Dr Amanda Tumusiime (Rhodes University Senior Research Associate) received a Maya Angelou Award from Native Voices International during their Celebrating Womanhood Festival Week 2019. Native Voices International empowers people to use art, film, music, drama, storytelling performances and sports as tools for self-determination. It recognises and rewards people who enrich their vision through giving out various awards. The Maya Angelou Award is one of the many awards this organisation gives out every year to the most outstanding person. This person has to have a vision similar to that of Maya Angelou who was an American poet, singer, memoirist and civil rights activist and who used these forms of art to empower her community. Dr Tumusiime was nominated alongside many other reputable Ugandan contestants, such as Anne Kansiime. She was later voted winner by the Ugandan community in view of her being an artist and an activist who uses art to empower Ugandan society, especially the girl child, through education. She uses her artworks to raise funds in the hope of building a hostel for the girls in her home area as a strategy to keep girls in school, a model she hopes to replicate countrywide.
Dr Tumusiime is a Rhodes University Senior Research Associate with the NRF/DST SARChI Chair Geopolitics and the Arts of Africa, Arts of Africa and Global Souths research programme in the Fine Art Department and a Senior Lecturer at Makerere University, College of Engineering Design Art and Technology in Uganda.