I once spent a difficult few hours stuck inside a car with a racist for a companion, way back in the early 1990s, on a journey upcountry for some filming assignment.

This man was from northern Uganda, but having spent many years in the south, during which time he had learned to speak Luganda, he saw himself as something of an expert on Baganda people’s “strangeness.”

He had sustained quite a tirade for some time on this matter. Having first explained how Baganda had only themselves to blame for being massacred during the 1981-1986 war since they “would not tell our soldiers where the rebels were, and yet some soldiers had just seen their colleagues get killed,” he eventually turned to the subject of counting in Luganda, to drive his point home.

As I was the only non-northerner on the crew, and he had chosen to make this presentation in English, I naturally assumed I was the intended audience for this analysis.

My colleague was particularly irked by what he saw as “stupidity” in the way very large numbers are named by putting a diminutive affix in front of the word for a smaller multiple of the number.

It was bad enough, he ranted, that the Baganda will take the number eight (“munaana”) for example, and call eight hundred “lu-naana”, and eight thousand “ka-naana”, since a “lu” implies something slender and a “ka” means something smaller (The Maasai equivalent for “ka”, for example would be “lai”).

This only got worse for him when Baganda then take other words that are not even original numbers, and then add the same affixes. He was particularly vexed that the word for one million also began with a “ka.” “Now, what kind of people are these?” he demanded to know.

Given the length of the trip, I had plenty of time to think about all this. It seemed to me that the language was actually making a more profound statement.

Conceptually, the number One should be seen as greater than any other number, given how we mentally link it to the most significant things in our thinking. We talk of “one and only” loves; one God (sometimes referred to as The One); doing things with “one heart”; and so on.

All other numbers need the existence of one in order to exist, but one itself needs no other such number. A “million,” for example, is actually a million ones. One is the native, the indigene, among all the other numbers.

It seemed to me that perhaps what the language was doing was recognising that all numbers after one, being subservient to it, are also smaller in significance, no matter how physically greater they may be in size.

This encounter returned to my mind upon reading news reports on the latest piece of Uganda government legislation concerning the contentious question of how our oil industry will be managed.

In essence, through the new law, passed just last month, government finally makes accommodation for landowners and “kingdoms” who are allocated 6 per cent and 1 per cent respectively of future oil revenues.

This is not to say that the share-out is necessarily seen as fair by all concerned, but at least the oil-endowed Kingdom of Bunyoro now has a clearer idea of what the central government thinks about its original demand for 12 per cent, or even of the Buganda Kingdom’s view that the oilfields belong to whatever resident native sits on top of them, and it is the government that should receiving a minority share.

In this situation, one is indeed a huge number. Not in terms of the percentage, but rather in terms of how it represents the failure of the European-planted state of Uganda to kill the native argument, even after 90 years of trying. An important principle has been unwittingly conceded.

This is not the first anti-native deployment of a 1 per cent. During the post-war, heavily donor-dependent reviewing of aspects of our legal codes, a leading judge railed against Uganda’s various native inheritance systems that had somehow found their way into family law and proudly described his role, as part of the government team, in extinguishing any role such nativism had been playing in cases of estates for which the deceased had left no will.

Much as the lawman expressed satisfaction that the heir system had been demoted to essentially a quaint cultural practice, he nevertheless grumbled that some die-hards had successfully insisted on a token recognition of the “cultural” heir being codified into the new law.

This was set at a figure of 1 per cent of the inherited estate.

Back in the car, I considered offering my philosophical musings on the mysteries of native counting. However, my experiences even by then, had taught me that the average African mission-school product often becomes extremely hostile when presented with the possibility of a knowledge system outside what the nuns had drummed into their heads.

The first (that number again) unwritten rule of documentary field assignments being “Don’t upset the camera operator,” I opted for silence.

By invoking a figure of 1 per cent, the neo-colony again hopes to radically diminish something it has failed to make invisible. But the act of allocating any percentage shows that, just like the number one itself, the native issue may look like a small thing, but is in fact as big as a One.