Cowism and Umoja: Choosing between two hard ideologies for the EAC

BY GEORGE KAGAME

Forty years ago or some, Tanzania established itself as a country of umoja, meaning unity. Umoja was also a popular brand of rubber slip on sandals, we called them Sapatu and in Rwanda they were known as Kama'mbiri.

Sapatu was a measure of pride in East Africa in the 80s, in some communities the thing was worn strictly indoors, as it was considered distasteful to walk about in "things of the bathroom outside the house."  In this community the wearer afforded normals shoes so as to render the sapatu an exclusively indoor attire, like an under pant. It was considered shameful to wear sapatu in public in some areas.

While in other communities,  the sandals were 'sunday' shoes, the other days of the week were spent thumping the earth bare foot, most times in scorching heat. Thank God it was not winter.  A picture of a kid wearing a pair of Umoja, and a smiling face smeared with vaseline jelly is a monument in my home town of Busunju todate.

Tanzania strictly and officially practiced Umoja both as a popular footwear as well as a political ideology but somewhere in the late 1990s something went wrong, socialism aka Umoja alias Ujaama was abolished.But while Umoja was successful in Tanzania, (they never had tribal wars, spoke a local national language that is soon becoming the official language of Africa and had a stable government on top of a coastal city, those bastards!!), Tanzania really was not much different from other Umoja adherents in its footwear reincarnation.

As a result of the success of Umoja in later years I shared a room at university with a Tanzanian journalist currently reporting for The Daily News. As would happen in our universities, each country had a group that brought together students from one country into a single association, this association participated in drama and theatre performances representing their countries at cultural galas. Rwanda was a leading contender in most of these cultural galas.

After one performance by a Rwandan dance troupe, the UN as the Tanzanian journalist who traced his lineage to Rwanda called himself,  said his country had only learnt about socialism in textbooks while Rwanda had in it their DNA and dances, he found it particularly hilarious that the dances resembled the movement of cows.

Then we would speak of people doing 'good things in the world', when we talked of vegetarians he said Rwandans care for the environment, thats why they dance like cows! "We have also learnt this by textbook," he would say. The cow was important in Rwanda that the business of eating meat was despised by the 'highly cultured' of the day.

A cow would be left to age gracefully and if seen to be incapable of living anymore it would be bartered for beans and sweet potatoes by neighbouring crop farmers. As a monument to the cow, the Kinyarwanda dance was crafted to actually resemble the movement and make up of the cow in the community. The UN said Rwanda practiced Cowism. Before Send A Heifer and Land O' Lakes thought about it, "they also learnt it from the textbooks," he said.

It is ironic that the cow, the way we know it in East Africa, has defined the story of Rwanda. The country is small but perhaps because on large parts of all its comprising hills,  a cattle ranch could coexist amidst crop farming ranches. Crop and animal have been central in the scope of the story. Sometimes and in foresight, the interest of the two could  override each other, but largely the two got along quite well. Someone later broadened the scope of "got along quite well" or simply changed its meaning and then things got of of order.

The business of the cow and its importance was in its recent replenishment officially a program at the current Ministry of Agriculture. It goes under the auspices of Girinka. Among its tenets is that each household with a given income capacity was given a cow as income support  for families, but with immediate and urgent emphasis to those in abject poverty. At the time of the cow story getting to the newspapers, the cow givers had 'dished' the cows to people who were relatively well to do and could afford their own cows after-all.

The recent cow story comes just before the report on the land squabbles in the Eastern Province shows up in your face.

If you are not familiar with the land, note that, in the Eastern province it took President Paul Kagame’s personal intervention in resolving matters connected to unequal distribution of land.

In large parts of the province, senior security officials had acquired large portions of land making many peasants landless and reducing them to squatters. Currently there are, according to the ministry of lands, 7.5 million plots of land in the country serving a population expected to be above 10 million now.

Cowism has its dangers, as seen with Girinka just as are many its benevolence targets; "a chosen group of one.."  And if you think Land and cow was a mess, read about the scholarship loans and how they are managed. One highly placed journalist at the Focus wrote: " Numerous allegations are that whoever gets loans from SFAR do so only a) after lengthy periods of pleading and begging, b) if you are his personal friend and c) if you are one of his girlfriends."