Somewhere in between her meetings with Mumbai’s captains of industry on one leg of her three-city tour, I slip into the breakfast room at the Taj Lands End to catch Uganda’s minister for agriculture, animal industry and fisheries, Hope Mwesigye, for a moment. With her is Uganda’s High Commissioner, Nimisha Madhvani, in town not only in her official capacity as ‘Her Excellency,’ but clearly also in the role of a friend and cultural interpreter to the minister.

It’s a bright morning as I chat with these two pillars of their region’s politics. “We are studying how agricultural systems have worked in India since the advent of the Green Revolution,” the minister explains, “as well as promoting commercial agriculture in Uganda.” With its fertile soil and regular rainfall, its famed coffee crop and the economic reforms that have bolstered the country’s economy in the last two decades, the country now feels confident inviting foreign investment.

But how is it that I am talking about this to Mwesigye, whose training and résumé both appear brightest in a seemingly unrelated capacity: as one of Uganda’s top lawyers and gender studies scholars? Politics is a funny business – but as the minister’s life and career prove, its internal logic sometimes functions perfectly. The minister’s part in the quest for social justice in one of East Africa’s most complex multicultural societ-ies makes her uniquely qualified to grapple with some of the biggest questions facing the world today: of equitable growth, of sustain-ability, of environmental sensi-tivity. National and global respect can only flourish in a climate where individual dignity comes first. Mwesigye knows all about that. “I joined the women’s movement in the ’80s,” she tells me, “at a time when men liked to say that feminists were ‘unmanageable.’ Now, things have changed. Women have mobilised and socialised. We have proved that we can manage and excel in every field. We went to meetings, spoke in public – people are sometimes astonished to see the high tables, full of women. Affirmative action at the village level and effective political governance helped us. We worked at it for ages – as a lawyer I worked to create the most gender-sensitive constitution possible.” She is realistic about change, and how far ahead the road to progress seems to stretch. “There is still discrimination, and we will have to continue to ensure that more and more people are educated.” Speaking as we do mere days after Uganda’s parliament passes a bill banning the practice of female genital mutilation, an issue Mwesigye has personally worked closely to combat, we agree that there’s a future to look forward to.

“Uganda is not going to slip back again,” High Commissioner Madhvani has told me a little earlier, as the minister slips out to change before her next meeting. “Amin is never going to happen again,” she says, referring to the dictator who mired Uganda in civil war and anarchy, and whose rule resulted in the exile of Ugandans of Indian origin, an act that Uganda has offered restitution for in the intervening years by repatriating those who were forced to leave, and by throwing the country’s doors open for others who may seek to follow. India has always had strong political and cultural links with its African allies. Madhvani thinks it may be a great place to start looking at the continent holistically. “Culture and business are integrated. India shouldn’t be looking at African countries as groupings or strategies, but work country to country.”

In one of the world’s most important regions, history is busy in the making. News in East Africa over the last decade has largely focused on the disastrous and the tragic: the civil wars of Sudan became a Hollywood cause célèbre, Kenya’s last presidential elections had serious questions asked of its integrity, and the return of refugees to Burundi’s devastated post-war economy brought the small African republic a new set of problems.

Yet, the next two years will be important ones for the region, as elections are held in several countries, democratic governments look to stabilise, and the world’s attention will snap towards it. Rwanda and South Sudan will both continue on their paths out of the conflict-ridden decades of the recent past. Uganda, with many of the bitter lessons of fragile republicanism already learnt, will be looking to lead the way. “We’re moving away from stereotypes,” says Madhvani. And Minister Mwesigye, in describing her own journey to the centre of the action, says something that has been a constant in many Indian minds over the last year. “Politics was always about activism,” she says. “It was never about power.”

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