Saturday, September 9: Some Early Thoughts

For these first two weeks, our life is basically all day classes; right now I have almost six hours of class a day, as compared to about twelve a week at Duke. There is so much to learn, beginning with two hours of intense Luganda training each day and followed by several hours of lectures on development theory and ideology, development in Uganda, Ugandan history and politics, and introductions to studying and researching in the field in an East African context.

As terrible as I am at learning languages, I have generally enjoyed studying them, and our Luganda experience has been pleasant thus far. The language is not hard, with no clicks or bewildering assortment of tones that left me lost in Vietnam. It is also comforting that fluency is not really necessary at all. Almost everyone speaks English, and we’ll soon know enough to communicate smoothly with the street vendors or those without an education who don’t know English. I know I will never speak enough to conduct deep interviews with those who don’t speak English, but that’s what translators are for. Knowing how to offer a traditional greeting or ask for help in the local tongue does do wonders in breaking down barriers and gaining trust, though, which will be very important when I am looking for an internship and conducting research interviews.

The language is actually only spoken in this region of the country anyways, in the area that was home to the Buganda kingdom in pre-colonial times. This actually opens a very important conversation in Uganda’s history that has shaped much of modern politics and development. Historically Uganda was the home to four different linguistic groups with five different powerful monarchical kingdoms. Currently there are seventy legally recognized ethnic groups, so even the kingdoms weren’t necessarily homogeneous groups. During the colonial period, the British eventually took control of all five kingdoms, using the Baganda, who were the first to agree to cooperate in return for special treatment and wealth, as their tools for local governance. The British were never able to create a united Uganda, though, as asking Buganda chiefs to be the local rulers in the other four kingdoms didn’t go over particularly well. Uganda itself is a rather arbitrary defined space created by the British during the 1884 Berlin conference when Africa was parceled out to competing European nations.

Ugandan independence came in 1962 mostly at the urging of the Baganda, but being granted independence didn’t create any national unity. The artificial nation still was an amalgamation of five very different kingdoms, except that now there were added scars from colonial management conflicts. Since 1962 most of the history could be defined as a mess. In four decades of independence there have been nine presidents and not one has handed over power peacefully. When the notorious Ida Amin was in power in the 1980s, he absolutely destroyed Uganda. Historians say he was probably psychotic, and he killed and destroyed indiscriminately. He expelled all non-Ugandans, and with the whites and Indians who left went much of the capital, agricultural and industrial knowledge, NGO development and aid workers, and professionals. As a result, the infrastructure of Uganda was left in complete collapse.

Museveni has been in power since 1986 and has done much to restore stability to the country. However, he has also insisted on bans on opposition parties and tight controls of media and dissenters. He’s been in power since the year I was born, which is starting to seem like a long time. Some regard him as a hero for his work to bring health care, education, water, and housing to all, but others see him as a tyrant who primarily works for personal consensus. Either way, the growing consensus seems to be that he is out of fresh ideas and it is about time to step behind. However, when a former close ally strongly opposed his changing the constitution to allow another reelection, he was quickly jailed.

One of the biggest problems facing Uganda is its corruption. Corruption seems to penetrate all branches of government at all levels, but the police force is notably terrible. Projects are poorly budgeted, contracts are given to friends and family, and little or no accountability is required. The renovations for the president’s state house are costing more money than the annual budgets for health care and education combined. There is almost no tax base because more than 35% of the country’s population makes less than a dollar a day.

Violence is closely related. There is no shortage of weapons for the police, but they are not always used that responsibly. The newspapers almost daily have a story of police men getting into fights or bar scuffles and killing their opponent. Private security guards are as bad or worse. In frustration, the public has taken to mob justice. Though this has been somewhat stemmed, there are all sorts of stories of brutal murders, beatings, stonings, and quite prevalently, immolations. For minor crimes like theft, when perpetrators are caught, they are stripped and whipped by mobs through the streets. A girl in our group encountered this already this week on the way to class one morning.

One would expect that development would be linear, but it really isn’t. Relative political stability has been constant in Kampala, but the guerilla warfare in Northern Uganda has lasted for decades, left thousands dead and thousands upon thousands more in Internally Displaced Person Camps and a country deeply divided. (Recently there have been tentative attempts at a truce to end one of the longest running civil conflicts in Africa---more on this as we study and travel and the talks develop, but do follow the news if you are interested.) Power and water come and go and are generally considered worse now than they have been in years. The roads are terrible and haven’t improved.

What has most amazed me so far is people’s seeming apathy about the stagnated development in their country. There is complaining, but its mostly resigned acceptance when the power goes out, taps run dry, education funds are cut and school fees are raised, or roads are ripped apart while dust becomes uncontrollable. In fact, I’ve found that many families here seem to have much more than families in Vietnam had in terms of personal property, but they are living in areas with far less infrastructure, preventing them from even enjoying the property they do have. In Vietnam, locals would often put together the money for a road to be constructed through their neighborhood or for their water to be improved. Here, it seems unheard of for people to take developments into their own hands at a grassroots level.

Our academic director, a noted Ugandan constitutional and development scholar, has postulated that this is because of the still overwhelming lack of national identity from its population that Uganda suffers. He says that people still see themselves as members of their traditional kingdom, and not as Ugandans. When someone is able to extort or embezzle money from the central government for kingdom funds, they are regarded as heroes and not deviants. Especially among the richest tribal group, the Buganda, there is clamoring for federalism, or the ability to take control of most governance themselves. The kingdom’s land include Kampala, the heart of Uganda, and the Baganda people are generally not being marginalized in any way—in fact they are usually favored in business. Instead of just seeing themselves as Ugandan nationals and focusing on real national concerns, these identity squabbles take up most of the public activism.

As much as I’d like to say, “Get over yourselves!” this doesn’t seem like it will be a viable solution. There is such deep-seated historical animosity between groups that I’m not sure how this can be overcome. Our director says it can’t, arguing that Uganda and even all of Africa will not be able to develop within the context of artificial European colonial nation state identities, and there is certainly academic literature to support him. However, I don’t see dissolving all African countries as a solution either; inter-kingdom warfare was problematic before colonialism and contributed to the success of colonialism—why would things be better without nation states?

The other huge problem with development has been the terrible record of development authorities. I plan to write my next Chronicle column on the historical complete failures of international aid and development, so stay posted for more here, but in short, rich white outsiders throwing money and making self-serving demands on cultures they do not understand does not offer a promising solution for development. The new participatory grassroots development techniques that are emerging are far more promising, but are inherently very gradual development processes, so there’s no quick-fix solution.

The whole week has been kind of depressing; we’ve heard about violent histories, terrible corruption, an impossible continent to develop in the context of current nations, the illegitimacy of development workers, and the exploitation of researchers. I can describe the problems vividly now, but I have no solutions. Development studies is still a relatively new discipline, so there isn’t nearly enough literature on “how to,” and the theoretical literature more than a few years old has largely been disproved in practice, so there’s not nearly enough to build on.

We’ve begun to think about how our independent research projects will go, designing internships and studies to conduct. I can’t get over the fact that I don’t understand a larger “key” to development, and until I can figure out what that “key,” should be, I’m having a really difficult time choosing anything specific to work with or study—after all, what if it is completely irrelevant in the bigger picture? I’m going to have to get over this, and I will, but it’s good to vent a little.

In the meantime, the only way I can get even a little closer to answers is by studying, and we have lots to read and our first beginning field work studies to practice. My reading list has grown by volumes and volumes, so I guess I should get started.