Learning about Uganda through old photos

Some of the photos on display a the gallery where the history of Uganda and the heritage of its people are well preserved. Photo by Rebecca Rwakabukoza.

It is not often that I have found a photograph exhibition and I was naturally eager to see photographs that had refused to be contained in dusty family albums and found their way into an art gallery. A quick look through the History In Progress Uganda (HIPUganda) Facebook page revealed that this ongoing exhibition was definitely something I wanted to see. HIPUganda, in collaboration with MishMash Uganda, organised the exhibition that focused on images from the Kaddu Wasswa Archive, Gayaza High School and self-portraits made by Deo Kyakulagira that were printed on fibre-based paper in a dark room.

The social network connection
The Facebook page and website images are photographed photographs while in the MishMash gallery, you will find art prints from the photographs that can be bought as art work. In fact there are some little red dots beside some of the pictures (mostly the Gayaza High School ones, I noted) indicating that the beautiful work had found owners.

The pictures are historical, as expected and you will find on the walls of the gallery, the bedroom of Bishop Tucker, Sir Apollo Kaggwa’s family alongside Deo Kyakulagira’s self-portraits. If you remember your history lessons, it will be the visual your teacher should have had in class. The photographs will take you back to a time you were not existent yet, and make you question who the photographer was. Was he/she a colonial administrator? Or perhaps, a White teacher? Are these the pictures that they send to Britain? How on earth did Deo Kyakulagira take these self-portraits in the 70s? After you have asked these questions of yourself and the inanimate objects in the gallery, I hope, like me, you will realise that the pictures before you speak for more than colonisation.

The lantern slides from Gayaza High School that were found without much information can be looked at and through at the same time. Some are black and white, while others are said to be hand-coloured.

They might have been used for educational purposes and you will find one labeled “ladies’ bedroom”. The power of these slides now is that they are ours and we can provide the captions.

The exhibition had taken something out of history, given it to me, without narrative, and I was free to make up stories about what I had seen. The older generation of this society might form better stories for the photographs, but their story about the children who were photographed with a crested crane would not be as half-interesting as mine.

The children were in attire (I looked more than twice to be sure) and they really did look like crested cranes too.

Like my friend said on twitter, HIPUganda’s collection needs to be declared a national treasure.