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

Drawing on the theoretical resources of Mbembe's critique of the archive as a political institution and Trouillot's analysis of historical production, the study develops a framework for reading institutional memory as a site of contested meaning. The analysis examines how Uganda's state archives, shaped by colonial administrative legacies and post-independence political ruptures, systematically marginalise particular communities and events. Rather than proposing a conventional empirical recovery project, the article advances a methodological and conceptual intervention: a decolonial hermeneutic that treats silence as a meaningful text requiring interpretation. The framework is illustrated through a comparative discussion of how official records and oral counter-narratives diverge in their treatment of contested historical episodes. The article concludes that attending to archival silence demands both a critique of institutional power and a hermeneutic openness to alternative modes of memory, thereby repositioning the archive as a dynamic field of interpretive struggle rather than a neutral repository of facts.