Remembering the Future

Get ready to be transported to a time before colonialism and globalization disrupted the African way of life.

For more than a century, “experts” from outside of Africa – colonial rulers, aid organizations, western media and world travelers – have labeled African society “underdeveloped” and declared African culture a barrier to “modernization.” But in this book, a group of prominent Ugandan writers challenge that narrative.

In conversations with traditional healers, church leaders, farmers, urban migrants, and characters as varied as a rap artist, a film maker, a psychiatrist, and others, the authors collect tales of the tragedy and triumph, and of spiritual crises and moral victories in postcolonial Africa. But in the memories of elders, they hear echoes of a society that worked well, and they rediscover ideals that sustained African civilizations for millennia: A commitment to family, to putting the good of all ahead of self-advancement, to moral character in dealings with others, and to human freedom.

By delving into the past, these African stories offer hope of a better future – not only for Africans, but for people everywhere. Timothy Wangusa, a distinguished Ugandan novelist, poet and educator, calls this anthology of true stories, memoirs and social criticism "the most outstanding book that Uganda has yet mothered."

Christopher Conte is an American journalist, writer and editor based in Silver Spring, Maryland. After starting his career as a local and statewide reporter in Vermont, he covered budget and economic policy for Congressional Quarterly magazine and then spent 15 years as a reporter and editor for the Wall Street Journal, where he covered economics, labor, transportation and the White House before becoming an editor focusing on domestic and international affairs and writing page one columns on labor and politics. After leaving the Journal, he worked as a freelance journalist for publications including Governing Magazine and AARP; as a consultant on development and economic policy for the World Bank, International Finance Corporation, and Gateway House Global Council on International Relations, and as a researcher and writer writer for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Benton Foundation, where he specialized, respectively, in health policy and communications. Working with the International Center for Journalists and the World Association of Newspaper Editors and Publishers (WAN-IFRA), he has trained journalists in many countries -- especially Africa but also India and east Asia. He developed an abiding interest in Uganda during a three-year stint as a media trainer and consultant focusing on health issues.