Undo

This is a public holiday that rather hit me when I was well working on getting to work. The process of undoing my work thoughts was a challenge and I spent about two hours wondering what to do. I listened to the 3 doors Album at the Sanfoka Internet café and by this time I had not had breakfast. When I finally decided to move home, I passed an elegant procession that was matching on Obote Avenue in Lira. Perhaps a few of our only representatives at the celebration of “our” Heroes day for several years.

 

“Patriotism: An essential factor in heroism,” the banners the school children held read.

 

The rallying call was being made and I well, wanted to savour the lost feeling of matching to the legendary band notes the police band was belting out. I can innocently claim I didn’t know which hero’s glory we are heralding but I guess each person apart from the public servants had a hero in their lives they were swinging their hands and legs for.

 

So I followed the procession for the whole length of the Avenue. Next to the school children, the women from the various institutions were the happiest lot, matching in a kind of care free dancing walk. Patriotism, I thought, is it not lost in history lessons and a few songs I had heard lined in my music library?

 

These women and children are all dancing/matching for the mere obligation of being in an institution that has to take part. For the students, it was the only way to keep out of the confines of school today, meet the opposite sex and perhaps escape for a few minutes to shop in town. For the women, they had to attend because the men have not shown any commitment to appear...for every group of adult women there was one man.

 

One woman I talked to said her heroes included Namaganda, the girl who died saving her friends in a school fire, Jesus, the people who have tirelessly made to bring peace to the northern Uganda, her sister who held household as head of family when their parents died.

 

Many other people didn’t know much about heroes and needed some few minutes to summon them into their minds. This is what actually also happened to me when one of the people I was talking to turned around and asked for my heroes. I wondered to myself which hero I would be matching for and it seemed I was quite out of it…I almost mentioned film actors like one of the students I talked to. Then I thought, who exactly are the heroes…are they the ordinary people that pull you out of a fix? Are they the friends that buy you beer on some terrace in the city centre? Are they the people that advice you on how you should mend that relationship with the girl who has thrown you out or is it the people who decide what road should come to your village?

 

The illusion of patriotism is further lost in the lack of demarcation between the NRA heroes and other national heroes. At some point it seems the NRA is asking everyone to celebrate their heroes primarily. What markedly points this is the overall arrangement; the speeches are all pro-yellow unavoidably, the top officials, the public service has gone to great lengths to summon all department to attend without fail. There is no space for the other political parties to slip in an agenda item. The patriotism of the chosen few.

 

Can we have patriotism without heroes? Or can we have heroes without patriotism? How can we as a country share a common hero? Should we be patriotic to notice many of the country’s heroes? We need to set down a database of our heroes and perhaps even build a monument with their names inscribed onto it. The real heroes and the real slim…

 

Of course, my real heroes are these guys who make music that clears my mind from the dark it tends to wander to, the people who write the books that change my life, the beer friends who change the course of my ship for some evenings.

 

Citizen /soldier- 3 Doors Down