Uganda

Uganda faces a fraught election

On 14 January, Ugandans go to the polls in what is likely to be the closest election the country has ever had. Their unusual choice: embattled incumbent Yoweri Museveni or popstar-turned-politician Robert Kyagulanyi, better known by his stage name Bobi Wine. Yoweri Museveni is Africa’s third-longest ruling leader. He is a political chameleon — once a Maoist revolutionary, he has posed as both a liberal progressive and a nationalist conservative while in office. The three-and-a-half decades of the Museveni administration are difficult to describe in a sentence or two, perhaps because most Ugandans cannot remember them all: the average Ugandan was born in 2004 (compared to the average American, who

The problem with mystery podcasts like Wind of Change

Did the US secretly write a power ballad in order to bring down the Soviet Union? That’s the question behind Wind of Change, a serial documentary that has topped the podcast charts. It’s the work of an investigative journalist called Patrick Radden Keefe who claims to have once received a tip-off, from an intelligence contact, that the song ‘Wind of Change’ — recorded by the hair metallers Scorpions — was actually a CIA campaign to encourage anti-Soviet uprisings. Now he wants to prove it. This week’s episode, the fourth of eight, takes Keefe to a collectors’ convention in Ohio in pursuit of an internet user called ‘Lance Sputnik’ who creates