Museveni was smart enough to realise that American foreign policy, American military involvement, had political limitations. And those limitations were: how many Americans could be killed? And when these killings took place in Somalia, the Black Hawk Down incident, Museveni offered his services.
He took his soldiers to Somalia. You remember that slogan, African solutions for African problems. Museveni offered that African solution in South Sudan, in Rwanda, in eastern Congo. The African solution was just a fancy name for Africans massacring Africans in the service of imperial powers. And that’s what happened at the end.
You recommend a federation as the most likely to succeed in post Museveni Uganda. Is there a political base for it at the moment? Or would something need to happen for the proposed federation to succeed?
Those of us who are militant nationalists and independents understood federation as a British project. We understood that it was the right wing, it was those who were interested in creating tribal fiefdoms, who used federation as a fig leaf to describe their agenda. We understood that this was their way of undercutting any attempt to build a strong nationalist state.
But since then, with a strong state having been built, we have understood the conditions have changed and the times have changed. Local organisation, local autonomy, has come to have a very different significance.
It is a way of resisting a development of autocracy in the centre and I think people are beginning to draw lessons from this.
Now, the thing is what kind of federation, because Museveni has also promoted something resembling a federation. But he has, as in Ethiopia, promoted what you can call an ethnic federalism. So in each single unit, he has divided the majority from the minority, the majority belonging to the ethnic group living in the country, and the minority having descended from other ethnic groups, even though living in the country, even though born in that place, still deprived of rights.
This is what’s happened in Ethiopia. If you look at Ethiopia, if you look at Sudan, you will see that the British politicised ethnic groups and turned them into tribes. And then after colonialism, what we have done is to militarise these tribes. So we have created tribal militias. That’s what they have done in Ethiopia. That’s the fighting between different tribal militias. That’s what they did in Sudan. They created tribal militias, starting in Darfur and then in other places. It is the state military which led the systems in creating these tribal militias. Then it is the tribal militias which have begun to swallow the state.
So this current civil war we have going on is between the state army and the tribal militias. It’s the same process you see in Uganda. We have not gone to the point of creating tribal militias, but we have been manufacturing tribe after tribe after tribe in order to fragment the country.
Some of these trends that you describe about Uganda can be found in most African countries. What are the lessons about the way forward for the rest of the African continent?
Broadly, we can see these trends in many African countries. The British model of colonialism became the general colonial model. Even the French, known for their assimilationist preferences, adopted indirect rule when they moved from assimilation to what they called association in the 1930s. And the Portuguese followed the French.
South Africans were the last ones in – they called it apartheid. But it was the same thing, the creation of homelands, the tribalisation of local differences. So that’s one trend in much of the thinking on the continent.
The alternative to that trend has been described as centralisation, so we’ve been moving between beefing up autocratic, centralised power and then opposing with fragmented, tribal powers.
I’m proposing a third way. I’m proposing a federation which is more ethnic. I’m proposing a federation which is more based on territory, more based on where you live. So it doesn’t matter where you’re from, but just the fact that you live there means that you have cast your lot with the rest of the people there in creating a common future.
And what matters in politics, more than where you came from, is the decision to make a common future. Migration is characteristic of human society. Human society has not come into being through homelands. So homeland is a colonial fiction.
The idea that Africans did not move, that they were tied to a particular piece of territory, is absurd, because Africans moved more than anybody else. We know that humanity began in Africa and spread to the rest of the world. So where is the homeland? You can have a homeland for this generation, for the previous few generations, but all African people have a story of migration. This is, I think, central.
So the way forward: one is a federation which consolidates democracy rather than eroding it.
The second way forward is to critically think through the whole neoliberal economic model and the empowering of elites, whether they are racial or ethnic or whatever.
I think we have to find a different economic model. But as you say, the book is not dedicated to looking for solutions. The book is dedicated to the proposition that we need to understand the problem before rushing to solutions.
And each country will have its own nuances. Different to Uganda.
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