By Oweyegha-Afunaduula
In Uganda, and perhaps in the whole world, we are more concerned about inflation, the economy, loss of political support, food security, commodity prices, physical security, academic standards, intellectual collapse, climate change, environmental security, military security, the World Wide Web, internet use, artificial intelligence, etc. We are less concerned about phenomena and events that we do not see with our naked eyes or that do not affect us directly, yet these have serious impacts on us as a human species and, by extension, on other species to which we are naturally connected.
Four phenomena have continually taken place in Uganda, especially since 1986, but are hardly talked about because they cannot be felt or seen by people—both in power and out of power—and sustained in power by paying taxes to buy weapons of mass destruction, including military hardware, chemical weapons, and biological weapons, or to develop nuclear energy instead of more poverty-relevant energy types, namely biogas and solar energy. The four phenomena are genocide, ecocide, ethnocide, and intellectual death.
Genocide
Genocide is the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group to destroy that nation or group. Ernesto Verdeja (2010) has reviewed several works and established that the causes of cruelty resulting in genocide tend to be the same all over the world.
The works he reviewed are Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur by Ben Kiernan; and Genocide in the Age of the Nation State. Vol. 1, The Meaning of Genocide. Vol. 2, The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide by Mark Levene; International Justice in Rwanda and the Balkans: Virtual Trials and the Struggle for State Cooperation by Victor Peskin; and What is Genocide? by Martin Shaw.
More specifically, Dominique Maritz (2012) identifies ritualism, modernity, wealth, power, dominance, exaggerated nationalism, ethnicism, and socio-economic crises. In Uganda, greed for power and wealth by a small group of people, which is also bent on grabbing land from the more settled communities, and destroying their belongings, identities, and sacred places, is preparing the country for future genocides.
This is criminal. It means whatever is being pushed as development is a mere cover-up of the real intention: dispossess, disown, displace, and depopulate traditional places for people not ecologically, historically, culturally, ethically, and spiritually attached to the land.
Ecocide
Ecocide is the intentional destruction of the environment, causing severe harm to the ecosystems and the people or communities that live in them. The term comes from the Greek word Oikos, meaning “house,” and the Latin word caedere, meaning “to cut down” or “to kill.” Many countries are considering making environmental damage or “ecocide” a crime. International lawyers in 2021 developed the legal definition of ecocide, but I will not bother you with it here.
The consequences of environmental damage are highlighted in the World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report 2023. Again, I will not bother you with it here. Those interested can research it. What is true, however, is that large-scale environmental destruction affects the future of all life in Uganda and on the whole planet.
In Uganda, this is what is happening as traditional and cultural lands are grabbed from the owners, and their belongings and identities are destroyed. It is as if Uganda is being re-colonised. Criminalising it would finally hold decision-makers (the politicians in power) to account (e.g., Antonelli and Thiel, 2021). Indeed, Martin Crook (2024) sees a nexus (connection) between ecocide and genocide (i.e. a chain of causation intentionally maintained to eliminate certain groups of people).
Ethnocide
Ethnocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of the culture of an ethnic group. Usually, “ethnocide” is carried out against the indigenous people by the destruction of their way of life. It ends up destroying a whole culture. There is overlap between it and ecocide because while it destroys culture, ecocide destroys the environment, and together they disconnect the indigenous people from nature. It is criminal to disconnect people from nature.
In Uganda, ethnocide and ecocide are taking place simultaneously as the cultural heads, sustained by the center, are wallowing in goodies and monies provided to them by the very government presiding over the ecocide and the ethnocide in their cultural areas. Virtually all cultural heads, politically deprived, are swimming on their diminishing cultural base and ecologies. They cannot do anything because they were stripped of political power by the Uganda Constitution of 1995, designed by the National Resistance Movement (NRM) specifically to capture all civic spaces and all resources and entrench itself in power through time.
Although the Constitution, in Article One, reads that all power belongs to the people of Uganda, it simultaneously concentrates all power in the hands of an all-powerful President who makes all the key decisions and unmakes others. Most ecocide and ethnocide emanate from presidential decisions, actions, or inactions.
Intellectual Death
Lastly, I want to dwell on intellectual death. Intellectual death is a term that can refer to a lack of intellectual development or the inability to obtain new information. It can also refer to a lack of creativity or the inability to tackle big questions. The term intellectual death is traceable to the famous Chinese teacher and public intellectual, Confucius. Confucius says:
“Learning without thinking will result in lack of understanding. Thinking alone without learning will result in danger (even death). Confucius reasoned that thought without learning is intellectual death. Learning without thought equals you might learn the wrong things, which makes the effort you put into it useless. Thought without learning equals you think but you don’t learn from your mistakes. Intellectual death equals no progress.”
There is intellectual death in our universities, politically and institutionally desired to ensure contradictory voices to those in power do not emanate from them. Consequently, the conspiracy of silence predominates the university environment. It is increasingly rare to hear voices such as those we used to hear from public intellectuals such as Mohamoud Mamdani and Ali Mazrui, which reverberated in and outside academia in the late 20th century and early second millennium.
Universities, in their original conception, were idealised in the Renaissance as places that could produce ‘intellectuals’. An intellectual was a person of an inquiring mind who, through rational judgment and prodigious independent study, battled with an intellect they could not suppress, to reason through challenges that as yet had little or no answers, for the betterment of knowledge, humanity, and the human race (Krook, 2014).
The truth is that universities have lost touch with this original conception of the intellectual in pursuit of a more mundane, professionalised ‘expert’, who contests not with ideas but merely with ideas that have come before, and inches knowledge by an inch, where their teachers refuse to let them run the mile. Intellectuals have lost their place amidst the bulging sphere of modern ‘experts’: people who have credentials in a subject matter but do not necessarily dare venture beyond formalised learning and formalised education (Krook, 2014).
Intellectual death is now the order rather than the exception. The most affected intellectuals are the public intellectuals—those who are supposed to clarify and articulate issues for the public. In Uganda, more and more intellectuals have withdrawn from the public space, leaving it to President Tibuhaburwa Museveni to loom large with his untested ideas on everything, including the parish development model, operation wealth creation, Myooga, and Bonna Bagaggawale, while the knowledge workers in the more than 50 universities have chosen the conspiracy of silence, preferring to produce and advance theoretical models on minute things that are of little public interest, for academic reward of degrees, career advancement, and promotions.
Indeed, unlike earlier intellectuals who lived in urban bohemias, today’s thinkers have flocked to the universities, where the politics of tenure loom larger than the politics of culture (Russell Jacoby, 2000). A bohemian is a person, such as a writer or an artist, who lived an unconventional life, usually in a colony with others, and wrote for the educated public. The curious joy of being wrong—intellectual humility—meaning being open to new information and willing to change your mind when superior ideas arise, is now a rare thing in our academia and the public space.
People will fight tooth and nail to hold to their archaic ideas. Intellectual humility is a particular kind of humility that has to do with beliefs, ideas, or worldviews. This is not only about religious beliefs; it can show up in political views, various social attitudes, areas of knowledge or expertise, or any other strong convictions. Intellectual humility is thus the ability to recognise the limits of one’s knowledge and beliefs, and to be open to new ideas. Jstor Daily defines it simply as a willingness to admit you’re wrong.
It has both internal- and external-facing dimensions (The Conversation). It is an innovation. When you are an intellectual with intellectual humility, you are humble. Being humble about what you know is just one part of what makes you a good thinker, a critical thinker, a critical reasoner. Unfortunately, intellectual arrogance predominates on our university campuses. It is worse in the public space where politicians have consummated the role of public intellectuals.
In The Last Intellectuals, Professor Russell Jacoby (2000) chronicles this decline in intellectual favour in correlation with the rise of modern universities. He argues that “before the age of massive universities, ‘last’ generation intellectuals wrote for the educated [public].” While Russell Jacoby (2000) was right for the American public, he was right to state that academic careerism has sapped the vitality of intellectual life globally and in Uganda. In his book Intellectuals in Politics and Academia, Russell Jacoby (2022) addresses multiculturalism, diversity, post-colonialism, utopian violence, civil wars, and state violence, which the diminishing public intellectuals should be clarifying and articulating for the learning public. Indeed, everything that Russell Jacoby writes is well worth reading.
He’s smart, independent, lively, well-informed, and alive with the joy of intellectual combat. Agree with him or not, he makes you think and think hard about any and every subject he takes up.” (Professor Mark Edmundson, 2022). In Uganda, we now have a critical shortage of knowledge workers of the Russell Jacoby type. We are now massively producing people with paper qualifications, fear-laden and incapable of manifesting as free, independent, well-informed thinkers. They are full of knowledge in small pockets of knowledge, worse still in subjects or topics of interest to only their colleagues or students for academic purposes.
Russell Jacoby’s (2014) article Letters to Power: Public Advocacy Without Public Intellectuals is as if he wrote with Uganda in mind. Here, public advocacy is now done almost exclusively by President Tibuhaburwa Museveni personally, with his National Resistance Movement providing him with secretarial support, in the absence of public intellectuals.
Intellectual death in Uganda is real! Intellectual humility and/or humbleness is declining meteorically, as more and more academics withdraw into their academic cocoons in pursuit of academicism and/or scholasticism, upward academic progression, and careerism. We cannot expect much from them in terms of helping us solve our national problems. Many are falling prey to the temptations of unrelated jobs in government institutions, even if they are not related to their professions.
Others are entering politics, presently the most lucrative employer in the country, to join the professional politicians, increasingly associated with corruption and abuse of power. We need to rethink. There can be no meaningful and effective development in an intellectual void. It is destructive deception.
For God and My Country.