Get ready for a rich, surprising and varied portrait of today's Africa.
For more than a century, outside "experts" - colonial rulers, aid organizations, western media and world travelers - have labeled African society "underdeveloped" and declared African culture a barrier to "modernization." But now a group of Ugandan writers challenge this narrative.
Examining their own lives and consulting with elders, the writers set out to rediscover the culture their ancestors built over millennia leading up to the interruptions of colonialism and, more recently, globalization. They find powerful echoes of earlier days -- and many surprises: A old woman in isolated hill country explains hidden levels of meaning in a bittersweet song young brides used to sing on their wedding days. An aging patriarch who leads his family by principles established generations ago, and offers a full-throated endorsement of women's liberation. The last in a line of powerful matriarchs shatters stereotypes of African women as submissive, in the process teacher her grandson a thing or two about manhood.
The authors have no illusions. One traces the rise and tragic decline of a pastoralist tribe that resisted colonial rule but sees their way of life dying in post-colonial Uganda. Another assesses the corrupting influence of money on a society whose values and well-being were based on barter. Yet another tracks the decline in rural villages that were long the backbone of society. A woman describes a long spiritual struggle that ultimately led her to abandon her tribe's traditional beliefs, while a journalist explores how conflict between traditional healers and modern health providers has opened the door to medical quacks to undermine the health-care system.
But amidst upheaval and confusion, the writers find much to keep spirits high. While some Ugandans struggle to preserve their nation's multi-lingual heritage, ghetto kids creatively spin out deliciously clever new slang at a stunning pace. A journalists collects stories of the ingenious ways taxi drivers and artisans adapted changing communications technologies to thwart colonial rulers and would-be post-colonial autocrats. And people of all stripes flock to movie houses to watch clever movies that mix folklore and modern martial arts to spoof old superstitions and recently-arrived foreigners alike. Meanwhile, you'll hear stories that explain the profound conversion of a majority of Ugandans from their traditional religion to Christianity, learn about the continuing appeal of clans as a basis for social organization, and meet a psychiatrist trained in western medicine who says today's doctors could learn much about patient care from his mother, a traditional healer.
For these Ugandan writers, memories are not just about the past. In reviving bedrock values born in the distant past -- family, commitment to collective well-being, recognition of the role of character in personal lives and freedom -- they give hope for a better future.
About the Author :
Christopher Conte is an American journalist, writer and editor based in Silver Spring, Maryland. After starting his career as a local and statewide reporter in Vermont, he covered budget and economic policy for Congressional Quarterly magazine and then spent 15 years as a reporter and editor for the Wall Street Journal, where he covered economics, labor, transportation and the White House before becoming an editor focusing on domestic and international affairs and writing page one columns on labor and politics. After leaving the Journal, he worked as a freelance journalist for publications including Governing Magazine and AARP; as a consultant on development and economic policy for the World Bank, International Finance Corporation, and Gateway House Global Council on International Relations, and as a researcher and writer writer for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Benton Foundation, where he specialized, respectively, in health policy and communications. Working with the International Center for Journalists and the World Association of Newspaper Editors and Publishers (WAN-IFRA), he has trained journalists in many countries -- especially Africa but also India and east Asia. He developed an abiding interest in Uganda during a three-year stint as a media trainer and consultant focusing on health issues.
Review :
"The 12 scribes of this book have penned what, to me, is the most outstanding book that Uganda has yet mothered . . . on the key importance of a community's indigenous cultures in moulding and enhancing human values. . . . This book is a treasure house of the excellent cultural values inherent in the oral traditions and practices of a cross-section of Uganda's ethnic communities. These are social and personal values that underpinned these ethnic communities in pre-colonial Uganda and should be carried forward and integrated into the communities of Uganda's technological and urbanized future." -- Timothy Wangusa, poet, novelist and educator.
