An Interview with Kato Mukasa — Board Member, IHEU

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Was there a family background in humanism?

Mukasa: Yes, but the background was never very directly linked to humanism as I know it to day but it as more to do with awakening my critical thinking skills and increase doubt in whatever was being said by religious people. My mother was religious but my father was rather liberal. He read lot of literature on philosophy and gave me several works of Leo Tolstoy, Voltaire, works on Plato, Socrates and I found several critical novels written by Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe. What my father did was to encourage me to read, though I did not have lots of time with him growing up. The literature I read as a teen somewhat made me start questioning several things as a young person but it was my sceptical agnostic grandfather who seriously made me question all about religion. My grandfather never attended church and was too critical of religion and its leaders. By the time I joined secondary school I was questioning much about the God theories and believing more in employing my reasoning, research, and science in answering things that looked difficult to understand.

Jacobsen: How did you come to find humanism, or a humanist community? You are from Kampala, Uganda, and currently live there too.

Mukasa: I had read one book: ‘Wretched of the Earth’ in 1997 and the author talked about Humanism in the passing and when I first joined University in 1999, I attended Philosophy lectures out of curiosity and the teacher talked…