Filming for ‘New Slave Trade’, Kampala 2020
‘New Slave Trade’, is a video art work by Ugandan contemporary artist and art writer Matt Kayem (Micheal Mathew Kayiwa) made in response to the Art, Archive and Activism project themes and involvement in the artist residencies in Kampala, 2020.
Matt planned to carry out a performance through the main streets of Kampala tied up in chains as a slave. Two others would wear bark-cloth, a traditional fabric made in Buganda alluding to history, and a fourth person would be the slave trader from the Middle East with a cane. As a result of Covid restrictions, Matt’s performance is being pre-recorded and projected in Kampala.
“There are these agencies here that take young people to the Middle East to do casual jobs. They act as middlemen between potential employers and the unemployed desperate youth here. There are cases where these young people have been mistreated by their employers and often murdered. This is not new because the Middle East has a history with slaves from East Africa, who were sometimes castrated, tortured, and killed in the 15th to the 18th century. That’s one of the reasons there is no Afro-Arabian population that goes back to those ages. So this whole scenario to me looks like a repetition of history. The government of Uganda should have done whatever it takes to keep the young population within it’s borders.”
