Joshua Baraka and Uganda’s intergenerational contest

Joshua Baraka

This week I listened to a YouTube recording of Joshua Baraka’s TikTok Live with singer Alexander Bagonza, better known as A Pass.

They were talking about the Ugandan music industry. Baraka was unhappy about the character of our local artistes. He said they were more interested in remaining kings in a small pond than becoming sharks that can swim in oceans.

He spoke about artistes who become famous too early and become satisfied with being recognised everywhere they go. Some begin to feel untouchable. They beat up people around them because they know their fame will protect them.

A Pass added another painful observation. Many of these artistes come from very difficult backgrounds. They know what it means to struggle, to need a chance, to have somebody open a door for you.

Yet when they finally succeed, some spend their energy making sure nobody else climbs as high. Why, he wondered, do people kick away the ladder they once used to climb? I am both a fan of Baraka and an ardent follower of his work.

I had never heard him speak so bluntly about our local industry. I can imagine he has become increasingly frustrated by this state of affairs. The more I listened, the more I realised that they were not talking only about music.

They were describing something much bigger about us. I remembered a conversation I once had downtown with a friend who wanted to open a small shop. As we moved around asking about businesses, we heard stories of traders who sometimes tried to undermine neighbours simply because they were doing well.

It did not even have to be the same business. Somebody could be selling clothes while another sold shoes, yet success next door could still become a source of suspicion and resentment. It would be easy to turn this into a moral story about bad people.

I do not think that would be fair. The small trader is often not the cause of this behaviour. He is a product of an economy where survival is hard, opportunities are few, and the margins are painfully small.

When everybody is fighting over the same little piece, another person’s success can begin to feel like your own loss. This is where the work of thinkers such as Samir Amin becomes useful.

African economies are incorporated into the global capitalist system in unequal and dependent ways. We compete within an economic order that has historically left us with less room to manoeuvre.

Under neoliberalism, the individual is often told to fight for himself, while the larger question of why there is so little to share disappears from view. So, we fight over the small piece instead of asking why the pie is so small.

Beyond Baraka’s comments, there is a political version of the same problem. Look at our politics. We have built a political culture in which those who have been around longest often become the gatekeepers of what is possible. They tell young people to wait.

They tell them they are inexperienced. They patronise them, speak for them, and sometimes treat their questions as disrespect. And when young people become too ambitious, they quickly become inconvenient.

The same generation asking musicians why they are satisfied with being kings of a small pond is beginning to ask the same question of politics: Is this all?Is this the political imagination we are expected to accept?

Is this the amount of freedom, dignity and opportunity that young Ugandans should be grateful for? Perhaps this is why ambition can be uncomfortable in Uganda. It disturbs arrangements that have become familiar.

A young artiste who wants to compete globally is told to know his place. A young professional who challenges an established order is called arrogant. The same happens when a young citizen asks difficult political questions.

But a country cannot grow if every generation is taught to stay within the limits of the previous one. This is also why Baraka’s frustration with older artists has a political meaning.

Some are holding onto a small pond because they have become powerful within it. But the young are beginning to look beyond the pond. They want to know what lies outside it. That does not mean every young person is automatically right, or that every older person is an obstacle.

It means that we seem to confuse stability and stagnation for the ultimate. We should be able to celebrate those who succeeded before us without allowing their success to become the ceiling above us.

I am not even apportioning blame. I recognise that those currently holding power may be unaware, incapable, or both. That unawareness may itself produce an incapacity to accommodate young people’s desire for larger possibilities.

But that incapacity will not stop the desire. We are heading towards an intergenerational contest. Young Ugandans like Aloikin are an example of what Baraka represents in the music industry: a generation questioning the limits imposed by those who came before it. The difference is that the gatekeepers on the political playing field have something the music industry does not: actual guns.

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The writer is a researcher with Agora Center for Research

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