In 2011, when I returned to Uganda after being away in Kenya for three years, I panicked; have seemed to grip y heart as pain, fear and confusion greeted me in Kampala:

I had grown to like Nairobi so the panic came partly because of leaving Kenya. In those three years, the weather, that high thin air and the gentle sun, so different from the humidity of Kampala, had given me energy I scarce could have expected.

On May 5, 2011, I packed up my things and left Nairobi for Lamu on Kenya’s North Coast for a month, planning to return to Nairobi for a week or so. I ended up staying for two months.

I had left Kampala in August 2008 somewhat brisky. Twenty nine months before that I had quit my job at this newspaper. I enjoyed writing for The EastAfrican paper — and I still do, for it permitted me to capture the emergence of the arts and culture — but felt that I had thrown myself into journalism (a mere 23 years old back in 1999) before I had fully explored what I wanted to do with my life.

The unease became unbearable when I turned 30, after seven years of “chasing stories.”

Back in the mid-2000s, Kampala was not receptive to the arts and culture. People were acquisitive — get that piece of land, roof that house, get that wife and then, do what? It was busy and yet at the same time, purposeless, no teleological finale planned after a lifetime. If you told them you couldn’t sleep at night over an unfinished poem, the look they gave you haunted you for days.

Nairobi was different. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be a writer, a filmmaker, a dramatist, poet or all at once. I met people who had mortgaged land and house so they could make a film. Nairobi was the opposite of Kampala.

I packed up my books (which were all I really owned — and yes, sold my Land Rover to boot) and headed east.

I liked Nairobi, but there were also huge chunks of it I did not. After a mere two years, the list of people I did not want to meet lengthened and I knew my time was up.

The panic was mostly from what greeted me back in Kampala. I did not run into old friends. When I did and asked about Wandegeya, Wilson Road and Nakulabye — old places we beat to a pulp and drank dry in our 20s, I got blank looks. I was told that you don’t go to such places, as if they had become dark in the soul.

Unbeknownst to me, the acquisitiveness had gained and held traction; I did not run into old friends because they all owned cars and people in cars are hard to see. They lived behind six-foot fences.

Like a plastic surgery — a boob job, a tummy tuck, a hair transplant — Kampala had become attractive but not beautiful. The streets seemed narrower, that stretch from Udyam House to Pioneer Mall the narrowest. The city was taller, very crowded.

My old friends no longer hung out in the places I last saw them. Mostly, they did not want to talk to me. They understood little of what I said. Life does not get sadder than that.

While I was away, an alien people had moved in. A completely new city had been built. There was evidence of it everywhere, in the new, great arching bypass that ran north of the city and had sprouted blocks of flats and shopping malls where bibanja holdings once tended banana plantations. There were the grand, ugly, casino-palaces of shopping malls. In Kamwokya, where once as children we played football, malls and petrol stations had been built.

It was to these new places that my circle of friends had moved. There was a new morality about town: when people worship at shopping malls, poverty becomes immoral, places that remain “old” become socially degrading.

The old places had been relegate to a soiled, desperate league. I was learning that the social horrors I once saw in Johannesburg and Sao Paolo, had taken hold in my own country. Kampala, like “rich” cities around the world, was mistaking social collapse for economic success.

The line is drawn somewhere along Duster Street; west of that is the old Uganda, still eating its old food and speaking its idioms. East of that, the new, cosmopolitan city serves everything from Dutch pastry to Chinese cuisine.

I felt betrayed. Mostly I was dislocated. I had returned for home air and food. But the people I used to know seemed ashamed that they grew up eating local greens like luwombo and nakati and malakwang. They still profess devotion to these dishes, but don’t put their money where their mouth is, which comes to the same thing.

The signal tragedy of Kampala was the proscription of Ekitobero Restaurant. For the first time in its existence, much of Kampala was no longer serving matooke!

The sense of the social cohesion I had taken for granted was gone. Permission appeared to have been granted; it was ok to live comfortably amid mass wretchedness. Poverty meant you were a sinner — it is what the new churches preached.

Our own cuisine and cultures were now eaten by the poor and taught in poor schools. People knew how to pronounce “mocha” but say Kawempe with an accent. They send their children to schools priced like dental surgery with Halloween costumes and weekend classes in ballet and piano lessons not for “knowledge,” but for social currency. They still speak despairingly of political corruption but its at a structural level, they are all practising it.

I was flabbergasted. I was enraged. How dare you, I screamed in my head. Did they simply read Song of Lawino because all who went to secondary school are obliged to?

I went down to the taxi park and to Kisenyi and to Wandegeya. Each time I did, I returned immensely sad. People I knew down there wore sadder faces. They had been left behind. Now there was a culture for the well-off, and another for the poor.

In returning to Kampala, I understood why Nairobi had taken to the arts and culture. When the economic and social system leach society of spiritual and moral function, arts and culture spring up as spiritual prosthetics. A city in which the arts and culture are booming is one hiding dark secrets.

I had seen the underbelly of Nairobi and it had frightened me. Now in Kampala, I felt cornered. Where could I go?

In every society and epoch, a discipline rises above all others as the centre for critical thinking and intellectual discussion.

In the 1990s, the mass media in East Africa were such a discipline and attracted the young, bright and energetic. But the immediate post-Cold War years were early days for the blind, brutal and pugnacious economic system that now threatens every country — wealth at the minority at the top, poverty for everyone else.

This massive disparity overran the media’s capacity and defences, and in the face of social media, traditional media is rendered powerless, for traditional media long ago became part of the establishment.

It is to the culture industry that the young and determined are turning. Once overlooked and shunned, the arts and culture have emerged in society with force. The musicians still sing of love. Always will. But now, in Kampala, they are also fighting running battles with police and the law courts, taking the baton (literally) from journalists. Playwrights and actors are locked up in police cells. Poetry groups have sprouted everywhere, in many towns.

How can we explain the popularity of Anne Kansiime and Pablo but that comedy is a reminder of its exact opposite, of tragedy?

Why do groups like The Lantern Meet of Poets fill the National Theatre to the rafters? Why do people like Beverly Nambozo risk it all starting a poetry prize? In time, dramatists like Angella Emurwon and Judith Adong, writers like Moses Serubiri, Brian Bwesigye, “Xenson” Ssenkaba and Dilman Dila will move into the centre of national discussion, for the arts and culture are propagating as potent a response to social dislocation as the media once did.

Twenty years ago, when the intriguing, animated adverts (2+2 = - and so on) began to appear on television, it announced an exciting epoch dawning upon East Africa. That advert became The EastAfrican newspaper. Radio and television stations opened up everywhere.

From the mid-1990s till a few years ago, the media was the point of convergence at which social and political criticism and intellectual discussion was taking place. The media, it seemed, could “save” society.

But traditional media has taken a bad beating from which recovery may not be only slow, but may well prove impossible The threats to social cohesion and political stability now emerging from socio-economic disparities are immense; the 1:99 per cent ratio is a recipe for disaster.

When society makes this transition, the university, media and religious institutions prove insufficient remedies. A desire builds up for an institution that combines both intellectual and spiritual power to address social dislocation. The arts and culture hold that promise, but in time, will prove insufficient. You can’t sing away structural failure.

A Bobi Wine or an Eddy Kenzo may sing beautifully of ugly circumstances. But they can only emerge from a society that permits slums to sprout alongside gated communities.