Archival Silences in Constitution-Making History in Uganda: A Decolonial Hermeneutic Analysis of Institutional Memory and Counter-Narrative

It argues that official archives, shaped by the institutional interests of the state and international donors, produce a structured forgetting that marginalises popular participation and alternative constitutional visions. Drawing on a decolonial hermeneutic framework, the analysis conceptualises the archive not as a neutral repository but as a site of epistemic power where certain narratives are legitimised while others are rendered unintelligible. It demonstrates how reading official records against the grain, alongside attention to the silences themselves, can recover traces of subaltern constitutional agency. The contribution is twofold: it offers a theoretical refinement of archival silence that distinguishes between deliberate suppression, structural neglect and epistemic incommensurability, and it outlines a practical heuristic for researchers seeking to write more inclusive constitution-making histories. The article concludes that decolonial historiography requires not merely adding missing voices but transforming how constitutional legitimacy is understood.