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

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.