Are we living in two Ugandas?

The house Negroes--they lived in the house with master, they dressed pretty good, they ate good because they ate his food--what he left.”

And if you came to the house Negro and said, “Let’s run away, let’s escape, let’s separate.” The house Negro would look at you and say, “Man, you crazy.”

On that same plantation, there was the field Negro. The field Negro, those were the masses. There were always more Negros in the field than were Negros in the house. The Negro in the field caught hell. He ate leftovers. He wore cast-off clothes, and he hated his master.

When the house caught fire, he didn’t try to put it out. That field Negro prayed for a wind, for a breeze. When the master got sick, the field Negro prayed that he’d die. If someone came to the field and said, “Let’s separate, let’s run,” he didn’t say “Where we going?” He said, “Any place is better than here.”
Malcolm X’s words always had a bracing effect on all those who heard them. Because his message went straight to the gut.

Uganda, like Malcolm X’s America, seems to be divided against itself as half-field and half-house Negro. In the field, the ghettoes swarm with poor folk whose air of injured innocence has left them feeling robbed of all hope.
With few skills and even fewer opportunities, their bank balances are in the red. And so when they regard their condition, they see red with ‘people-powered’ intensity.

This vision manifests itself in the form of rage towards a gerontocracy (rule of the old) which seems to treat government like a retirement home. So these greying leaders are not about to leave the house to go into the field.

To them, it makes little sense to separate from the “masser” who comes in the shape of pay and perks at no cost to themselves. Yet this free lunch is paid for by a taxpayer shrinking under the deadweight of expanding public debt.

The taxpayer seeks to unburden themselves of this cross and venture into the unknown, splintered by the thorny paths of activism. Any place is better than the place at which they find themselves.

Tragically, the duality of these two Ugandas may lead to an Armageddon-like showdown. For we inhabit warring worlds, peopled by the haves and the have nots.

When the two disagree, the former uses words like “bitter” or “disgruntled” to describe the latter.
This serves to delegitimise criticism against the former’s obvious excesses while the latter views the government as predatory and vampiric -- full of leaders who are the merest utensils to a feeding frenzy.

A gulf between the two is thus widened to a pit large enough to accommodate us all in a mass grave.

Moderates on both sides of this stalemate have been silenced. On the side of the Opposition, for instance, you cannot propose the Leninist tactic of infiltrating the State’s institutions without being labelled a sell-out.

You must line the streets and gnash your teeth to prove you truly want change. The danger here, of course, is that resistance might become an end in itself; a way of life detached from the objective of ending the plight it protests against. When this happens, the Opposition becomes a debating society analysing freedom in its secondary colours.
Or it becomes a commemorative association ritualistically observing the anniversaries of heroic efforts and the deaths of martyrs by organising funerals for fallen loyalists to the cause.

Before his death, Malcolm X joined forces with suspected “field Negro” Martin Luther King Jr.
And inadvertently sent a message to a divided world which stated that there were two kinds of slaves, but only one kind of bondage; from which only a love born of unity can unshackle us to strengthen our mystic chords of humanity.

Mr Matogo is a digital marketing
manager with City Surprises Ltd
[email protected]