Redefining Africa's Future

A long time ago, I worked in a small town in northern Uganda, in Kitgum District. There, I once met a guy named Kidega. Kidega told us a story about two men who were walking along a village footpath somewhere in rural Kitgum. Village footpaths are usually paths where people can walk or ride a bicycle or motorcycle, but not drive a vehicle. Because people use these paths so often, the grass wears down, and the path itself is mostly bare ground. On either side, the grass can be quite tall during the rainy season, while in the dry season it is normally dry and a bit bare. So, Kidega told us about these two men walking along one of these village footpaths. As they walked, they saw a man some distance ahead of them pulling a goat on a rope. The two men were friends, and one of them was a teacher. The other man looked at the teacher and said in Acholi: “Lapwony, dyel eni mwode.” Loosely translated into English, he was saying: “Teacher, this goat can be eaten.” What he meant, ho...

Last week in Kampala, while listening to Radio One FM 90’s Great Morning He/She, I caught part of a conversation in which a woman seemed to be struggling with her husband and in-laws over building a wall around a family home. I missed the beginning of the story, so I cannot claim to have grasped all the details. From the snippets I caught during the advice session, however, the woman appeared to be an engineer who offered technical advice on the construction, but whose input seemed to be disregarded. There also seemed to be an expectation that she would contribute financially to the project. What struck me was the possibility that a woman could be expected to contribute to a family project while having her professional knowledge and expertise disregarded in the decisions surrounding it. I may not have captured the full story, but that fragment and the advice from different callers were enough to get me thinking. Some listeners advised the woman to stay out of her husband’s family issue...

As a teenager, I spent a lot of time around my maternal uncles. I grew up very close to them, and in many ways, I looked up to them as the father figures in my life -something I am forever grateful for. One particular uncle had a lock-up shop in Gulu town, and in the late 1990s and early 2000s, his children and I often ran the shop during the holidays. Gulu was very different then. There were bicycles everywhere. Motorcycles were not as common as they are today, and bicycle repair was serious business. Just in front of my uncle’s lock-up shop was a group of men who repaired bicycles. I still remember one of them very well. We called him Zong. Zong handled his work with so much dedication. He had a family, took his children to school, and had a dream for them. He always told us he wanted his children to achieve more than he ever had, which I assumed meant doing more decent work or earning more than he did from his bicycle repair job. But one thing I admired about Zong and the other men ...