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Can ethnicity be delinked from Uganda’s politics?
Anitah Atwijuka Bwiira
What you need to know:
- Serumaga’s claim that NUP’s ethnic nationalism is ‘inclusive’ unlike tribalism, raises questions: Around what is this party mobilising? If it is ethnicity, then we need to collapse the whole institution of ethnic federation.
While warnings by African decolonisation theorists (Ngugi wa Thiongo, Mahmood Mamdani, and Frantz Fanon), such as having our minds, socio-political and cultural institutions decolonised still stand, manifestations of minds that are still colonised in contemporary Uganda, and perhaps Africa, are evident. One scholar, Partha Chatterjee warned: “The root of post-colonial misery lies in the surrender to the old forms of the colonial state. Instructively, we need to take heed of the colonial forms, but before we do so, it is important that we identify them.
This piece draws from one of the recent thoughts about ethnic nationalism that the new political party in Uganda - National Unity Platform (NUP) is perceived to be enhancing (see, Kalundi Serumaga’s article, ‘Uganda: Bobi’s Nup, Buganda and tribalism’ in the Daily Monitor of August 26).
Serumaga says NUP is eyeing ethnic nationalism, which he posits “fights for greater orderly guaranteed inclusion”. He adds that ethnic nationalism is often mistaken to be rekindling the fire of tribalism in Uganda and that many nepotists are masking behind ethnicity to pursue individual interests.
The argument is problematic in two ways: The socio-linguistic context does not only dehistoricise and depoliticise ethnic nationalism in Uganda. His thoughts indicate a misconception of phenomena. Ethnic nationalism has a history that needs to be discerned before considering it a positive principle. This limited space can only afford a brief conceptualisation of the phenomenon and how it has been politicised. It should not be understood from its previous cultural context, but political one where it has shifted too.
Nationalism as an ideological movement envisions attaining identity, unity and autonomy pursued by a given social group that assumes a nation. Anthony Smith mentions that ethnic nationalism is enforced by the intelligentsias of ethnic nations that politicise culture and aim at ‘purifying’ their communities by getting rid of any ‘foreign elements’.
These aim at rediscovering ethnic past - cultural elements deemed indigenous to them in their pure and homogenous form.
But can we identify or even achieve indigeneity so that we can determine and extricate it from the non-indigenous, especially in contexts that have had interactions with other communities through immigrations, intermarriages, etc? These nationalists imagine a given identity and want to form it from culture,’ hence creating a cultural identity, as “one shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self’, which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common”, as Stuart Hall posits. However, experience and identity do shift because history changes things. They are subject to constant transformation as they face in history, culture and power.
The question is whether ethnicity can be delinked from politics? Prof Mahmood Mamdani warned against wholesale taking of ethnicity and so ethnic groups that structure most post-independent states, as indigenous to African states.
They are colonial constructs, shaped by colonial institutions, such as law and so are tradition, political identities, cultural and political boundaries and they continue to be a problem in contemporary African politics. To build a state, colonialists formed political identities, including ethnic ones, but this is always overlooked by scholarship that merely looks at constructs of tribe and tribalism and naturalises ethnicity and race.
Serumaga’s claim that NUP’s ethnic nationalism is ‘inclusive’ unlike tribalism, raises questions: Around what is this party mobilising? If it is ethnicity, then we need to collapse the whole institution of ethnic federation.
Ms Anitah Atwijuka Bwiira is a graduate student at Makerere Institute of Social Research. [email protected]
