Step inside any packed taxi near Jinja Road in Kampala, and you will hear a massive shift in how people talk. A youthful conductor casually lets out a string of swear words, and nobody blinks. Nearby, a woman in her mid-40s laughs while repeating more or less similar words into her phone.
In today’s Uganda, vulgar language is no longer just used to shock people; it has become everyday punctuation, social armor, and normal speech.
From chaotic taxi parks to viral videos on TikTok, profanity has suddenly become the new national dialect. Schoolchildren, corporate workers, boda boda riders, and market vendors alike are using words that used to be strictly forbidden.
In indigenous traditions, taboo words were strictly context-bound. Expressions that were once whispered in secret such as stupid, koma…ko, and crude references to private body parts and human waste have now become ordinary punctuation, leaving older generations wondering where our good morals went.
Today, Uganda is experiencing what sociologist Erving Goffman (1956) implicitly described as an acute “context collapse.” The digital age has eroded the walls between our polished “frontstage” and private, raw “backstage,” transforming once-forbidden expressions into viral internet memes.
This acoustic shift has triggered an intense wave of moral panic.
From pulpits to public barazas and political rallies, elders point to this raw vocabulary as definitive proof of a collapsing national moral fabric. However, looking past the immediate offense reveals a completely different story. The rise of vulgarity is not the root cause of moral decay; it is a loud, structural symptom of a society in transition.
As French philosopher Michel Foucault (1970) observed, language is never neutral. Vulgarity is an arena of power. Young and middle-aged people are navigating a hyper-competitive landscape defined by staggering youth unemployment and political marginalization. To them, choosing vulgarity is a deliberate choice to break the rules of the powerful.
As Stella Nyanzi demonstrated through her “radical rudeness” poetics (2020), profanity can be a deliberate counter-discourse structural rejection of the power dynamics embedded within formal, polite speech. In context President Yoweri Museveni famously channeled this cultural logic when explaining that Westerner powers often fail to understand diplomatic politeness or quiet unhappiness unless told to “go and eat their mother’s something something.”
Conversely in Uganda, vulgarity has been converted into alternative “linguistic capital”. When some local artists defend raw lyricism, they assert that harsh words are required to describe harsh realities like poverty, unemployment, and illicit activities. To sound tough is to survive and buy peer status (and likes) where economic capital is denied.
Conclusively, the use of harsh or vulgar language is a coping mechanism for powerlessness, economic exclusion, and systemic frustration. In order to address the root causes of this trend, punitive crackdowns or forced silence will not work. The government must look past the surface level of the language and focus on structural solutions.
Language is a mirror of society. Rather than breaking the mirror, adults must listen past the swear words to understand the grievances underneath.
The post Nestor Basemera, PhD: Bye-Bye Morals, Welcome Vulgarity: Uganda’s New Normal appeared first on Watchdog Uganda.