The journey from Rukungiri to Kampala is at least three hundred and eighty kilometres by road, past the green hills of Ntungamo and Mbarara, then past the bushy plains of Sembabule and Masaka in the heart of Uganda. By the time one reaches the sprawling swamp at Katonga, when the automobile starts to bounce on the uneven surface of that sorry bridge, one has been so drained of life’s vital juices that there’s little interest even in being spoken to.
This was certainly the case one day four years ago when my driver suddenly started talking to me, not of what else he knew about Yuri Andropov, as he had in Mbarara, and not even of his disputatious step mother, as he had when we started our journey. Interrupting my sleep, he turned to me and said, “By the way, there’s an Acholi man there in Kawempe. He has a Munyankore wife. If you insult him, katugambe you say he’s a poor man, he gets angry and says, ‘Do you know what you’re talking about? Do you know that my woman is a Munyankore?’”
The story was so unexpected that I felt stirred and started to laugh, summoning all of my energy back. The account was plausible, of course, the story of a man in a bar who, when inebriated, reveals his deepest fears and hopes. Many brag about the little assets no one suspected they had, the two cows in the village or the love child who is doing unbelievably well in school. But the man who sources pride from his wife’s tribe is rare indeed, and I had questions. Was she beautiful? Yes. Were they married? Sort of. Did they have children? Not yet. Did they hold hands in public? No one had seen them do that, but that was beside the point: “Omukazi we amwagala nyo. Tomwemolerako.” His loves his wife too much. You can’t flirt with her.
I’ve been thinking of that Acholi man and his Munyankore wife a lot these days, even though I don’t know the couple and perhaps never will. A few times I’ve imagined them as a Munyankore man and his Acholi wife, like a real couple I know, fantasizing about a society in which we have more of those. This is because the tribal currents around us have become so powerful these days that one is compelled to finally get out of the comfort zone and grapple for answers. If we are still struggling with egregious tribalism after nearly four decades of the National Resistance Movement government, one of whose stated goals was to eradicate sectarianism, then how have we advanced as a modern society during this time? Why is it more troublesome to point out instances of tribalism than it is to actually practice it? If we are a nation of disparate tribal groups, as some people say we are, and as the constitution suggests, then in whose furnace is national unity to be heated, rendered, and sharpened? Quite simply, where is Uganda?
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Uganda is, realistically speaking, one of the world’s smallest countries, although it doesn’t feel that way when one travels from Rukungiri to Kampala. So small, in fact, that some maps don’t mention the country. My children rotate the globe in search of their country and can’t easily spot it, because the word Uganda is illegible and the indicated boundaries don’t make sense. Then they go to a wall in the living room to explore the colorful Collins World Map for Children, on which, while they can spot the word Kampala spelled out, Uganda is missing. Why? We don’t know.
So the question of where Uganda lies has come to be loaded for me with much meaning – or perhaps not much – because my children have opened my eyes to the kind of distinct reality I am always looking for. If the kids say there’s no Uganda, and can prove it with whatever evidence they have, then they have done their homework. They are way too young to understand why their discovery is interesting to me, but one day they will know as much as I do: that Uganda is a small country with big and small tribes, with a national ID but without a national language: a house with dozens of bedrooms but lacking a living room.
Tribalism is Uganda’s corporeal malady, chronic and malignant and potentially fatal. It goes on and on. We think we know everything, and maybe we do. All that needs to be said has been said already, by the right people saying the wrong things, by knowledgeable people saying daft things, by well-intentioned people saying the right things that others interpret differently, by those who say nothing when they really should speak up, and even by those, so many of them, who ask the wrong questions and get the answers they deserve. He who writes thus, you wonder, what’s his tribe? If today I lose my phone and report my misfortune to the police, the officer will ask me, among other questions, what my tribe is. I shall tell him, reluctantly, that I am a Munyankore, certain that he doesn’t need this information while he records my statement in English. But I know from experience that this detail may be meaningful to the officer in a prejudicial way, and therefore he’s likely to look me up and down in order to make certain determinations, including whether he should feel sorry for me.
Regarding tribalism, the past year proved quite interesting – interesting, that is, because we know where we stand as a nation: on precarious ground. What really unites us isn’t our Ugandanness, because it’s increasingly clear that such a thing doesn’t exist. If occasionally Ugandanness can be felt and seen, like when we scream for Joshua Cheptegei after he wins races and drapes the flag over his shoulders, it’s never been articulated and it remains an intangible thing.
One is amused to hear educated Ugandans still quote Winston Churchill’s description of Uganda as “the pearl of Africa,” oblivious to the fact that the Englishman had mostly untrammelled wilderness in mind when he wrote that. The tourism promoters focus a lot on mountain gorillas, offering the great apes to foreigners as the best Uganda has to offer. And now, we hear, many Ugandans traveling abroad dutifully pack bottles of Uganda Waragi – our UG, the spirit of Uganda, as they call it – to present the ‘perfect’ gift abroad. Now, there’s nothing terribly wrong with any and all of the above; the problem is that these ideas of what identifies our country, such as we know it, tend to emphasize an underlying lack of a super glue: the material basis of any claim to a durable national identity.
Inevitably, while the idea of Mgahinga’s mountain gorillas as representative of Uganda may come across as absurd, even remotely one doesn’t have the same feeling about Kilimanjaro, whose peak dominates a country that doesn’t need to say it owns Kilimanjaro. It’s so obvious. People say they go to Tanzania to summit Kilimanjaro; you don’t hear them say they visited Arusha to summit Kilimanjaro. The Wachagga, locals who since time immemorial have cultivated the mountain’s fertile foothills, are one of Tanzania’s biggest tribes, but in a country united by a common language – Kiswahili – the Wachagga don’t call attention to themselves. They understand that Kilimanjaro is for all of Tanzania, even though they know its caves and ravines better than others do and, it must be said, despite the fact that sharing Kilimanjaro with the world has brought unwanted consequences. If Sam Ntiro had left his pastoral paintings untitled, it wouldn’t have been so obvious that it was his Wachagga people he was depicting. He was a Tanzanian painter. Tanzania is what he saw. Ntiro, by the way, was Tanganyika’s first ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, representing President Julius Nyerere, the African leader who succeeded more than his contemporaries in the region to build a country in which tribe wasn’t the important mark.
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From the beginning, before and after independence in 1962, tribe was a vexatious issue for Uganda. The kingdom of Buganda, from which Uganda gets its name, loomed large in negotiations for self-rule, so that King Frederick Mutesa II became Uganda’s first president and Milton Obote, a Langi, his executive prime minister. The structure was a constitutional mess, totally unsustainable and riddled with tribal tensions. In 1964, when Buganda lost the referendum on the disputed counties of Buyaga and Bugangaizi, which would return to the kingdom of Bunyoro, the stage was set for the dramatic chaos that came next: an intense rivalry between Obote and Mutesa, and the emergence of a virulent strain of Buganda nationalism. Some lawmakers in the Lukiiko, the Buganda assembly, warned that the Ugandan government would have to move its administrative seat from Kampala. When at last Obote could no longer abide Mutesa, he sent army chief Idi Amin to take the kabaka out in 1966, proclaimed a new constitution, banned traditional institutions, and henceforth governed Uganda as a republic. Mutesa fled to London, where he died a broken man not long after.
In the end the fate of Obote, who ruled Uganda until Amin deposed him in 1971, was not much better than Mutesa’s. Patriotic and cosmopolitan, Obote had married the Muganda woman he loved and was so fond of western Uganda, particularly of Bushenyi, that even now it’s still possible to meet people there who will weep at any mention of his name. Obote was their Nyamurunga, a spotless white bird. But Obote wasn’t entirely free of prejudice, and he was self-destructive in a key way. After being inaugurated for his second administration in 1980, Obote immediately faced an insurgency by Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army. He despised those rebels and refused to negotiate with them, insisting that their leader wasn’t a bona fide Ugandan, even as the rebels weakened his government by establishing themselves near Kampala, in the Luwero bush, and attracting followers. Obote’s casual dismissal of Museveni, a former government minister who had already served as Uganda’s de facto No. 2, as a Rwandan refugee was a moral failure and a strategic mistake. His stance galvanized the NRA, whose ranks swelled with even more recruits from the maligned community, and forced Museveni to keep fighting. Obote saw Museveni’s ragtag army as “bandits” and not warriors, for how could these sons of mostly cattle herders have the fight in them?
There’s in the stories of Mutesa and Obote a cautionary tale for all of us, for our current and future leaders especially. Beside the fact that both men died in exile, sad and cursed to never again see the land they once had ruled over, today no one who is equipped with all the facts remembers them with unqualified reverence. They squandered the earliest opportunity to unite the country beyond merely rising to sing the national anthem, to articulate Ugandanness in a way that made sense across tribal boundaries. One could say, sadly, that they dug their own graves.
That sounds like a harsh thing to say of anyone, but for me the comparison isn’t altogether unwarranted. I’ve seen gravediggers twice in my life, and both occasions were events of utmost pain for me. Once, in 1999, at my father’s funeral and then, in 2014, at my grandmother’s funeral. The gravediggers at my father’s funeral were led by a man who wanted to be begged to do the right thing. He had to be reminded that the hole was not yet deep enough. He sat leaning against the trunk of a banana plant in the wet mud, saying he had finished and sulking because the bereaved family hadn’t yet brought the jerrycan of banana wine he had been promised, and still he wanted to know who in the grieving family was tasked with paying him when the job was done. With some encouragement, the man jumped back into the pit, his boots landing with a thud, and I remember being surprised by how red the soil seemed when it flew in the air and landed on the heap of excavated dirt. I don’t remember what the gravedigger looked like, but I know that he behaved badly that day. I was eighteen at the time, old enough to be emotionally anguished but not quite old enough to perceive the business of gravediggers.
My second encounter with gravediggers was no less stressful. They seemed alien, not in the sense that their work was special when they rolled up their trousers but because, by their very congregation, they looked as if they had come from somewhere else. They balked when shown where to dig. They started wondering if someone wasn’t already buried in that particular spot, as if they knew the homestead better than everyone else. They complained that the pickaxes weren’t good enough, and they abandoned their urgent work to seek shelter when it started to drizzle. I heard them tell inappropriate jokes. I don’t remember what those gravediggers looked like, but I recall their dirty red gums when they laughed, plus the sideways, disinterested manner in which they spat into their palms and then gripped the wooden handles of their tools. I was thirty-three at the time, now old enough to know that gravediggers don’t work for anybody but themselves. If gravediggers were capable of seeing beyond the narrow pit they were digging, it never once registered in their conduct.
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The American writer Joan Didion memorably wrote that a place, any place, “belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.”
President Museveni has amassed an incredible thirty-eight years in power. He’s had some achievements during that time, but eradicating tribalism isn’t one of them. He’s claimed Uganda very hard, but out of this passion he has yet to fashion an enduring image of a pan-Ugandan pastoral. His memory is long and sharp, but the immediate present eludes him.
If recent events mean anything, he may yet seek more time in office. One important consequence of his longevity in power is the existential struggle between those who have benefitted from his long rule and those who wish to usher in a new era. To put it crudely, it’s a struggle between those who have eaten (and want to continue eating) and those who want to start eating, as if they can’t all eat at the same table. It’s, at its core, a tribal struggle, because there’s damning evidence in the public assertions of two of those who want to succeed Museveni as president: Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the president’s son, and Bobi Wine, the singer and opposition leader whose real name is Kyagulanyi Ssentamu.
Kainerugaba using his Twitter loudspeaker to suggest he’s descended from the Bachwezi, the Bachwezi being a mythical line of cattle-keeping rulers who, if they really lived, have been gone for thousands of years that they deserve to rest in peace. These days the Bachwezi are worshipped by some people in central and western Uganda as powerful spirit mediums, so why does Kainerugaba “pity those who think they can defeat [the] Bachwezi?” How are the Bachwezi relevant to public affairs in Uganda today? In any event, Kainerugaba has succeeded in reaffirming the fear of those who see a tribal undercurrent in his quest to succeed his father.
Bobi Wine draping himself in the bark cloth of his ancestors while touring Luwero and repeatedly saying to his Baganda people, “Who bewitched you?” He said of himself that he was speaking as omubanda wa kabaka, the Buganda king’s gangster, raging against land grabbing, corruption, nepotism, human rights abuses, and all the other issues that have marked Museveni’s long stay in power. It would have been all right if he had stopped there, for these are the issues that Ugandans of all tribes detest in the status quo. But then he went on, and in a chilling dénouement he looked into the camera and broke into English, so that, he said, everyone would understand: “You can come for me, but my people will come for every last one of you.”
If Bobi Wine’s speech didn’t concern me, then why did I feel self-conscious? After all, I am a Munyankore man who has never worked for the government.
I’ve never grabbed anyone’s property. My children don’t speak Runyankore, except to utter a shy agandi when provoked. I am interested mostly in books, books written in English, so that it fascinates me when I find a word in Runyankore that’s said to be untranslatable. C’est impossible, I say to myself, and then get working.
The Ugandan opposition leader’s speech made me self-conscious because I perceived the context in which he said what he said, even though his words were a terrible choice for a leader of his standing. He was saying publicly what many others think privately of the Museveni regime. They point out that tribalism has peaked under the NRM, rampant like never before and with a viciousness that spreads unexpectedly. And yet they themselves, even those of them with a capacity for insight, sometimes can be heard espousing their version of tribalism to fight tribalism.
We’re digging our own graves. The newspapers report, truthfully, that the Banyankore dominate jobs in the public service.
Some government officers insist on selecting their assistants, of course their tribespeople.
The people of Bunyoro say the oil in the ground belongs, first and foremost, to them.
And, after nearly four decades of NRM rule, why do we still hear stories of Banyankore women who want to marry Acholi men but face resistance from their families? I find this to be a grotesque expression of tribalism, the worst of it, which is why the story of the Acholi man in Kawempe who praises his Munyankore wife still fascinates me.
Yet even that story seems fraught with danger. When the man bragged about having a Munyankore wife, in what spirit did he say that? Was he joking? He said that to prove what exactly? Recently I questioned my driver, who found my inquest amusing, to say the least. He told me that he doesn’t remember. When I persisted, he asked me why I wanted to know.
“Nsonga ki?” he said. “What’s the matter?” ▪