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Camaraderie,
surely, where did you go?
You once sat beneath the mango tree,
your voice rising with laughter and calabashes,
your feet dusty with the same earth that named us one.
Our grandparents knew you,
not as a stranger,
not as a memory,
but as breath itself.
They say you walked with them at sunset,
shared millet and stories without counting portions,
that hunger was divided until it disappeared,
that joy multiplied until it filled the village.
Camaraderie,
where did you go?
Was it when fences began to grow taller than greetings,
when walls learned to speak louder than names,
when a neighbour became a shadow behind iron gates,
and silence replaced the knock on the door?
Tell me,
when did we stop being each other’s keepers?
Do you remember
those nights when families gathered in circles of firelight,
when elders sat steady as baobabs,
and the young leaned in to listen?
Calabashes passed from hand to hand,
local brew foaming with stories and song,
roasted meat crackling over an open flame,
its scent calling even the distant into belonging.
No one asked, “Is this mine?”,
because everything was ours.
Disputes did not sleep in bitterness;
they were summoned to the fire,
words were spoken,
truths were unearthed,
wrongs were weighed,
and hearts were mended before the embers died.
Tell me,
when did we replace the campfire with cold distance?
When did we stop sitting together
long enough to understand each other?
Camaraderie,
was it when wealth began to measure worth,
when a man’s value was counted in coins
instead of the hands he could hold?
When competition replaced compassion,
and progress forgot the people it was meant to carry?
Camaraderie,
did politics steal you?
Did you vanish
when brothers were renamed by party colours,
when tribes were sharpened into weapons,
when leaders rose higher and higher
until they could no longer hear the cries below?
Was it then
when we learned to step over one another
in the race to be seen?
Answer me this:
how did we become strangers
in homes built by our ancestors’ unity?
For once,
a child was never “someone else’s child”;
a cry from the next hut
was a call to every heart;
discipline was communal,
love was abundant,
and belonging was unquestioned.
But now,
how did we arrive here?
Where a neighbour’s suffering
is background noise,
where fear has replaced familiarity,
and suspicion has replaced solidarity?
Camaraderie,
did we abandon you,
or did you abandon us?
Because now,
a man can fall beside us,
and we scroll past his pain;
a woman can cry next door,
and we turn up the volume of our own lives.
What kind of living is this?
We have gained the world, they say,
but lost each other in the process.
So I ask again,
where did African camaraderie go?
Did it dissolve in the cities we built,
did it suffocate under ambition,
did it scatter in the winds of modernity,
forgotten in our hunger to become “more”?
Or
is it still here,
buried beneath our indifference,
waiting to be remembered?
Camaraderie,
we are calling you back.
Come back to our doorsteps,
to our conversations,
to the spaces between us that have grown too wide.
Bring back the fire,
the circle,
the shared meal,
the courage to speak and to forgive.
Teach us again
how to sit without suspicion,
how to share without counting,
how to care without condition.
Remind us
that we were never meant to walk alone.
Because we are lost,
not for lack of roads,
but for lack of each other.
Camaraderie,
if you can hear us,
come back home.
About the Writer
Evan Sande Ndahura is a Ugandan political and legal commentator, columnist, poet, and social justice advocate whose writings focus on governance, constitutionalism, democracy, and the political economy of power in Africa. He is widely published on issues of judicial accountability, electoral justice, human rights, and institutional reform, with a particular emphasis on Uganda’s political and legal systems. Ndahura writes from a Pan-African critical perspective, interrogating the failures of state institutions and the lived realities of ordinary citizens under entrenched systems of power. He believes that the liberation of Africa will occur through a mighty pen, not the gun.
