Prime
Sheebah and why politics matters
Author: Phillip Matogo. PHOTO/FILE
What you need to know:
- Her assault is symptomatic of a society under assault by those who we ‘respect’.
Singer Sheebah Karungi, also known as Queen Karma, was reportedly assaulted a week ago. She revealed this during the week via a video statement she posted on her social media pages.
Sheebah posted these words with the video: “I dont (sic) care what you think about when you see me on stage or in any of my videos dressed the way i (sic) dress up, you better respect my body. Its MINE (sic), I get to do whatever i want to do with It. You don’t. You can watch but you certainly can’t touch.”
Sheebah says in the video:
“I had a show, I was performing for somebody. One of ‘those people’ you ‘respect’ and call ‘real role models’... This old pervert was trying to be funny with me, in my car. He just opened my car, with his security.”
The 140-second video doesn’t name or shame the person we purportedly respect, but the fact that he had “security” indicates he is a well-placed person, probably in government.
Sheebah forgot that our standards for who we deem to be respectable do not square with what we deem to be righteous, besides “villainy wears many masks; none so dangerous as the mask of virtue”.
Also, Sheebah and many others have fatally avoided politics under the misguided belief that it has nothing to do with them.
However, with our society being trampled underfoot by the powerful, she and others who avoid politics must realise that her assault is symptomatic of a society under assault by those who we “respect”.
Sheebah and other apoliticals must understand that when the chickens come home to roost, they shall find all of us, not just the politicos, in the coop.
Idi Amin’s reign of terror led to widespread killings and the dispossession of many (including my family).
As Amin terrorised and pauperised Uganda, he didn’t look for the politicos but everyday Ugandans: students, clerks and even hawkers.
They were killed or forced to kill one another by Amin’s henchmen, who were given official cover by the Public Safety Unit and the State Research Bureau.
Today’s Aminism wears a mask which has been episodically unmasked by widespread torture, killings and oppressive policies which are perpetrated in the name of fighting terror or insecurity.
The scarred body of novelist Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, for instance, points to the scarred ruins of a country disfigured by its own defeatism.
You may deny it, but Ugandans are indeed circling the wagons in fear instead of in unity. As a result, even our political vocabulary is changing.
Words like “drones” are now part of everyday political lexicon. It was the same in Amin’s time, when words like ‘’giving the VIP treatment’’ to someone meant to kill and ‘’giving tea’’ meant torture.
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True, political vocabulary shares a linguistic kinship with political attitudes, as our vocabulary is a window to what’s on our minds. So, when we use words like “drones”, which are used in warfare, we betray a siege mentality.
This mentality breeds fear and the safety valve for fear is violence. This violence will not only be perpetrated by the State, but also by those who feel victimised by the State. Thereby spiralling us into an abyss from which Sheebah and other apoliticals will not escape.
Sheebah must thus realise that the assault on her person is only the opening act to a reckoning which will leave her and ourselves doomed. That is, unless she politicises her thinking on the side of change. So that when it comes to her being assaulted the next time, there will not be a next time.
Mr Matogo is a professional copywriter
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