Resistance is the future 

I learnt that he was the publisher for the National Resistance Movement (NRM)-in-exile newsletter, Resistance News.

To make sure we did not miss out on all the action, Tumusiime published the book titled Mission to Freedom. 

It is a compilation of most of the issues of Resistance News during the war against the Obote II regime, between 1981 and 1985.

Against this background, I think it would make sense that Tumusiime resumed publishing Resistance News. Not to recapture the past, but to reclaim it. 

You see, the ruling NRM once unveiled a grand design whose transcendental quality was summarised in 10 points. 

The year was 1986 and Ugandans were obsessed, as ever, with more immediate concerns: wages, jobs, prices and revenge. 

Revanchism, or the act of vengeance in politics, may have been what was on the ground. But the NRM, at the time, appeared to have its head in the clouds. 

To rebuild Uganda, NRM functionaries seasoned their rhetoric with words that were unseasonably welcome. 

Change, they informed us, was a revolutionary word. It implied continuous resistance, nay, permanent revolution. 

Karl Marx, the German philosopher and economist, urged the proletariat to “make the revolution permanent”. 

In essence, this meant resistance born of a militant stance, during and after the struggle to defeat the reactionaries and petty-bourgeois mountebanks. 

To be sure, the word “resistance” is as loaded as the word “change”. The difference is that resistance is a verb and change is an abstract noun. 

The former might lead to the latter and vice versa. You could thus say these two words were the same with a different syllable count and a different spelling, pronunciation. 

Indeed, the words “furze” and “gorse” are the only two words in the English dictionary with the exact same meaning. Still, resistance and change come close to matching that distinction.

So if the Resistance News was brought back into cold print, the heat it would generate could remind us of the need to buck the system. It does not matter which system. 

All that matters is promoting the spirit of resistance. Not resistance for its own sake, but to ask questions of one another. 

Sadly, though, the word “resistance” is also the term “Satan”. It has evolved from a Hebrew term for “adversary” or “to resist”, into the Christian figure of a fallen angel who tempts mortals into mortal sin. 

As Google has it: the word “Satan” was not originally a proper noun, but rather an ordinary noun that means “adversary”.

To give the word an even worse rap, the Lord’s Resistance Army also felt the word should experience its second youth. And for the NRM/A, well, the less we say about this the better. 

In this context, the word has gravely been demonised, in every sense of that word. 

Still, its cultural relevance has found expression in the defiance of, say, Robert Kyagulanyi. And this is the real legacy of the word: it is infectious. 

That is because, being a doing word, resistance is a rebuke against the cynical view that when “all is said and done” - much more will have been said than done.

In this age of armchair revolutionism, resistance is key to a less sedentary life.

Mr Philip Matogo is a professional copywriter  
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