Author: Moses Khisa. PHOTO/FILE
Wednesday was Independence Day. It is 62 years since 1962. Compared to other regions of the world where states and nations have continuously existed for longer than 500 years, ours, and indeed Africa as a whole, is a very young sovereign nation.
Today, many Ugandans are deeply disillusioned. Among the masses, especially the young folks who know little or nothing about our troubled past and the actual colonial project that led to independence, the crux of the moment is the emptiness of a Uganda that offers no opportunities for a meaningful livelihood.
For Ugandans old enough to have lived through the euphoria of 1962, and equally among those consciously inducted into the lofty promises of 1986 when the current rulers came to power, big on an agenda of bringing about true independence, celebrating independence rings hollow. Sections of the African intelligentsia and those chattering on social media are wont to pour scorn on independence, in fact going so far as to suggest that colonialism was ‘good’ and Africa can do better by being recolonised!
This is ludicrous. For those of us committed to the value of freedom, the right to be even if it means living in impoverishment, and those aware of the long protracted struggles among African peoples going back more than 200 years during anti-slavery activism, laundering colonialism is patently insulting. Whatever other justifications and the revisionist attempts that assign a moral mission for the colonial project, the colonisation of Africa (and indeed other parts of the world, notably Asia and Latin America) was about the pursuit of European capitalist interests, setting up colonies as natural (and human) resource reservoirs for the metropole.
It was also a racist agenda that sought to ‘civilise’ the supposed backward and barbaric humans outside of Europe and its extensions in North America. One only has to read the writings of European thinkers of the 18th and early 19th centuries, or better still consult documents written by early European explorers and missionaries. While coached in a civilising and modernising language, European adventures around the world were savage, repressive and in some instances genocidal as happened in North America and Southwest Africa, among others.
Back in Europe, incessant wars characterised state formation and nation-building processes. The Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, believed to have for the first time codified the norm of state sovereignty, came at the end of (or perhaps a pause in) the infamous 30-years’ wars. Two hundred years later in the second half of the 19th century, bloody wars were fought over the creation of modern Italy and Germany, while earlier, the major European powers of the time had fought fiercely in the Crimean war of 1854-56 not to mention the Napoleonic wars. Having managed major technological breakthroughs in the second half of that century, Europe set up itself for largescale war with the First World War, paused for two decades and resumed on a grander scale as total war in 1939 engulfing the entire world.
Today, Europe is back at it again, with war raging in the East and the dire devastations of Gaza and Lebanon using Western-made mass-killing bombs. Africans were defined as a barbaric race in need of civilisation, and today we are still construed as a backward lot that requires being saved from its own failures and incapacities, but no other part of the world has had an uglier past than the West. Whether in its own wars as mentioned above or the forays abroad, the brutality and immorality of Western behaviour remains unmatched.
Like other African countries, Uganda today faces enormous problems, no doubt. But the idea that somehow we were better under colonial rule or that after 62 years of independence we are worse off is an ahistorical argument and a claim that can’t measure up to empirical evidence.
Whatever the dysfunctions and glaring failures of post-independence governments, especially over the last 3-4 decades in the case of Uganda, one can pick any indicator and Uganda in 2024 is better than it was in 1962.The colonialists were here for over 80 years, we need to look back and take an inventory of what they left behind whether in terms of levels of education and healthcare or physical infrastructure.
Today, Ugandans live under a repressive military authoritarian regime, but colonial rule was an outright coercive dictatorship where the colonised peoples were taxed but not represented, with subjects not citizens who had no rights and freedoms. Even if we set aside the functional value of independence, on the aspect of freedom and sovereignty, the right not to be ruled over by distant racists who saw Africans as a lesser race, independence as freedom is very much worth celebrating and proudly holding onto. Colonialism should never have happened in the first place, and because it did we can’t tell what the course and future of African societies would have been like without colonialism.
