The Impenetrable Forest

by Thor Hanson

  Although promising that “free and fair elections will soon be held,” Amin wasted no time entrenching himself and his allies in positions of power. As crowds filled the streets of Kampala to cheer Obote’s downfall, the executions had already begun. Hundreds of soldiers and officers from Obote’s Luo tribe were purged from the army, while prominent politicians and business leaders simply disappeared. Western countries that had backed Amin’s rise to power began withdrawing their support as tales of his eccentricities and violent inhumanity grew. Acting on instructions he claimed to receive in a dream (but more likely learned from his friend Muammar Qaddafi’s treatment of expatriate Italians in Libya), Amin expelled Uganda’s entire Asian community in 1972. He redistributed their extensive business holdings among his political and military cronies, and an already weakened economy fell into ruins. Production in key areas from sugar and soap to coffee, cooking oil, and cotton plummeted by 90 percent or more over the next several years. Isolated from the international community and threatened by growing internal opposition, Amin ruled the country by decree and force of arms alone. Daily flights from Europe brought planeloads of whiskey and expensive clothes to ensure loyalty among his troops, and they responded, sending thousands of suspected enemies, including foreigners and diplomats, into prison cells and unmarked graves.

  I thought about this dark history as Tom and I approached the Kajansi police station, a small cement-block structure at the edge of town, set back from the highway and shaded by two huge jacaranda trees. The building looked innocuous enough, but I wondered what kind of residual terror haunted its dull gray walls. Three officers in pressed khakis lounged on metal chairs by the roadside. We greeted them as we passed, and I noticed an AK-47 balanced casually against the stool between their feet. They gave us a bored wave, and one of them said something to Tom about the “muzungu.” Everybody laughed and so did I, falling back on a principle rule for travel anywhere in Africa: a policeman’s jokes are always funny.

  Inside, we waited on a wooden bench, watching a young taxi driver lodge some kind of vociferous complaint with a stone-faced officer behind the counter. He gesticulated wildly while he talked, pausing only to peer into an open ledger where the policeman took occasional notes with careful strokes of his pencil. The room was a cold, square box of scarred concrete, unpainted and smelling faintly of urine. Dim light filtered through window slits near the ceiling, and the atmosphere was oppressive and hopeless, exactly how one would picture a Ugandan police station. A heavily barred three-quarter-size doorway in the back wall led farther into the small building, and I sincerely hoped I would never find out what was on the other side.

  The officer mumbled something without looking up, and the driver nodded, suddenly humble, as if surprised by his earlier tirade. He pulled at the brim of his hat, a black baseball cap proclaiming “Bob Marley Lives,” and backed out of the room, leaving me and Tom in a silence broken only by the slow scratching of the policeman’s pencil.

  Tom had hardly uttered a word all afternoon, and I suddenly wondered how he felt about our little visit to the police. Having lived through the reigns of Amin and Obote, he had certainly lost friends to the death squads, and police stations probably held far worse connotations for him than they did for me.

  Finally, the desk officer beckoned us forward, and we stood in front of him like guilty schoolboys while Tom explained the situation. The officer listened, glanced at me with disinterest, and pulled a different ledger book from the unruly pile on the desk behind him.

  “Where are you from?” he asked in perfectly accented English, and I tried not to look startled. I told him I was from the United States.

  “Which part?”

  “Washington,” I answered. I had long ago given up on explaining the difference between my home in the Pacific Northwest and Clinton’s home in the capital, but the officer surprised me again, becoming the only person in Uganda ever to ask me, “The state or D.C.?”

  He then took down my name and Tom’s and the location of Tom’s house, entering everything slowly into his book. With that, he waved us away, and I found myself suddenly outside again, blinking in the late afternoon sunshine. The whole process had taken less than ten minutes, and I had the impression that the policeman, far from being surly and threatening, was probably one of the most professional people I’d met in Uganda.

  Still, I felt a distinct sense of anticlimax as we walked up the hill toward Annette’s place. I was relieved, certainly, but also disappointed, as if the whole experience had failed to live up to its full dramatic potential. Ugandans must have had a similar reaction in 1979, when they finally got rid of Idi Amin only to see the same combination of tyranny, atrocities, and civil war continue unabated for another seven years.

  As the 1970s drew to a close, Amin found himself leading a shattered country with a restless, increasingly disillusioned army. To keep the troops occupied and rally popular support, he tried to annex Tanzania’s sparsely populated Kagera region. When his forces swept southward, Ugandan exiles and rebel groups leaped at the opportunity to join the Tanzanians in repelling Amin’s attack. The disheartened Ugandan army retreated steadily, and within half a year, Amin had fled to Libya and victorious Tanzanian forces swept into Kampala, handing over power to a coalition of more than twenty different Ugandan rebel factions.

  The Ugandan National Liberation Front, as the union was known, had shared only one common goal: ridding the country of Idi Amin. With Amin gone, their cooperation dissolved quickly into a political struggle among the different groups, each with its own vision of how the country should be run. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Uganda (PFLU), the Uganda Patriotic Movement (UPM), the Front for National Salvation (FRONASA), the Relief Education Training Uganda Refugees Now (RETURN), the Save Uganda Movement (SUM), the Uganda Nationalist Movement (UNM) . . . the list goes on. Confusing enough in acronym form, the reconciliation of so many competing interests proved hopeless. Two presidents, Yusuf Lule and Godfrey Binaisa, served less than one year each before a rigged election in 1980 paved the way for the return of Milton Obote.

  Obote’s second term in office met with immediate armed resistance. Former defense minister Yoweri Musevini went “back to the bush,” with troops already experienced from their struggle against Amin. He was joined by former president Yusuf Lule to form the National Resistance Movement (NRM), and they began a grueling five-year guerrilla war to bring down Obote’s government. As the campaign raged on, Obote’s countermeasures grew more desperate and brutal.

  “At least with Amin, he killed only his enemies,” Tom told me once. “Obote would kill anyone.”

  Government troops slaughtered whole villages in the Luwero region northwest of Kampala, a stronghold of NRM support. In less than five years, more than three hundred thousand died, mainly innocent civilians and suspected opponents of the regime. But the NRM forces gradually gained ground, and by 1985 Musevini controlled most of western Uganda.

  A groundswell of discontent rose through the ranks of the government army, and for the second time, Milton Obote was overthrown by his top military commanders. General Tito Okello took over the office of president and immediately called for peace talks with the NRM and other warring factions. Several smaller groups joined his coalition, but a treaty with the NRM fell through, and fighting escalated along the front lines west of Kampala.

  In January 1986 the National Resistance Movement emerged victorious and installed Yoweri Musevini as the country’s eighth president. Although he came to power by force, Musevini vowed that his presidency would mark a fundamental change in the political landscape, and Uganda embarked on a decade of steady recovery.

  Musevini’s government succeeded by maintaining a delicate balance among the country’s major political factions. Instead of execution, Musevini relied on negotiation as a governing tool, and his cabinet included many rivals and former enemies. When I arrived in 1993, Uganda’s news media freely printed opposition viewpoints, and the country’s human righ
ts record had climbed from nightmarish depths to become one of the best in the region. Rapid economic growth and continued government stability gave rise to an atmosphere of tentative hope, and President Musevini was regarded as a hero by many Ugandans. Although civil unrest still marred the northern districts and critics argued for a return to multiparty politics, the lively political debates I heard among Tom’s friends all agreed on one point: the NRM government was good for Uganda.

  “Without Musevini we would still be fighting,” a munanasi regular told me once with solemn, bloodshot eyes, and everyone at the bar nodded their assent.

  Life for the average citizen was steadily improving, but the habits learned in twenty years of violent unrest still dictated the rhythms of our daily routine. At ten o’clock sharp we locked ourselves into the house, and Fox was set loose to patrol the yard. I didn’t begrudge Tom his elaborate safety precautions, particularly after the neighbor’s robbery, but it did have drawbacks. Late one night I woke again, not to the cries of kuteerateera, but to face a far more personally threatening security problem. Clenched and sweating under my mosquito net, I cursed the combination of copious pineapple wine before bedtime and a lack of indoor plumbing. With the doors tightly barred and a wild, slavering dog prowling the compound, a midnight latrine run was out of the question. I got up and paced in tight circles around the room, about to learn another critical lesson of the Peace Corps experience: “how to fashion a bedpan from local materials.”

  I pawed through everything in my backpack: Walkman—no; sandals—no; flashlight—no; aspirin bottle? Not up to the task at hand. Time was growing desperately short when my search uncovered the only possible solution.

  As part of our antimalaria precautions, the Peace Corps equipped each volunteer with a vial of potent insecticide. A mosquito net soaked in the stuff was guaranteed to kill any bug in the room, and I’d seen a single drop of it literally melt the legs off a three-inch cockroach. While the effects on a person inside the mosquito net were never explained, we were warned to keep the concentrated solution from touching our skin, and every net-washing kit came equipped with a pair of large, clear plastic dish gloves. Calling on the cold-blooded tactics I’d learned in a third-grade water balloon fight, I easily filled one of the gloves and sealed it with a rubber band. Escapees in a prison break never knew such relief, and I slept soundly for the rest of the night.

  The next morning, however, I faced an even more challenging task: subtly disposing of the evidence. At first light I sneaked outside with my makeshift bedpan and headed for the pit latrine, but even at dawn, inconspicuous muzungu is a contradiction in terms. I immediately met a group of neighborhood kids returning with water from the spring. They dropped their yellow jerricans to the ground with a slosh and crowded around me, giggling and chattering in Luganda.

  “Musuzi mutya,” I greeted them, nonchalantly hiding the glove behind my back. But it was no use; they’d seen exactly what I was carrying, and for that moment I needed no translator to understand the conversation: “Hey, look at that muzungu—he’s got pee in a glove! Har, har, har!”

  I scuttled away to the outhouse with my sloshing parcel, thinking in that instant of mortified clarity: It’s no wonder people stare at me in this country. I’m running around with a plastic glove full of urine. I may not have built any cultural bridges that day, but desperate situations call for ridiculous innovation, and I kept glove number two standing by on the bed stand, primed and ready. With luck, it would be the worst Ugandan security emergency I’d ever have to face.

  3

  The Kabaka’s Fence

  It was in those days a fine native town, extending from the Kabaka’s enclosure on the top of the hill Mengo fully a mile to the north, east and west, with well-kept roads fenced on each side with elephant grass and tidy courtyards to each enclosure….

  —John Roscoe

  from The Soul of Central Africa, 1922

  “Jjuko, we are going!” Tom’s voice echoed down the corridor as I locked my bedroom and turned to join him. For weeks he had refused to call me anything other than Jjuko, my new Baganda title. The name identified me instantly as a member of Tom’s family clan, Mborogoma, the lions, one of fifty-two totems in the tribe.

  “It is a royal clan,” he told me proudly. “From the same blood as the kabakas.”

  Passed on from a father to his children, clan bloodlines create a sense of extended family within the larger tribal unit. Each totem, from mudfish to colobus monkey, had legions of loyal members among the eight million Bagandan people. Many of their traditional functions had broken down since Obote abolished the kabaka’s court in 1966, but clans still played a vital social role for the tribe, forming a basis for everything from sports teams to arranged marriages and business deals. The cultural and political roles of Bagandan clans, however, stood to soon regain much of their former significance. In a move to bolster his popularity with several of the major tribes, Musevini had invited traditional kings to resume their thrones and ceremonial courts. The next week the Baganda would crown a new kabaka, their first in nearly thirty years, ending the longest single lapse in a line of rulers stretching back more than six centuries, the oldest continuing monarchy on the African continent.

  Tom and I met Dave Snedecker on the path, and we walked together through the wakening bustle of Kajansi on a Saturday morning. With no training sessions scheduled over the weekends, volunteers were free to relax, study, and explore the countryside around Kampala. Several times I joined the Ntales for their weekend activities, and today Tom had invited Dave and myself to help the Mborogoma clan prepare for next week’s coronation ceremony.

  Tom led us to a duka along the main road and introduced us to the proprietress, a grandmotherly woman who smiled and brought out several stools from behind her counter. We thanked her and settled down in the shade to wait.

  “The Ministry is sending a bus. They will pick us from here,” Tom said, referring to his employers at the Department of Transportation and Works. “They should come anytime, depending on the petrol.”

  We sat in silence, watching cars and lumbering old trucks throw back clouds of dust and greasy diesel smoke as they sped past. The Entebbe highway was a major thoroughfare, two lanes of blacktop crumbling away at the shoulders, a testing ground for the fleets of white Toyota vans that served as shared taxis throughout the country. Drivers raced and jockeyed along the busy route, honking and gesturing questioningly at anyone standing by the roadside. We saw dozens of people catch rides in both directions as the wait stretched into its second hour. I glanced at Dave, and he rolled his eyes with a small shrug.

  Living in Africa, I soon came to realize that impatience may be an entirely Western phenomenon. Ugandans approach time from a fundamentally different perspective, not as a commodity to be spent or wasted, but as an event that unfolds continually, regardless of circumstances. Importance is placed on whether or not something happens at all, not on the timeliness of its occurrence. Tom showed no signs of frustration as the hours slipped by. We were going to the coronation site today, an expedition that was decidedly in progress. Any amount of waiting incurred in getting there was simply a part of that event, part of the intrinsic process of happening.

  Across the street, shop owners began opening for business, unlocking the metal grates in front of their stalls and sweeping debris out into the dusty roadside with brooms of bundled spear grass. Street vendors unrolled mats directly onto the ground and set their wares out before them, a varied collection of newspapers, old magazines, matches, chewing gum, pencils, and sweets. Two men in stained white aprons struggled by with half a cow in a wheelbarrow. The freshly slaughtered meat glistened in the morning sunlight and left a trail of dark blood spots through the dirt. We heard the wet slap of a machete as they divided the haunches, then hung the best cuts on iron hooks dangling from the eaves of their shop. The ring of hammers on metal announced tinkers at work in the scrap yard, repairing bicycles, mending pots, and shaping oil lamps from discarde
d cans. I watched one man weld an unfathomable series of rods onto a sheet of pig iron, squinting down at his work without any kind of a face shield or even a pair of sunglasses. Some instinctive alarm in my mind linked welding flames with solar eclipses and waragi as a potential source of blindness, and I tried to look away. But like a moth to a lightbulb, my gaze crept back to that bright blue flare again and again as the hours dragged by, until the glance, the flame, and the turning away became my only markers for the passage of time.

  Suddenly, Tom stood up and peered down the road. An ancient Mercedes bus careened into view and clattered to a halt before us in a plume of diesel smoke. Rust showed in patches through the cracked blue paint, but the words “Ministry of Works and Transport” were clearly visible. Our ride had arrived.

  Less than twenty miles separated us from our destination, but the trip took nearly two hours. We detoured through countless back-road trading centers, stopping to pick up dozens of Tom’s coworkers from the Ministry. The occasion was obviously a major event, and many people were dressed in their traditional best, the women in bright satiny gowns called gomas, and the men decked out in long white smocks. Known as kanjus, the smocks had been worn for centuries, but were adapted in colonial times with the addition of navy blue blazers, giving men the aspect of students at some kind of Arabic/New England preparatory school.

  Everyone joked and laughed as the bus rattled on, passing bottles of soda and a calabash of sour banana beer. The festive mood faltered only once, when the driver tried to collect money for fuel. People shouted him down angrily, and one man threatened to beat him. He skulked back to the front of the bus and drove on with the simple warning that he might not have enough gas to come pick us up.