Ubuntu in Mitooma, Western Uganda — Rivalry Elsewhere
We are not claiming that everyone in Western Uganda walks in perfect harmony. No region does. Yet in places like Mitooma the fruits of a certain solidarity remain visible and stubborn. There “Mitooma People’s Development Trust SACCO (MPDT SACCO)” also known as Mitooma People’s SACCO has operated cleanly for years, refusing the familiar pattern of institutions that collect the savings of the poor, collapse overnight, and leave the treasury empty at the end of the saving cycle. That SACCO has matured into something closer to a micro-finance institution, with multiple branches serving the district and neighbouring areas. When a village child lacks school fees the community shoulders the burden. When a house falls into dilapidation the neighbours gather and rebuild. Land wrangles remain rare. The people act as one.
The same region names its children with words of blessing and mercy; “Mbabazi” and the like. Elsewhere children still receive names that carry tombs, graves, and remembered pain. These are not neutral choices. Names shape the imagination of the next generation. One tribal set leans toward hope; the other keeps trauma near the surface.
The rest of the country sometimes labels the straight-forward speech of majority Western Ugandans as arrogance. The fruits suggest otherwise. What looks like arrogance is often the residual strength of Ubuntu, the recognition that a person is a person through other persons. We do not write this to elevate one tribe above another. We write it so that every region in Uganda can examine what is good in its own inheritance and what must be laid down. Inter-tribal solidarity is not tribalism. It is the deliberate adoption of whatever makes for peace and a better life. Charity begins inside the household, moves to the neighbour, and only then travels outward. That was the Gospel sequence itself: first Jerusalem, then Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth.
Every group, every society, every nation has a mainstream and margins. The mainstream consists of those qualities, behaviours, and values the group supports and normalises. Other qualities are pushed to the periphery. The mainstream sets the tone, the communication style, and gets its preferences accepted. This is not primarily about numbers; it is about whose interests are recognised and institutionalised, who is given rank.
This dynamic is never static. Mainstreams grow only by becoming aware of their margins and changing behaviour in relationship with them. Groups and cultures grow at their edges. When a mainstream refuses this awareness, the group stagnates or dies. The paradigm does not exist so that margins can cancel the mainstream or the mainstream can permanently silence the margins. It exists to rehumanise us. It reminds us that we all play both roles at different times and in different settings. It confronts us with the truth that we are dust; finite, fallible, and interdependent. In that humility lies the possibility of genuine national unity rather than perpetual score-settling.
Western Ugandans have occupied political and economic mainstream positions for a period. They are not the first ethnic group to do so; others held similar rank in earlier eras. The point is not to fix blame or celebrate dominance. The point is that any mainstream, left unexamined, becomes clueless about the margins it creates. Cluelessness, not always malice, produces false judgments. The healthy response is neither shame and blame nor defensive denial. It is to assist the margins to speak and the mainstream to hear, so that both can move toward liberation.
This is the elusive national unity President Museveni has relentlessly sought since the 1950s, the unity that has repeatedly slipped through our fingers when politics remained trapped in tribal solidarity rather than advancing beyond it. The mainstream/margin lens offers a practical way forward: acknowledge the roles we play, refuse to cancel one another, and grow at the edges where difference meets genuine listening.
To understand why rivalry still eats at our humanity we must go back to Babel. Genesis 11 records a united humanity that said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” The tower was not merely a physical structure reaching the sky. It was a ziggurat, a staged platform whose summit was a shrine. On that height the builders intended to summon a deity, one of the “sons of God” or Watchers mentioned in Job (FYI – the oldest book in the Biblical writings), and to trade human allegiance for power and specialised giftings. The response of the Most High was judgment: confusion of language and scattering. Deuteronomy 32:8 (in the older reading preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint) states that when the Most High gave the nations their inheritance and divided humankind, He fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. Israel alone remained Yahweh’s portion.
That scattering was not random. It abandoned the nations to the rule of rebellious principalities and to the endless cycle of mimetic desire, wanting what the neighbour has, envying what the rival tribe possesses, and turning difference into hostility. The cultures that emerged carry anti-Shalom lyrics in their deepest layers. Human sacrifice, sacralised kingship that treats the ruler as a living serpent or prince of the underworld, rigid hierarchies that make some men permanent slaves of others, these patterns appear across civilisations. They are not neutral “heritage.” They are the residual grammar of the principalities.
No wonder God solemnly warned Israel when they demanded a king “like all the nations.” In 1 Samuel 8 the elders came to Samuel and said, “Now appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations.” The Lord told Samuel, “They have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them… Now then, obey their voice; only you shall solemnly warn them and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them.” God then outlined the heavy consequences: the king would take their sons for his chariots and armies, their daughters as servants, the best of their fields, vineyards and olive orchards, a tenth of their grain and flocks, and they themselves would become his slaves. “And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.” Nevertheless God gave them Saul. In doing so He allowed them to experience the very pattern of kingship that had already taken root under rulers such as Nimrod, the mighty hunter who opposed the Lord and whose kingdom was bound up with Babel kings who operated under the template of the principalities rather than under the direct rule of Yahweh. Israel’s demand was not merely political; it was a preference for the anti-Shalom order that the scattering had unleashed.
Into this fractured world the Gospel enters as undoing. Ephesians 4:8 declares that when Christ ascended on high He led captivity captive and gave gifts to men. The powers that once held the nations in thrall were publicly disarmed. The same Christ died and the temple veil was torn from top to bottom. Access to God was no longer mediated through a single ethnic priesthood or a single sacrificial system. More than that, the tearing of the veil announced a new possibility between human beings. If we cannot love the brother we see, how can we love the God we do not see? Ephesians 2 is explicit: Christ has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, creating in Himself one new humanity in place of the two, so making peace. Neither Jew nor Gentile. The old categories that kept people at war are declared obsolete.
Consider the weight of that claim. God Himself had spent a millennium asserting the distinctiveness of Israel; circumcision, dietary laws, the elaborate Day of Atonement rituals, the exclusive temple. Yet in the death and resurrection of Jesus those very customs, precious as they were, were set aside for the sake of a larger family. If God was willing to dismantle practices He Himself had commanded, how much more does He require us to lay down the anti-Shalom practices and beliefs embedded in our own cultures? The principalities that once ruled men as slaves and set tribe against tribe have no further claim. When Satan offered Jesus the kingdoms of the world, the offer was not empty. Those kingdoms had been allotted to him and to date Satan is referred to as the Prince of the Air. The Cross revoked the allotment.
Abraham’s calling already pointed toward the larger vision. His descendants would be as numerous as the stars of heaven, a humanity no longer trapped inside the boundaries that keep us in perpetual rivalry.
Christian missionaries first reached the court of Buganda in 1877 and 1879. From there the message moved westward. In Toro, Ankole and the surrounding kingdoms the Gospel took deep root and, over time, reinforced habits of mutual care that look very much like Ubuntu. African evangelists such as Apolo Kivebulaya carried the same message further west across the mountains. In other parts of the country the same messengers met death. The blood of the Uganda Martyrs and of later witnesses still speaks. Genesis 4:10 records that the blood of Abel cried out from the ground. That cry has not been silenced.
We must also speak honestly about the slave trade. It did not begin with Europeans. Across Africa, including the interlacustrine kingdoms of East Africa, people were already being captured, sold, and put to labour on farms and in households. The great pyramids and monumental structures of earlier civilisations stand as permanent witnesses to coerced human energy extracted under far smaller populations than we possess today. When the Arab traders and later the Europeans arrived, they found an existing market and amplified it. Guns were offered in exchange for captives; African rulers seized the opportunity to obtain firepower and entrench their own dominance. The trans-oceanic trade was an intensification and industrialisation of something already present, not its invention. LET THAT SIT FOR A WHILE! If you need to take a break, please do!
The old kingdom systems of Eastern Africa contained both glory and tyranny. Some of the beliefs we still hold dear amplify inequality, sacralise power, and keep the weak under the boot of the strong. Christ undoes those patterns yesterday, today, and forever. The disruption of certain royal and ritual structures was not pure loss; in places it was the necessary clearing of ground so that something closer to the one new humanity could take root.
We stand therefore at a cultural reckoning. The solidarity visible in districts such as Mitooma; exemplified by institutions like Mitooma People’s Development Trust SACCO, is not an ethnic monopoly; it is a human possibility that the Gospel confirms and enlarges. The rivalry that still poisons other relationships is not an inevitable inheritance; it is a residue of the principalities that have already been led captive. In every society the mainstream/margin dynamic operates. Westerners are not the first to occupy the centre, nor will they be the last. The healthy response is neither cancellation nor permanent entitlement. It is mutual recognition, growth at the edges, and the humility that we are all dust.
We are invited to adopt whatever is good in every region, whatever builds peace, protects the vulnerable, and treats the neighbour as family, and to lay down whatever keeps us small, suspicious, and divided. The President’s long search for national unity since the 1950s points in the same direction: beyond tribal solidarity toward a politics that advances the whole. Charity begins at home. It does not end there. The same Lord who tore the veil and created one new humanity out of Jew and Gentile is still calling us out of our smaller loyalties into the larger family whose number is like the stars. The blood that cries from the ground still waits for an answer. The only adequate answer is the deliberate, costly practice of Ubuntu that has been purified and expanded by the Cross; solidarity that no longer stops at the edge of the tribe, and a mainstream humble enough to hear its margins so that the whole nation can grow.
Read more about the author: Philip Kakungulu
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