Mr Charles Onyango-Obbo
Over a year ago we reported on what we called the “new Ugandan tribes”, good people who have formed social, cultural, economic, and philosophical communities around a set of experiences, values, and organising that didn’t exist in strong ways until about 10 years ago. Or they could be products from trends that have emerged or been revived in the last 10 years.
We reported about running and hiking communities, Saccos, travel storytellers, “designer peasants”, the rugby tribe, and such folks. I have my guy in, as the Kenyans would say, in “oshago” (village/upcountry) who is a good watcher of the evolution of the countryside.
He is a smart dyed-in-the-wool National Resistance Movement (NRM) man, but of the old variety. He has not done materially well from NRM – in fact, where his business has succeeded, it has been in working with the opposition-supporting entrepreneurs - but his devotion to the party seems to increase every year, even when his fortunes sometimes diminish considerably. He talks unquestionably about “instructions from above”.
He told me that word has already come from above that it is “Mzee (i.e. President Yoweri Museveni) sole candidate in 2026, and we have our instructions already”. He is not apologetic about anything. If you are doing a PhD on how NRM wins elections, and some of its tricks, he is a gold mine – if he can trust you.
I have a broad relationship with him on many non-political endeavours, and a few days ago he told me how things had changed inside the party, and gave me some insights into how the nominations next year will turn out. “NRM has always enjoyed strong support from women, but now it has become a party of women, at least in many parts of eastern Uganda which I know well and work in”, he said.
“We have our numbers that we look at. If NRM women decided to support other women next year in the mainstream slots for Parliament, they would sweep most seats. It is a new situation for us”, he said.
“Women are on the rise upcountry. Walk around, you will notice there are fewer men. It would seem men have migrated to the big towns, and boda boda has taken away very many young people”, he said. He added, with a wink, “Today you see a lot of beautiful young women in the villages and town, just go to Tororo and Mbale and see for yourself, a few years ago, they were not there. The boys are trying to impress the girls, they have gone soft and are not showing up for politics, which is a tough business”, he said. I laughed and disagreed with him, but I paid attention.
For sure, there are more boys blinged up. And I noticed several had dyed their hair red, white, or dark blue. Outside Soroti, in the sweltering heat, I espied a group of young men in skinny torn jeans, wearing black hoodies. It must have been a sauna inside there, but boys have to turn up.
A trend we have tracked in recent years is born of three factors: the growing number of middle-class “environmental exiles” leaving Kampala, or returning from the Diaspora, and setting up upcountry where there is cleaner air, less filth and potholes, and less poisoned by the bitterness of our partisan politics.
The second and third are a contradiction; parents who have lived longer than all previous generations, but retiring to the countryside as single parents because their spouses died from the ravages and politics that have plagued Uganda over the last 36 years – HIV/Aids, war/conflict, and the lifestyles that came with the sporadic economic boom of the last three-decades plus.
The tendency is for one of the children, some educated in prestigious universities abroad, to retire with them to become farm managers. This is at a time when there is a slow but sure decline in conventional marriage. In western Uganda, we see several of these wonderful young women on dairy farms.
In the other regions, they tend to be bohemian green warriors. To give just two examples; one I know in Buganda and the other in the northeast of Uganda, are both raising new forests of, strictly, indigenous trees and investing in studying and chronicling their medicinal qualities, and reviving their place in our food system. The offshoot, for one of them, has been a growing meticulous record of disappearing Ugandan traditional foods, the recipes, and how they were cooked. They are connected to global slow food and nature movements.
Next time, we shall look at how they are likely to change the country if they continue growing, and the impact they will have on the 13-year secession by sections of Uganda from a decaying and backward centre.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “wall of great africans”. twitter@cobb