The Fourth Heritage: How we Ugandans can Integrate our Tribal, Religious and Colonial Heritages.
by Emmanuel Sunlight Kirunda

Description

In the front matter of the book, Mr Kirunda gives a thrilling discussion of his tribal childhood in Uganda which covers his family, intellectual growth and personal struggles. As he puts it, his 19 years in Uganda can be summarized by three words: love, luck and books. The love part comes from the fact that even if his parents were illiterate village folks who never uttered the word "love" to him, the way Western parents do, Mr. Kirunda realizes that his parents offered him unconditional love. He strongly believes that it is that strong love from his ever-smiling father and his good-natured mother that shaped his profound love for other human beings be it friends or strangers. 

The "luck" part comes from the fact that he has always been lucky beyond his own imagination. Coming from a poor family in a small village, he writes about how so many times his life could have taken the wrong turn or his progress could have been stopped, but through sheer luck, he always ended up on the brighter side of things. For example, his going to school was influenced more by the men he befriended as a toddler than by his parents; during his education years it was his oldest sister Becca and not his parents that saw the potential in him and sacrificed so much so that he could go to the best schools in Uganda; he had missed being nominated for the scholarship that eventually brought him to the U.S, but surprisingly he was awakened the night before the interview and told that he would replace the two school nominees. 

The "books" part comes from the fact that even if his home never had books because the parents could not read or write, ever since he set eyes on his first book in the first year of primary school, he has always been in love with books. His curiosity about ideas in books inspired him to learn English and read about topics like Egyptian civilization and world geography & history at an early age.

In the first chapter, he writes about how "self knowledge is the Tree of Knowledge." According to him, "analogous to the biblical story of Adam and Eve, Ugandans' comprehensive grasp of the totality of our triple heritages is our Tree of Knowledge. The lighting flash from our self awareness will make us realize that we are naked, and the subsequent thunder will lead us to the inevitable evolutionary step: a paradigm shift in our identity and nationhood."

He goes on to discuss the most pressing need for the Ugandan people; developing intellectually and economically.  In a very sincere and powerful analysis of the developed countries of the world, Mr. Kirunda introduces a new concept, "The Heri" which he employs to explain why the Americans, Germans, Japanese and scientists are developed. For Uganda, the lack of development is caused by two main problems: a lack of "a heri" and the fact that our indigenous heritage is dominated by the religious and European heritages.  Because society has not diagnosed our problems to those two factors, all our attempted solutions since independence in 1962 have been geared towards solving the symptomatic problems like politics, poverty, wars, hunger, etc.

In the main part of the book, Mr. Kirunda introduces the thesis: The Fourth Heritage/Integrating Our Triple Heritages. With the aid of a creative model he calls the Sano Model, he defines the fourth heritage as: "Use human skeptical reasoning to guide your embrace of a tribal identity, to understand your religious faith and to choose the good while discarding the bad in the European heritage." With this new personal identity, Ugandan society can solve the problem of lack of a heri and also rescue the indigenous heritage from religious & European dominance. Furthermore, the Fourth Heritage can have four other benefits: 1) nation building, 2) indigenous heritage preservation, 3) tribal-religious harmony and 4) prevent cultural confusion.

Lastly, Mr. Kirunda writes about how The Fourth Heritage relates to morality. By using a decision tree structure, the author discusses the major moral philosophies starting with Greek classic philosophy all the way to Immanuel Kant. One bold discussion by the author is an assertion that morality does not have to have a religious basis.   He equates the modern western philosophy of Kant's categorical imperative with the tribal idea of universal justice known as 'obuntu bulama'. By adopting the idea of the Fourth Heritage, Ugandan society will be secular and will embrace moral underpinnings that uphold a universal sense of justice and the respect of each individual.

The author concludes the book by saying that he is less proud of the individual heritages of tribe, religion or colonial legacy, but more proud that he can analyze them and embrace a personal fourth heritage. The question posed to all Ugandans is, what are you proud of?