How can it be that we share the same memory capacity with a housefly?

Have you ever seen a housefly try to go through a glass window? Puzzling. Never stops buzzing and hitting itself against the window to try and get in. But also, never succeeds.

Someone once explained that apparently, houseflies have no memory. As a result, nothing tells it that it tried and failed to go through the last time, so perhaps it should find an alternative route. Instead, the brain just keeps pushing its body and wings back to the same blocked pathway, where it hits a dead end again and again.

Please note that I did not go to Google to validate this theory for the fear that it might be wrong; which would then nullify the argument that today’s column seeks to make. You know, like when you use the wrong example to make a good point and then it gets dismissed. So, just take the theory as is. Okay?

There is a considerable number of people reading this column who might have never heard of the 1998 Kichwamba massacre. Or maybe you have, but its one of those events with vague details. On the night of June 8, the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) - Yeah, same guys who are accused of assassinating prominent people and setting off bombs - attacked the Kabarole-based technical institute, and set several dormitories ablaze. Eighty students were killed.

Twelve years later, and perhaps fresher in our memory, is the night of the 2010 World Cup final. Two suicide bombers hit the Kyadondo Rugby club in Lugogo and the Ethiopian Village Restaurant in Kabalagala, killing 74 people who were watching Spain take on The Netherlands.

Ten years later, in the November of 2020, armed forces responding to riots that followed the arrest of Presidential candidate, Robert Kyagulanyi, shot and killed over 50 unarmed civilians. Others were disappeared in the aftermath and have never been heard from since. These events probably pass with little commemoration because we are personally unaffected. Yet, even then, you could feel, smell and touch the somberness, dejection, and quiet anxiety the next morning. Same as the Buddo Junior School fire in 2008 which killed 19 pupils. For each of them, something collective should have happened out of the anger and sorrow but it didn’t. We let the families mourn on their own and did nothing with that collective chilling effect that we all felt.

In many ways, we lost the opportunity to say and work towards a “Never Again!”. As a result, those events weren’t just a one-off but instead created conditions for follow-ups in all manner of ways. And that is why we are unable to collectively deal with the monster that is road accidents. The loss of one life, to anything, must be unacceptable. How then do we continue to live like nothing has happened, when over 50 lives are lost? What does that say about our conscience? The Uganda Police reported that 55 people died in road accidents in the period between 23rd to 26th December.

Yet, we haven’t mastered the required anger from all the somberness, dejection, and quiet anxiety we feel the next morning, because there is no collective memory and anger from those that we lost in the past. Each family mourns on its own and we move on, as if anybody is immune. Three days, 55 people, one cause of death! If there is one thing we can and should commit to this year, it is the value of collective citizen agency. The value of one-ness especially in the face of adversity. The value of empathy. The value of anger and how to direct it towards doing good. But it won’t happen if we all continue to smell and touch the somberness, dejection, and quiet anxiety the next morning, on our own. If it’s left to whoever it may concern (Zirindaba olwange).

The job of coming together can’t be left to a government as lethargic as ours and certainly not to a Parliament as sidetracked as this; because there is no history of either prioritizing the lives of citizens or even memorializing those that have been lost. It belongs to everyone who has had the misfortune of losing a loved one to a senseless death, and feeling disconsolate the next morning. It belongs to those whose memory - of the pain of loss - has the ability to transcend that of a housefly, and cause collective action. Shall we?

Mr Rukwengye is the founder, Boundless Minds. @Rukwengye