By Brooke S. Bocast

Author of

If Books Fail, Try Beauty: Educated Womanhood
in the New East Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2024).

We are about a year into the United States’ new presidential administration, and many Americans are reeling. The cornerstones of the country’s democracy – separation of powers, checks and balances, fidelity to the Constitution – were once axiomatic. Now, the President and his cronies ransack federal agencies for private gain as “big men” enrich themselves at the public’s expense.

As people grapple with our new reality, many observers turn to Europe to apprehend the rise and fall of authoritarian regimes. But Europe is not the only source of history. African states have also undergone  –  and continue to undergo – polity transformations. I suggest that we look to African nations, like Uganda, for insight into the “politics of the belly,” or, simply, clientelism.

If Books Fail, Try Beauty tells the story of young women coming of age in Kampala, Uganda, where clientelism is the prevailing logic of power. Clientelism is more than a political system; it is a social order built on networks of reciprocity that define norms, expectations, and moral obligations.

The book’s protagonists, Stella and Milly, are among the first generation of Ugandan women to attend college en masse. The book traces Uganda’s education restructuring from 2004 onwards and demonstrates how these reforms generate new obstacles for young women in their pursuit of academic credentials, upward mobility, and moral adulthood.

Based on thirty-six months of ethnographic fieldwork and decade-long relationships with my interlocutors, I reveal how students embody and reconfigure “educated womanhood” through the crucible of the university’s sexual economy. Stella and Milly become “educated” by exchanging sexual favors with older businessmen in a web of reciprocal obligation that presents a case study of intimate clientelism.

For example, one night out at Club Cayenne, Stella, Milly, and their friend Winnie met up with Henry and William, two businessmen in their early thirties. The women juggled their own priorities with the men’s desires while attempting – unsuccessfully – to maintain social equilibrium. Stella explained the conflict to me:

Milly and Winnie, you know they wanted Henry’s money, and this William likes me also, so they felt bad when I dumped him immediately. They wanted me to maybe give him sex. Milly and Winnie, they are very good, they are very generous, but they get their money through guys. That’s why they got pissed at me. I told Milly, “Milly, I’m not interested in William. I just want Henry. I want to just meet him, talk about the job, drop my CV.” She told me, “But Stella, you can’t go direct to Henry when William is there. You have to pass through William to get to Henry.” She’s protecting her game through me. She believes you give something in exchange for something. For her to get an internship, she had to give things. I told you that.

These dilemmas reflect a fundamental reimagining of women’s futures amidst political economic uncertainty. Stella and Milly play by the rules – or more precisely, with the rules – of clientelism to enact new strategies for upward mobility and agentic action in a setting where young women’s public presence remains morally fraught. While many people condemn “campus girls” as unserious gold diggers. I argue that Stella and Milly’s sexual endeavors can only be understood within larger cultural historical frameworks of patron-clientelism.

What do Ugandan university students’ romantic relationships have to do with the dismantling of American democracy? And what insights might we glean from this juxtaposition? If Books Fail, Try Beauty offers a window into a world where, as Ugandan students often quip, getting ahead depends on who you know, not what you know. More profoundly, the book affords insight into a setting where institutions offer a simulacrum of the rule of law, and power flows most meaningfully through social infrastructure.

Uganda has never seen a democratic transfer of power. But its pro-democracy movement is in its ascendancy, and we now witness a groundswell of popular support for Uganda’s opposition political parties. As Ugandans take to the streets and social media to demand electoral accountability, Americans would do well to take note of this, too, as a lesson for our country’s future.

Brooke Schwartz Bocast is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and affiliate faculty in the African Studies minor at Western Washington University. Her debut monograph, If Books Fail, Try Beauty: Educated Womanhood in the New East Africa (Oxford University Press 2024) was awarded the Council on Anthropology and Education’s Outstanding Book Award.