By Tony Mushoborozi
Today we celebrate 62 years of independence. Thousands of Ugandans are standing in the hot sun, at Busiko Teachers’ Training School in the eastern border district of Busia, watching the armed forces goose match in their pressed uniforms as politicians watch from their fenced off tent, far away from the sweaty masses. No huge different from what happened 62 years ago; on one side, the aristocracy that knew exactly what was going on, on the other side, the overexcited masses brimming with false hope.
Sixty-two years later, a select few top politicians know we are not really independent while the masses think we are. For this annual state event, billions have been spent towards making this mirage in the desert look like a real water body, and we must all play along.
Busia in Pictures: Celebrating 62 Years of Independence.
Frankly I could be wrong in my cynicism. It’s an opinion after all. But please answer these few questions before we agree to disagree.
Why would the British, without a fight, just hand us a country that they had curved out and created without our help or permission, given a name of their choosing and worked had to build for over 70 years? This was more of their creation than ours, wasn’t it? We were passive participants in a grand plan that we didn’t know anything about and had nothing to do with. They came they conquered and we acquiesced. They had lost great men on the high seas between Europe and Africa, and on the great trek from the Indian Ocean to find these lands. They had spent so much money and brain power for over 70 years to make it happen. For sure there had to have been a good reason beyond Christianizing us. You don’t just let go of an investment you have worked on for that long as if it means nothing to you, especially when you are as powerful as Britain was. At least that is not how international politics works.
Granted, Ugandans were making it harder and harder for the British to rule for many years prior to 1962. Educated Ugandans were writing newspaper articles casting the Europeans and their rule in bad light, and for good reason, waking up the sleeping peasantry. The fact that the Britons looked so markedly different from us made it so much easier to identify the ‘enemy’ and to resist their rule in different ways. But this was their country as much it was ours. To repeat myself, they had not only curved it out with their bare hands, they had built the infrastructure that was currently running it, and in some ways making the lives of natives better. There was something in it for them almost as much as there was something in it for the natives. To think that they could just throw their hands in the air and give up an investment like that just because of a few riots in the city makes for lousy fiction.
In 1962 the original Independence Day celebrations were held, naming Milton Obole as prime minister. The British government was represented by the Duke and Duchess of Kent, who can be seen attending the ceremonies in the photo.The Britons had so many cards to play compared to us. They were advanced in every single way, militarily, intellectually, economically and politically. They had an upper hand in every aspect of global politics and economics that they could have chosen to stay and we would have done very little to stop them. To think that we forced them out is to misunderstand the true nature of political power. They left because there was a better way to do what they had done for previous 70 years. Working smart hasn’t just started, bro. They knew that it was markedly easier to rule us through proxies that looked like us because they understood human nature. We are all too busy with our own lives to figure out what is really, truly going on when it comes to the grand scale of things.
Has it ever occurred to you that sixty-two years later, very few, if any, remember what Queen Elizabeth National Park was called by the people of Bushenyi and Kasese that live around it? Sixty-two years later, no one remembers the original name of the most powerful falls in the world, currently called Murchison Falls. What did the Banyoro call it? What did the Alur call it? Surely it had a name. Sixty-two years later, we still think that a Christian name has to have English origins because in our psyche, English is synonymous with Christianity while Kiganda or any other indigenous traditions is synonymous with witchcraft. Such ideas are hidden so deep in our subconscious that we don’t even know we hold them. And whether we admit it or not, these things have a bearing on our psyche as a nation and it is not a very pleasant bearing. This is how minds are enslaved. And if we were truly independent, we would have sought to make all these changes for the sake of the future of the independent country. It would be a patriotic move.
By keeping these fake names that should have no place in our midst, we pay homage to our ‘enemy’ and forget our own history. We keep their great men alive in our hearts while we forget and erase our own. We forget where we truly came from and effectively guarantee that we ultimately fail to know where we are going as a country.
We have been independent in name only for 62 years today. The top leadership of the country knows this but most of us don’t. They kowtow to whatever demands the West puts on them while pretending to be strongly against the West. That is why they treat us with so much disdain and disrespect because they know we are mere pawns in a cosmic board game that they play for their own benefit. That is why they can kill us in broad day light (whether with bullets or vaccine mandates) and the West will not say a word against them. Please remember that people like Gadhafi were killed by the West for presumably killing their own people. Our leaders have learnt that their political power doesn’t come from our votes, but from the powers that handed us our ‘independence’ 62 years ago.