It is a sacred tenet of modern self-care; celebrate the milestones. Do not take the passage of time for granted, because time, after all, has a nasty habit of eroding things. I get it. But let us be honest, who feels like fussing at 60? You would rather save your breath for something more critical than blowing out candles. Your teeth cannot handle the sugar, your knees cannot handle the dancing, and your soul simply cannot handle the forced merriment anymore. Yet, here we are.
Uganda is 63. And I think we should throw the party. Not despite the creaking joints and the chronic back pain, but because of them. Look at her. She has been through the fire; civil wars, coups, the slow, grinding wear of bad governance. And she is still here, holding some semblance of a nation together, which is more than can be said for some of our once-glamorous benefactors. Just look at Libya.
So, let us not celebrate an idealised version. Let us celebrate what actually makes us tick. Uganda is that coworker who grew up with nothing, and whose survival instincts are both her greatest strength and her most profound weakness. She learns fast, adapts faster, and has a hustler’s eye for an opportunity. We see what our neighbour has; a new technology, a hairstyle, a school system, and we must have it. Whether we need it or can afford it is a question for later. We will get it first, and ask questions never. We are magpies, drawn to the glitter of the new, until the next shiny thing comes along and we abandon the last one without a second thought.
But for all our love of the new, a stubborn part of us remains rooted in the past, clinging to traditions with a ferocity that defies all logic. We will bankrupt ourselves to send a child to university, fully aware the degree is a ticket to a queue for a job that does not exist. We will drop every commitment to attend a funeral, refusing to relegate this sacred duty to a convenient weekend, unlike our pragmatic neighbours in Kenya. We will buy our meat from the same fly-blown market stall because that is where our family has always bought it. Our traditions are intact, even if our sanitation is not.
We are, to our credit, pathologically generous and tolerant. Or perhaps we are just conflict-averse. We would rather not rock the boat. So we sit, mute and still, as the taxi driver breaks every traffic rule in the book. We sit, offering a silent prayer, as the boda boda guy weaves through crazy traffic to our possible injury or death. We sit politely in church as the pastor preaches pure nonsense, then line up to congratulate him with a pat on the back and an envelope. We pour money into weddings for marriages we know are doomed, and we clap politely for politicians whose lies are so transparent they are practically a form of modernist art. Our reasoning? A shrug. ‘They are all the same.’
What we must celebrate, above all, is our breathtaking pragmatism. Our refusal to tire of trying, even when the trying is profoundly unserious. Our reasoning, of course, is that we can always move on to something else. A Ugandan will start a business if he sniffs a whiff of quick money, but should an unforeseen crisis arise; a broken generator, a new tax, a competitor, he will abandon it for the next trending thing. That is why the Rolex stand that was doing roaring business two years ago has vanished, following the supermarket and the salon that occupied the plot before it. Our landscape is full of abandoned ventures.
Sometimes, it is difficult to decide whether I am happy to be Ugandan. But that is the wrong question. The question is not about happiness; it is about identity. This is who I am. I am the one who litters, then complains the city is dirty. I jump the queue, then fume about the lack of order. I slip a bribe to a government official, then write an essay about corruption. I know what is wrong. I see it with painful clarity. I just do not, yet, have the courage to fix it. And in that, perhaps, I am the most Ugandan of all.