Bizeemu Then and Now:

 Bizeemu Then and Now:

Uganda has been here before.

In December 1980, the country stood at a crossroads, emerging from the wreckage of Idi Amin’s rule and promising itself a return to civilian governance. What followed instead was an election conducted under the shadow of soldiers, decrees, and quiet exclusions. The Uganda People’s Congress did not simply win; it presided over a process in which many of its rivals never made it to the starting line.

Candidates from opposition parties arrived at nomination centers carrying forms, letters of endorsement, and hope. Many left empty-handed. Some were told their English was insufficient. Others were informed their paperwork was incomplete. In some districts, returning officers simply refused to accept opposition nominations at all. In Tororo, seven Uganda Patriotic Movement candidates were barred without a single vote being cast. Across the country, UPC candidates were returned unopposed, not because they were universally supported, but because no one else was allowed to stand beside them.

No public announcement declared the election rigged. There was no single dramatic act. The system itself did the work quietly.

When results were finally announced, they confirmed what many already knew. The opposition protested. The Democratic Party rejected the outcome. Yoweri Museveni, whose Uganda Patriotic Movement had been largely excluded from the process, did not argue for a recount. He disappeared. Toward the bush.

That disappearance marked the birth of a five-year war and a new path to power — one forged not through ballots, but through bullets.

Nearly four decades later, Ronald Mayinja released a song titled “Bizeemu.” It was not a protest anthem in the traditional sense. It did not shout. It did not name names. Instead, it whispered. Bizeemu — things have gone wrong. The song described a country where laws exist but do not protect, where leaders speak of peace while citizens lower their voices, where truth survives best when disguised as metaphor.

The song resonated because it felt familiar.

In 1980, opposition voices were not silenced with mass arrests alone; they were suffocated through procedure. Today, the methods have evolved, but the feeling remains. Opposition rallies are blocked under the banner of public order. Candidates face arrests, travel restrictions, or endless court appearances. Legal frameworks are invoked not to expand participation, but to manage it.

Then, as now, power does not always arrive wearing boots. Sometimes it arrives holding a stamp.

Uganda’s current electoral climate carries the same tension that hung over the tally centers in 1980 — the sense that outcomes are shaped long before polling day. The language has changed. The justifications are more polished. But the effect is similar: a narrowing political space where competition is permitted only within carefully controlled limits.

Bizeemu is not a call to rebellion. It is a memory encoded in music. It reminds Ugandans that when elections lose credibility, people stop believing in ballots. In 1980, that loss of belief led to war. Today, the consequences are still unfolding — slower, quieter, but no less consequential.

History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it hums softly in the background, waiting to be recognized.

And that hum, in Uganda, still sounds like Bizeemu.

Coffee from Wild Shrub to Cultivated Crop: Memory, Ritual, and the Moral Archive of the Baganda; part one

 UGANDA LEADS AFRICAN COUNTIRIES IN COFFEE PRODUCATION" 

Coffee, before it became a drink, before it became a cash crop, before Europeans exported it by the ton, existed as something far older, quieter, and more intimate in the cultural memory of the Baganda.

It was never brewed.
It had no aroma rising from a clay pot.
It was never sipped at dawn beside a cooking fire.

Coffee did not belong to the mouth. It belonged to the hand, the oath, the threshold between conflict and reconciliation. It lived not in cups but in palms; not in markets but in moments of consequence. The bean was not consumed for pleasure. It was invoked for meaning.

To understand this earlier life of coffee is to enter a world where objects carried moral weight, where truth was not written down but enacted, and where memory was preserved not in archives but in social consequence. Coffee, in this world, functioned as a moral instrument—one that mediated disputes, sealed agreements, healed fractures, and bore witness to truth. It was not neutral. It judged.

In its earliest life, coffee existed as a wild shrub, growing at the edges of forests, along footpaths, near wetlands and transitional spaces where human settlement gave way to spirit territory. These spaces were liminal zones—places where the visible and invisible were believed to intersect. Coffee thrived there because its role was itself liminal: it stood between accusation and forgiveness, between illness and healing, between war and peace.

The Baganda did not farm coffee in this period. They recognized it. They encountered it. They gathered it deliberately, sparingly, with attention to context and timing. Selection mattered. A cracked bean was discarded. A bruised one was avoided. A seed that had fallen prematurely was considered unreliable. Coffee used for ritual had to be intact—physically whole to symbolize moral wholeness.

Disputes were inevitable. Boundary disagreements, accusations of theft, marital conflict, inheritance questions, broken promises—all surfaced within community life. What distinguished Baganda dispute resolution was not the absence of conflict but the method by which truth was pursued.

When a serious dispute arose, elders convened. These gatherings were public and slow. Each party spoke. Witnesses recalled memory rather than documents. Silence mattered. And at the center lay coffee.

The bean was placed between disputing parties. To lie in the presence of coffee was to invite misfortune. To swear falsely while holding it was to curse oneself and one’s lineage. In this way, coffee functioned as an archive—recording promises not in writing, but in memory and consequence.

Elders observed not only words but demeanor. Hesitation, trembling hands, abrupt speech—these mattered. Truth was embodied. The coffee did not force confession. It invited accountability.

Punishment, when it came, was restorative rather than retributive. Compensation restored harmony. Coffee accompanied reconciliation, chewed slowly to symbolize endurance. Peace, like bitterness, required patience.

Coffee accompanied moments of life and death. At funerals, it reminded the living that death was transition. In inheritance, it anchored memory. In accusations of witchcraft, it restrained reckless speech.

For young men, coffee marked passage into adulthood. Chewing bitterness without complaint signaled readiness for responsibility. Masculinity was discipline, not dominance.

Coffee could not be hoarded. Its power depended on circulation. It belonged to relationships, not individuals. This moral economy directly contradicted later plantation logic.

Colonialism ruptured this world. The British encountered coffee as underutilized land potential. Ritual meant inefficiency. Memory meant disorder. To cultivate coffee was to enclose it. To enclose it was to strip it of moral authority and convert it into property.

Coffee ceased to witness truth. It began to measure productivity. Quotas replaced oaths. Taxes replaced testimony. The whip replaced belief.

Yet memory endured. Elders remembered when coffee judged men without violence. They remembered when truth had weight without coercion.

This chapter recovers that lost archive. Not as nostalgia, but as history.

Before coffee was cultivated, it was trusted.
Before it was sold, it was sworn upon.
Before it was weighed, it was remembered. The wild shrub remembers.

Thank you so reaching the end.

I am Jeremy Jjemba! Chao!