Mixed-ish: race, class and gender in 1950s–60s Kampala through a life history of Barbara Kimenye

Vibrant social scene, intellectual hub and diverse glitterati: this was Kampala for its beau monde in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The city enjoyed a liberal reputation with ‘rosy’ race relations, attracting thinkers and socialites from across Africa and the world. It was in this singular space that Barbara Kimenye, a Black mixed-race woman of dual English and Caribbean heritage, self-identified Ugandan, and ‘one of East Africa’s most prolific children’s writers’, moved. An examination of her life in the Ugandan capital illuminates the nature of race and class, as brought about by British colonialism, in 1950s and 1960s Kampala. As a mixed-race woman, Kimenye occupied a unique position, living at the intersections of Black Ugandan and white expatriate communities. Her movement in Kampala’s elite circles, as an economically challenged single mother of two, was in part enabled through her proximity to whiteness. Drawing on Kimenye’s serialised memoirs and other archival sources, this article will demonstrate how her unique positionality challenged colonial taxonomies of race and class, highlighting their insubstantial and porous nature, and providing a new understanding of the nature of the post-colonial East African city.