Explainer-in-Chief

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I was talking to a friend who just moved back to Uganda after years of doing Kyeyo in the UK. This man has spent years working double shifts in the cold, wearing the same old jacket, and skipping meals just to send every pound back home. ​His younger brother picked him up from Entebbe in a very clean, luxury car. He drove him straight to a gated house in Kiwatule with a paved compound and a wall fence(kikomela). ​When my friend asked who owned the house, the brother smiled and said, “It’s mine, big brother. Thank you for always praying for me.”Webale kunsabila ​My friend wasn't jealous, but he told me his heart just sank. In London, he lives in a tiny rented room and waits for the bus in the rain. He doesn’t even own a single plot of land in Uganda. But the brother he was "helping" is living a soft life built on his sweat. ​This is the mistake many of us make abroad. We become ATM machines for people who don't see our struggle. We fund their "emergencies" while they are busy buying land and building mansions behind our backs. ​The Truth: Help your family, but don’t be the ladder that everyone else uses to climb while you stay on the ground. ​As you build for them, make sure you are building for yourself too. Don’t wait until you move back to realize you have nothing but old receipts and a tired back.🙌

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This story and headline is a perfect example of how racist politics and narratives are subtly deployed in media. Blink and you miss it. On Thursday, a man killed four children in an attack inside a nursery school in the Ugandan capital of Kampala on Thursday. It was the most horrific attack on a kindergarten school in Uganda in recent memory. The attacker “brutally stabbed and killed four juveniles,” with a knife police said. Nearly all Uganda media reports said the murderer used a knife. However, in AP’s telling, he became a “machete wielding” attacker. It doesn’t make the tragedy any less, but the the word "machete" often carries cultural baggage in Western (and sometimes global) media framing. It often evokes images of chaotic violence in tropical or African settings –think the "wild savage" trope from colonial-era storytelling –more readily than a "knife" does for similar attacks elsewhere. And thus it conjures up an image of Kampala, or Uganda for that matter, as a place with menacing “natives” walking around with deadly machetes, rather than an individual who might be been mentally ill. Surprising how strong the instinct to fall back on these tropes remains.