Bayaaye is a Luganda word meaning ‘hooligans’ used since the 1970s to both disparage Ugandan urban youth and celebrate their streetwise resourcefulness. The original so-called bayaaye were youth, often fresh from the countryside, who worked as street hustlers in the 1970s underground economy. This article focuses on how one Ugandan intellectual, M. B. Nsimbi, in his Luganda-language novel about the Idi Amin era, Kulyennyingi (1984), diagnosed the rise of the bayaaye as a national moral pathology. I discuss how this novel relates to earlier Luganda literary works, which advocated an idealized precolonial, rural African tradition as a moral reference point for modern living. A recent revised discourse about urban youth as ‘bayaaye’ or ‘ghetto’, accompanying the political rise of reggae star Bobi Wine, is considered in light of the earlier history of the bayaaye stereotype.

Bayaaye是一个卢干达语，意思是“流氓”，自 1970 年代以来就被用来贬低乌干达城市青年并庆祝他们的街头足智多谋。最初所谓的巴亚耶是年轻人，通常是刚从农村来的年轻人，他们在 1970 年代的地下经济中担任街头骗子。本文重点介绍乌干达知识分子 MB Nsimbi 在他的卢干达语小说《伊迪·阿明时代》( Kulyennyingi) 中如何(1984)，将巴亚耶的兴起诊断为国家道德病态。我讨论了这部小说与早期卢干达文学作品的关系，后者提倡理想化的前殖民时期的非洲农村传统，作为现代生活的道德参照点。最近修订的关于城市青年作为“巴亚耶”或“贫民窟”的话语，伴随着雷鬼明星波比酒的政治崛起，被认为是根据巴亚耶刻板印象的早期历史。