For those of you who missed the golden age of letter writing, take heart: The good old days are back.

If you never saw the light blue aerogramme form that doubled as paper and envelope to carry light airmail, never used post cards with beautiful pictures of wildlife and foreign cities, do not feel left out.

Uganda’s grand old men must have been missing the letters they wrote to girlfriends back in the 1950s and 60s and are reviving the art of letter writing.

Here is a quick summary for those raised in today’s artless, uncultured age of e-mail and sms.

Letter writing was a crucial aspect of secondary school life. It was a group activity, where a boy who had spotted a girl in another boarding school would sit down with his consultants to compose the most convincing missive to her.

On receiving it, the girl would assemble her team of confidants to study the letter word by word, arrive at a decision and then compose a response.

Big dictionaries were indispensable tools for these letter-writing committees. In half of the cases, the girls’ committee would return a negative verdict. A brief rejection could be sent, or they could choose to ignore the letter altogether.

If the boy persisted, a longer, angrier reaction and request not to be bothered again would result. The jilted boy could choose to recruit the nastiest letter writer to craft a counter response.

But if the “application” got a favourable response, a flurry of passionate correspondence would result. Airmail forms with flowery designs would be used. At lower ages, the writers even enclosed dried flower petals in the letters, scented the envelopes with powder, drew hearts pierced with arrows — and so on.

I think it is Bidandi Ssali, the longest serving local government minister, who fell out with the system 10 years ago, who is to blame or be credited for the return of the letter writing culture.

A man of peace, Bidandi has been writing letters to his former boss the president on almost every important issue of public concern where others have been mobilising riots that often turn bloody.

Getting no response from the president, Bidandi even wrote to the president’s son at one time. Many young digital age politicians are unimpressed with Bidandi’s letter-writing passion.

The writing bug has of late bitten military generals too. One even handwrote his missive to fellow leaders and hand-delivered it to the media.

Another general wrote a powerful missive suggesting how to deal with the rampant corruption. For his part, President Museveni recently wrote responses to his top opponent Kizza Besigye. So passionate was the president’s response that it had to be broken into two parts, to deal with what he called “Besigye’s lies.”

I think these missives flying between the big men are a good sign. Like some extreme cases of yesteryear’s teenagers when a boy’s “application” got pinned on the noticeboard of the girls’ school, today the leaders are publishing the letters telling off their opponents in the press.

There was a time when they tackled their differences using bullets, arrests, teargas. Let us rejoice that now they put their disagreements in letter form. The good old days could be coming back after all.

Joachim Buwembo is a Knight International fellow for development journalism. E-mail: [email protected]