The author of this book asks a sincere and unsettling question: Why does religious strife persist when so many belief systems appear to gesture toward the same underlying truths—only clothed in different names, languages, and symbols?
A partial answer lies in how human systems preserve themselves. Tribes and creeds rarely wander beyond what is admissible to their high priests. To stray too far is heresy; and heresy, historically, has implied crime and punishment. Engineers would recognize such arrangements as local minima—stable basins that conserve energy by discouraging exploration. They are efficient, coherent, and ultimately fragile. Over time, they grow defensive. There is no further descent or ascent—only preservation.
Restlessness, then, becomes the exception rather than the rule.
The wazungu—that famously unsettled people—were never content with equilibrium. Where Europe once declared non plus ultra, it later rechristened the world plus ultra. The globe itself became proof that wandering without permission was possible.
This book is written in that same spirit. It is the voice of a lay wanderer—curious, reflective, uncredentialed, and unafraid to move across the terrain of human life without formal boundaries. At fifty years of age and twenty years into marriage, the author is not done wandering. What he offers here are not conclusions, but returns: aphorisms, reflections, provisional landings.
The Basoga say:
Kutambula kubona.
Kwira kuwaya.
Wandering is seeing.
Returning is sharing.
This book is a return.
The wanderer has clearly traveled far through Western thought—through the Stoics, the Enlightenment, the scientific temperament, and the anxieties of modernity. That journey has shaped his questions, his metaphors, and his voice.
And yet a gentle tension lingers: has the wandering been as extensive laterally as it has been northward?
Has there been sustained listening with African elders—custodians of oral archives whose wisdom predates print, whose philosophies were never typeset but carefully transmitted through proverb, rhythm, repetition, and ritual?
If Homer and the Hebrew Bible represent the flowering of oral traditions into written canon, then Africa is not lacking philosophy. It is lacking archivists. Wisdom already encoded in language risks disappearance not because it is inferior, but because it has not yet been patiently recorded by those who inherit it.
This is not an indictment of the author’s journey. It is an invitation implicit in it. The same curiosity that led him outward—to books, lectures, and distant traditions—may yet lead him inward and sideways: to sit longer, listen more slowly, and help set the stage for cumulative memory. That, too, would be a form of wandering. And a profound form of return.
The book opens with Lao Tzu:
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
The Baganda express a similar insight:
Kamukamu, gwe muganda—one by one makes a bundle.
Different symbols. Same wisdom.
Which returns us to the author’s original question, and to the quiet convergence beneath apparent difference.
One final observation concerns form.
The table of contents suggests linear progression—chapters advancing toward resolution. Yet the book itself resists that architecture. Its natural unit is the maxim, not the argument; the return, not the arc.
For this reason, the text may be best approached not as something to be finished, but as something to be entered. Wisdom literature invites retrieval rather than completion. It rewards rereading, not momentum.
Ideally, this work would be read as a collection of numbered aphorisms, supported—if at all—by a light thematic index rather than a strict chapter sequence. Such an arrangement would mirror oral traditions, where knowledge is clustered cosmologically rather than marched sequentially, and where the reader enters where life places its questions.
A thematic index might include domains such as:
Form, after all, is not neutral. It teaches the reader how to read. And here, the wisdom within the book is more supple than the scaffolding that contains it.
The author does not present a system, nor does he claim final authority. What he offers instead is something rarer: an honest record of thinking in motion. He lives inside the tensions he names, and writes from within them.
That, too, is a beginning.
Kutambula kubona.
Wandering is seeing.
Kwira kuwaya.
Returning is sharing.