Mbethki, Itah Patience

Itah Patience Mbethki, is a  teacher by profession with over 10 years experience in secondary education, a researcher and PhD fellow at Makerere Institute of Social Research Makerere University. She is interested in studies that focus on migration, settlement adaptability and the social – cultural existences within which tribal conflicts arise. As a scholar, she has researched on migration and identity crises, migration, education and the refugee crisis and has used her own childhood that can be defined as motional to influence her areas of interest. Interculturality is a phenomenon arising out of change, but it also a powerful experience of growth, as a scholar, these shape her interests in how societies adapt to these changes. Having traversed Kamwenge, Kibale and Mubende as a youth, she revisits these non-accidental occurances to question the agricultural realities that she lived, and incorporates them in an area of interest in the socio-cultural and visual arts, investigating the position of culture in the agrarian nomad, the seasonal tides that form the character of the tribes she grew up with; Banyankore, Bakiga and Bafumbira. She enjoys the uncaptured text that the people are, and she has used these to interrogate and respond to the social-cultural and economic realities in these communities. 

She is published poet with a history of performance, and incorporates a lot of the processes, incidents and the social-cultural realities around her in her work. She is currently producing an artistic visual-literary poetry anthology, ‘Conversations with My Hair.’ Which she hopes to adapt for theatre.