight, rather it has taken years of manufacturing conformity and consent.

Yusuf Serunkuma writes that a migrant worker dies many times, and has many killers. They die in their home countries - where they are structurally, violently uprooted -  they then die on the journeys to either Europe or the Middle East and then, they finally die in dehumanising working conditions if they ever arrive. Serunkuma exposes the hypocrisy, racism and murder at the heart of the global north.  

ROAPE contributor Yusuf Serunkuma asks if the pillage we are witnessing on the African continent—mostly from the 1980s-onwards—is worse than the exploitation of the 1884-1960s, where is the resistance? Serunkuma writes that even after decolonisation has been achieved (the academy decolonised, stolen artefacts returned, Rhodes, and others, fall), Africa will remain an impoverished and looted continent. The reason for this absurd state of affairs is that the African intelligentsia still struggles to see and expose the performative, informal, localized, and seemingly benevolent manifestation of new colonialism.

Yusuf Serunkuma argues that the apparent success and smoothness of electoral ‘democracy’ in African states is a recipe for disaster—just as bad as Africa under conflict. Beneath the hype is the ruthless continuity of economic and political control by Western companies and governments. Serunkuma argues that elections across the continent are invariably a trap that disguises naked and unabashed plunder.   

Yusuf Serunkuma asks how the continued and violent colonisation of the continent has not been more systematically resisted. In a long-read, Serunkuma looks at the extraordinary control of the continent, from banking, the coffee trade, land grabs and mining. Why have Africans failed to see these forms of foreign control as ‘colonial,’ in which former colonisers have continued the pillage of the continent?

In a powerful polemic against the new intellectuals of empire, Yusuf Serunkuma addresses an African audience. Serunkuma warns his audience of a new breed of missionary-scholars who speak to the visible wrongs in our midst, but they hardly ever offer any context, longue durée, causation, and abstraction, to the point that they have even conscripted disciples from among us. This new breed, he argues, is more tactical, more sophisticated, but as dangerous as their colonial predecessors.