Revelations from two special weeks in Uganda

In the two weeks between March 29 and April 13, three seemingly unrelated events happened in Uganda; but they were.
As in other parts of the Christian world, on March 29 there were several Way of the Cross processions symbolically treading the path Jesus walked to the hill of Calvary where he was crucified. What was striking was that the processions in Uganda were far bigger and more passionate than any in other East African countries. Anecdotally, this year’s processions were also larger than last year’s.

Then on April 7, there was the annual Kabaka Birthday Run. The theme for the Run was “Men as Pillars to Fight against HIV/AIDS to Save the Girl Child by 2030”. Ugandan women are disproportionately affected by HIV, such that out of 1.4 million people living with the disease, 860,000 are women and 80,000  children.

Girls in the 15 to 19 age group show twice as many HIV cases as boys in the same age group. Last year 100,000 people signed up for the Kabaka Run, making it easily the largest such road race in the world. It seemed a bar too high to beat, but organisers said this year’s run saw 10,000 more sign-ups than last year.
And to close this stretch, on April 13 a cross-section of leaders from northern Uganda initiated a unity process between West Nile, Acholi and Lango communities to heal the political and social wounds caused in the past by acts of revenge by state soldiers during military ruler Idi Amin, UPC leader Milton Obote, and Gen Tito Okello Lutwa’s regimes.

All three are self-organised; by private institutions, local cultural-political entities, private and civic societies, communities, and churches. Not by the central government. They are partly rising to do three things. One is to offer a solution to  public problems (the continued HIV crisis and social disharmony arising from historical injustice by violent government, for example). The juices driving their passion also come from private and independent sources.

Second, to deal with the more intangible problems caused by politics and economics. This one is complicated because it has produced two contradictory forces. Economic growth and “modernisation” have opened a more permissive social culture (as it should), but because it threatens the old ways in which millions have found security, it is a threat. Previous attempts to ban the Nyege Nyege musical festival, the laws against pornography, and, for cultural and religious conservatives, their support for the “Kill the Gays” law, are all responses to that.

However, the economic developments have also left the majority behind, and the politics continues to repress and marginalise millions. Their response is to find new sources of support where they feel included, and some form of solidarity, even if just moral support. Like other growing sporting events, the Kabaka Run partly offers community, helmed by a cultural-political figure who is not menacing; won’t throw you into safe houses, shoot you, loot your taxes, nor will his lieutenants seize your land at gunpoint. It partly explains why a lot of this action is happening around the old hierarchal Protestant and Catholic churches (evident in the eye-popping explosion of the Martyrs’ Day celebrations), and not the evangelical and prosperity churches that promise miracles and meetings with God or Jesus Christ if you contribute to buying the pastor the latest Range Rover that his heart desires. The people are looking for community and warm encounters closer to Earth.

Third, the northern Uganda unity process harks back uncannily to the late 1930s and early 40s when men from the broader northern Uganda were swept up as foot soldiers for colonial ruler Britain and its allies in World War II. There was a northern camaraderie that developed and became an important stream that later fed the nationalist movement, but also laid the roots for the “domination” of the military by northern men and officers – that ended in disaster, and cost hundreds of thousands of innocent Ugandan lives. However, it is also a show of citizen agency born from the absence of a larger public structure to build community harmony. 

Where that structure exists at the state level, it is not interested because politically divided people make better political pawns. Now look just eight years ahead, and visualise a Kampala which has been balkanised by potholes and streets with lines of cars squatting on them, and it will be all but impossible to get from Makindye to Kabanyolo in half a day. The streets will be even darker after an Umeme that reverted to state control has been eaten to the bone. We won’t have a Kabaka Run. It will be a Kabaka Walk, with over 250,000 people.

The Way of the Cross too will be bigger because, finally, the roads will give something close to the punishment the faithful seek. Jesus would approve bigly.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3