Fun Fact: Mabira rainforest may be cut in the near future to make way for sugar plantations. Its dense tree population is estimated to be worth over USD$900M in carbon credits and other benefits. Fact: Cutting down the forest won't cost $900M, and preserving it won't preserve $900M of Uganda's GDP (or any other sensible metric). That $900M is a complete fiction.
Fun Fact: In a 2005 survey of thousands of adults in northern Uganda, 40% of respondants claimed to have been abducted by the LRA. 31% claimed to have had a child abducted. Fact: reintegrated abductees are given special treatment by various NGOs; so either there's an entire subculture of abductees which was hitherto unnoticed, or people have figured out a way to get free food.
Fun Fact: 80% of the LRA's recruitment is of children. Fact: um, no.
Back home, I developed a bit of a reputation for fact-gathering. If I heard a fact or question I wasn't sure of, I'd google it to find where it came from. If people sent me hoax chain-emails, I'd google them and respond with facts. The Internet is not the only source of facts, of course: libraries, school materials, personal experience, intuition, and networks of trustworthy contacts all contribute to a rather accurate view of our world. We implicitly assign our interpretation of reliability to every datum which is presented to us, thus producing in an appropriately weighted perspective of the truth.
In Uganda, it seems that truth simply does not exist. The above-mentioned Fun Facts are typical examples: read any newspaper and you'll find dozens a day. One learns to pick the more reliable newspapers and to read between the lines. And one learns that any number which is not quoted from a large, international organization is a fabrication. And even from large, international organizations, numbers should be taken with a hefty dose of salt. Personally, I have consciously given up on truth, in a sense: I know that very little of what I hear is true, and I find that a large part of the culture here is that nothing is certain. (To be honest, that's part of what makes Africa so fun.)
This inaccuracy spreads across the world. My first Fun Fact (that two million people have been displaced in northern Uganda) was pulled from Wikipedia; I have not found a source which will back it up. (It has since been removed from Wikipedia.) I can only assume the person who wrote that statistic on Wikipedia has either never been to northern Uganda, or the person has been to northern Uganda but accepted what everybody said at face value. (Hey, so did I at first.) Two million is an overenthusiastic estimate: not a fact. In reality, the statistic is closer to 1.5 or 1.6 million, though these numbers could be off by hundreds of thousands (yes: the world's best estimates of the suffering in northern Uganda are only accurate to within hundreds of thousands of people). Don't hastily blame the Wikipedia contributors for the misinformation: when it comes to the LRA, even widely recognized international organizations have published various statistics which seem to be imaginary.
Where does the misinformation originate? From everybody. For instance, since my first week in Uganda I've been asking just about everybody about the rainy season. It started as curiosity about the weather, but it ended as curiosity about misinformation. The funny thing is, for the past two months I've been told that we should be in the middle of the rainy season right now
, and that global warming has skewed the seasons drastically.
How can everybody here not know about the climate, which is completely predictable? And how can everybody blame global warming, without consulting a reliable source? Lonely Planet, for instance, has a couple of weather graphs which accurately predict that this rainy season consists of April and May: no more, no less. And sure enough: the beginning of this April marks the beginning of the rainy season, just as all impartial facts would indicate. For the past two months, everybody was misinformed, misinforming friends and acquaintances who raised the topic.
Everybody
is a perfect person to blame in Uganda, where accountability is a farce (to phrase it lightly). But blaming everybody
doesn't make any sense back home, and when I say everybody is a part of it
my readers should rightly feel insulted. So, take your pick: newspapers? radio? white people? Somebody started the trend of accusing global warming of causing an imaginary climate problem, and now everybody has jumped on the bandwagon. Who started it? Who knows? Truth does not exist in Uganda: only so-called facts
which spread like wildfire.
Anything you are told here has a very low probability of being true.
Most Ugandans I've talked with are aware of the phenomenon in general (they'll readily point it out to me when talking about differences in culture); but, hypocritically, often specific facts are notwithstanding taken at face value and perpetuated.
To summarize: here, people grant a certain amount of belief to any opinion, without due consideration of its merits. And this has a very sobering consequence: if you assert something strongly enough, your listeners will assume it is the truth.
Which brings us to my last Fun Fact. I promise not to put you through any more. I have had some readers tell me which Fun Facts have affected them the most: I am appreciative because it shows that the whole idea was worthwhile. I have seen that different readers assimilate my Fun Facts very differently. This particular Fun Fact is the one which hurts me the most; and since I doubt I can begin to explain its repercussions (or even comprehend them myself), my puny form of emphasis has been to save it for last.
Fun Fact: Kony, the leader of the LRA, is possessed by extremely powerful spirits. They grant him invincibility, precognizance, and other supernatural powers. They exclusively are responsible for the atrocities in northern Uganda.
Here in Uganda, witch doctors, possessions, exorcisms, and the paranormal are commonplace. Because when nothing is truth, everything is truth.
Prayer and superstition are used instead of medical diagnosis. For many, it is expected that one should rely on faith instead of one's self to achieve success. Poverty leads to despair except during that once-a-week song-and-dance in which churches gather what little leftover wealth their subjects have acquired. Most suffer. An inspirational minority proves that self-sufficiency is very well rewarded. And then there are those very few shrewd individuals who can control the masses with power the likes of which even Nietzsche couldn't imagine. By any standards, 9/11 is tame in comparison to the terrors in Africa.
Of the one or two thousand LRA soldiers at present, the vast majority likely commit their atrocities (which are too horrible to mention here) out of fear alone, not evil intent. Abductees become soldiers and victims observe helplessly. To most, the war is being fought in the spirit realm. They sit back and watch as their lives are destroyed beyond recognition.
And so, as promised, here is my opinion. I believe that religion has no place in education. I believe that excessive involvement of religion and spirituality in schools perpetuates crimes against humanity by needlessly instilling belief into the minds of students. Belief may be important, but it is not a part of rational thought. How can one be expected to differentiate between real and imaginary when one is taught in school to accept critical notions without adequate explanation?
I don't mean to wantonly offend my readers, so let me clarify my position. I am not condemning religion, nor am I denying the existence of the spiritual and/or supernatural. I am denying that Kony is possessed by evil spirits.
I am aware that massive quantities of children do not have access to any education whatsoever. I am focusing on the ones who do: the ones who will be more respected in the future, the ones who right now are not learning the one most important thing that schools should be teaching. All I am arguing is that people should be taught to think for themselves. Religion does not teach rational thought, and children need to learn it.
Without independent, critical reasoning, there is no end in sight. Kony is not the first person to be possessed by evil spirits
. Allegedly, one of the spirits possessing him is the same spirit that possessed his predecessor. A common view is that if Kony were to die, the spirit would simply possess somebody else and continue to wreak havoc: ironically, this is probably quite close to the truth.
There are real people dying real deaths—and living unreal lives—because too many individuals refuse to think for themselves. I have seen no shortage of strength or resolve in any of the poorer people I have met here: only a complacency which has been drilled in since birth.
And that, to me, holds more truth than any statistic.