At a time when many of us have been hoarded into our
homes like unripe bananas, it would be an opportune moment to have a discussion
about privilege and its begotten child entitlement. The subject is more
apparent given that the world is afflicted by a global pandemic as World Health
Organisation puts, a ‘privileged disease’, as I sometimes refer to it.
Privileged, because it has been to apartments and palatial mansions (a rare
occurrence for pandemics) but we also know for a fact that it has sojourned in
the corridors of the Buckingham castle. But that is not a conversation for
today.
I will use a familiar tale, one that has been music to
our ears for quite some time now; it has been drummed into us. We now know it
like the back of our hands. In 1980, the current President of the country
garnered courage (he picked up the guns later) to wage war against the
government of the day. He was followed by his close friends, in-laws, kinsmen
and well wishers. From a rag-tag rebel outfit, they became an embellished army
who sustained a military offensive that unsettled the sitting government.
However, for the eagle-eyed there was something fascinating about their
organisational structure and ranks. There were fierce fighters who earned their
pips on the basis of their heroic acts in battles and these were called
loyalists. There existed another equally conspicuous group who enjoyed special
status not because of their military abilities but majorly because of their
tribal leaning. These were called royalists.
Stories abound of how time and again their Commander in Chief had to deal with various
standoffs between the loyalists and royalists. But again that is not for today.
The takeaway here is that status has a way of bestowing immeasurable leverage
over and above the others. It is this that has the metamorphic ability to sire
privilege.
In an attempt to underscore the context within which I
talk about privilege, do not only imagine a politician who is chauffeured in a
state of the art latest SUV. Consider those who are fortunate to pick their
food from freezers, those whose deliveries are made at a click of an imaginary
button or even the farmer who picks hanging fruits from their garden that sits
on hectares. Privilege is more about possession and how it is used. But it is
broader if you look at it in the context of race, of sex and gender or even
tribe as Museveni’s royalists will tell you.
To look at privilege, we need to consider the bigger
outlook that our society is. It was supposed to be organised to function
smoothly and effectively with members sharing some basic tenets but that did
not happen. Humanity was supposed to have a face whose outlook was
accommodative rather than combative but that was only a utopian setting.
But what is wrong with being privileged? What is wrong
with having the wherewithal? Absolutely nothing to start with but it can be
everything in the long run. Privilege for starters has a position of thinking
that it confines its hosts. They tend to look at the context of things quite
differently. People can be insensitive to the suffering of others because they
don’t have the imaginative ability of getting into the skin of another, to be
able to see the world through the eyes that for once are not their own. There
are people who have amassed power and with it come privilege. Their children’s
main struggle is normally over the remote control in their plush living rooms,
and many times the greatest danger they face is boredom. For others the
greatest risk their lives are facing is not being texted back. They don’t
understand that meals can sometimes be a luxury, that basic human decency, like
water and food is a consistent inconsistency for many. But the dictates of life
wouldn’t let many understand this because the only time they interact with food
is on the dining table. The food chain is what they read in academic books but
they don’t make as much meaning out of it.
So what then is the point? The point is that many
times our selfishness that is born out of privilege hinders our ability to step
in the shoes of the less privileged even for a moment. You can tweet from the
comfort of your sofas, knowing that your fridge is fully packed, calling for
the Fountain of Honour to impose a total lockdown on the country. The rest can
always find a way after all there is an imaginary threat to your existence. How
about those whose existence is being threatened on a daily by real dangers?
Harm and peril that stares them in the face and lurks around them! Of course we
would never know because they don’t have the luxury to tweet about it or be
hosted in mainstream media to air it out. But like Achebe famously said,
privilege, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a
thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.
So what should we do? Social exclusion, identity
seclusion and isolation from the social mainstream are still the dark realities
faced by individuals today. It is only when each and every individual is
liberated from the shackles of such bondage and is able to work towards full
development of his/her personality that we can call ourselves a truly free
society. We concede to the diversity and variegated hues that nature has
created but we can take steps by vanquishing the enemies of prejudice and
injustice and undoing the wrongs done so as to make way for progress and
inclusion.
*Inspired by Arinda Lillian
