From Musevenism to Generation Z: Different strokes for different folks

“For us, we believe that these were peaceful protests,” he told the media, adding, “that is why we are rallying behind them, to see to it that they get justice that they deserve.”

The protests were largely the handiwork of youth from the demographic cohort Generation Z. The oldest of these so-called Zoomers turns 27 this year. Ironically, that is exactly the age when Uganda’s current president, Yoweri Museveni, put together a body of work that captured the zeitgeist of the 1970s. Mr Museveni’s undergraduate thesis written in 1971 during his time as a student of the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania could not have been more different from what the Zoomers—who have had his security apparatus work overtime—espouse. 

Far from cherishing the notion of peaceful protest, his was a thesis dripping with venom. Titled Fanon’s Theory of Violence: Its Verification in Liberated Mozambique, Mr Museveni dispensed with any pretence to a peaceful resolution. As a bare hanging bulb cast his room in Dar es Salaam in jaundiced light, Museveni showed just how he had received with enthusiasm, if not adulation, the richly detailed and hauntingly beautiful written works of Franz Fanon. A Marxist political philosopher, Fanon’s texts such as The Wretched of the Earth, Black Skin, White Masks, A Dying Colonialism, and Towards the African Revolution sat neatly in the canon of post-colonial studies.

“Fanon advocated violence in order to bring about total and authentic decolonisation,” Mr Museveni wrote, adding, “Fanon acknowledges violence as the highest form of political struggle.”

While the mention of “decolonisation” could be inferred as Mr Museveni reading October 9, 1962 as the onset of flag independence, it is also worth noting that Mozambique was still four years away from being liberated from Portuguese colonial rule. Mr Museveni, therefore, found it wise to reference in his thesis “a dialectical relationship between the existence of the settler and the native.” 

Peeling back the layers of the oppressor (i.e., the settler) and oppressed (i.e., the native) binary, Mr Museveni made clear that “the native is even thought to be a defective of some sort.” He also wasted no time in detailing what ought to be done.

“In a colonial situation, where the master has created the illusion of invincibility by habitually using intimidatory colonial violence on the people, it is necessary to demonstrate to the masses that the enemy can be destroyed by revolutionary violence,” Mr Museveni wrote in his undergraduate thesis.

“When the oppressed, the ‘native’ of the white man, opens machine gun fire on the oppressor and mows him down, he kills two birds with one stone,” he added.

Young firebrand
Evidently, Mr Museveni spent his youthful days embracing Marxist-Leninist teachings and the craft of guerrilla warfare. It can be successfully argued that he had little or no choice as this was the ideological resonance of his generation during the twilight of Uganda’s post-colonial history. While that assumption rests on a cornerstone of conjecture, what is clear is that it is this burning ambition that led him to slip away from the University of Dar es Salaam where he was a student. 

Mr Museveni swapped the relative comfort of student life for the treacherous fields of the Mozambique Liberation Movement (Frelimo). He would also seek military training in North Korea before commencing a daring covert operation against the despotic rule of Idi Amin. This was not a sacrifice to be taken lightly as it resulted in the death of his acolytes, including those shot dead at firing squads.

In 1967, the year when Mr Museveni finished High School and joined the University of Dar es Salaam, the world was in the throes of a cold war pitting communist Russia and its allies against the capitalist United States and its allies; the poster child of Marxist guerrilla warfare, Ernesto “Che” Guevara had been killed by Bolivian troops; the six-day war in Israel had reshaped the geo-political contours of the volatile Middle East; Milton Obote had abolished kingdoms in Uganda; and the Internet was 16 years away from being invented. More on the democratising power of the Internet later.

The University of Dar es Salaam was by then the bastion of radical leftist teachings and Cold War diplomacy. Liberation movements such as Mozambique’s Frelimo, South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC), the South West Peoples Organisation (Swapo) and the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu), and US civil rights movements established offices on the outskirts of the city, fighting white military rule where leaders such as former Mozambique liberation hero Samora Machel, later assassinated by the South African apartheid regime, Frelimo fighter Marcelino Dos Santos, former Mozambique president Joachim Chissano, former Namibia President Sam Numoja and Lesotho freedom fighter Potlako Kitchener Leballo, converged to share guerilla tactics. Lecturers such as the Guyanese scholars, Walter Rodney and Dr Cheddi Jagan; Canadian political economist, John Shannon Saul; Dr Eduardo Mondlane, the Frelimo leader, who was later assassinated after a bomb was planted in a book; the US civil rights movement leader, Stokely 
Carmichael; and Jamaica’s Marcus Garvey—preached fiery oratory as well as taught the craft of revolutionary lore. They also read the scripts of books such as How Europe underdeveloped Africa, The Wretched of the Earth, and Black Skin, White Masks.

Fanon influence
“These books by Fanon analysed the psychosis of the colonialists and the colonised. He argued that both the coloniser and the colonised were dehumanised by their respective roles and needed liberation—one from being oppressed and the other from being the oppressor,” Museveni wrote in his memoirs, Sowing the Mustard Seed. 

For instance, Fanon stoked the flames writing thus: “The naked truth of decolonisation evokes for us the searing bullets and bloodstained knives which emanate from it. For if the last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists. That affirmed the intention to place the last at the head of things, and to make them climb at a pace [too quickly, some say] the well-known steps which characterise an organised society, can only triumph if we use all means to turn the scale, including, of course, that of violence.” 

The last shall be first. It is a line that Mr Museveni could not help but also include in his undergraduate thesis. He wrote thus: “True decolonisation, might be described in the well-known words: ‘The last shall be first and the first last…’” Last month, whilst eulogising Simon Peter Aleper, the fallen vice chairperson of his ruling NRM party, Mr Museveni evoked the line. Again. He recalled a trip made to the Karamoja Sub-region in his capacity as a research officer in the president’s office. While the sub-region was an economic backwater in every sense, Mr Museveni said he saw potential.

“Karamoja has got minerals—gold, marble, phosphates. I think there could also be other minerals which we are not very clear about. Because of that, we have taken the electricity there, we have taken the tarmacked road. So it will be a big hub for mining and manufacturing,” he told mourners on July 26, adding, “This is exactly what we told when we were still in the bush […] we said that Karamoja will get special emphasis because it has been neglected by people who don’t have eyes to see. Karamoja now […] is like the story of the Bible—the last will be first.”

Incidentally, a corruption scandal headlined by the brazen abuse of iron sheets that were ring-fenced for locals in Karamoja Sub-region, is what has forced Zoomers to take to the streets. Acting like they were reading from Mr Museveni’s thesis or at least the less militaristic aspects of it, the Zoomers had christened and continue to christen their protests as “party-less” and “tribe-less.” Writing in 1971, Mr Museveni offered thus: “The peasants in North Mozambique have already grasped the meaning of a nation as opposed to a tribe. In Uganda, on the other hand, peasants and indeed the intelligentsia at Makerere, have failed not only to get beyond the tribe but have not conquered the clan.”

He added: “It might be said that one can conduct such political education without fighting so that Fanon’s theory on violence becomes a superfluity or mere romanticism. I do not share that view. […] one cannot create a new order unless one shakes the old one.”

Creating a new order
At the University of Dar es Salaam, Mr Museveni met a pantheon of other future leaders. These included the deceased SPLA leader, Dr John Garang, who had deferred an offer to study a PhD in Economics at the University of California, Berkeley to undertake the Watson fellowship at Dar es Salaam University. 

It is this radical political thought that inspired Museveni and his surrogates—today’s equivalent of Zoomers— to embrace the lofty ideals of revolution that provided the unflinching courage to launch an underground operation against Amin’s despotic government under the Front for National Salvation (Fronasa). It also came at a high price where several of his colleagues, including Martin Mwesiga, Sam Magara, Valerio Rwaheru, and Mpiza Kamimoto were killed in the struggles. This was alongside nine others like Malibo Abwooli who were publicly executed by Amin’s firing squads. 

The left-leaning Fronasa organisation published its manifesto titled An Indictment of a Primitive Fascist, a direct rebuke of Amin after Museveni recruited surrogates such as the former Premier Amama Mbabazi, former Deputy Chief of Defence Forces, Lt Gen Ivan Koreta and Internal Affairs Minister Maj Gen Kahinda Otafiire, among others.

By the time Mr Museveni transitioned from his university days to launch a five-year Bush War struggle in the Luweero jungle, he had in the words of Fanon laid the groundwork that “each generation must identify its mission and fulfil it.” 

Generational shift?
As Mr Museveni seeks to take his rulership of Uganda into a fourth decade in 2026, critics say he has pretty much-changed places. Last month, on the 23rd, his praetorian guard, armed with automatic rifles, erected barricades across roads leading to Parliament and detained young protesters who, among others, wanted Parliament Speaker Anita Among, to step down.

Both the United States and United Kingdom governments determined that her involvement in the Karamoja Sub-region’s corruption was so significant that she was sanctioned. A symbolic generational shift from the old guard to the young Turks, the young protesters, much like their counterparts in Kenya and Nigeria, are part of the different shades of social movements emerging across Africa. These social movements rely on a hybrid model that infuses tactics from the West and oral traditional methods from nativist primary social movements like Bunyoro’s Omukama Kabalega to frame the political elite as the ‘new colonial masters.’

The youth believe that the corrupt political elite has arrogated itself excessive power and wealth—a special fund for treatment in first-class hospitals, huge salaries, and perks at the expense of unemployed youth and has taken the place of colonialists. They mimic what Museveni and his acolytes largely preached—the values of modesty and the sneering contempt for the primitive accumulation of wealth, and a hedonistic lifestyle.

“There was an insidious enemy campaign portraying the freedom fighters as leisure lovers that were squandering in bars with white women—freedom fighters were pleasure seekers who could not fight a serious war,” Mr Museveni wrote in his memoirs.

Before, in his undergraduate thesis, still only 27, he had opined thus: “The most important thing is to win the confidence of the masses. It is necessary for all the local cadres to ‘terrainers’ , as they are sometimes called, indeed for all activists that seek to enlist the support of the masses, to lead a pure, exemplary and, most preferably, ascetic life.”

A life of sacrifice?
A young man whose career was formed in the crucible of the Frelimo guerrilla camps in Mozambique, Museveni spent his university holidays in military training and, in July 1969, travelled to far-flung North Korea to undertake military training.

In his memoirs, Sowing the Mustard Seed, Museveni says, “I had put all my three choices to the University of Dar es Salaam. I had done so because, by this time, I was no longer a careerist. I was a freedom fighter and I despised careerism. It was a political-ideological choice, not an academic choice.”

To his disappointment, he found “most of the students as careerists who wanted to fill positions of departing colonialists. Many of the lecturers were right-wing and preached the message of imperialists.”

In the December holidays of 1968, Mr Museveni alongside a group of seven, including the former minister and Masaka Municipality lawmaker John Kawanga visited the areas liberated from Portuguese occupation by Frelimo.

He writes: “We drove in a Russian truck with Frelimo soldiers through Iringa, Njombe, Songea, Tunduru up to Newala. At Newala, we walked on foot, down a hill, called Killido, and crossed the Ruvuma River in canoes in broad daylight. We did not know that Dr Mondlane had ordered that Frelimo should organise an ambush against the Portuguese for us to witness. Unfortunately, the commander Samuel Kankhomba who was supposed to do this had been stabbed to death on the Tanzanian side by the rival faction of Lazaro Kavandame.”

He adds: “The only Portuguese presence was one of their warplanes, which dropped some Napalm bombs in the bush from where we were. As guests we would get one meal a day – I think of cassava flour and suffered severe constipation.” 

Mr Museveni later returned to the University of Dar es Salaam and gave a rapturous lecture to the theatre, which was full of students.

Barely after completing university,  Museveni returned to Uganda in 1969 and sneaked in a pistol he received from Cuba. He kept the treasured weapon with the late Abbas Kibazo at Kibuli on the outskirts of Kampala.

Mr Museveni says through the help of the chairperson of the Public Service Commission, Abdalla Anyuru, he joined the President’s Office. He specifically worked in the research section headed by Wilson Okwenje whose permanent secretary was Wacha Olwal.

“However, it seems that the UPC leadership could not understand the ideological-political-social potential of the youth,” Museveni wrote in his memoirs, which bears similarities with the prevailing views of protesting youth who accuse their leaders of being out of touch with reality.

Counter-narrative 
But in the book titled From Obote to Obote, authored by the former head of the General Service department established in 1964, President Obote’s first cousin, Naphlin Akena Adoko, claims that Mr Museveni worked in the spy agency as a research officer. The spy Tsar and former president of the Uganda Law Society, described Museveni as someone who exhibited burning ambitions.

“[Museveni’s] ambition was so intense that it became a substitute for talents. His whole heart seemed to have been devoted to the attainment of the goal of his ambition. In the case of Museveni, the passion developed to a morbid degree is one for political power. The monomania to rule over others,” Akena Adoko writes. 

Akena believed that the role of the spy agency, which was based in Entebbe, was to “recruit and train, new security officers of widely different descriptions who united the qualities of deep learning to the highest quality of apostles: men who were neither hypocritical nor avaricious, nor fearful but dedicated to the demolition of idols and the purification of sanctity. Men of sincerity, disinterestedness, and adventurous courage who would dare to defend right when the right was miscalled wrong.”

Adoko claims that Mr Museveni practised the art of sneering at everybody so much that it obtained for him “the reputation of being a great judge of character from those people who are impressed by such an art.” 

Akena didn’t mince his words whilst writing of Mr Museveni thus: “He did not have a high opinion about many around him. He sneered almost at everybody. I would say, ‘But surely the Vice President [John Babiiha] is doing everything with obvious success, to increase the population of exotic cattle in the hands of farmers.’ Answer: ‘He is a snake.’ Question: ‘And what about Onama …’ Answer: ‘That is a C.LA.’” 

After the [1971] coup, Mr Museveni was asked about Milton Obote, Akena, and Oyite on whom Amin had placed millions. His comments were pithy: “Obote is reactionary, tried to pass a progressive. Failed badly.” 

Secondly, “Akena is not a politician. Why talk about him?” 

And lastly, “Oyite [Ojok] is bourgeois.”

A little over five decades later, Zoomers are taking to social networks to speak of him in similar disparaging terms. It remains to be seen whether he will manage to use just the right mix of contrition and charm to gradually win them back.

Protests
As Mr Museveni seeks to take his rulership of Uganda into a fourth decade in 2026, critics say he has pretty much-changed places. Last month, on the 23rd, his praetorian guard, armed with automatic rifles, erected barricades across roads leading to Parliament and detained young protesters who, among others, wanted Parliament Speaker Anita Among, to step down.
 
Both the United States and United Kingdom governments determined that her involvement in the Karamoja Sub-region’s corruption was so significant that she was sanctioned. A symbolic generational shift from the old guard to the young Turks, the young protesters, much like their counterparts in Kenya and Nigeria, are part of the different shades of social movements emerging across Africa. 

Museveni’s ideologies
His undergraduate thesis.
“Fanon advocated violence in order to bring about total and authentic decolonisation, and Fanon acknowledges violence as the highest form of political struggle.’’

‘‘When the oppressed, the ‘native’ of the white man, opens machine gun fire on the oppressor and mows him down, he kills two birds with one stone.’’

Museveni also emphasised the necessity of revolutionary violence to dismantle the old order: ‘‘It is necessary to demonstrate to the masses that the enemy can be destroyed by revolutionary violence.’’

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