Africa Is a Country

Save the Museum (in Uganda)

Save the Museum (in Uganda)

By
Brett Davidson

Just about this time last year, Uganda lost a priceless part of its cultural heritage when the Kasubi Tombs were burnt down. The tombs were a UNESCO World Heritage Site and were built in 1882 – the burial place of four Buganda kings.

Now it seems another cultural site faces destruction. Global Voices reports on a campaign in Uganda to save the Uganda Museum, founded in 1908.

Apparently the ministry of Tourism, Trade and Industry plans to build a 60-storey office building on the site (I wonder whether there were many fights between the Tourism and the Trade and Industry factions over that one).

Not only does the museum house some important exhibits, but according to the Facebook page set up by the Save the Museum Campaign, it’s the oldest museum in Eastern Africa.–Brett Davidson

Further Reading

Goodbye, Piassa

The demolition of an historic district in Addis Ababa shows a central contradiction of modernization: the desire to improve the country while devaluing its people and culture.

And do not hinder them

We hardly think of children as agents of change. At the height of 1980s apartheid repression in South Africa, a group of activists did and gave them the tool of print.

The new antisemitism?

Stripped of its veneer of nuance, Noah Feldman’s essay in ‘Time’ is another attempt to silence opponents of the Israeli state by smearing them as anti-Jewish racists.