Uganda's visual environment: development and change

Abstract

The appropriation of external elements and their local domestication are important ingredients for the growth and survival of a distinct culture. Norbert Kaggwa, a student at the Margaret Trowell School of Fine Art, Makerere University, Kampala, 1960-1964, gives voice to a gratitude for social changes that led to rapid economic development, and at the same time to a dissatisfaction over repercussions of a rapidity so unprecedented that particular localities were taken by storm, allowing them no more than a moment for the adjustments necessary to their survival. This essay looks at the ways in which external factors were necessary currency for the emergence of new local modernism in the visual arts, and at the means by which local resources were used in this development in the wider context of rapid social and cultural change in Uganda