Do Ugandans have a knack for satire?

Jim Spire Ssentongo is a popular satirist. His online following is in the neighbourhood of tens of thousands. As a good neighbour, so to speak, he shares with this following cartoons and commentary of a satiric bent. By doing so, he claims to be “expanding modes of speech, especially on uncomfortable issues, plus triggering public debate through the hard-to-ignore vessel of humour.”

Before Spire, there was James Tumusiime, Fred Senoga Makubuya (Snoggie), Emmanuel Tumusiime Rushedge, popularly known as Tom Rush or the Old Fox, Harry Sagara, to name but a few. All these satirists were widely heralded by Uganda’s literati. Basically, they set the tone of socio-political agendum. And Ugandans took them at their word or illustration in order to shape their own opinions.

So what is satire? According to American author Philip Roth, satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art. Further, “satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own”, says Jonathan Swift.

Whichever way you may look at it, satire largely aims at moral reform. This reform is grounded in the subterranean quality of subtly telling the powers that be to go and “stuff it”, as it were.

Be they illustrators or verbarians, satirists challenge the status quo with the moral purpose of “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.”

Types of satire

There are three main types of satire, namely: Horatian Juvenalian and Menippean. Horatian satire borrows its name, rather permanently, from the Roman satirist Horace. This sort of satire is the curl of the sardonic smile of wit. According to the dictionary, it is “satire in which the voice is indulgent, tolerant, amused, and witty.  The speaker holds up to gently ridicule the absurdities and follies of human beings, aiming at producing in the reader not the anger of a Juvenal, but a wry smile.”

This was Harry Sagara’s brand of satire. As he wrote, Sagara invited his reader to laugh with him as he extended the welcome of his humour to his targets, too. Often, we would hear people who he gently tore from limb to limb applauding his friendly assaults. 

Snoggie also falls in this category. That is how he was able to work for a government newspaper and still take potshots at his bosses.

Juvenalian satire, according to the dictionary, got its name after the Roman satirist Juvenal.

It is “formal satire in which the speaker attacks vice and error with contempt and indignation. Juvenalian satire in its realism and its harshness is in strong contrast to Horatian satire.” It spills from a poison pen, if you like, and is angrier and more take-no-prisoners with its ribbing.

Spire falls in this category. His barely concealed rage and exasperation with what he deems a decaying Ugandan polity is obvious to all. Essentially, it carries undertows of not only reform but revolution.

Menippean satire is seriocomic and therefore, lends itself to the image of a Cheshire cat with the disposition of Garfield. To the uninitiated, Garfield is a fictional cynical orange tabby Persian cat who would probably only wear a smile if it were a prerequisite to rid the world of dogs.

Menippean satire attacks “contemporary institutions, conventions, and ideas in a mocking satiric style mingling prose and verse. Developed by the Greek satirist Menippus of Gadara in the early third century BCE, Menippean satire was introduced to Rome in the first century BCE by the scholar Varro in Saturae Menippeae.”

John Nagenda was an expert at this brand of satire. His biting wit and less than saccharine sarcasm bordered on the comical, even though it was as serious as a heart attack.

Satire’s relevance

Satire in Uganda is now more relevant than ever, especially in view of the fact that the rich and powerful in our society often don the olive green duds of the soldier out of his time. To be sure, the army and its acolytes run Uganda’s political space. So using guns against them would be akin to turning those guns on oneself. This is why satire is as essential as a non-violent tool carving out restitution.

Still, satire can be violent in the use of its inconvenient truths. After all, the conditions that produce satire demand that we fight our oppressors with their own weapons, one of which is humiliation.

Indeed, Ugandans feel humiliated by the state of their country. Yet they are unable to take up arms and are uncomfortable with having to beg for alms, being caught between a rock and an enamel-hard place. Their only recourse, then, is to pick up the cleansing blade the French revolutionaries, specifically the Jacobins, called “our national razor”—satire. 

After all, Ugandans walk upon a razor’s edge and this has sharpened their appreciation of satire.

That said, even the powerful may use satire as an intra-authority means of checking its own excesses.

Reform agenda

The upper echelons of state could do with some enlightened despotism, if despotism is what they must employ. Here, they may borrow a leaf from the Russian empress Catherine II the Great. Known for palling around with satirists such as Voltaire, she sponsored the arts to remove the fig-leaf of respectability from her own dictatorial regime.

In 1769, she established a satiric journal, Vsyakaya vsyachina (All Sorts and Sundries), which was soon followed by others, including the Truten (“Drone”), founded by Nikolay Novikov.

As a culture of satire took hold with such publications, her regime was called into question and this, surprisingly, made her rule less questionable as she used the insights gleaned from satire to be a more benevolent leader.

Although Catherine II the Great is Russia’s longest-ruling female leader, she was not even Russian. She was actually the eldest daughter of an impoverished Prussian prince.

In Uganda, the ruling group could peer through the lens of the satirist to capture the Ugandan temperament in its primary colours.

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