Forget Museveni, tell me about Migingo’s people

Migingo Island as it stands in the middle of Lake Victoria. FILE PHOTO | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • For a newspaper is about human beings, especially of the country in which it is based.

  • Even if an event occurs as far away from Kenya as Siberia, its importance to Kenyans should immediately be made manifest in the story carried by a Kenyan newspaper.

A news publication is a product of human beings. Indeed, under its most important headlines, a newspaper is about human beings. It is also, of course, about other animals, about plants, about certain other non-living things. Essentially, however, this is only insofar as these other things are of life-and-death importance to human beings in society.

For a newspaper is about human beings, especially of the country in which it is based. Even if an event occurs as far away from Kenya as Siberia, its importance to Kenyans should immediately be made manifest in the story carried by a Kenyan newspaper — ideally, in the headline. Of course, a newspaper also deals with animals, plants, minerals and, for that matter, even clay, pebbles and sand. But — in the last analysis — that is only insofar as every one of the earth’s non-human things is, in some way, of concern to human beings. In particular, however, where two roughly equally important possibilities are aspects of the same event, one question should immediately occur to the headline’s writer.

MOST IMPORTANT

In the newspaper sub-editor’s estimation, what was the event’s most significant aspect to the relevant human beings, especially, to those who regularly buy and read your newspaper? In a word, what should be the basis especially of the story’s “intro”, namely, of the beginning of it that should, ordinarily, be also the source, not only of the headline, but also of the story’s speed?

Such are the kinds of questions that every intelligent newspaper consumer everywhere in the human world should usually be asking from the pages of newspapers published in, for instance, Dar es Salaam, Kampala and Nairobi. For example, was it merely that “a landfall” had been made somewhere on our planet — perhaps by one of the creatures of which our world’s science fiction writers are so fond?

Wasn’t it, rather, that nearly 60 whole human beings had perished as a result of the reported “landfall”? I ask because one page of the Nation of Monday, September 17, carried the following headline: “Uganda flexes muscle in row over Migingo” (a Lake Victoria island belonging to Kenya that Uganda has perennially claimed for itself ever since a starry-eyed man called Yoweri Museveni rode roughshod to impose himself on Ugandans as their “saviour” from a monster called Idi Amin).

In that case, if you are a socially conscious newspaper reader, the question will stare at you as revoltingly as Medusa’s face. None of Africa’s national boundaries is natural. All were imposed by an extraordinarily avaricious, conceited and undemocratic class of Western Europeans given to land robbery all over the human world, especially in Africa during the 19th century.

I was working as a newspaper sub-editor and columnist in downtown Dar es Salaam when a certain Yoweri Kaguta Museveni emerged as a boisterously “revolutionary” student leader on the university campus at Ubungo. But the only aspect of him of which I have remained unaware is his constant claim nowadays to be a revolutionary. That is remarkable because a revolution is never achieved by means of the mere word “revolutionary”.

In Museveni’s early days, it was important for one to depict oneself as a revolutionary so as to appeal to young East Africans, especially at the University of Dar es Salaam, following the Arusha Declaration inspired by President Julius Nyerere.

If Mr Museveni has raised the lives of Ugandans from one level of material culture and thought to another, I am not aware of it. That the material life of a certain very tiny class has shot up meteorically is not in question. But the President’s claim would make good sense only from the mouths of neighbouring Kenya’s political class.