I will never forget Uganda, where forty years ago a whole generation was lost. I think of it especially now, when a new generation’s future also is at risk.
I won’t forget how I saw that earlier generation suffer while covering the war to depose the draconian despot Idi Amin. I won’t forget what I learned there about the wicked side of human nature.
Sometimes we have to remember how the other half has to live so we can remember how lucky we still are. Sometimes we have to remind ourselves never to forget the ones who aren’t.
So I will never forget the bespectacled citizens from that wartime generation who came out of the bush and surrendered to us after hiding for eight years, frightened that they would be discovered and shot because if they wore glasses, they must be educated and therefore a threat to Amin’s barbaric regime.
I will never forget the bodies of Ugandan dissidents, piled behind parliament like strings of straw.
I will never forget the rural villager who defied a death threat and trekked to Kampala on foot to find me and tell me about the fate of four European journalists with whom my camera crew and I had traveled, who had sneaked into the country by a different route than ours but were caught and executed in a village on the shore of Lake Victoria, then wrapped in banana leaves and left to rot in the East African sun.
I will never forget the gloomy cells, or the tools of torture, or the skeletons of their victims still chained to stone walls as we descended from one subterranean level to another in the prison euphemistically called the State Research Bureau, which looked on the surface like a suburban elementary school and sat not a hundred yards from Idi Amin’s antebellum-style home.
I will never forget the photos, packed in steel-grey file cabinets in a closet off his bedroom, photos of the depraved dictator standing amid lines of inmates, his face adorned with an evil smile, his arms around their shoulders where bones protruded the way we’ve seen them in images of Jews liberated from Nazi concentration camps at the end of World War II.
From pandemic to poverty to politics, things are bad here, but nothing, thank goodness, nothing like any of that.
I will never forget thinking, I will finish covering this war and, at least until the next one, go home to my sweet life, but a generation here has lost the taste of it. A generation always threatened, always deprived, always terrified, always on the brink of extinction.
Sometimes we have to remember how the other half has had to live so we can realize how lucky we still get to be.
But here’s the tragedy today: after that generation was forsaken more than forty years ago, another— Uganda’s children— is being forsaken again. In ways that our children’s generation on this side of the world isn’t.
In a story yesterday titled “Uganda Reopens Schools After World’s Longest Covid Shutdown,” The New York Times ran a despairing report about what the world’s longest shutdown, of 22 unbroken months, has meant to today’s generation of more than ten million school-age children.
Start with this: educators predict that despite the restart of its schools, as many as a third of Uganda’s students may not go back. The government’s Ministry of Education says that after two years of the shutdown, “There’s a percentage of our children who have gotten pregnant, the young boys have gotten into the moneymaking economy, and others have gotten into things.”
Those “things” probably can’t be good.
What’s more, when the shutdown started, educators offered remote learning through TV, radio, and the internet. That might work for students who have TVs, radios, or the internet, but in a poor country that has suffered through countless crises, many don’t. Many don’t even have electricity.
Making matters worse, even where students have had access, many don’t have parents with any meaningful measure of education themselves to help their children navigate through remote learning. Shades of South Africa, where I once asked the Minister of Education why students’ achievement levels were still low long after the end of apartheid. She said it’ll take a generation to make progress, because since their parents had no meaningful schooling, they don’t know how to motivate their kids or, in many cases, even understand why they should.
Another generation, now in Uganda, lost.
The Times story tells of two students. 15-year-old Kauthara Shadiah Nabasitu wanted to go on to high school, which is impressive in a country where compulsory education ends at the age of 13. She told The Times, “I am a person who wants to study.” But the pandemic dashed that dream. In a nation where most people earn less than $10 a day, she had to go to work when school shut down to help support her low-income family, whose already meager earnings had taken an irredeemable hit. She set herself up on the streets, braiding hair and selling juice. There she will likely stay.
The other is David Atwiine, also 15. He too turned to the streets, selling masks to make what money he could, which comes to about $5 a day. He has a measure of optimism that Kauthara doesn’t have: “I must return to school and study.”
But other calamities conspire against him. The government says that in its nation of 45-million people, more than 3,500 elementary schools and more than 800 high schools are likely to remain closed permanently. Some have been repurposed for housing, others no longer have the funding to reopen. On top of that, many teachers who resorted two years ago to other ways to make a living are gone for good
In one of Africa’s first-ever countries to offer free elementary education a quarter century ago, which materially multiplied the number of children in school, there is little reason to hope that for this generation, the trend will continue. After two irretrievable years, some students will never go back, and some who do will never catch up. The leader of a Ugandan education non-profit says with no trace of hyperbole, “We may have lost a generation.”
Sometimes we have to remember how the other half lives so we can remember how lucky we still are. Things are bad here, but nothing, thank goodness, nothing like that.
For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Some of his writing also appears on a website he co-founded, BoomerCafe.com.
Good stuff, and always timely. The median age in Uganda is 16.7. This means half the population is that age or younger, and, inferentially, only around 25 people per 1,000 are older than age 65. Ugandans face many problems, but with that demographic, COVID probably doesn’t make their Top-10 list. The citizens of Third World countries tend to be young in age and thus less vulnerable to COVID, yet, due to weak social safety-nets, they are extremely vulnerable to lockdowns.
Important reminder, powerfully told. Thank you for your perspective. I’d heard an NPR interview with an educator in Kampala yesterday, but her only context was government overreach viz. COVID. Thank you, Greg