By Katy Lindquist

Emergent Conversation 22

This essay is part of the series The Politics of Crisis, PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 22

“You cannot predict your future, so you just have to believe that it will be good. Somehow” (Fieldnotes, January 16, 2023). Jason—an established young chef in Kampala—echoed a common saying among young Ugandan urbanites when talking about the future: “somehow.” Over a cup of spiced tea at a restaurant whose menu he designed, Jason recounted his own narrative of becoming in a city where very little was for certain. His stories of challenge and triumph, success and failure, love and loss were undergirded by a type of secular belief in the passage of time “working out, somehow.” Somehow, there will be money. Somehow, a job will come. Somehow, the government will change. Somehow, love will find me. Somehow, the good life will arrive. This belief in a future that works out, somehow, isn’t a naive grasping of modernity’s straws. Nor is it a romanticized narrative of resilience. Rather, it is a specific way of being in time—one that embodies much of the urban condition in a place like Kampala. In this essay, I explore the time of somehow and its temporal manifestations in urban Uganda.

The time of somehow stands starkly, poignantly against dominant narratives of Uganda and Africa writ large. Since the independence era, narratives about African futures have oscillated between idealized narratives of hope and catastrophic narratives of crisis (Goldstone & Obarrio 2017). The latter has had the most valence in international media. Following the violence experienced by many countries during the 1980s and 1990s, portrayals of Africa as “hopeless,” “violent,” and “dark” dominated news media. This was especially true in media about Uganda—a country that had emerged from a decade of brutal rule under Idi Amin and a long civil war that left the country in a state of dire need. In the last twenty years, narratives of Africa’s future have shifted notably.

Uganda’s “New Breed” (Oloka-Onyango 2004) leadership, ushered in by the civil wars of the 1980s and 1990s as well as rapid economic growth rates across the continent, became wrapped up in a new narrative of Africa’s trajectory: “Africa Rising.” Now seen as a promising site for corporate investment, consumer growth, and democratic expansion, the Africa Rising narrative transformed both policy and corporate investment strategies during the early years of the twenty-first century. In Uganda, the rise of President Yoweri Museveni and his ruling party the National Resistant Movement  (NRM) was seen as a sign of great hope and promise for the country’s future democracy and economic development. In recent years, the shine of the Africa Rising narrative has faded. Museveni enters his thirty-eighth year of rule and the hoped-for democratic and economic transformations of the country have not materialized. Crisis looms once again.

Jason and many young professionals in Kampala don’t deny the possibility of crisis. In fact, most count on the probability of crisis. Beyond the precarity of the present, a political crisis of varying degrees of predicted magnitude occupies the future visions of most young people in Kampala. With an aging president and an increasingly autocratic ruling party, the threat of political violence is great. The end of President Museveni—in whatever form that comes—is seen by many as an unavoidable crisis. The main opposition groups to Museveni’s party have been violently suppressed for decades. The most recent opposition hopeful—the charismatic singer-cum-Parliamentarian, Bobi Wine—has been tortured and illegally imprisoned on and off for years. A party successor to Museveni has yet to emerge beyond some conspicuous organizing around the President’s son, General Muhoozi, who has adopted a Trump-like persona of international infamy. The end of Museveni is often a topic of great debate.

Some predict a prolonged civil war with the form of governance of the country at the center of the struggle. Others suspect Museveni’s end will result in acute violence with a successor from the president’s party emerging quickly to continue the autocratic governing of the country. And a few predict something much worse—pogroms of ethnic cleansing and violence against civilians taking the country back to the dark days of the early 1980s. While debate is always lively, the one point of convergence is that some type of crisis is coming with  Museveni’s inevitable end.

Yet this predicted crisis is not the temporal rupture that narratives of crisis often hinge on. Crisis, as Brian Larkin notes, follows a classic narrative structure where a rupture in a state of normalcy orients past and future around a specific climactic point (Larkin 2016). Crisis narratives, thus, produce specific types of timelines where past and future are seen through the prism of crisis itself. In his eerily omniscient book, The Pandemic Perhaps, Carlo Caduff (2015) theorizes “prophetic time.” Drawing on fieldwork done with microbiologists on the H1N1 virus in the early 2000s, Caduff observes a distinct calibration of reason and faith in what he terms “pandemic prophecy.” The faith in the coming of an imminent pandemic justified the reason of pandemic preparedness. An agreed upon apocalyptic future gave way to a re-organizing of the present. The present itself vanishes, folding into a prophetic future of crisis. The time of somehow and the way that many young people in Kampala inhabit time defies classic narratives of crisis. The prophetic moment of crisis—Museveni’s end—lacks the temporal rupture that most narratives of crisis depend on. Rather, the present and the future remain largely unhinged from the crisis itself. The political crisis of Museveni’s end is just one factor among many in how young people think about their futures. Crisis lacks its seductive narrative stickiness in the time of somehow.

Recent scholarly work has theorized the diverse temporalities of urban Africa, focusing on the ways in which contingency is built into the urban experience of time. Achille Mbembe’s (2001) notion of “emergent time” or “time that is appearing” frames time as unfolding in African cityscapes (17). Emergence carries with it both uncertainty and potential, situating time itself as a source of potency in the African city. Others have theorized the temporal space between the present and an aspirational future as life in the “meantime” (Masquelier & Durham 2023; Jansen 2018) or an “aspirational bottleneck” (Archambault 2021). Aspiration may orient future-time, but the ways in which young urbanites navigate the temporal landscape between present and aspiration reveals the ways in which contingency is a lived condition. The time of somehow takes contingency as a premise. There is no teleological pathway in the time of somehow. Plans are made with the assumption of being foiled. Yet, the plans are still made.

Jason was fond of telling me about his many plans—all of the ones that failed and the few that panned out. He wanted to be a veterinary doctor, but his father’s untimely death delayed his schooling. He worked hard to save the money to get his diploma in hotel management and then worked a series of low paying jobs at hotels across Kampala. Life was precarious in these years, and Jason lived in between friends and abandoned buildings. An immanent visit from the Queen of England led to the government investing unexpected money into service training for young people in Kampala. Jason found himself in a culinary training school at Kampala’s most prestigious hotel, where he himself cooked for the Queen on her visit. Jason’s services came into great demand, and he became known for his creative approach to menu-making in Kampala’s nascent food scene. Jason started making plans to start his own business and training school for young chefs in the city. But then COVID happened and Jason lost almost everything. He sold his car and gave up his apartment, moving in with his sister in what seemed like the lowest point of his life. In the years since, he has started piecing things back together again. Making more plans.

For Jason, though, it was never about the plan itself. It was about the intention the plan forged:

In Uganda we have a saying, your tongue is connected to your brain. What your tongue speaks, your brain believes. When you believe that you are poor, your brain will believe that you are poor and not work hard. If you say you will make it, then you will work hard and things will get better. What you talk is what your brain interprets. When you say you are rich, your brain will believe it and finds a way to get there (Fieldnotes, January 16, 2023).

Jason believed more than anything that he will always find a “way to get there,” somehow. His stories were always punctuated with a critique of the constraints that he and many young people like him grew up knowing in Kampala—the poverty, the education system, the corruption. His belief in the ability to speak the somehow into existence wasn’t one mired in any type of structural advantage. If anything, Jason faced more challenges than many of his peers who grew up with middle-class parents. But Jason’s belief in his future being good never seemed to waiver, or at least it never disappeared even when faced with crisis itself.

The time of somehow doesn’t hinge on crisis. In fact, it hinges on something quite different: hope. This isn’t a naive hope about revolutionary change. Nor is it a religious notion of redemption. And it certainly isn’t the corporate hope penned in the narratives of “Africa Rising.” It is an ordinary hope—a faith that life will always find a way of working out. Crisis exists in this time. It is expected. But crisis doesn’t have the same ability to rupture the time of somehow. It is just one of the many things that happens on the ever-changing path towards a future that is somehow okay. The time of somehow—and the many young people who live in it in Kampala—reveals an alternative way of living in times of crisis. It allows us to ask different types of questions. What happens when crisis loses its narrative power to control time? What types of worlds become possible when crisis can loom but not consume? What futures are possible when crisis isn’t the horizon point?

?w=200″ alt=”” width=”200″ height=”191″ />Katy Lindquist is a Klarman Fellow and Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Emory University. Her research explores the political subjectivities of young, middle-class professionals in urban Uganda and their role in the recent wave of social justice movements in the country.

Works Cited

Archambault, Julie Soleil. 2021. “Urban Precarity and Aspirational Compromise: Feeling Otherwise in a Mozambican Suburb.” City & Society 33(2): 303-323.

Caduff, Carlo. 2015. The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Fear.          Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Goldstone, Brian and Juan Obarrio. 2017. African Futures: Essays and Crisis, Emergence, and    Possibility. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jansen, Stef. 2018. Yearning in the Meantime: ‘Normal Lives’ and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex. New York: Berghahn Books.

Larkin, Brian. 2016. “The Form of Crisis and the Affect of Modernization.” In African     Futures: Essays on Crisis, Emergence, and Possibility. Goldstone, Brian and Juan      Obarrio, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pg 39-50.

Masquelier, Adeline & Deborah Durham. 2023. In The Meantime: Toward an Anthropology of    the Possible. New York: Berghahn Books.

Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of          California Press.

Oloka-Onyango, J. 2004. “‘New Breed’ Leadership, Conflict, and Reconstruction in the Great     Lakes Region of Africa: A Sociopolitical Biography of Uganda’s Yoweri Kaguta         Museveni.” Africa Today. 50(3): 29–52.