It's good to be free. Of course, it is hard to claim it isn't without seeming contrarian just for the sake of it. On that, almost everyone agrees. What does being free mean in practical terms, though? That's where it gets tricky and the answers diverge, depending on who you're asking and where their life is lived. The concept provokes varying pictures in our minds, based on our interaction with it.
Freedom is like good food. If you have a taste of it and it proves delightful, you develop a taste for it. If you consume a cheap imitation of it and it underwhelms/repulses you, you develop a misinformed aversion to it. And If you've never known and tasted an unadulterated piece of it, you won't even know of your need of its true form. Still, you can be assured that everyone everywhere in the world has been promised a variant of it. Everywhere, including Uganda of course.
For sure, Ugandans are not a monolith operating in singularity of thought. Neither is freedom one huge indivisible idea. It takes on life in different lived contexts in the form of freedoms, i.e., freedom of speech, freedom of thought & conscience e.t.c. As to if Ugandans have a taste for it can therefore be determined by their attitudes towards its forms and their advancers or inhibitors. Given the inevitable diversity of sentiments in a national setting, said attitudes are best addressed when they're voiced, as opposed to generalization without context.
On the need for context, take freedom of speech for instance. "There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech." The preceding is a statement that's been parroted quite a bit lately in Ugandan public discourse spaces on X (formerly Twitter). It's been deployed as a comeback to speech advocacy posts by Public Square, and even recently towards our team lead Anthony Natif in his defence of Motiv Kasaga's liberty of expression. For one, it's unarguably an own-goal to quote Idi Amin as some kind of authority on the subject. But more than that, to imply a punitive measure against an action is to functionally prohibit it.
It's not a good look to be apologists for prohibitions of freedoms. Going beyond looks, it exposes a lack of a taste for freedom. The same plague is exposed when the freedom of assembly is impeded based on a prejudice about the outward appearance (class signifiers) of the crowd. It's also evident when public leaders and hordes on social media celebrate legislations that necessitate the breach of privacy, simply because it avails a chance to apprehend practitioners of consensual acts they deem to be repulsive.
This all but shows that freedom isn't tasty, figuratively, to holders of said attitudes in as far as the mentioned instances are concerned. And yet in each of those instances, it's not implausible that holders of such attitudes can find themselves on the receiving end of these breaches of freedom. In other words, there is a foresightedness to having a taste for freedom.
With this foresight in mind, it is a noble attitude to think of freedom generationally, in contrast to merely a situational necessity. In this regard, there are measures freedom-loving/freedom-curious Ugandans can personally or collectively take towards cultivating a taste for freedom in their spheres of influence. We will explore two kinds. In both, the key concept is to grant people a taste of freedom, so that they gain a taste for it.
It starts with the formative years. Right from school, the education we offer learners should embolden expression and not stifle it. Educators should desist from branding verbally inquisitive learners as arrogant. Instead, they should teach them to express curiosity with emotional intelligence. Teenage learners are not to be herded with punitive threats like directionless livestock for doing so infantilizes them & dulls their proactivity.
Teachers should nurture learners' agency by explaining the rationale behind instructions & not normalizing sights of institutionalized violence through corporal punishment.
The second kind of measures are in the realm of art. The operating principle here is that one can only give what they have. Art can only offer a taste of freedom if its crafter has a taste for it. Such art
is most effective when it isn't untactfully preachy, whether it be visual, musical or literary. For by its very nature, freedom is more apparent in a descriptive medium than a prescriptive one. With such tact, freedom-loving artists can benefit from forming cross-disciplinary clusters and offering coordinated visibility to censored experiences. A medium like literary art would enjoy the extra tool of allegory to bypass any prevailing censorious policies of the powers that be.
More can be said about art in this respect. But the same is even truer for many other potential ways of instilling a taste for freedom that weren't covered in this piece. The two mentioned ones, though, prompt the question of influence. How can one be practical about using education or art if they are neither influential in any curriculum-drafting body nor on the art scene of any discipline? But for one, simply being an artist or an educator is enough positioning to action these recommendations. But even if you're neither in a vocational sense, you can be either of them in a functional sense. That is to say every parent is an educator and every art benefactor is a source of artistry. Therefore, whether by vocation or only in function, all freedom-loving Ugandans can be agents of a taste for freedom in their spheres of influence.
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