For what you needed an axe!
THE Baganda, from whom I am proudly descended, have a saying, “Kyewayagaliza embazzi, kibuyaga asudde!†(For what you needed an axe, the wind has uprooted!) It carries the bonus: Spend no more energy, the deed is already done for you. <br>We writers (of a sort!) even when not suffering from an
BY JOHN NAGENDA
THE Baganda, from whom I am proudly descended, have a saying, “Kyewayagaliza embazzi, kibuyaga asudde!†(For what you needed an axe, the wind has uprooted!) It carries the bonus: Spend no more energy, the deed is already done for you.
We writers (of a sort!) even when not suffering from an active “writer’s block†spend anxious moments worrying where the next subject will spring from. And then, on a happy wind, they can sometimes fall into your lap; just like that! So it was with your columnist mid-week. Reader, all I did was sit and receive.
There was the confirmation, of news forecast some weeks ago in this column, that that vexatious (nay, deeply calamitous) mass murderer, Kony, had finally found his way into the Central African Republic (CAR) and there linked up with the leading regional rebel, Chadian Mahamat Nouri. As a fortuitous but fervent solution, can we hope that they will wipe each other out?
Meanwhile can even the most gullible still believe in the Juba Peace Jokes? Referring to Kony’s then intended breakout from his Garamba hideaway in DR Congo, the column had called him the worst, and unintended, current export from Uganda; export from hell, as it would swiftly prove. Yet even now there will be those who will still be advocating the efficacy of the Talks in Juba as if they are practically meaningful and a going concern! Then there came serious questioning from a leading US source, whether a Clinton nomination victory would not disenchant Black voters away from voting for the Democrats. This had already been posited by our column.
The US article in which the thought appeared used more or less the arguments encountered earlier here. Then Wednesday’s Vision front page carried a wholly moving story on 600 families being evicted by ruthless landlords, a subject close to our hearts, as well as those of many serious others, from the Ugandan President downwards, and on which we have consistently written.
We consider it time to bring out our little trumpet and blow it! Other subjects not exclusively foreseen by us, but already postulated in general terms: Barack Obama made a major, major, speech on race in an address at Philadelphia on Tuesday. The column had already warned that the first nomination candidate to look into the racial factor might well be lynched. Will Obama? But perhaps his speech was too big, too major, too richly felt, to bring him trouble; perhaps, instead, by its force, it might in fact gain him new routes to follow, and a new following to gain? Time, as it does, will show. But surely Obama’s courage to walk that plank, will assure him of a historic placement!
And then, as if the week were not already full to the brim, out of the blue on Wednesday came President Museveni’s thunderbolt (as reported in Monitor), that most traditional Ugandan leaders, including the Buganda and other kings, are of Luo extraction, God bless our soul! You need to have knowledge of the background to realise what a mother of a thunderbolt this is. A cat among the pigeons! Even: A spanner in the Works!
Might it not do considerable damage to Mengo’s attempts to discredit Museveni (and Government) efforts on the Land Bill issue? Yet again Museveni, the ever prudent General, was showing his knack for not idly wasting a salvo! Below the belt in this particular case? That’s where it most hurts.
*****************
Indeed I am inclined to beam in on this Luo bombshell. Uganda is a tribally divided society. N’eBulaaya bibaayo! (Even in Europe it happens!) In small Britain you have the English, Welsh, Scots, Cornish, Irish, and then a plethora of new ones. In Uganda it is far more pronounced: from which stock you come can still largely decide how others see and judge you. To now tell the ultra-traditional Baganda that their monarchs come from the North, from the very Abagwiira (foreigners) who are deemed to have done them the most harm since Independence, is bound to cause some excitement, to put it at its mildest. (What about total confusion!)
Will Mengo, from where the present Buganda Kabaka (King) reigns, be able to survive unscathed? And yet Mengo has been at the frontline of rubbishing the Government’s proposed amendment of the Land Bill. Government states that its main intention is to minimise the disenfranchisement of tenants by ruthless landowners, as in the case of the 600 families, above, and numberless others beside.
Then stories abound that, among other offending landowners, those from the Mengo hierarchy itself, not least from the top, are paramount. Yet the “serfsâ€, the tenants, were always here! Thus might run a far-fetched conspiracy theory. Catch the drift?
*****************
But there was unalloyed joy and happiness in the air in Uganda this week too, and what a deserving note on which to finish! That outstandingly beautiful Mosque in Old Kampala, modelled, I understand, on one in Casablanca, was opened by its benefactor Colonel Gadaffi of Libya.
Side by side with him was his host, a triumphant looking President Museveni, and many other presidents and potentates from the region and beyond.
All the high pomp and ceremony was in order (as well as the mind blowing traffic jams!), attended by high and low from near and far. This, even more than the contentious notion of the United States of Africa, now, now, is what binds us together, this potentially great continent of ours, troubled as it often is.
THE Baganda, from whom I am proudly descended, have a saying, “Kyewayagaliza embazzi, kibuyaga asudde!†(For what you needed an axe, the wind has uprooted!) It carries the bonus: Spend no more energy, the deed is already done for you.
We writers (of a sort!) even when not suffering from an active “writer’s block†spend anxious moments worrying where the next subject will spring from. And then, on a happy wind, they can sometimes fall into your lap; just like that! So it was with your columnist mid-week. Reader, all I did was sit and receive.
There was the confirmation, of news forecast some weeks ago in this column, that that vexatious (nay, deeply calamitous) mass murderer, Kony, had finally found his way into the Central African Republic (CAR) and there linked up with the leading regional rebel, Chadian Mahamat Nouri. As a fortuitous but fervent solution, can we hope that they will wipe each other out?
Meanwhile can even the most gullible still believe in the Juba Peace Jokes? Referring to Kony’s then intended breakout from his Garamba hideaway in DR Congo, the column had called him the worst, and unintended, current export from Uganda; export from hell, as it would swiftly prove. Yet even now there will be those who will still be advocating the efficacy of the Talks in Juba as if they are practically meaningful and a going concern! Then there came serious questioning from a leading US source, whether a Clinton nomination victory would not disenchant Black voters away from voting for the Democrats. This had already been posited by our column.
The US article in which the thought appeared used more or less the arguments encountered earlier here. Then Wednesday’s Vision front page carried a wholly moving story on 600 families being evicted by ruthless landlords, a subject close to our hearts, as well as those of many serious others, from the Ugandan President downwards, and on which we have consistently written.
We consider it time to bring out our little trumpet and blow it! Other subjects not exclusively foreseen by us, but already postulated in general terms: Barack Obama made a major, major, speech on race in an address at Philadelphia on Tuesday. The column had already warned that the first nomination candidate to look into the racial factor might well be lynched. Will Obama? But perhaps his speech was too big, too major, too richly felt, to bring him trouble; perhaps, instead, by its force, it might in fact gain him new routes to follow, and a new following to gain? Time, as it does, will show. But surely Obama’s courage to walk that plank, will assure him of a historic placement!
And then, as if the week were not already full to the brim, out of the blue on Wednesday came President Museveni’s thunderbolt (as reported in Monitor), that most traditional Ugandan leaders, including the Buganda and other kings, are of Luo extraction, God bless our soul! You need to have knowledge of the background to realise what a mother of a thunderbolt this is. A cat among the pigeons! Even: A spanner in the Works!
Might it not do considerable damage to Mengo’s attempts to discredit Museveni (and Government) efforts on the Land Bill issue? Yet again Museveni, the ever prudent General, was showing his knack for not idly wasting a salvo! Below the belt in this particular case? That’s where it most hurts.
*****************
Indeed I am inclined to beam in on this Luo bombshell. Uganda is a tribally divided society. N’eBulaaya bibaayo! (Even in Europe it happens!) In small Britain you have the English, Welsh, Scots, Cornish, Irish, and then a plethora of new ones. In Uganda it is far more pronounced: from which stock you come can still largely decide how others see and judge you. To now tell the ultra-traditional Baganda that their monarchs come from the North, from the very Abagwiira (foreigners) who are deemed to have done them the most harm since Independence, is bound to cause some excitement, to put it at its mildest. (What about total confusion!)
Will Mengo, from where the present Buganda Kabaka (King) reigns, be able to survive unscathed? And yet Mengo has been at the frontline of rubbishing the Government’s proposed amendment of the Land Bill. Government states that its main intention is to minimise the disenfranchisement of tenants by ruthless landowners, as in the case of the 600 families, above, and numberless others beside.
Then stories abound that, among other offending landowners, those from the Mengo hierarchy itself, not least from the top, are paramount. Yet the “serfsâ€, the tenants, were always here! Thus might run a far-fetched conspiracy theory. Catch the drift?
*****************
But there was unalloyed joy and happiness in the air in Uganda this week too, and what a deserving note on which to finish! That outstandingly beautiful Mosque in Old Kampala, modelled, I understand, on one in Casablanca, was opened by its benefactor Colonel Gadaffi of Libya.
Side by side with him was his host, a triumphant looking President Museveni, and many other presidents and potentates from the region and beyond.
All the high pomp and ceremony was in order (as well as the mind blowing traffic jams!), attended by high and low from near and far. This, even more than the contentious notion of the United States of Africa, now, now, is what binds us together, this potentially great continent of ours, troubled as it often is.