There’s a strange kind of genius that only really comes alive when you try to crush it. In Uganda, our whole Internet story has just been the State swinging heavy and a bunch of young people refusing to sit still and take it.
Look closely, and you will see that repeated attempts to muffle the national conversation online have produced the opposite effect. They have turned Ugandans into some of the most digitally sophisticated people on the continent. We are a nation of accidental tech-wizards, forged in the fires of what might best be called “porous authoritarianism”.
Porous authoritarianism is the defining feature of the Ugandan State. It is a system of “islands of freedom” surrounded by shark-infested waters. You might not be allowed to run freely in an election against President Yoweri Museveni without meeting a cloud of teargas or even bullets. Yet, you can draw a scathing, borderline-heretical cartoon of him for the Sunday papers, or savage his policies in a blistering commentary, and walk home untouched. You might land in serious trouble for exposing grand corruption in the corridors of power. Still, you are perfectly free to party until dawn and philander across Kampala’s nightlife without a moral police unit cracking down on your lifestyle. It is a regime obsessed with your vote, but largely uninterested in your vices.
That contradiction has shaped Uganda’s digital life. Take the recent fascination with BitChat. As reported by Gizmodo in the article “Jack Dorsey’s BitChat Sees Downloads Spike in Uganda Over Internet Shutdown Worries,” the app-founded by the digital monk Jack Dorsey-has become the latest darling of Kampala’s streets. Its appeal lies in defying central control.
BitChat does not rely on a single, kill-switch-vulnerable server. It is a decentralised, peer-to-peer protocol that turns every mobile phone into a small, independent broadcasting station. When the threat of an Internet blackout looms, Ugandan youth do not panic; they download.
We saw this instinct in the campaign of Robert Kyagulanyi, better known as Bobi Wine, who became perhaps the first African opposition leader to treat digital evasion as a core pillar of a political campaign. In the heat of the run-up to the January 15 vote, Bobi Wine was not only talking about healthcare and roads. He was dedicating campaign time to digital hygiene, urging supporters to download specific tools to stay ahead of the coming “darkness”. He never sold himself this way, but almost by accident, Bobi Wine became one of Africa’s most serious digital candidates.
All this feeds into what might be called the Great VPN Awakening. An article I wrote in The EastAfrican in 2021, “From Internet shutdown to VPN showdown,” noted that the Ugandan government has inadvertently become one of the biggest promoters of technical literacy. During the 2016 election-related social media blackout, the response was swift and dramatic. Within 24 hours, Ugandans recorded an estimated 1.5 million Android VPN downloads.
Then came 2018 and the infamous social media tax, popularly dubbed the “gossip tax”. Rather than pay, users staged a mass exodus into the digital shadows. One proxy indicator from the VPN comparison site ProPrivacy showed Ugandan traffic to its site exploding by 1,567 percent almost overnight.
The outcome is a country where many people have nearly forgotten how to use a regular mobile phone. Apart from devout parishioners calling priests for blessings, the traditional “clear” line is in decline. The national conversation has migrated almost entirely into an encrypted space.
In conversations with people from across Africa and beyond, one thing stands out. No one-not even dissidents in far harsher regimes-will alert you to a newly released encrypted app with more speed or enthusiasm than a Ugandan. There is a constant, rolling race fuelled by rumours that a once-secure platform is now “audible” to the security services. Immediately, a new migration begins.
Yesterday it was Signal; today it is Botim or Telegram; tomorrow it may be an obscure tool still being coded in a basement in Tallinn, Estonia. It is a never-ending game of digital hide-and-seek with the security services.
Imagine the unintended elegance of this outcome. Over time, the digital crackdown has not produced a silenced society. It has created a generation of shadow-walkers-young people who have learned that authority is not absolute, but often just a technical problem awaiting a clever workaround.
The attempt to switch off the light has only taught many how to see in the dark. And as veteran night-hunters will tell you, those who can see in the dark have a distinct advantage over those who only know how to operate in the light. BitChat and Signal are the unintended monuments to a national spirit that, much like a good VPN, always finds a way home.