Write your memoirs

GODFREY BINAISA has volunteered to contribute to a programme that is documenting Uganda’s oral history. He hopes to make an input on the Buganda Crisis of 1966, one of the key historical events the Makerere University programme is targeting. Binaisa’s contribution and the documentation centre’s broad curriculum are very welcome. But Binaisa should be looking beyond making that oral contribution. He was President of Uganda at a critical time in this country’s history — the year after the 1979 fall one of Africa’s most brutal dictatorships. His contribution to Uganda’s political history started in the 1960s when, as Attorney General, he presided over the death of the federal/monarchical arrangement and ushered in republicanism. From those two vantage points and insider’s positions, Binaisa must have a lot to contribute for posterity. The best way is to write himself. Now that he is no longer in active legal practice and presumably has time on him, and with all the benefits of a former head of state that should make him materially comfortable, Binaisa should write his memoirs. There are many more of us who are public servants, civic leaders and leading lights in our respective areas of endeavour who have a lot we can pen. Whether publishers are available or not is not the issue, for books can be published post-humously. Binaisa has, like his illustrious evangelist father, been blessed with a long life and a leading part in our society. He is intelligent, sharp, well exposed to other cultures and literate. He has all the reason to buck the trend that our forefathers left, giving rise to that old adage which says that in Africa, the death of an old man is like a library going up in flames.