University of Amsterdam Graduation

On Tuesday 22 September 2009, I joined 15 other men and women receiving their masters degree certificates from the University of Amsterdam. We were 28 students in our class, but only 12 were able to finish in time and get their diplomas. 4 other graduands were of previous years.

The ceremony was held at the University theatre in central Amsterdam. It started on time with a few speeches from the University administrators and head of the New Media. The procedure was for a graduand to go to the table, his professor reads out a statement, he/she signs the certificate which is later offered to him and a gift from the university. The gift was an executive laptop bag.

My thesis supervisor Dr Geert Lovink was away, but the second reader Dr Jan Simons read out his remarks, which are as follows:

Dear Ali,

Congratulations on your graduation. We all know it has been a difficult challenge for you, this year, but you did remarkably well, in time. You came from a long career in journalism in Uganda, then moved to Holland, and then at some point decided to go for a new media masters degree to seriously upgrade your knowledge about ICT from a broad cultural perspective. I remember well you weren't that familiar with computers to start with, a year ago. However, you worked hard and saw possibilities to further build on your experience. When I mentioned in class the previous work done within our program on ICT for Development, for instance by Rikus Wegman and the Incommunicado project, back in 2005, you played a crucial role, with Ben White, in the formation of the ICT 4 Uganda research group. The first students research initiative within our MA, if I am right. You were four, and then soon after, five students who started working together on a plan to travel and work together for 2-3 months in Uganda to study diverse issues within the quickly emerging new media sector in your home country Uganda. You assisted the group in finding the link with Makerere University in Kampala and housing. Your own research focused on the new media uptake within the Ugandan print media, a sector that itself is only 20 or so years thriving and now in such an amazing transformation due to the digitalization, networks and globalization of the news industry. We agreed that you're probably the first to map out this terrain. Ali, you may not yet be a Continental philosopher; theory is something for later, a next life! So, good luck in your career 2.0 and the staff is proud to see you becoming an important player in the amazing growth that new media in Africa is currently going through--with so much more to come.