Memory, Legacy and Belonging; the search for home in peril times.

Years later, when I was in primary school, “Why did the British come to Uganda?” is a question we were asked, and expected to answer in our social studies classes. We would go on to list the answers we had crammed, but never interrogated to pass the exams.

The answers are grouped under economic, social, and political reasons.

They included; to secure control of valuable resources such as ivory and rubber, establish a presence in the region to counter the influence of other European powers such as Germany and France, to establish ‘legitimate trade’ in East Africa, to spread Christianity and Western civilisation, and so forth.

To succeed at this, the British and all other colonial masters had to wrap up their invasion in ways that could justify its horrors. And so, natives become primitive, their gods idols, their ways of being needing civilisation. Edward Said and other postcolonial philosophers have deeply explained these theories of orientalism as fabricated by western explorers, poets, philosophers, economists, and imperial administrators.

At the heart of colonial histories lies the foundation of export capital and developments that have shaped the modern world. The violent appropriation of land, people, and resources resulted in global hierarchies that present in socio-economic, legal, and political realities today. This is what currently links global interests to exploitations of the now.

There are some threads of thinking that argue that these are questions of past. Such arguments of course, can only be made by those whose histories do not continue to shape their present. For many of us, the past is a living thing.

It is in understanding the shaping of our societies that allows us to appreciate why the world is structured as it is. Appreciating this interconnectedness between where we were and where we are now makes us more likely to get to a place other than what this is. The way through necessitates that we once again reckon with colonialism, imperialism, and their lasting legacies. This is the seemingly easier conversation to have. The missing and yet critical link is how these hangovers continue to shape our present-day reality, and, even so, how those who directly benefit from it still continue to perpetuate its the lasting horrors.

All across the world we see the direct consequences of the imperial and colonial world order as imposed. It is evident in Palestine, across America and Canada, in Africa, the Middle East, The Caribbean. None of us remain unsullied.

I go back often to the words of Pansahe Chigmudazi, “A person is a person through those who have come before us, those who come with us, and those who come after us”.1 This is a core essence of the spirit of Ubuntu, which as African people, is and should always be, our north star. In essence, this knowing that; we have not in fact made ourselves, is an invitation to hold in our bodies the possibility that we are vessels tethering us across realms and space. This prospect of course necessitates that we collapse the singular and limiting understandings of time that have been so shaped by the modern world as we experience it.

In so doing, we allow ourselves an avalanche of memories that are available to us by those who are living and those who are not. It then opens up a new set of ways which redetermine; how we remember history; how the past is accepted; and how the future is shaped. As we place ourselves in that which has formed and reformed us, recognising ourselves in all of it, we emerge as active co-creators of the material world. This is why I hold that memory is deeply personal and deeply political.

And so, in honouring and acknowledging this deeply personal and political thing that is memory, I share some of my own with you.

Our father’s father, my tatenkuru is the man who named me Twasiima. He is a man I knew little in life and I piece him together through the stories and memories of others, and through interactions with him as a guide in the ancestral realm. In life, he was a farmer and a weaver of mats and baskets. A simple man, with a simple life. Our father, his son was the first in his family to go to university. In fact, both my parents were the first in their respective families to go to university and to settle in Kampala. This is important to note because it formed a big part of how they raised my siblings and I.

Our tatenkuru was also the last of his family to radically resist Christianity and from what I gather he remained unbaptised in the Catholic faith that most of his family took on as their own. Our father, his son on the other hand, was coming of age at the time where they were immersed in learning the language and actions to assimilate, especially if one intended to be successful. People went to church on Sundays and children aspired to speak better English and leave home. And so, shaped by the altering that was demanded of by a faith in a different kind of God, and a language that was not their own, they changed their names, were baptised, and so accepted into the social and economic structures of a developing Uganda. They spoke less and less of what and who we came from.

As a result, a large part of my childhood and early adulthood was spent speaking primarily English, going to Bushenyi occasionally for a few days during the Christmas holidays, and appearing almost as a tourist in my own native lands. I went to law school, graduated, started to work in and around international development until 2023, when I could no longer ignore the nudging that had started in 2018 when our father transitioned to an ancestor. You see, in essence what happened in 2018 was that after our father passed from this realm, in search of a new sense of my world that had become deeply dislodged, and in many ways in search of our father, I found myself immersed in new truths that stood in direct conflict with that which I had been raised with.

These paths led me to sets of questions that ultimately led me back to my ancestry. As I wondered about the connections that are or could be from this life to the next, I found myself opened up to mysteries and divinities that have continued to fuel me, and can in large part be credited for the first three books I have written. Now, mysticism was not entirely new to me as one who was raised Catholic; but this was something different. This was a connection to memories that had been intentionally hidden by the kind of schooling and churching I had known.

I come now to you with some pointers; a bit of a summary if you will of what I am learning thus far.

1. A people without a history, they frail through the world.

For colonialists to succeed, they needed the indigenous people, and imported slaves from other conquered territories, to be able to transform fully in service to the colony. This resulted in an Africa where we were (and are) observed and systematised into an already accepted European history. As Joseph Ki-Zerbo says, “Unless one chooses to live in a state of unconsciousness and alienation, one cannot live without a memory, or with a memory that belongs to someone else.”

What then does that mean for African people in particular who have experienced a deep and lingering violence that has almost disrupted them entirely from themselves?

That is a question I leave for you to ponder deeper on.

Let us go back for example to this concept of time.

The colonial framework measures time in linear fashions; hours, seconds, etc. And in so imposing unto us this concept, we see the beginning of Africa measured in reference to BC and AD.2 Before and After Christ, is of course alien to Africa and its people, and has no real historical or cultural ties to who we were and are. Thus, this now universally accepted concept has disappeared entire civilisations and legacies that existed way before this foreign invasion. This is why it becomes necessary for those of us invested in undoing these legacies to revisit historical records that exist in our libraries and books yes, but even more essentially, in our minds, our bodies, our memories.

2. The deep ties to our identity and ancestry are formed in our tongues.

Language carries the sound of how cultures perceive the world. In a sense a way of a people is most ably reflected in its culture through the language that communicates what the beliefs, values, myths are. Thus culture and language are ying and yang of each other. They are both so closely tied to the concept of identity that it is difficult to talk of one and not the other.

In her book Afro feminism and Decolonization, Sylvia Tamale asserts that for colonisation to succeed, it was important for the colonialists to capture the minds of the colonised. Not only did they restructure the knowledge systems of the African people, but they also embarked on a mission to erase and/or devalue their history, culture, expression and way of being. One of the clearer ways to do this was through the imposition of language. It is no wonder then that colonialists renamed lakes, rivers, even people.

By imposing the language of the coloniser, colonialists succeeded in disrupting us from that which previously tethered us to our sense of identity, history, ancestry and even spirituality. We are still yet to recover from this, which is why must insist on it as a key starting point if we are to at all weave worlds towards freedom.

3. We alone can reclaim ourselves and how and to whom and what we belong

These questions beget more questions. Questions of how and where we begin with all of this unravelling that needs to be done. It becomes deeply complicated to answer these given the layered context and history within which we exist.

Let’s take Uganda as an example of one such a complex layer. Uganda is a direct product of British invasion and imperialism that forced several indigenous groups together. Different people with different cultures and languages, belief systems and so forth. More often than not, these create contestations and resistances that we acknowledge, and refuse to because of the possibilities that could erupt should we. The result is among many things; contested claims of belonging and identity.

The political project of states and that of modern-day nations like Uganda is built on specific locations and in specific historical moments. They can never in my opinion be fair or just or all-encompassing because they were never designed to be so. And so to continue to exist in the ways they do, they must construct people, states and homelands as inherently and immutably connected. So when then I think about what it then means to belong, as a Ugandan. as a munyankore woman. as an African, I struggle with the answers.

And so, I don’t offer you any, just more ideas and personal reflections such that you might emerge with your own.

In my own search, I try to define what belonging entails. The nearest answer comes to me through the ideation of this feeling of ‘being at home’. However, as Ghassan Hage points out, ‘home is an on-going project entailing a sense of hope for the future’.

Where then does this situate me and us given that home does not always translate towards hope for the future, or safety or positive reactions even. This I ask for the many of Africans across the world who for one reason or another are forced to search for home and therefore belonging in lands further from their own. We do this amidst loud calls telling us we are unwelcome, unworthy and unsafe most of wherever we go.

I assert that while it is true of course that this possesses immense challenges for us, it also brings with it opportunities which could are more suited to our rapidly changing world.

Perhaps then, as people with contested claims of identity and belonging, we have the opportunity to reconstruct our individual and collective identities and attachments to centre the value of others and self. Perhaps this can be done in many different ways by people with similar social locations or not, who belong to the same community or groupings defined broadly to mean having similar values and interests around reconstructing new ways of being that centre care and love and possibility for all.