Nasser Road.
Political Posters in Uganda.
Kristof Titeca
Kristof Titeca is a Professor at the Institute of Development Policy at Antwerp University. There he focusses on governance and conflict dynamics in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
His book Nasser Road. Political Posters in Uganda is the result of a long fascination with these posters. He first started seeing them 20 years ago and has been collecting them ever since. A few years back he started looking for the designers, a quest which led him to Nasser Road. The book presents an analysis of both the posters and the street.
The nickname of Nasser Road, Kampala is ‘Uganda’s Silicon Valley’. This narrow street crammed with bustling arcades forms the heart of the city’s printing trade. It is also known as a centre of fraud. From fake identity cards to university degrees, anything can be made and bought here.
Nasser Road produces also a wide variety of posters. All these posters share more or less the same flashy visual language. Another shared element of the Nasser Road posters is their use of uncredited and unsourced images downloaded from the internet. This publication pays tribute to one particular example of this form, namely political posters. It is also one of the street’s most commercially succesful products.
The posters are visually rich and striking, but also humorous. They depict politicians and well-known personalities as superheroes. Pictures showing Hollywood action figures such as RoboCop or Rambo, but with their faces replaced by those of national and international politicians. And then there’s the celebration of figures broadly considered global villains, such as Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden. International villains celebrated as heroes fighting Western imperialism.
Nasser Road is a slim softcover book with a strong vertical orientation. The book is printed using the same cardstock as the actual Nasser Road posters, glossy on one side and uncoated on the other. The poster reproductions in the book are printed on the glossy side and the essay that runs through the book on the uncoated side. The middle section includes photographs by Titeca and the Ugandan photographers Katumba Badru Sultan and Zahara Abdul, and is printed full bleed on a lighter paper. Nasser Road is exciting in both its content and presentation.
Nasser Road. Political Posters in Uganda.
Editor: Kristof Titeca
Published by The Eriskay Connection
Published in 2023
Full cardboard cahier, 19,7 x 28 cm, 64 pages
Text: Kristof Titeca and Yusuf Serunkuma
Photography: Kristof Titeca, Katumba Badru Sultan and Zahara Abdul
Shortlisted for the 2023 Paris Photo – Aperture First Photobook award
Shortlisted for the Author Book award 2023 at the Les Rencontres de la Photographie festival in Arles