Sexual moral panics and the new Ugandan woman in Tom Rush’s “Old fox” column

The humorous satirical column is a long-established Ugandan genre of literary-journalistic social critique, evident in the popularity of columns by Joaquim Buwembo, Harry Sagara, Jimmy Spire Ssentongo, and Kevin O’Connor in Ugandan and regional newspapers. Rather than offer a comprehensive account of how Ugandan columnists have used this style to critique Ugandan society, I focus on how one columnist – Tom Rush – uses his Sunday Vision column entitled ‘Old fox’ to explore patriarchal anxieties stirred by the new Ugandan woman of the 1990s. I read ‘A kid detoother,’ ‘Spare parts girl,’ ‘Friends without bounds,’ and ‘I finally scored’ as critiques of gender-sexual moral panics that unsettled Uganda’s patriarchal establishment in the 1990s. I conclude that the moral panics instigated by this emerging agentic female persona challenged patriarchal expectations of how a Ugandan woman should behave.