Why Uganda’s senior citizens should write books about their lives
One of my best moments is normally a visit to the bookstore. When I go there, I browse through the shelves, check out the different new titles, read the blurbs, and even steal brief checks into photographs inside the different books if possible.
I normally take these visits when I have reasonable time for them, because such moments are not to be rushed. When I find one, a good book has me bound for a while until I am done reading it. In particular, I love reading people’s life stories. I prefer, especially, biographies and autobiographies of African figures as well as those of non-African men and women that have had their experiences making an impact on Africa.
The stories in such books motivate and inspire me in more ways than one, both in my career and social outlook. There is one major problem with my passion above though. There are simply not many books in the above category.
When you look for books about senior Ugandans, it gets even worse. Many senior Ugandans made their mark in the civil service, as wonderful teachers and in other key vocations, others have served in churches for many years while others have taken care of the needy by paying their way through school, or have been doers of so many more remarkable deeds.
Some have been entrepreneurs and have registered a level of achievement and also made mistakes that would serve as lessons to those following in their footsteps.
They simply keep silent about their lives. It is such a big loss for younger generations. The lessons, motivation and inspiration resident in these individuals often goes to the grave with them.
At the face of it, this may appear like a harmless condition. However, it has consequences on the destiny of our nation. It makes the aspirations of younger generations to rely on and be formed by distant influences, some of which are not so compatible with indigenous factors.
A couple of years back, the Uganda Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Initiative, under the commission of the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs highlighted as one of Uganda’s challenges to entrepreneurship, the lack of mentors for upcoming and young entrepreneurs. There is simply not enough guidance for the young to draw upon. It is simply unfortunate that as Ugandans, we do not expand the depository of own experiences and lessons for our children and their children to learn from. We therefore leave the young at the mercy of influences that we are not in control of, and possibly these influences will form outcomes we would not be proud of.
Uganda’s youths need to be positively provoked from within, as opposed to relying predominantly on foreign literature. Knowledge born of experience is unmatched and rather than let every generation learn from its own experience, it is better that older generations provide lessons from their experiences so that younger people can make better choices and achieve better results with their lives. This is a key ingredient of progressive society. Our ancestors used to transmit their “biographies” by oral traditions, and the shortcomings of this are many including the scantiness of record, in many respects, of an otherwise rich African history. Today, we have a chance for a formal and reliable mode of preserving and transmitting the lessons and experiences of our elders to the young. Our senior citizens simply need to write about their lives.
Last week, a friend of mine had a book published. Sabiiti Herbert’s Young and Flourishing is his own life’s story and he is not a senior citizen; he falls a couple of decades short.
It made me realise that possibly narrating our experiences should start earlier in life. It might be harder for many of us to do it for the first time when we have for example attained our 60’s and retired.
As we discussed with the above author, we appreciated that Uganda will not have many of the people that the young ones look up to, for much longer.
Many of them are first generation elites that rose from humble households, acquired education or made their mark in trade and business in past decades.
A number of living ones were born about the 1940s and 1950s, and majority of those older than them have since gone. They constitute a huge section of first-crop, present-day civilization experiences for most Ugandan families.
There will never be another generation to match them, for they represent a turning point in Uganda’s transformation trajectory. They have lived lives from which others can learn, but many of them prefer to pass without recording these lives. It is such a huge loss for Uganda.
Raymond is a Chartered Risk Analyst and risk management consultant
