Manry Family

In January this year, I set off on a much anticipated journey: PhD research at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, studying Uganda's colonial and postcolonial history. I began the program with a growing awareness of how much I don't know, having far more questions than answers.  Such a disposition is actually ideal for the academic enterprise: honest questions, not pre-packaged answers, lead one to new insights and understandings.  My research is driven by questions that have emerged during the past four years I have lived in Uganda and witnessed/participated in the ongoing cultural collisions that define the political, economic, and social landscape. I continually wonder, how have ordinary people in Uganda (and by extension, other colonized peoples) defined their realities in a rapidly changing world during the past 100 years?

This line of inquiry leads to more probing questions and concerns that have far-reaching implications for Christian thought and practice.  As an incipient historian, I believe that the meaning and values assigned to human life are a product of historical processes that have given us the stories and language we use to understand ourselves and others in community - in a word,culture.  As a missionary with a missional understanding of church, I am compelled to express my faith, in word and deed, within the increasingly complex intersections of Christianity and cultures.  How, then, do we faithfully follow Jesus who "became flesh and dwelt among us," crossing the divide between sacred and secular, eternity and time, leading us to live in the tensions of Christianity and culture?

Over the next two (or three) years, I want to consider this faith-shaping question while diving deeper into Uganda's history to better understand the social, economic, political realities of post-colonial Africa, realities which reflect the persisting domination of "powers and principalities" against which we struggle to find life.

For now, to be more concrete (pun intended: read below), allow me to introduce my research topic which makes use of archival sources in Uganda, the UK, and the USA to:

Identify and interpret continuities and discontinuities in the development discourse in Uganda during the colonial and post-colonial eras by comparing and contrasting the two signature development projects of their time: the Owen Falls Dam of the 1950s and the Owen Falls Extension of the 1990s.

Elucidate the multiple meanings of the term “development” as it was articulated, interpreted, and practiced by actors across the social scale – from powerful elites to peasant farmers, with particular emphasis on Ugandan perspectives and agency.

Show how development discourses have dominated the Ugandan political economy since WW2, while failing to achieve stated goals. Rather, development plans, policies, and practices have framed Ugandan society in conflict - land vs. population, industry vs. agriculture, urban vs. rural, modern vs. “primitive.”

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