A fellow I know – a handsome, intelligent and presentable man, the kind you’d not be afraid to take to meet your parents – likes to boast about his heritage. He’s 100 percent Mukiga, he says, and enjoys bragging about the exploits of his people and the beauty of his ancestral land.
On his Facebook page, he identifies himself as a “Kabale Kid” and enjoys tallying how many other Kabale Kids there are on the web and how far they have gone in life. He speaks Rukiga with the typical homeboy flair and can list his ancestors down to 10 generations.
Before I rejected Facebook for the more conventional way of meeting people and making friends, I was listed on Mukiga Boy’s page as one of ‘them’. A Kabale Kid. I protested my inclusion in a group for which I feel no affinity. Despite the fact that my parents are Bakiga, my Rukiga is as bad as my Cantonese. I know as much about the Kiga culture as I do about the Tibetan monks and even though I have been to Kabale several times, I feel more at home in Nairobi.
The truth is, although I was born by Bakiga parents, I am NOT a Mukiga.
As you can expect, the Kabale Kids are not happy with me. Not at all. They say I am trying to be a mzungu by asserting that I have no tribe. They accuse me of denying my heritage and have called me pretentious, arrogant and stupid. Some have even gone as far as to say I am a shame to my father’s good name.
What can I say in response? Nothing really. Perhaps just to repeat why I feel this way. Why I am this way.
I was born in 1975 in Mengo Hospital, located smack-dab in the center of the Buganda region, thousands of miles away from where my parents grew up in southwestern Uganda. I was born to a generation of people who for the first time were venturing out of their villages to seek education elsewhere in the country. They went to school far from their homes and settled wherever they could be gainfully employed. My parents’ wedding was a joyful cross-cultural celebration with my father’s Best Man from Acholi and my mother’s Maid of Honor from Buganda.
Before I was a year old, my parents moved to Canada and for the first five years of my life I was surrounded by people with a skin color not my own, who knew nothing of my ancestry. At six, we moved back to Uganda and lived in the Church of Uganda housing on Namirembe Hill where my best friends were Lugbara and Langi. My parents did the best to teach us the Kiga language and culture, but above all emphasized good behavior, the love of God respect for all regardless of age, economic status, race or tribe.
School felt pretty much like home. It was a melting pot of people of all sizes and colors and I didn’t care where they were from or what language they spoke. I had been taught to judge people for who they were as individuals and not what part of the country they came from.
As I entered teenage, the realities of my divided country were first made known to me. I was told I was privileged because I was from western Uganda and that I would be able to get a better job and live a better life. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. My family was as poor as the next and most of my school fees and the fees of my siblings were met through scholarships. We wore hand-me-downs, ate chicken only a few times a week and felt proud to drive around in my parents’ old car. We carried baskets to school in place of snazzy bags and when they grew old, my mother made us bags out of scrap material donated to her.
So what if my great-great grandfather came from Karagwe and not from Sudan? It didn’t matter. It never has and never will. I was told I was a Ugandan and was taught what that meant and that was enough.
I guess this is why it is hard for me to understand tribal conflict. To understand Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya in the last three weeks. Of course I can empathize with the downtrodden and I will fight for the end of injustice, but when it comes to justifying violence on tribal lines, I don’t get it. I just don’t.
A Ugandan journalist for whom I have a lot of respect would probably call me an ignoramus because of this. Of the Kenyan situation and the criminalization of sectarianism he wrote,
It now appears to me that this fast globalising world, rather than give people a new and highly individualistic, capitalist and consumerist identity, is so faceless and empty of real meaning that it forces many Africans to try, as much as possible, to retain their original identify of tribe, language and culture.
Maybe the solution is to the embrace the tribe as the unit of social, political and economic mobilization — as was the case in pre-colonial times. We would eliminate the sham of having ‘broad based’ governments that in reality represent the interests of a small ruling elite with a sprinkling of outsiders to give beef up their political-correctedness credentials. Maybe tribe should be embraced, not abused as a primitive and backward form of social mobilization and political organization.
It might be backward-looking, but at least it will ensure that when angry members of disaffected tribes come running after you with a machete, you will be able to see them before they strike.
He’s a philosophical maverick, my friend is, but perhaps he has a point. Why deny what is? Instead of imposing a culturally unnatural state on a population that clearly thinks otherwise, why not embrace the diversity?
However what do you do with the rest of the population? Those small, but growing groups which like me share no particular kinship with people who have the same nose shape as theirs and can’t speak the language of their historical past?
I know I am a pariah among the Kabale Kids, but I am not apologetic about my stand. At the end of the day I am still a fairly good person who is thankful for where I come from and respectful of my past. But I am NOT a Mukiga.
