UCU Digital Institutional Repository(UCUDIR)
Welcome to the Uganda Christian University Digital Institutional Repositoy (UCUDIR). This is the University's official Institutional Repository. It aims to collect, preserve and showcase the intellectual output of staff and students of UCU. This growing collection of research includes peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, working papers, theses, and more.
- The Repository ingests documents, audio, video, datasets and their corresponding Dublin Core metadata
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- we also issue permanent urls and trustworthy identifiers, including optional integrations with handle.net and DataCite DOI
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Select a community to browse its collections.
- Items in this community present a concise summary of information that can help readers understand, and likely make decisions about, government policies.
- This is a collection of Masters and Doctoral theses and dissertations submitted in electronic format to the Uganda Christian University.
Recent Submissions
Understanding characterization: the young adult character in the prose fiction of selected Ugandan female authors
(International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences, 2025-12-04) Alice Jossy Kyobutungi
This article explores the details of characterisation, particularly that of the young adult character in the prose fiction of selected Ugandan female authors, through a thorough reading of Barbara Kimenye, Mary Karooro Okurut and Glaydah Namukasa's novels and short stories. This study positions the texts within the broader literary analytical realm of the fundamental analytical framework of characterisation. Drawing from the archetypal critical theory and young adult studies, the work locates young adult protagonists as they navigate life's complexities, expectations, and their own personal perceptions about family, peers at school, teachers, and other people in their lives. Different characters are studied from their different settings accorded to them by the different writers; the schools, street environments, and later a university setting, all of which offer adolescents spaces to discover who they are. They rebel, they bond, they conflict, and they grow even as they negotiate their spaces in a world that is dominated by adults. The study highlights the physique of characters, their actions, their reactions and narrative voice, which reflect their agency and their search for identity. This analysis of characterisation of the young adult in female-authored prose fictional works stresses the role of Ugandan literature in increasing worldwide understanding of the young adult character in prose fiction.
For the young adult, autonomy is a dream: tracing the power dynamics in Ugandan literature
(Annals of Language and Literature, 2021) Alice Jossy Kyobutungi Tumwesigye
Age stereotype and its impact on literature is a factor that has not been sufficiently researched especially in Uganda. This article uses the postcolonial theory to reveal that the young adult demographic category is pushed to the periphery in literature as it is in life. It is part of a research done on representations of the
young adult in the fiction of selected Ugandan women writers; where the third objective in the bigger study investigates the power dynamic in literature. The article is a projection of a documentary study that uses critical analysis to explore how young adult characters are denied power in literature. It proposes that since literature has had a positive effect on society by reducing marginality in other aspects, it can do the same in the aspect of young adult power. The study confirms that writers (who target the young adult audience) by portraying young adult characters positively are likely to eventually influence such readers by making them aware of their peripheral positions and subsequently contributing towards redressing the problem of age stereotype. The novel Voice of a Dream by Glydah Namukasa (2006) is the core of the analysis.
Hybrid voices and embodied politics: Gender, performativity, and postcolonial negotiation in Mary Karooro Okurut’s ‘The Invisible Weevil’ and ‘Child of a Delegate’
(Centre for Democracy, Research and Development, 2026) Alice Jossy Kyobutungi Tumwesigye
This chapter explores gender-based challenges and opportunities in African cultural expression through a comparative analysis of Mary Karooro Okurut’s The Invisible Weevil and Child of a Delegate, drawing on feminist performance theory, postcolonial performativity, and hybridity. Although these texts are prose narratives, they are deeply performative in their narrative strategies, dialogic structures, and representations of embodied social practices such as political spectacle, ritualised speech, and gendered public performance. The chapter deploys mobilizes Homi Bhabha’s notion of hybridity to analyse how Okurut’s narratives operate within liminal postcolonial spaces where traditional gender norms intersect with modern political and social institutions. In The Invisible Weevil, gendered political participation becomes a contested arena where women navigate corruption, patriarchy, and civic agency, while Child of a Delegate foregrounds intergenerational and socio-political performances of power, masculinity, and femininity within postcolonial governance structures. Although music and dance are not foregrounded as theatrical devices, the novels encode performative cultural practices, rituals, political rallies, and communal gatherings that function as narrative performances of identity and power. These narrative performances contribute to African heritage discourses by illustrating how gender is enacted and contested within everyday socio-cultural spectacles. Ultimately, the chapter argues that Okurut’s fiction constructs the postcolonial public sphere as a performative stage where gendered identities are continually negotiated and reimagined. By bridging literary studies with performance and cultural studies, the chapter contributes to interdisciplinary debates on gender, power, and performativity.
Discourse on hybridity, voice, agency and embodied politics: Gender, performativity, and postcolonial negotiation in Mary Karooro Okurut’s ‘The Invisible Weevil’ and ‘Child of a Delegate’
(Journal of Popular Education in Africa, 2026-09) Alice Jossy Kyobutungi Tumwesigye
This article explores gender-based challenges and opportunities in African cultural expression through a comparative analysis of Mary Karooro Okurut’s The Invisible Weevil and Child of a Delegate, drawing on feminist performance theory, postcolonial performativity, and hybridity. Although these texts are prose narratives, they are deeply performative in their narrative strategies, dialogic structures, and representations of embodied social practices such as political spectacle, ritualised speech, and gendered public performance. The article deploys mobilizes Homi Bhabha’s notion of hybridity to analyse how Okurut’s narratives operate within liminal postcolonial spaces where traditional gender norms intersect with modern political and social institutions. In The Invisible Weevil, gendered political participation becomes a contested arena where women navigate corruption, patriarchy, and civic agency, while Child of a Delegate foregrounds intergenerational and socio-political performances of power, masculinity, and femininity within postcolonial governance structures. Although music and dance are not foregrounded as theatrical devices, the novels encode performative cultural practices, rituals, political rallies, and communal gatherings that function as narrative performances of identity and power. These narrative performances contribute to African heritage discourses by illustrating how gender is enacted and contested within everyday socio-cultural spectacles. Ultimately, the article argues that Okurut’s fiction constructs the postcolonial public sphere as a performative stage where gendered identities are continually negotiated and reimagined. By bridging literary studies with performance and cultural studies, the article contributes to interdisciplinary debates on gender, power, and performativity.
Kimenye’s Moses series and implications on pleasure, neglect, and the child reader: A transnational re-reading of Barbara Kimenye’s Moses series
(Centre for Democracy, Research and Development, 2026) Alice Jossy Kyobutungi Tumwesigye; Caroline C. Hunt
The Moses books by Barbara Kimenye, long popular with young readers in Uganda, deserve more exposure outside their country. Published from 1968 to 1998, these 15 novels depict Moses and his friends and their struggles at boarding school. We argue that Kimenye flouted Ugandan expectations of the time—that books for the young should be didactic—and that her position is significant. We also argue that although Kimenye uses the familiar tradition of the school story, she moves beyond that tradition to challenge outdated attitudes and expose some of the corrupt practices of her time.
The wide variety of literature series has come into greater focus in the half-century since Cawelty, Radner, and others drew long-overdue critical attention to popular fiction. The importance of series fiction for young readers is now well accepted, starting from the Stratemeyer Syndicate and moving toward (but not ending with) modern-day television, film, and online series. Outside of the United States and Great Britain, however, literature series seems to have received less attention than it deserves from scholars of children’s and Young Adult literature. One series that deserves a closer look is the Moses books, by Barbara Kimenye, whose popular Moses series offers much to readers across the globe.
Begun in the tumultuous post-independence period and continuing for over thirty years, these books drew many young readers into reading for pleasure—a goal that may seem obvious from a twenty-first-century Western point of view but that was, we suggest, not always the accepted attitude among Ugandan educators and scholars. We also argue for the importance of Kimenye’s careful selection of topics in the Moses books—quite different from many of her other works, even those for children. Gender stereotypes and pervasive corruption are two such topics that we explore.