Write your story today

It was during my middle school (S.3 & S.4) that I did, The African Child, a novel and in fact an autobiography of, Camara Laye, in Literature, where I vowed to take my writing passion to greater heights. This was because I had harboured fears of writing after I had read other works of writers like Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Wole Soyinka, Peter Abrahams, and others where the art of creativity was exploited to full satisfaction. I wondered whether I would have the ability to maintain a flow to the end, despite the fact that the art of creativity was always tested and proved in the subject of English language where composition writing was examined. I always excelled in that paper and many other students did, but we that shared the passion of writing always failed to understand that we could get somewhere at writing, had it not been the fact that the paper lasted only 2½ hours! There is no doubt many of us could keep the pen draining itself on paper for hours as long as we maintained the same level of concentration.

The motivation first came when I read, Camara Laye’s, book. It was not like the others I had read before and it told a story I was familiar with, a story about a boy and an African boy what’s more, who carved his path in education until he finished from a typical African setting. And there we were reading the life of a boy from Guinea Conakry. And I said to myself that maybe I would start off with a story about a boy from Rwentobo, Ntungamo, in Uganda, the Pearl of Africa. I failed at this! Later in my high school (S.5 & S.6), my interest in poetry shot high and this saw me writing a few lines occasionally. Like the old times, my school mates liked my work and a few of them were inspired to start writing, and by the grace of God, one of my teachers offered to supervise the publication of an anthology of poems. The preface of this anthology, yet to be published as, Songs of The Horizon, partly reads thus:

Uganda publishes about 64 new book titles a year. America publishes about 150,000, China about 120,000 and Russia about 70,000.

These figures are so amusing and alarming especially if looked at considering the future of knowledge dissemination in our country. What are we Ugandans and Africans up to? We must appreciate that our old ways of passing on knowledge and information to the next generations have been biased and alienated and as so, we the young generation of today barely know of our history. We know not our old proverbs and myths and legends and fireside sessions. How then shall we pass on information to our children? We by virtue of having been colonised and culturally alienated, ought to embrace the skill of writing that now has formed the basis of formality and credibility of information. The figures above imply that we are condemned to rely on the knowledge of the West on end if we do not publish enough to rely on our own information. When shall we write a paper and out of the citations made, three quarters or otherwise more than that, is Ugandan or African? It is more appalling that we quote European writers even on African topics like our history, political organisations and many others. Is this not another point of neo-colonialism?

It is my prayer that we overturn these figures and start writing. For starters, if you cannot write about anything, then tell your story like Camara Laye, does or tell a story as simple as, Arthur Gakwandi, demonstrates in his, Kosiya Kifeefe. I’m to start my story, and so are you. Let’s together run the campaign: Write your story today, as Uganda, and as Africa!