Humour is Powerful’: Cartoons Take on Uganda’s Repressive Government

When Jim Spire Ssentongo, a cartoonist from Uganda, Cartoons tweeted in April asking people to share pictures of the many potholes in the nation’s capital, he had no idea what he was kicking off.

On April 15, last year, he posted on X, the former Twitter platform, saying, “A friend of mine is organizing a mega KAMPALA POTHOLE PHOTO EXHIBITION.” “Post pictures of potholes in Kampala city here, along with information about their location, depth, circumference, and approximate age.” He requested that his supporters tag the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) and the organization maintaining the nation’s roadways.

The notorious potholes in the nation, which the locals call “ponds” in the roadways due to their size, were the subject of attempts to display the defects back in 2005 physically. However, Ssentongo remembers that the cops foiled these attempts.

Thus, according to 45-year-old Ssentongo, the notion of hosting an online exhibition struck him. He strikes me as a thoughtful person who deliberates his words before speaking. Ssentongo acknowledges that he didn’t intend to “turn it into a grand initiative” and that the tweet requesting pothole images was “partly joking, partly sounding out how it would be received.”