At the beginning of this year, I was going through a box with stuff from my high school days - 20 years ago. I can across a book where I had written several poems that I loved. Somewhere in the middle was written the poem 'IF' by Rudyard Kipling. It is a poem about character, steadiness, restraint and becoming a certain kind of person in a complicated world. Back then, I admired and tried to be the kind of person that Kipling hoped his son would be. For about a week now, I have been thinking a lot about this poem in a practical way as a measuring stick. Well, I am not necessarily measuring myself against it exactly, but measuring the space between what it asks of us and what I see around me.
Some mornings on my run, I pass through a market where a woman sells fruits and vegetables and prepares fired cassava for commuters' breakfast. She is always there early and arranges her tomatoes carefully. She greets people softly and will sometimes give a school kid a stick of fried cassava without being asked. Sometimes she is bargaining with customers especially during the dry season when vegetables are more expensive, and very often I have seen she looks really tired.
Nothing about this is extraordinary and yet everything about it feels important. The poem IF is not about grand moments of heroism and boasts of triumph. It is about ordinary moments of honesty, endurance and peace. It talks about who you are when no one is watching, and this is where I start to feel the tension.
We live in a time where shortcuts are celebrated and where loudness and the most intellectual argument wins. Today, success is increasingly defined by display rather than substance, and corruption is no longer shocking but actually expected. In Uganda corruption was once a distant monster, large and shadowy in far away offices that we would ever enter, and rooms that we would never sit in. But today the monster has been tamed. It has learnt our local languages and it walks among us, no longer faceless, but has a face and a name that looks like a neighbour and a friend. We fed the monster in the ordinary spaces through the small permissions we kept giving it. The official asking for "something small" to move or remove a file; the boss who hired his cousin instead of a qualified stranger, the student who cheats and calls it smart. None of these people woke up saying "today I will destroy my country." They wake up saying "I need to survive."
Going back to the poem, which I have read several times as I write this, it does not speak to perfect people. I speaks to pressured people. It speaks to people who are tempted, tired, angry, hungry, needy, and who are surrounded by bad examples. The poem tells them to hold the line anyway, which could be such an uncomfortable message, especially in the Ugandan context, where holding your line can make you look foolish and where integrity looks like weakness. Saying "no" in some spaces may even feel like self-sabotage.
This conflict is not only in the big spaces where billions of shillings are diverted or pocketed. It is also in small places where a supermarket cashier accidentally gives extra change and someone quickly pockets it, or at the office where a mistake is quietly hidden instead of corrected. Often in conversations, everyone complains about our leaders, and rightly so, because they are the very faces of corruption, but nobody wants to talk about personal responsibility. This makes me wonder whether the hardest part about the poem is not its idealism but its insistence on personal agency. The poem does not say "if the system is fair and good"; it says "if you can be good in an unfair, poor and corrupt system", which is harder.
Even if the poem is not African, there is something deeply African about it. Many of our traditional proverbs say similar things: A person is a person because of other people; Character is not announced, it is revealed; The way you treat what you did no earn shows who you are. These are not flashy teachings. They are in fact quite quiet. Thinking back to Ugandan behaviours like sweeping the compound in the morning, greeting elders, greeting people on the streets, returning a goat that has strayed or a chicken that has wandered too far... these are acts that shape our moral spine as Africans. Sometimes we think that our problem as Ugandans is that we we lack values. No. I believe that we have gotten tired of practicing them. Practicing values is exhausting. Practicing values requires patience in a world that moves really fast and wants things now. It requires self control or restraint in a world that rewards appetite and greed. And then when I think of the lady at the market selling her vegetables every morning, I see a quiet dignity. She is practicing values. She will ever read this blog, may never hold office, may never trend online, which brings me to one of the ideas in the poem IF that stays with me. It is the notion of steadiness. Of being able to endure praise and criticism without being destroyed by either.
This feels relevant now where we live in an age of constant performance and everyone is curating a version of themselves, branding and rebranding their name to trend. It becomes easy to start living for reaction instead of reality, irrespective of who one steps on along the way. Destroy someone's name to build yours - type thing. But character is not performance. Character is what remains when nobody is clapping, liking, reacting, retweeting. I think about how many scandals we see and how often people fall and we quickly move on. We discuss corruption as entertainment and consume dysfunction hungrily as content. How slowly we are becoming desensitised! In fact, the poem IF feels stubborn by contrast. It insists that self-mastery still matters, not because you will be rewarded, not because the world is fair but because you have to live with yourself. This to me is the most Ugandan part about this conversation. Traditionally shame was not only social. If anything it was largely internal because you carried your actions inside you and had to answer to your ancestors, to your name, to your tribe, to your lineage, in a moral sense. It was about the kind of person you were adding to your family story and to community memory.
It is easier to talk about broken systems than broken selves. It is easier to demand better leaders than to become better people. It is easier to quote poems, speeches, philosophers than to live them.
As a teenager, I used to read the poem IF like a checklist. But now I read it as direction to not be perfect, but to try to be steady, honest, patient, decent, especially when it feels pointless. Uganda is not collapsing from only the big betrayals but also from the millions of small surrenders. Likewise, we can rebuild Uganda in a similar way - small honesty, small courage, small restraint, everyday. I do not know what Uganda will look like in 50 years, but I know the kind of country I want to live in. A country where character is not old-fashioned, where people still care about being good when it is inconvenient, where integrity is not treated as weakness or naivety, where poems like IF endure because they keep asking us an uncomfortable question - not what is the world like, but who are you going to be in it. And perhaps from where I stand, that question is enough to begin with.
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