Besides sparking off ‘beginnings’, imagination helps us understand the world in which we live and prevail. It gives us the competence to form abstractions and perceptions of things in our environment. It helps us name and define the world. Language (a tool we often use to name the world and communicate) is a product of human imagination. All lexical items, syntactic structures, phonological tendencies, and semantic constructs are arrived at by a community’s vigorous attempt at imagining. That is why most units of linguistic expression are very arbitrary to their referent. A word doesn’t have to look like what it labels. As such, one item or thing could be labeled by multiple codes or words. That is why different languages have different words to mean the same thing. In some amusing circumstances, a holy word in one language could be an obscenity in another.
Consider the word ‘mana’ in most Bantu speaking communities in Uganda. It refers to the female reproductive organ, a swear word that should not be spoken out loud in public, an obscenity so to speak. But in next-door Rwanda, the same word is a name for ‘God’. This very word is used in the book of Exodus in the bible to mean ‘God’s providence (food that falls from heaven)’. In many Polynesian cultures in the pacific, the word means ‘power’. Any number of cases can be adduced to illustrate this point and, as such, it is clear in our ability to experiment with language (along with with the liberty of its arbitrariness) that man’s capacity to imagine helps determine his conception of the world. Naming establishes protocols of knowledge. Knowledge leads to understanding. Understanding and knowledge give humans the power to control the world, to create a world order where the human being sits at the top of the pyramidal hierarchy of the living and ‘non-living’ things. All this process starts with an imagination without which man would be no different from other creatures languishing in the jangle.
Imagination facilitates the process of recreating the world. All innovations and changes start with imagination. Science itself (no matter how paradoxical it may sound) is the biggest beneficiary of creative imagination. The knowledge, principles, and discoveries of science that we know today are a result of the imagination of inventors like Archimedes, Newton, Copernicus, Galileo and Einstein whose minds conceived images of a scientific world order that was different from ‘what was’ and hence established the order of ‘what is’ in today’s status of knowledge. The builders of the Great Pyramid of Giza over 4,700 years ago represent an age of a people whose will to attempt the impossible was fueled by the immense power of their imagination to create, at an incredible scale, what had never been produced before. All the other wonders of the world were not just works of great architecture, engineering, and art, but products of great imagination.
Nations are also imagined communities. The designation of a people (as nationals waving the same flag) is not a mere demarcation of geographical boundaries or the preservation of a community with a shared linguistic or ethnic history. It is a vigorous (and sometimes volatile) process of imagining the collective ‘we’ under one throne. The occupants of what is known today as the United States of America feel themselves more entitled nationals to that land than Hispanics even when, originally, the same land was occupied by people that had a closer kinship to Hispanics. When Christopher Columbus arrived in the 1400s, he thought he had landed at the island of India, thus labeling the natives he found and exterminated as ‘Red Indians’. Those ‘great’ men that Americans today refer to as ‘founding fathers’ founded no territory but an imagined community of ‘new/real’ Americans.
The nation we call ‘Uganda’ is also an imagined entity in this sense. Even when this word ‘Uganda’ was coined a couple of years after the earliest Indian traders had arrived in this territory, ‘Ugandans of African descent’ still dismiss the ‘Ugandans of Indian descent’ as aliens. No wonder poor Idi Amin sent them packing in the 1970’s. Even today, it is not uncommon on the streets of Kampala to see a black boda-boda rider or taxi driver jeer at a ‘Ugandan of Indian descent’ in traffic with words like “You Muyindi, go back to your country.” But the same ‘muyindi’ looks at Uganda as his/her country, a country where his/her great grandfather was a citizen. This ‘muyindi’ is a Ugandan by birth and descent but his/her skin-color estranges him/her from the imagined community called Uganda. The recent Xenophobic attacks in South Africa are molded by what the people there imagine of what being a ‘South African’ is or isn’t. The common tendency of people in postcolonial African countries using ethnicity as a pillar of more solid identities underscores the banality of the nation since the nation’s very existence lacks the strong historical and cultural provenance that ethnic units bare in the people’s psyche. In all, the nation is just a figment of our imagination, not a concrete definition of who people are. But this imagined community (however banal) constructs and controls our lives. It determines to whom we pay taxes, which law we should obey, which emblem we should respect, which anthem we should sing, which ID or passport we should hold and which leader we should be loyal to.
In academic and political discourses, imagination sits at the heart of intellectual currency. Imagination is the well-spring of ideas and solutions to a community’s problems. We often conceptualize issues only if we can imagine them and mentally tailor their logic to a conclusion. We cannot think or argue if we cannot imagine. We cannot make plans if we cannot conceive them. Governments cannot develop nations and communities if they cannot, in the first place, imagine and determine this desired destination. What some leaders call ‘vision’ is in actual sense an ‘imagination’.
The designation of ‘Strategic Economic Development Plans’ (a common ritual in many banana republics) is an act of elitist imagination. Political contests are usually won by those who best imagine the possible process from the onset. The NRA/M did not win a war of conquest by mere luck but by imagining a process of capturing power. Football coaches cannot win matches if they cannot accurately imagine and deploy winning formulas and strategies.
In a word, imagination can move mountains. It has moved many mountains before and human beings still rely on it as a very important survival instinct. It is not a thing for the arts alone. Nevertheless, I believe it is the artist’s role to make his/her people believe in the power of imagination.