In the midst of an August 1967 speech on democracy to the Makerere University student guild, Benedicto Kiwanuka made a remarkable claim. Following the lead of Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere among others, President Milton Obote and his Uganda People's Congress (UPC) had justified Uganda's continuing drift toward a one-party system by labelling it a uniquely ‘African’ form of democracy. Kiwanuka scoffed at this claim. Uganda's political system was not the embodiment of some kind of uniquely inculturated, ‘African’ democracy. Rather than a praiseworthy example of political inculturation, Uganda's political system was an oligarchy ‘where a few people govern for their own interests, unconcerned about the views of the majority Democracy’. Kiwanuka went on to assert that political systems like democracy or socialism

To say that such comments cut against the grain of 1960s pan-Africanism would be an understatement. When Kiwanuka gave this speech in 1967, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) was four years old. Tanzania hosted anti-apartheid freedom fighters from South Africa, and Congolese President Joseph Mobutu was about to launch his authenticité campaign in the soonto- be-renamed Zaire. In the world of religion, the Kenyan scholar John Mbiti was publishing his groundbreaking work theorising African Religions and Philosophy, and even Pope Paul VI would stand in Kampala exactly two years later and proclaim to a continent, ‘You can, and you must, have an African Christianity.’