Some bad ‘tribal days’, but the better side of Ugandans will still win out

The Directorate of Public Prosecutions has now murder charges against Matthew Kanyamunyu in connection with his alleged recent shooting of Kenneth Akena.
That is as it should be - that Akena’s suspected murderer gets tried in court.

This tragedy, however, was particularly depressing on many levels. First, that Kanyamunyu allegedly shot Akena for scratching his car in a parking lot!

Secondly, it was also one of the lowest moments in recent times for how it was portrayed in ethnic limes in the media (“Munyankore shoots Acholi”), and of course social media. The rage there was quite remarkable.

I didn’t expect that today, one private citizen’s crime against another would be so generalised to an ethnic group and even region. As a good friend in Uganda who knows a lot about the risks involved here used to tell me, “tribal gaming is very tempting, but it is the one genie that wise people should never let out of the bottle”.

Yet, as Frederick Golooba-Mutebi argued in his column in The East African, it helps to understand where the anger is coming from. One source, he noted, is what many perceive as the rampant sectarianism in Uganda today.

One could also add that the Kanyamunyu-Akena incident also tapped into a potentially explosive factor that people from areas that went through a lot of pain, as the north did in nearly two decades of rebellion, feel when during peace time, one of their “survivors” is killed by what they see as a “representative” of their oppressors.

In post-conflict societies, such issues are always a time bomb and intelligent people would do well to be alive to them.

The good thing is that there is a powerful counter-narrative that showed that Uganda society, and elements of State policy, reveal a big-hearted country.

Since South Sudan went back to the killing fields in December 2013, it has resulted in another influx of refugees in the region, and a record number into Uganda.
Various reports have noted Uganda’s “unique and generous foreign policies”.

A long article on the refugee crisis by the Norwegian Refugee Council noted two elements. One, that those who flee to Uganda “automatically receive refugee status”.

In some countries, if you flee there with murderous soldiers or rebels on your heels, you still have to go through a process to qualify as a refugee, and you can be sent back where you ran from if you don’t.

Secondly, it spotlighted that most times “there are no typical refugee camps, but instead there are settlements where people can build houses and grow their own food”, adding that; “For example, since hostilities broke out in South Sudan in the beginning of July, the number of settlements has increased from 16 to 19 in Adjumani District”.

That number, according to the latest information, has gone up.

What makes this quite remarkable is that Uganda is relatively a tiny country, compared to Tanzania – which is nearly four times bigger.

In the past, especially in Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania, the combination of generous land size and progressive ideology made it a good country for refugees, with many being offered citizenship.

So how did Uganda get this way, despite being a small country.

Some of it is ancient. We are a quasi-transit country. A lot of early migrations, e.g. of the Luo, passed through here, so the parochialism toward “our soil” is actually not as entrenched as some agitators would make it seem. (By the same token, other portable cultural aspects became more cherished).

Another part of it is geography. The lands are (or were) fertile, so it could easily feed all. This fact speaks to why Ugandans need to take more seriously climate change. It is reducing the ability of the land to feed us, and bringing out our worst side.

Imperialism also had a role. Because after the colonialists carved out Africa we were left without a coastline – and Uganda had kingdoms where a strategic thinking about access to port had taken shape – we didn’t fall into the worst form of nativism.

Finally, beginning from 1966 with the Milton Obote-Idi Amin attack on the Lubiri, and the abolition of the kingdoms, we have been a country of exiles of refugees.
The result is that the “nationalist generation”, the men who fought for independence, who also tended to be provincial, had to flee persecution in large numbers.

Their provincialism – all that “this is our land, we shed blood and went to prison for it” – wasn’t given a lot of time to sink deep and be passed on to future generations.

But also, a greater antipathy towards “foreigners” developed. In Buganda, it allowed the emergence of rural cosmopolitanism in areas like Mukono.

And so I am not ready to despair yet. Our better nature is still very strong. In the end, it will prevail.

Onyango-Obbo is the publisher of Africa data visualiser Africapedia.com and explainer site Roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3