The need to contextualize mental health in an African setting.

There are a few mental health professionals I’ve talked to who have shared about the need to contextualize mental health in an African setting.  Most of what they study caters for a robust study of the western world. And if they ever get to this stage, I wonder if they’ll be honest enough to list “living under and depending on the African governments” as a single stress factor.

I started following up on state affairs when I was 11. The two stories I first followed religiously were the Besigye-Kyakuwa & Robinah Kiyingi’s murder. By the time I was 17, I had Beatrice Anywar and Hussein Kyanjo as my heroes. I’d started writing my views on the current affairs. Some on random pieces of paper and the others in an old diary. I’d also started digging up what happened in history. I was in Senior 6 when the 2011 elections happened. I was on tension for what the results would be. I wanted Besigye to win. I waited anxiously and even started singing some of the old political songs which one of my friends then thought were traumatic and that I should stop singing them. I think I did.

By the 2016 elections, I was about to either get half deep or fully deep into politics. Even as a Besigye supporter, I demanded for the release of Amama Mbabzi’s body guard. Red pepper published a picture they purported to be his burnt lifeless body. We went from demanding for the human being to at least give us his body. One of my mom’s former workmates was deep into NRM. She suggested that I didn’t know what I was talking about in my posts. To her, Aine was alive. I lashed out at her and had her blocked.

The election results were released a certain night in February 2016 but the silence was defeaning. I couldn’t hear anyone celebrating. Once again, the nation had been played. I felt a lump in my throat that made it almost impossible for me swallow my saliva. I shut my teary eyes because and took some deep breaths.

Life moved on but in April, Aine was shown on the news at Gen. Salim Saleh’s home. He seemed healthier. I….I couldn’t make sense of what I was looking at. Whose dead body did we see on Red pepper’s front page? What’s going on? His story on the news ended but I was still staring at the TV, stunned with disbelief. Days went by and I still couldn’t make sense of what I’d seen on the news. I think I started doubting most of what’s really happening around me because it’s like I couldn’t tell what a reality was. I washed my hands in a Potious Pilate manner. I was done with politics. I was done with getting invested in the state of affairs.

Lucky for me, I visited a friend’s home the same year and I realized how simple their life was. No mainstream media. You only see the news when you look for them. I adopted this lifestyle. It was better for me because I had started losing my head keeping up with Uganda. Bukedde’s Gataliiko Nfuufu had made it worse when they made it their business to find every battery story that happens in the day and air it all in lump sum, in one night. I slept sick and woke up scared to leave home. I left mainstream media. I left politics. I stopped following political debates because they were just noise making sessions – no changes came from them. I no longer wanted to be triggered by newspapers.

I’ve since chosen to close my eyes and ears because I know I’d be propelled to fight. Kagayi’s Ben Kiwanuka poem often brought me to tears. It’s more than half a century since he died and yet we still grapple with an unindependent judiciary. Last year I saw the High Court set to hold the 6th Benedicto Kiwanuka memorial and I wondered what about him they commemorate (or rather strive to emulate).

With unaccountable salaried officers and/or lack of resources to run them, we continue to see more systems gravitate towards being dysfunctional. We know of people who have died in accidents. Some have succumbed to certain ailments – if not at the negligence in our hospitals. Some died in war. Others died of things that would make sense and now we have started telling stories of people who were killed by rubbish. Like… someone will say that they were orphaned by garbage? Rubbish? That “my parents died of rubbish”? Not by eating it but it collapsed on “our home”? Are we a joke to these people?