Your Tooro speech opened a bigger question about culture, the state, and Africa’s unfinished institutional journey.
Your Excellency,
I listened with unusual interest to your address at the coronation of Omukama Edward Rukidi Nyabongo I in Tooro on 29 September. I had expected to listen mainly through the lens of the three articles I recently wrote about Tooro. Instead, you took me back to questions that have occupied much of my writing over the years: Africa’s languages, education, indigenous knowledge, cultural institutions, Obuntu, science, the nation-state and our tendency to consume systems developed elsewhere without sufficiently interrogating what we already possessed.
Uganda is fortunate in one respect. Its President is deeply rooted in African cultural knowledge. You move naturally from cattle to language, marriage, indigenous medicine, and political organisation because these are not simply academic subjects to you. They belong to a world you have inhabited.
But your speech opened a bigger question: Is the distinction we continue to make between Africa’s modern state and its so-called “cultural institutions” itself part of the problem?
Who exactly are the wananchi?
You drew a clear distinction between hereditary cultural authority and political power. When a hereditary ruler makes a political mistake, you asked, what do you do with him?” Politics, you concluded, belongs to the wananchi.
But who exactly are these wananchi?
They do not cease being cultural beings when they enter a polling station, Parliament, a courtroom, or government office. They remain members of families, clans, and communities. They carry languages and memories and inherited understandings of responsibility, authority, wrongdoing, forgiveness, marriage, death, and human relationships.
The citizens and the cultural beings are the same person.
If cultural institutions carry language, identity, family structures, indigenous knowledge, historical memory, and systems of social responsibility—as you yourself argued—then we are hardly discussing decorative appendages to the state. We are talking about structures through which African society still lives.
Language is lived before it is taught.
Your concern about African languages particularly resonated with me. You warned that our children increasingly speak English and reminded us that indigenous languages contain meanings English can not always adequately capture.
But where did we once learn these languages?
We lived them.
Children spent school holidays with grandparents and extended families in villages. They listened to elders, learnt names for plants, animals, and foods, absorbed proverbs and stories, and discovered the complex web of relationships represented by family, clan, and home.
My own informal survey of parents has revealed something worrying. Some parents deliberately avoid sending their children to villages for holidays. Village life is considered uncomfortable or too far removed from the modern lifestyles their children know. In some urban homes, English has effectively become the family language.
Meanwhile, the smartphone has entered the space once occupied by grandparents, cousins, and community. A child can spend hours making virtual friends thousands of miles away while barely conversing with the elderly relative sitting nearby.
We, therefore, face something bigger than language loss. The socialisation architecture through which language, identity, and culture were transmitted is itself changing.
Teaching indigenous languages in schools will help, but it can not recreate a culture that children no longer live.
Indigenous science must meet modern science
I was equally interested in your call for cultural institutions to become patrons of indigenous science. You spoke about medicinal plants, indigenous cattle, agriculture, and knowledge that modernisation has sometimes encouraged us to discard.
This takes us into the debate about biotechnology and GMOs.
You have yourself raised concerns about protecting Uganda’s indigenous genetic resources and biodiversity. The debate should not be reduced to being either “for” or “against” GMOs. What problem are we solving? What indigenous resources already exist? What do generations of farmers know? What can biotechnology add? Who owns the resulting knowledge? What happens to biodiversity?
Those are not anti-science questions. They are scientific questions.
A confident society neither rejects new knowledge because it came from elsewhere nor discards its own because something newer has arrived. It interrogates both.
Mr President, we also need the social sciences
This brings me to an old disagreement I have with your government’s decision to prioritise scientists, including through salary enhancement, while teachers and professionals in the arts and social sciences waited.
Your own Tooro speech made a powerful case for the social sciences.
Language, marriage, family, culture, political authority, human behaviour, indigenous knowledge, and community—who studies these?
A laboratory scientist may identify the active ingredient in an indigenous medicinal plant. The anthropologist can help explain who possessed that knowledge, how it travelled across generations, and why it disappeared.
Medicine can identify a virus. It can not, by itself, explain human behaviour.
Uganda has already learnt this lesson.
Remember “Zero Grazing”?
When HIV and AIDS confronted Uganda, we did something extraordinary. We did not leave the epidemic to doctors.
Government, scientists, communities, families, religious and cultural institutions, civil society, the media, international partners, and people living with HIV all became part of the response.
We also translated biomedical knowledge into Ugandan social reality.
“Zero grazing” was a wonderfully Ugandan expression. Everybody understood the agricultural metaphor, but we were talking about sexual behaviour. More importantly, the response recognised that society could not simply be rewritten overnight. Polygamous relationships, family obligations, religion, and culture existed. Public health had to engage society as it was while encouraging behavioural change.
That was social intelligence.
Uganda’s HIV response demonstrated that the state, science, communities, culture, civil society, and international institutions can inhabit the same architecture when a national problem requires it.
We have already tested part of the model I am proposing.
COVID reminded us again.
COVID-19 revealed something else. When fear spread and hospitals struggled, Ugandans reached instinctively for knowledge inherited through families and communities: herbs, mixtures, and steaming.
Not everything worked; some practices carried risks. Traditional knowledge should never escape scientific scrutiny simply because it is traditional. But neither should it be ridiculed.
Why did people reach for it? Because indigenous knowledge had never disappeared. We had pushed much of it outside the formal architecture of knowledge.
Study it. Test it. Document it. Retain what withstands scrutiny and discard what does not.
That is what a knowledge-producing society does.
The division itself needs rethinking
This brings me back to your distinction between politics and culture.
Africa’s challenge is no longer simply to decide which responsibilities belong to the state and which belong to cultural institutions. We need an architecture capable of drawing intelligently from both while protecting constitutional rights, democratic accountability, and individual freedom.
I am not proposing that kingdoms replace parliament or customary practices and replace courts. Nor am I suggesting that everything pre-colonial was good.
My argument is simpler: African society did not disappear when the modern African state was created.
We inherited constitutions, parliaments, courts, bureaucracies, and national boundaries. Underneath them, people continued living through family, kinship, language, community, customary obligation, and cultural identity.
We have treated one architecture as modern and the other as traditional.
Both exist today. Both are contemporary.
The real intellectual challenge is how they should relate to one another.
Uganda’s HIV experience tells us integration is possible. When the problem was serious enough, nobody worried whether the cultural leader, doctor, community worker, religious institution, international agency, or government official belonged in separate conceptual boxes.
We needed everybody.
Africa can not become trapped in yesterday’s modernity
Societies never stop evolving. The Western nation-state itself is not frozen. Alliances change, economic blocs pool sovereignty, technology ignores borders and political identities adjust to new realities.
Africa can not become the custodian of political arrangements that others continually reinvent.
Independence can not mean inheriting the colonial state and then declaring political imagination complete.
We too must keep reinventing ourselves—not by rejecting everything that came from elsewhere or romanticising everything African, but by asking continuously: What works? What no longer works? What did we unnecessarily discard? What have we learnt from elsewhere? What can we create ourselves?
This is what I mean by:
Return. Restore. Reimagine.
Return to understand what existed. Restore what remains valuable. Reimagine it for the world in which we now live.
Your eighteen-year Pan-African challenge
You have spoken about producing a new generation of Pan-Africans over the next eighteen years.
Then, let us use those eighteen years ambitiously.
And, teasingly, Mr. President, please do not leave this assignment entirely to the traditional technocrats.
We need political sociologists, anthropologists, historians, philosophers, linguists, scientists, constitutional thinkers, cultural knowledge holders, economists, technologists, young Africans, and communities themselves. We need people prepared to produce new and even radical knowledge.
Our technocrats are not the problem; we need their expertise. But can people trained principally to administer an inherited architecture be solely responsible for imagining its successor?
Uganda could provide leadership.
Convene an African intellectual project—not another conference celebrating culture or another committee preserving tradition, but a serious, sustained interrogation of one question:
What should the relationship between the African state and African society look like in the twenty-first century?
Your Tooro speech has opened that door.
HIV tells us integration is possible. COVID reminded us that indigenous knowledge remains alive. Our children and their smartphones tell us cultural transmission can no longer be taken for granted. Biotechnology forces us to decide how modern and indigenous knowledge should meet. The wananchi remind us that the citizens of the modern state and the African cultural being were never two different people.
Your Excellency, Africa does not need to choose between its past and its future.
We need the confidence, intellectual imagination, and political will to design the relationship between them.
The writer, Gertrude Kamya Othieno is a Political Sociologist
Founder of Global Peoples Network (GPN)
Alumna, London School of Economics (LSE)
gokbooks@gmail.com
