The
following article, written by Andrew Green, was originally posted on the ThinkAfrica Press website on 14th November 2011 (link to original story). I am
reproducing it here, with full permission, as the first of a number of
interesting articles from other sources related to my promotion of Uganda's
Jubilee this year.
October
9 may have been Independence Day in Uganda, but it could have been any other
sleepy Sunday in Kampala. Disappointment from the previous night’s football
match against Kenya – a 0-0 draw that denied Uganda a spot in the Africa Cup of
Nations – dulled any impulse for celebration. There were rumours of a ceremony
at the Kololo Airstrip, where British colonial administrators had handed power
to Milton Obote 49 years previously, but the grassy field stayed empty even
after the morning drizzle finally cleared.
The
lack of pageantry was apace with the scepticism and dismissiveness that marks
Uganda’s approach to historical discussion and celebration. It is a country
where the national archives cannot accept new material because it does not have
the space and because the government tried to tear down the national museum to
turn it into offices last year.
Uganda
has the world’s second youngest population, but the lessons of its past are
being lost to its children, leaving no national identity to overcome commonly
held ethnic stereotypes. The USdecision this week to join an ongoing conflict
in northern Uganda highlights a division some scholars believe a more complete
teaching of history could help resolve.
How
soon is now?
Ugandans
have “made a lot of mistakes in the past and we still make mistakes,” explains
Edwin Paratra, who works at the Uganda Museum. “I look at the children we groom
and they’re docile … many are just passing through the time.
"It’s
important to make them be critical, but how can they criticize when they don’t
really know [about the past]?”
Paratra
joined the museum in 2007, part of a wave of new hires ahead of that year’s
Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Kampala. He was a student at
Makerere University then, and he clearly still delights in getting the
opportunity to work at the museum. As he walked through its halls, he stopped
to point out a temporary exhibition on transportation he helped set up.
For
the last five years, part of his job has been giving tours to the busloads of
students who show up each school day.
“It’s
good that the young ones know where they come from,” he says, with a hall of
displays on traditional Ugandan customs as his backdrop. But their interests
are limited to the things they are taught in school, he continues. So they
marvel over the country’s first car and its first typewriter – both legacies of
the colonial era – but they rarely ask why there is no mention of the country’s
post-independence leaders anywhere in the museum. History textbooks in this
country end where the post-colonial era begins.
Reading,
writing and remembering
“Anyone
who comes in power doesn’t want the others’ history to be put anywhere,”
Paratra explains. Not in textbooks, not in memorials, and not in the national
museum. According to Mwambutsya Ndebesa, a senior history lecturer at Makerere,
the decline in historical preservation is partly an attempt by the country’s
leadership to control the national narrative.
More
broadly, the history of history in Uganda is one of neglect. In a poor country
with limited resources, doctors, engineers and even teachers provide the kind
of results that look good on international donor reports and campaign
billboards: lives saved, buildings constructed and students educated. The work
of historians, archivists and curators does not deliver those kinds of
statistics, so does not get the same kind of attention and support.
But,
overlooked in a results-driven society, are the uncountable benefits of a
citizenship with a robust sense of its own history. Uganda must, according to
Ndebesa, create “motivation for society, incentives for work, motivation for
nationalism and patriotism…We want to create the soul of a nation. We have no
soul in this nation”.
In
the absence of a national identity that the teaching of history would help
create, Uganda is running the risk, he claims, of becoming a country where
ethnic divisions dominate individual perspectives. He repeats several times
that in his classes “I don’t take people into the past to leave them there”.
One of the most important things he does in his history of Uganda class, he
says, is to trace historical migration patterns to show people that
contemporary ethnic prejudices have no basis in historical fact. That many of
Uganda’s tribes are steeped in intermarriage. And that divisions within
society, which sometimes erupt into conflict, are not necessary.
“The
prejudices are there… but there is no systematic way of ‘de-teaching’ to remove
those prejudices,” he says, adding that,
“[I am] aiming at doing that. But I don’t have big audience. These are very few
students. Uganda is 32 million. If I teach 200 people, it’s a drop in the
ocean.”
The
dangers of forgetting
Ndebesa
will soon be getting some support. Next year the state-of-the-art, fully
digital Kitgum Peace Documentation Centre in northern Ugandan will be
operational. Part memorial, part research centre, its goal is to encourage
national reconciliation in a region subject to massive violence for more than
20 years.
The
conflict in northern Uganda has variously been described as a guerrilla
campaign by the Joseph Kony-led Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) or as a civil war
between the country’s north and south. Through both force and persuasion, Kony
drew troop supplies from his own Acholi tribe in the north, while
simultaneously waging a terrorist campaign against the Acholi and their
neighbours.
People
in the north maintain that the government’s slow response to the LRA is, in
part, out of ethnic retribution. The National Resistance Movement party of
President Yoweri Museveni has never enjoyed much support in the north. And
Uganda’s former leaders Obote and Idi Amin, who are vilified by the current
leadership, traced their lineage to the northern part of the country. Even as
the conflict has waned, thousands of Acholi are still displaced from their
homes, breeding further resentment. Obama’s decision to send US troops to clear
out what remains of the LRA underscores the fact that the conflict – and the
ethnic divisions it has exacerbated – is still not fully resolved.
“The
more we looked into the conflict in northern Uganda, the more it became clear
that the problem is a manifestation of those historical problems [between north
and south],” says Moses Okello, a senior research and advocacy advisor at the
Refugee Law Project, the group setting up the centre. The violence “is a
product of a blinkered way of teaching history”.
The
new museum will build on oral histories and documents to “create a complete
picture”, Okello says. But ultimately, the bigger goal is to force the country
to reconsider how it teaches history.
“History,
and particularly its cultural dimensions, creates a sense of identity as
individuals and as a nation,” Okello argues.
“The
average Ugandan kid is ignorant of other ethnic groups. The average Ugandan
adult doesn’t know so much about other parts of the country. What they know is
mostly stereotypical. By and large many of the problems of conflict come from
this teaching of history.”
