by Don McCullin
I was marched downstairs again. When I asked where they were taking me, they said to the police station. I clung to the hope that I was just being deported.
The police station was a madhouse. Everyone, black or white, who might conceivably be opposed to Amin had been rounded up and brought in. The crush forced us to sit on each other’s knees. I spotted John Fairhall of the Guardian in the throng, as well as someone from Reuters whom I knew by sight and the man from the Telegraph. Beside me was a young German boy who had lived in Uganda for some time, and who spoke Swahili. Suddenly he started crying. I asked what the trouble was and tried to comfort him.
‘I’ve just heard one of the guards saying we are all being sent to Makindye. It’s a terrible place,’ he said. ‘No one comes out of there alive.’
‘No, I’m sure that’s not right,’ I said.
A man in a short jacket, who I later discovered was also a member of Amin’s secret police, was saying loudly in English—indicating me and Fairhall and the others—‘Who are these people?’ The desk sergeant told him that we were journalists and the man registered the word with distaste. ‘Journalists,’ he repeated. ‘They are dirty people.’
We of the press were weeded out and taken to a long Land Rover. The man I had seen being pushed to the floor of the truck outside the Apollo was also there. They bellowed at us to get into the vehicle. After a push and a shove, and a few punches thrown, we were heaped in on one another, all tangled up with our baggage on the Land Rover floor. It screeched away angrily in a leftward direction. I relinquished the last hope that we were going to the airport.
We disembarked in a yard with verandahs giving on to it. Piled outside the gate was a large stack of empty beer cans—not a reassuring sign. Uniformed men lounged on the verandahs, tossing back cans of beer and chatting up women. As the guards yelled at us to get out of the Land Rover, these men put down their cans and came loping over to us with sticks in their hands. Now the bullying tempo started to pep up.
‘Get down. Sit down. Take off your shoes and socks.’
One of our group, an ex-colonial policeman, stood straight and said, ‘I beg your pardon!’ Thump. The punch landed squarely on his chin and rocked him on his feet. ‘What the devil’s that for?’ Thump, came another. I had seen some of this sort of treatment meted out in Biafra and the Congo, though not to whites. My shoes and socks were off in a flash. I was beginning to feel really scared. We sat hunched in a semi-circle, almost in a foetal position, cowering under the baton blows that came raining down. I felt a boot in my back and thought, Christ, we are going to be murdered!
We were shoved into a guardroom. A heavy African body came flying through the air and crashed into our midst. It was a drunken soldier, being punished by his comrades. Later, when it was only half-light, we were taken out to a courtyard and stood against a wall. I was sure we were going to be shot. A guard with the novel experience of holding white men at gunpoint was sniggering in a way I had learned men do when they torment prisoners, before they are dispatched. I’m going to die here, I thought. This is where my life will end, in a dark and dingy African killing-house.
I waited for the rest of the firing squad to arrive, my legs barely able to hold me up. There was a lot of scuffling and running around. Other men came, and Fairhall and the Daily Telegraph man were taken away. We were just left there.
Eventually they moved me and the policeman further on. My legs didn’t feel as if they were carrying me along. I just seemed to float, as if my crushed spirit were carried on a magic carpet. Dimly in this zombie glide I heard the rattling of keys. A door opened and I saw in front of me another white man. He said genially, ‘I’m Bob Astles. Sit down. Have a drink. You look as if you need a drink.’
It was the most needed drink of my life. Later I learned that this man was of the most sinister provenance, but the sound of his voice at that time was like sweet music. Fear had soaked up every droplet of moisture in my body. I felt as if I had spent a month in the Kalahari desert.
‘You’re in a bloody dangerous place here,’ Astles said. ‘It’s really bad.’
‘Don’t tell me, don’t tell me,’ I said.
It transpired we were in the VIP wing of Makindye prison. I had no idea what was to come. I looked round a high-ceilinged room with sub-cells leading off it, fronted with bars like cages in the zoo. All the cells were fully occupied, and there were cots for the overspill. VIP privilege meant that prisoners were not locked into the cells but could move from one to another and into the small communal area.
Among a handful of white prisoners was an English schoolteacher who wore glasses and had a very nasty head wound. He had been coshed with a rifle. There were Asians and a brooding Tanzanian among the Africans. One man was locked in his cell with a stack of coffee-table books. He was said to be the richest man in Uganda, and Amin was bleeding his fortune away for privileges and ransom.
Astles was filling me in on these and other more alarming details. Fairhall and the Daily Telegraph man had almost certainly been taken to the execution block, where the sledgehammer was the favoured means of cheap and blunt dispatch. Nineteen men in succession had been battered to death, I was told, by a twentieth acting under duress, whose own head was then smashed in by the guard. Astles had grisly atrocity pictures to show around.
All this took place in another block, not far away. They could come for you just as easily here. Astles pointed to the marks of recent terrors in our block—mattresses stained with blood and scratches on the walls. While Astles told his mounting tale of horrors, the Reuters man kept trying to catch my eye.
My mind twitched with the humiliations undergone and fear of what might come. I lay in the dark on my bloodstained mattress in deep shock. Suddenly, in the stillness, I heard the rattle of rifles and then the crashing of doors. A prisoner was thrown into the outer room. There were terrible thudding sounds.
At one o’clock the rattle and crashing of arms approached again. They stopped just short of my cell. I heard howls and beating and whimpering as the Tanzanian man took a terrible pasting before he was dragged away.
‘S’all right,’ Bob Astles drawled out of the darkness. ‘He’s for the chop. Poor bastard never stood a chance anyway. They’ve broken his arms.’ He detailed the punishments inflicted on Tanzanians, which were similar to those suffered by policemen of suspect loyalty. Screams penetrated the night from somewhere outside the block.
I dozed fitfully, waiting for the crash of doors again. Humiliation and terror and despair chased each other across my brain. It was wonderful to see the dawn break, but appalling to realise you faced another day of the fear you had just gone through.
My heart thumped at another scuffling approach. The door opened to reveal two Africans holding between them a dustbin, which was steaming. Both had taken fearful beatings. One was covered in welts and bruises, the other had an eye hanging with a sack of fluid. As the jailer loomed up behind them I tried to muster some dry-mouthed spirit.
‘What have you got for us there?’ I said.
‘It’s your breakfast,’ said the jailer.
The sinister steaming substance in the dustbin turned out to be tea. Rarely has tea tasted so good. And there were hard tack biscuits to go with it. We were fortunate. Prisoners in Amin’s jails often starved to death.
As I bit into the hard tack, squatting on the floor, the Reuters man tried to raise morale with a wry smile, ‘I heard something funny in Swahili last night. The guard told the jailer that these Wa-zungi cannot run away because they had taken our shoes and socks.’ Shoeless or not, I would have run out of there barefoot and broken-legged, over a mile of burning coals and broken glass, if there had been any chance of escape.
While we washed—another VIP privilege—we were out of earshot of Astles. The Reuters man said quietly, ‘That Astles—he’s not kosher. He’s not on the side of the angels.’
Astles was one
of the most feared white men in Uganda. He had risen to power as one of Amin’s leading advisers, but recently there had been talk of him falling out with Amin, though this wasn’t generally believed. If he had not quarrelled with Amin, the Reuters man thought his presence among us more than sinister. When I asked Astles why he was there, his reply was vague. ‘I was rounded up with the others,’ he said. ‘Amin’s gone mad. He’s just gone mad.’
I spent hours staring through the window grille at the egrets and the little weaver birds. From time to time they were scattered by the arrival of a party of vultures.
‘They always come,’ said Astles. ‘They come for the body-truck.’
For four days I looked out through the bars and watched the trucks leaving with the bodies of those executed. They were the four longest days of my life.
A tall officer with a large jungle hat arrived at my cell door carrying a whip. His henchmen were armed with cudgels, knives, daggers and whips. As they all crowded in I thought, in a state of acute alarm, This is it!
‘Are you a newspaperman?’
I looked straight at him and said, ‘Yes, I am.’
‘I am giving you this form. You must fill in this form. I don’t want a statement. I want you to fill in this form. If you don’t you will be chastised.’
There was nowhere to do it except to kneel down before him and write it on the floor. As I scrawled my name and passport number I thought, At any minute now my skull will explode. The officer’s manner suggested barely suppressed rage. At any moment, I thought, I would be whacked in that most vulnerable position. When I clambered back to my feet, the man scanned my writing with displeasure, staring at me after registering each detail.
Astles, who never missed anything, was rocking to and fro and laughing. ‘You’ll be all right now,’ he said. I didn’t believe him, but the words raised a little hope in me, soon to be denied.
I was taken to a hut in the yard to collect my shaving things. Inside I saw a mountain of shoes and pathetic little cases, some held together with string, others no more than bundles. I saw my own suitcase there, shiny new in this derelict heap.
‘Leave it there,’ the escort said.
I felt dismayed. I’ve been here before, I thought with dread. And I had been there—in those photographs of Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps. The mountain of shaving brushes and the piles of spectacles, the sort of cases people took from the Warsaw ghetto. I was more stricken by the sight of that room than by people I had seen shot in front of me. I returned to my cell physically drained, smelly, my clothes stained, spent.
In the block were two new prisoners. ‘These men,’ said Astles, ‘were customs officials at Entebbe. They’re going to get the chop. They know they’re for the chop and would like to have a church service. Would you care to join in?’
A square was formed. I stood on one side, Astles was across from me, the two doomed Africans formed a third side. The spectacled schoolmaster stood in a corner. They started singing, and I tell you there is no more beautiful sound than an African singing hymns in harmony with another African. My mouth opened but no sound emerged as I watched the Englishman gradually slide down the wall in his corner, overcome by the fever in his head wound, the fear in his belly and the sheer sadness of the situation.
I fled into my cell when I heard the keys rattling once again. The Reuters man crouched beside me, tense. But they weren’t taking anyone, just pushing someone in.
I went out to find the upright, clean, handsome figure of Sandy Gall, and my heart rocketed with the reassurance that seeing him gave. He told me that Donald Wise had been deported. Then he asked what it was like in here. I said truthfully, ‘A bloody nightmare!’
The next day men came and dug half a dozen grave-like pits outside our window. My heart plummeted. We’re not going to be released at all, I thought. It’s all a con. They’re going to kill us. The party of vultures was again in position on the roof.
Then the guards told us, ‘You’re being released.’
Astles got up and said, ‘What about me? Don’t I get released?’
‘Oh, no,’ he was told. ‘Not you, Bob.’
He seemed very sanguine about it. ‘Maybe tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Maybe.’
We were taken to the huts and I rescued my suitcase from that piteous mountain. I felt a new spring in my ankles but joy had to be curbed. You can’t show joy to those who stay behind.
As we made our way to the main gate indescribable screams pursued us. The Nubian officer with the lizard eyes was on gate duty and took offence at Sandy’s look. He was affronted by Sandy’s elegance, his cleanness, his composure. He walked across and said, ‘Why are you looking at me? There is still time to chastise you, now, before you leave.’
Sandy pushed back his hair. ‘I’m not looking at you, old boy,’ he said. ‘I can assure you.’
As we waited, listening to the terrible thrashing and screaming, there was the sound of a truck starting up. It produced intense joy in me and an undercurrent of fear. What if it wasn’t release after all? I had heard that some people went from Makindye to the forests outside Kampala, where bishops and other religious people had been disposed of by Amin. Maybe even now we were being duped.
At Entebbe Airport they gave me the most pleasing document of my life—a certificate of deportation from Uganda. John Fairhall and the Telegraph man were reunited with us. They had been in quarters next to the execution block, and we heard with numbness that the sledgehammer tales were true, and more that was unbearable. We trashed our filthy clothes, and on the plane Sandy said, ‘Champagne all round, I think.’
Fog diverted the flight from London to Manchester. For four hours after landing we stood back to back with commuting businessmen on a packed train to London. The British Rail restaurant car hadn’t been attached. It was, even so, still heaven.
The fields were peaceful around our new farmhouse home near Bishop’s Stortford. Idi Amin’s Uganda seemed like another world, though. Makindye had reached into the English countryside. The shock of believing I had been killed brought Christine out in great red blotches. It took two years for them to clear.
25. HANDSHAKE BEFORE HIGHWAY 13
A brief social interlude followed quickly on my return from Uganda before I found myself back in the thick of the fighting in South-East Asia. It might seem like a punishing schedule—for both me and my family—but I had accepted the invitation to go to Peking some months before. It was not so much an assignment, more an appointment with history.
With the Cultural Revolution behind them, the Chinese were confident enough to receive honoured British guests while simultaneously responding cordially to President Nixon’s overtures, so enabling China to play a pivotal role in bringing to an end America’s long and discredited war in Asia. These great political matters concerned me less than the business of photographing a handshake. A pioneer of the British sortie was my own boss, Lord Thomson, the proprietor of both The Times and the Sunday Times. He had approached me, before Kampala, to be the official photographer of the historic Anglo-Chinese friendship sealing moment when he shook hands with Chou En-lai. Also in the party were Denis Hamilton, the editor-in-chief; Frank Giles, the Sunday Times foreign editor; Louis Heren, a seasoned correspondent who later became deputy editor of The Times; and Lord Thomson’s son Kenneth, heir apparent to the newspaper empire.
On the face of it, our proprietor had few of the conventional attributes of a transatlantic tycoon who was to strike oil in the North Sea. He was below average height and his homely features were dominated by thick pebble-lens glasses which were said to be made especially for enlarging the tiny print of the financial columns. He made it a policy to appoint strong editors and keep his own interference to a minimum. Despite his legendary reputation for meanness, he financed big expansion plans for both papers. As he edged towards his eightieth year, one young journalist had the temerity to ask him if there
was anything he thought he had missed in life. Lord Thomson reckoned that he had missed something in not having a proper university education—though perhaps not, he added, for ‘then I would have wound up like you, working for a guy like me’.
Most of us endured the nineteen-hour flight, fidgeting and trying in vain to get some sleep, while our proprietor showed no sign of discomfort or irritability. He read a book, located no more than three inches from his nose, throughout the entire flight. Curious to know what he thought it necessary to equip himself with for his conversations with the great Chinese Communist leaders, I kept craning for a glimpse of the book’s title but could see no more than that it was a thriller by Alistair Maclean.
We were welcomed in Peking by the Red Army ensemble playing the Eton boating song and tunes from The King and I. On the great day, I carefully followed instructions and got into a suit—not my normal attire—well before the appointed hour. I even gilded the lily by shaving, though some misjudgment brought blood out on to my face. I dabbed at it with lavatory paper and all kinds of after-shave without any effect. When the call came to say that a limousine was waiting, I grabbed a handful of the coarse revolutionary paper and raced downstairs. In the chilly air I ripped off the paper that had stuck to my cheek and hung my face out of the car window to dry. As we arrived at the Great Hall a small river of blood was running down my neck.
I was still trying to load my cameras and at the same time staunch the flow when one of the top brass came up to me and said, ‘Come along now, Donald, be ready. Be ready on the signal. They’ll be here at any minute.’
Concerned Chinese hands were propelling me into position for the historic encounter between Capitalism and Communism, symbolised by Lord Thomson and the Chinese premier pressing the flesh. It was the ultimate handshake picture.
I missed it.
Later, feeling pretty dejected, I was bullied into taking my place in a group photograph with the whole Thomson party and Chou’s men. I stood forlornly at the end in my ill-fitting suit while the blood went on trickling down my face and neck. If Lord Thomson was upset, he didn’t make a meal of it. What impressed me about him as I busied myself taking pictures through the three hours of talks—conducted through interpreters—that followed was his spitting precision. As a heavy smoker he had frequent recourse to the spittoon, which he never failed to hit dead centre.