By Dr Jimmy Spire Ssentongo.
For the past couple of weeks, I was absent here. Talking to a friend who asked where I was, I told him about the despair that sometimes overwhelms me when I think about what is going on in this little landlocked beautiful country.
I get weighed down by a nagging feeling that nothing can stop us now from sinking deeper down the sewer. It is a disturbing pessimism that I always wish to subdue. And I believe I am not alone at this station.
Many people have resorted to watching the ship capsize, going about their own business on the ship, having fun, and announcing how they are apolitical. On the academic side from which I come, the bus that hit us left a little but a stain. We are drenched in fear, its mongering, and preoccupied with self-improvement.
It is not uncommon for a trembling colleague to advise you to ‘keep quiet and focus on your academic work’. I quite understand the love and care with which some do this, but I get concerned with what this means in the larger frame of things.
If we academics, the ones in which society has invested a lot to gain very high levels of education, choose to abandon them in their everyday struggles with life as we busy ourselves with inaccessible publishing marathons, isn’t that betrayal? Ironically, we glorify fellow intellectuals and public icons of old that spoke truth to power at great risk.
For what reason, should we celebrate Frantz Fanon’s risky frontline work? Why should we idolise Ali Mazrui, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe, Dani Nabudere, Wangari Maathai, Walter Rodney, and so on?
We have been turned into a selfish class that is comfortable with its financial privileges and echoes of exclusive jargon, classroom work, playing into ‘international’ scholarly traditions of self-importance, and carefully avoiding popular media. This is not to say that academics are totally silent and indifferent to what is going on in the public.
It is also not to be blind to other forms of ‘contribution’ by academics to bettering the country. However, when the number of academics in our over 40 universities is compared to the voices out there, we notice the glaring silence.
In my view, it is rather pretentious to check newspapers and listen to news every day to check if someone has caused a positive change while the reader does nothing in their means towards the change they desire to see. This kind of self-exemption and indifference is eating deeper and deeper, while the committed primary spoilers use the room to cause more damage.
What concerns me more is what will be left by the time we say ‘enough is enough’, and how long it might take us to come back to sanity. Looking at this unabated tribalism in public institutions and social spaces, together with the ethnic hatred it has bred, doesn’t it scare us that we are seated in a leaking boat?
When you read the burning anger in social spaces and its transformations into road rage, domestic violence, and bullying, doesn’t it send you into asking how we have reached here?
As I said in earlier articles, it is not enough to condemn the social upsurge of abusive language. We should ask ourselves; what is breeding this behaviour? Where do we expect the anger that has been denied outlet to go? It will certainly create alternative forms of expression.
In some societies, marginalised women protest by stripping naked. It doesn’t mean that such societies valorise nakedness. It might simply mean that such women desperately pull up the weapons they are left with in their helplessness – their bodies.
The rise in insults and derogatory metaphors towards government officials is not necessarily a marker of falling social values. In my view, it is a symptom of desperation, frustration, and suppressed space for political expression.
Ordinarily, our cultural and religious values would refrain us from insulting or celebrating abusive people. And these values are not totally dead. But why do so many people follow and cheer on insulters? This explanation also applies to the trend of celebrating sickness and deaths of government officials.
There is a way in which hurting an oppressor (by whatever means available) is therapeutic to the oppressed. That is how far they have pushed the population. My fear is that this might become normalised. It is part of what we will struggle to deal with after this long night.
One might still ask; where is all the public anger from? While I think that answers to this question should be self-evident to anyone with a working conscience, I will labour to say a little more on a few things: the arrogance, insensitivity, violence, and greed.
When you watch highly schooled and otherwise intelligent men like Dr Chris Baryomunsi and Mr Matia Kasaija, blubbering to explain away people’s pains on national television, and with a smile, what do you expect? Roses? When people’s sons and daughters are brutally tortured for holding different political opinions, does the anger surprise you? Should you focus on demanding for decorum?
When it is not enough for some powerful people to accumulate untold wealth through corruption but also want to amass more by selling away desperate Ugandan girls to the Middle East, should it shock you to hear them being called pigs?
Shouldn’t you instead stand in defence of the real pigs for the unfair comparison? Don’t you ever sit and wonder: ‘what more do these people want!’ Even a pig eats to its fill and falls asleep.
Many of us are tired and weary. It feels like talking to a stone. For our sanity, we would want to keep away from the constant flow of bad news. I would want to keep quiet. I would love to live very long. But what shall I tell my conscience?
The author is a teacher of philosophy
👆🏾 when it becomes difficult to shut up your conscience!
Comments
Post a Comment