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Uganda: Country is a Thief - Who
is Encroaching On Whom?
The Monitor (Kampala)
15 October 2006
Kalundi Serumaga
The recent drama of the attempted violent eviction of Basongora
from Queen Elizabeth National Park brought my mind back to
questions I confronted late last year while shooting Living Above
the Line, a documentary commissioned by ActionAid International
Uganda about the lives of the Benet people of Mt Elgon Forest Game
Park, the Batwa of Kisoro and the Ogiek of western Kenya.
We filmed the Benet deep in their forest. Their cattle are seized,
herdsmen shot dead, women assaulted, and they are forced at
gunpoint to burn down their homes with all their property inside.
Meanwhile, timber merchants are able to gain access to the forest
and illegally fell trees at an alarming rate. All this, the Benet
say, was done by officials of the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA).
We also visited the Ogiek in western Kenya and the Batwa in Kisoro,
peoples whose identity, existence and resources are under threat
from the so-called modern state and so-called progressive
neighbours.
In the Daily Monitor on September 17, Ms Lillian Nsubuga, the UWA
publicist wrote insisting that the "cows and huts" of the
Basongora were an unsuitable sight for potential tourists and
Chogm-related visitors to the country to see. She seemed
particularly outraged by the fact that this was happening in a
park named after the Commonwealth Queen while she is on her way
here.
The Basongora and the Benet did not encroach on any national park.
In fact, it is the so-called national parks that have encroached
on them. All these people existed in these areas long before Speke
was finally led by locals to "discover" the source of the River
Nile, leading eventually to the violent invention of Uganda, which
then started imposing new identities and functions on our
territories.
Native demands
Many Ugandans today may share Ms Nsubuga's irritation at the
continuing rumblings regarding native demands, often called
ebyaffe and associated most closely with Buganda in a seemingly
endless crusade that began with a simple 1992 request for the
return of the Sabataka, and has now grown into a movement
demanding the return of huge areas of land and even possibly
breaking way from Uganda! In a sense, one cannot blame those who
are tired of this.
After all, the matter was supposed to have been finally settled in
1967 with the abolition of kingdoms, and then settled again in
1993 with the invention of the notion of "non-political" kings.
Now, Busongora voices are beginning to point out the fact they
were the original occupants of the territory now named after the
esteemed and highly anticipated Queen visitor. As for the Benet,
they say that proposals to carve some degraded woodland out of the
forest and set it aside for them for settlement misses the point
that, as forest-dwellers, they want to keep living inside the
actual forest.
Hence, Banyoro, Benet, Batwa, Basongora and Acholi people and
others are all now in essence making the same critique that
Buganda has been making of the state that has progressively
dispossessed and impoverished them since it was founded in 1894.
Clearly, ebyaffe is not about Buganda alone, neither is it a
judgement on the performance of just the NRM government. It is a
statement about the illegitimacy of the Republic of Uganda by its
citizens who lose much more than they gain, by remaining "Ugandans".
For those benefiting from state power, the matter is much more
straightforward. Our collective loss is their private gain.
Buganda, for example, lost over half of its land to the British
colonisers in 1900, won it back in 1962, only to lose it again to
the Republic of Uganda in 1967. These are the 9,000 square miles
of land plus 1,500 more of forest that the NRM government would
rather give to foreign investors and friends.
In order to remain in control of property that the Queen's agents
of the time seized from native people, the modern Ugandan
political class has to now invent and sustain myths, even
self-contradicting ones.
They claim that they are protecting these resources from the
native people. This is laughable. It is obvious that it is
actually the natives who have been protecting these resources for
centuries.
The Elgon and Bwindi forests seized over 70 years ago, like Mabira,
are actually more threatened by this class whose mindset equates
progress with being able to import a second-hand Range Rover (stolen
or not), and send their unfortunate children to third-rate but
expensive European private schools. They therefore constantly seek
ways to convert our natural resources into private cash.
Another myth is to deny the existence of native peoples. This
starts with acts of verbal genocide ("a good Muganda is a dead one"),
and ends with the attempt to physically destroy them once the idea
of their non-existence has become widespread.
In short, "Uganda" is a thief, and a genocidal one, at that.
If they do find that they must accept at all the fact that you
existed before, then it is portrayed in the worst possible light,
as if that existence was a purely negative occurrence.
Hence, one day you will have Ms Aisha Kabanda implying that
Buganda did not exist and on another the President conceding
Buganda did exist before but only so as to blame it for all sorts
of bad behaviour that will be repeated if it is allowed to fully
exist again.
Likewise, we heard many derogatory comments about the Benet's
lifestyle from neighbours settled on their land ("they must learn
to live like other Ugandans", one lowlander stated most
emphatically to me), and an attitude of utter contempt for the
Batwa from their Bakiga neighbours in Kisoro, and now this
contemptuous reference to "cows and huts" of the Basongora. All
this is part of a wider anti-native attitude.
Ugandan conquests
As a wise old man from the embattled Ogiek community put it this
way: "If we were living in a wasteland, we would not be having all
these problems. The US fought Saddam for the oil production in
Iraq. The "oil" we have here is these trees and mineral water
springs. People don't like us just because of the resources that
are on our land."
Buganda is simply the first and most deeply penetrated of all the
Ugandan conquests and even had her name stolen. "Uganda" has
grabbed more of Buganda than of any other native community's land
(except the Batwa and Benet) and most of "Uganda's" property is
within Buganda, so it will always attract a lot more hostility
from the current controllers of the central government as well as
many others who wish to control it in the future.
This is a problem for many of the states that Europe created in
Africa, which are deeply uncomfortable with the continuing
validity and existence of the actual African identities. They try
to ignore them, or hide them and eventually even to destroy them,
but deep down, they know they have to respect them. Rwanda's
President Kagame provided a perfect example of this dilemma on
September 10 by contradicting himself when asked about the issue
of the return of the exiled King Kigeli.
He insisted that the king was just an ordinary person who should
not expect any special treatment, then went on to say that he had
had a special meeting with the king to explain this! He then went
on to reveal that the Rwandese government would also cater for his
welfare and society if he returned. If that is not special
treatment already, then nothing is.
For a continent that tops every negative global list (Aids,
poverty, corruption), and at the bottom of every positive one (GDP,
food security), our leaders display incredible recklessness in
deluding themselves that they are going to keep their ramshackle,
war-prone states afloat through the modern political culture of
combining of AK47s, donor aid and spin doctors.
The time has come for them to work out how to strengthen, not
weaken, native communities and institutions. Giving them back all
their property would be a good start. In part II, we shall discuss
how and why this should be done.
Mr Serumaga is a writer, filmmaker, broadcaster and cultural
activist based in Kampala
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