Allan Katatumba

FORMER presidential candidate Abed Bwanika was quoted in the press recently as asking President Yoweri Museveni to repent for the ritual of jumping over a carcass of a white bull the latter performed in Juba recently.

It is unfortunate that someone who wanted to be president can deny our great African heritage. This shows that the Europeans have fooled our minds, due to the power of the gun, and convinced us that our cultures and traditions are the source of whitchcraft. We have now picked up their cultures. This has taught us to accept humiliation and division, and to embrace eurocentric ideas that do not make us proud of who we are.

How could an African call an African tradition witchcraft? This proves that we have reached the climax of neo-colonialism and promotion of Westernism.

Our people in Acholiland have used beautiful, gracious and elegant ceremonies in our African tradition to welcome back deserters and former murderers into the community in a way that western kind of methods cannot comprehend. My brothers and sisters, forgiveness is not only taught in the modern Bible.

Sudanese African culture and Acholi, Ankole and Kinyarwanda cultures are alike. But these getting diluted because we have been taught how to undermine them.

Africans in Sudan, Tanzania, Zambia, Ghana, Uganda and others are all the same. Why then don’t we feel the same pain as our people being slaughtered in Darfur or Acholi? This is why we call for a Pan-African approach towards solving many of the problems we have been facing collectively as Africans?

We should know that parochial Uganda, Kenya or Rwanda will never make it alone. Not African country has, through the the enterprise and efforts of natives living in respective African countries, transformed from developing to developed country since independence. We are all in the same boat of poverty and we face most of the problems as Ugandans but as Africans.

We think promoting Africanness is the first way forward to getting our children (the next generation) be proud of being African. Then the sky will be the limit. Being an enemy to what is African is a cancer we must get rid of.

If being African and practising African culture is tantamount to being a witch and performing whitchcraft, then I am a very proud witch.

The writer is the Secretary General of NRM USA