Mr Daniel K. Kalinaki
It says a lot about us that the phrase we use most to describe ourselves -- the pearl of Africa -- was coined by an outsider, Sir Winston Churchill. Most Ugandans have never seen a pearl in the flesh. Even fewer know how they are formed or where they come from.
What Churchill meant as metaphor we wholeheartedly embraced as analogy. More than a century later, we still largely define ourselves by how other people see us (very friendly and welcoming) and what nature has given us (fertile soils, flora, fauna, water bodies, et cetera).
Both are worth examining. Yes, we are friendly and welcoming, but mostly towards people who have something to give us. Mostly, we are mean to each other. Those with power abuse it, be it through physical torture or the denial of basic rights and services through corruption. Those without power mostly abuse, wishing ill for those they believe are responsible for their predicaments.
This schadenfreude is not unique to us, but there is nothing uniquely friendly or welcoming about Ugandans that you won't find in many other pre-capitalist people living in warm climes. Instead, there is little if any local philanthropy beyond family and tribe. Everyone is trying to take advantage of everyone else. In many countries you snooze, you lose; here someone is trying to steal the sleep from you. Friendly and welcoming my foot!
We do better on the flora and fauna front. I have had the misfortune to visit some dry and barren countries and been left mesmerised by man's ability to eke out a living out of nothing.
Yet, as beautiful as our land is, it is, I am afraid to report, not necessarily the most beautiful, the most endowed, or the easiest to live in.
The River Nile is quite something, but so is the Amazon, or the Nile's downstream reaches. Our wildlife is majestic, but we do not have a monopoly on it, not even on the mountain gorillas. We have plenty of food to choose from, but no, the 'rolex' is not anywhere near the best street food even in Africa, neither is luwombo exclusive to us.
This self-flagellation should not be mistaken for self-hate, although I can feel the bile rising already in the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil brigades. It should, with any luck, be considered as uncomfortable home truths and a call to reframe the way we see and live with ourselves.
One way is to flip the two narratives on their head. We cannot hope to be genuinely friendly and welcoming to others when we are hostile and disdainful to each other, be it in small ways like the way we share public spaces like roads, or in big ways like the way we share national resources or disagree disagreeably.
Being Ugandan must mean something more than a shared passport or support for the Cranes. It must reflect more than geography and transform into broadly shared values, cultures, and aspirations. We might have been locked up together in a colonial marriage of convenience; we must find a way to make it work, not just stay for the children.
These shared aspirations will, if formed, -- and they have to be forged out of the furnace of nation building; nature sadly doesn't gift these -- allow us to use the many natural resources we have been gifted to create a truly dynamic and prosperous country of people who have irreducible dignity and unlimited ambition.
We can start with agriculture, for instance, and decide that in 10 or 15 years we will not import any food that we can produce locally. Or we can clean up our homes and cities and, in under a decade, start building and maintaining our own roads ourselves. There are many other ways in which we can start to find greatness in the things we have built, not those we were lucky to be born around.
Early social anthropologists visiting pre-colonial Buganda, just for example, found roads that were straighter and better maintained than in some parts of Europe, neat royal palaces with fences that trailed as far as the eye could see, as well as intricate social norms and political order.
This was the Uganda that Churchill described. If he visited today, would he use flowery words or colourful language to describe us? Uganda can still be the pearl of Africa, but we must stop sitting on a tired old epithet whose meaning few of us understand and put in the work to build a great country and a people who are genuinely friendly to each other.
