Regionalism in Small Uganda

Hello, between classes, projects, and visiting friends I have fallen sick.  No worries, it brought new experiences and some interesting conversations. 

School has settled down for now and I will try to explain how a class or lecture compares to my Canadian experiences.  To start with most of my lectures are only one hour long, a few are doubles which are two hours.  I do not mind this because I live so close and the seats in the lecture halls are not that comfortable.  In SFU I dislike the short lectures because of the wasted travel time.  The other big administrative difference is the professor-student relation.  So far the relationship appears more formal and businesslike for the East African students.  For the non-Africans, we are able to drop in and out of offices with slightly more ease and issues are not dealt with a manner as formal as with the East Africans.  I make the divide between non-Africans and East Africans because the biggest group comes from within the East African community; Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Kenya, and Burundi, well the next grouping maybe the one I fall into, the non-African.  Secondly, the relationship and experiences seem to divide along these lines, the status of the non-African is normally a short, semester to two, term student and we are treated as foreign.  The East African is at Makerere for the full three years and is considered a local and has his or her regional-based community to fall back on in Kampala and Makerere.  

I will try to have pictures of some halls soon.  The halls themselves are smaller and most have a flat, not sloped, floor with wooden chairs or benches facing a slightly raised platform and podium and blackboard.  Of my lecturers teaching Refugees in International Relations, one teaches in a style similar to what I would expect at SFU in Burnaby.  One, Theory and Practice of Democracy in Africa, uses more of a discussion style which he is able to guide.  The final one is confused, he seems to understand politics very well but wants to teach philosophy with references to the topic; Security Studies - IR. 

Of the three lecturers, Theory and Practice of Democracy must be the most entertaining and interesting because it has opened up local or Ugandan politics to me through these debates.  The lecture will normally start with points given by the professor and then be debated.  These debates can cover such ideas as basic democratic practices and elections, formations of cabinets, and regional political relating to the Ugandan cabinet.  As it stands, the stats will be wrong but will provide an idea, two of the regional or tribal groups in Ug form over sixty percent of the Cabinet yet form only thirty-ish percent of the population of Uganda!  Interesting stuff, before you write this off as tribalism think of how Canada votes; where is the Green seat and support, what does the Bloc stand for, do the Prairies vote together?  Maybe the issues are the same in a different context. 

I will attempt to remember the most heated topics of each week and explain my view on them here.  However, it does help to have questions or topics which you, the reader, find interesting.  I will make sure my comment settings are correct. 

Thanks for reading, I look forward to hearing from all of you soon.