When I met Orwell

COMMENT | ANDREW PI BESI | I was fifteen when my father, in a fashion typical of him, bought my brothers and me a book with an oddly unsettling title: 1984. Except for my brother Peter, it lay untouched on our bookshelf for nearly two and a half months — until Christmas came and we travelled to Rujumbura.

It was there, between the scent of eucalyptus smoke and the hum of village evenings, that I finally opened its pages.

The first line caught me at once:

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

It remains, to this day, one of the finest openings I have ever read.

But it was not the line itself — it was the world that followed. A world of thought police, of slogans masquerading as truth, of citizens taught to love their servitude. Orwell called it fiction. I have since learnt it was prophecy.

Even now, so many years later, 1984 feels uncomfortably familiar. It lives on — replayed in our cycles of political deceit and violence, in the arrogance of those who mistake loyalty for wisdom.

Whenever I read what some of our political party functionaries and acolytes write or listen to their self-assured pronouncements, I shudder. Take, for instance, Commissioners of Parliament — including the then Leader of the Opposition, Mathias Mpuuga — who rewarded themselves, ostensibly for a job well done, with nearly UGX 2 billion.

Or those within our archaic civil service who, as Claude Ake so famously put it, “see the state as a hostile force to be evaded, cheated, or defeated as circumstances permit.”

Or even those who, seeking to hide the decay of morals and the flourishing of ideological disorientation within our once-august House, use President Museveni’s disdain for the Daily Monitor as justification to curtail press coverage of our National Parliament.

But perhaps the most worrisome are the acolytes—both of the NRM-O and the National Unity Platform—who now flood our social media feeds, insulting anyone who dares to ask or to speak truth. They fail to realise that while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power.

Words offer the means to meaning — and for those who will listen — the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there? The ease with which falsehood is dressed as argument would make Orwell sigh.

These functionaries and acolytes remind me of a line about Parsons, Winston’s colleague at the Ministry of Truth.

“He was a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasm—one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended.”

Reading that as a boy, I thought Orwell was writing about a distant land. Reading it now, I sometimes wonder if he had simply seen too far into our future.

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By Andrew “Pi” Besi | On X: @BesiAndrew