Mr. Deusdedit is awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship.

“The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation established the Gates Cambridge Scholarships in 2000 with a $210 million donation to support outstanding graduate students’ study at the University of Cambridge. To this date, Gates Cambridge Trust remains the largest single donation to a university in the United Kingdom. For two decades, it has been changing lives by awarding scholarships to several individuals. For that matter, Makerere University honors and recognizes one of its Alumni Mr. Deusdedit Kansiime for the milestone he has reached.“

Mr. Deusdedit Kansiime a well-known academician with an interest in English/Literature, is an alumnus of Makerere University with passion and enthusiasm for everything related to the University including the ongoing activities to commemorate this great university marking 100 years of excellence.

During his time as a student at Makerere, he pursued a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Education from 2012 to 2016 where he majored in English/Literature and graduated with a First-Class Honors degree. His tenure as a student at Makerere did not end at that.  

He later on, pursued a Master of Arts in Literature Degree from 2018 to 2021 at the School of languages, literature, and communication (SLLC), where he wrote a dissertation Titled Kansiime, D. (2021). “Negotiating social identities in Makumbi’s Kintu, Isegawa’s Abyssinian Chronicles and Ocen’s the Alien Woman,” according to the Makerere University Institutional Repository. His dissertation is premised on the understanding that identity is malleable, changeable and, hence, negotiable.

His work plays a big role in a grander scheme of things as part of the development of literature for hundreds of current and future prospective students and researchers.

To further his career, Mr. Kansiime was recently awarded a scholarship with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and will be joining the University of Cambridge to pursue a Doctorate of Philosophy (Ph.D.) In English/Literature.

As one of our Alumni, we are proud of Mr. Kansiime for this is a mean achievement.

The scholarship is one of the most competitive and prestigious in the world, with around 1.3% of applicants receiving an award in recent years which calls for recognition. Furthermore, he is one of only three Africans out of seventy-nine scholars globally who were awarded this scholarship for the class of 2022.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation established the Gates Cambridge Scholarships in 2000 with a $210 million donation to support outstanding graduate students’ study at the University of Cambridge. To this date, Gates Cambridge Trust remains the largest single donation to a university in the United Kingdom. For two decades, it has been changing lives by awarding scholarships to several individuals. For that matter, Makerere University honors and recognizes one of its Alumni Mr. Deusdedit Kansiime for the milestone he has reached.

On his comments to the Gates Cambridge organization, Mr. Deusdedit Kansiime makes comment of his experience at Makerere, “During my undergraduate and graduate studies at Makerere University in Uganda, I was fascinated by the gap between the literature we were taught and the literary texts that had currency on the Ugandan cultural scene. These texts were produced by an emerging generation of writers whom my university professors knew so little about and had so little interest in, yet these writers and their writing fraternities constituted the most vibrant literary ecosystem that resonated with contemporary publics. These were the writers dominating shortlists of literary prizes in the region.

They associated themselves with non-academic, non-commercial literary organizations – LINGOs. I intend to use my PhD to explore the underbelly of this network of literary value in Africa by examining the institutional logic of these literary organizations in light of their posture as expressions of literary activism.

By theorizing literary activism in a LINGO framework, my PhD project shall help inform publishers, literary award organizations, writers and academics about the emerging literary enterprise in Africa. It will also help demonstrate how the LINGO framework is essential in reconfiguring cultural discourses and creating new spaces for free expression.”

By Simon Ijalla, the writer is member of the Makerere@100 Secretariat, Makerere University.