by Giles Foden
“What does it mean?”
“Bwana, I do not know. Even in our country, we have some crazy people.”
Bewildered in Uganda, and not for the last time, I looked into the rear-view mirror and watched the rolling ground recede. Still waving, the figure of Angol-Steve diminished into a speck, and then nothing.
Part Two
16
I have been able to find out little of the history by which Idi is come to us. After all, who knows where any of us is come from, who could go to the cause? Our current Prime Minister, indeed, might be distantly descended from the conjunction of a stonebreaker and a lady’s maid caught short on the highway. But this is the story of H.E., as I have had it recounted to me – by himself and by others. He wasn’t always to be trusted.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they say, in the region of the Kakwa tribe on the scrag-treed borders of Sudan, where Idi was born, that he was eleven months in the womb. Or some such monstrous thing. It is, so far as one can ascertain, New Year’s Day, 1928 (though it could be as early as 1925), that he comes into the world, in a village not far from the dusty little village of Koboko. Who knows what curses beat down on the straw roof of the hut that night, what blessings rose from the hard earth floor?
Such questions are germane to the Kakwa territory. I recently found an excellent book in the Fort William library, by a Mr George Ivan Smith. He says:
It is a barren region where stones are set on the hills to attract the rain. The wise men of the tribe, faced with questions of life and death, human hope or fear, sought answers by tying a long string to a chicken, attaching the string to a stake, then beheading the chicken. Its reflexes and death throes would cause it to fly. The string confined flight to the limits of a circle, like a satellite voyaging around the earth. Answers to deep human concerns lay in the direction to which the body of the dead bird pointed as it came to rest, like the last breathless click of the roulette wheel. Superstitions and visions drifted up through the tribes and peoples like evening mists along the Nile.
Power, in this landscape, was vested in rocks and trees, in streams and animals. And power, as everywhere, was one of the forces that determined human intercourse. Only here it was more naked. I’ve underlined in thick dark pencil where Smith writes:
The Kakwa question is not: “Who are you?” It is: “What are you?”
“What kind of a man?”
“Are you a big man?”
“Are you a slave?”
The Kakwa people, numbering some 60,000, are identified as often as not by a series of tribal markings: three parallel cuts on the cheeks longways. Later, in Amin’s regime, these would become known as ‘one-elevens’. And the people who wore them were feared by those who did not.
But back to the mother: a Lugbara (another of the Nilotic tribes) impregnated by a Kakwa man, she is that rare thing, a slave with power. For even as she is heaving in her labour to expel her twelve-pound burden into the sweating night, she is by many accounts held to be a witch. Though I am not so sure.
But let us follow the other historians in their garish story. She offers amulets and fetishes at market: the backbones of birds and the skulls of small reptiles, powder ground from the bark of rare trees, berries, roots, coffee-beans and sea-shells…A child with colic, or an uncle in debt, a thief in the village or rats raiding the wicker maize bins – these are her charges, this the genus of problem that her charms will solve.
Others, contrarily, have her as a camp-follower. Nicknamed ‘Pepsi Cola’, she makes herself available under canvas, in the tents of the army lines. Others still say that Pepsi was actually a mad old woman, possessed of a devil, whom Amin’s real mother failed to cure, lowering the stock of her reputation. Who knows?
Sex or sorcery, these are the options. Otherwise starvation, no doubt about it: the land is fertile in places but Pepsi (if it is she) is landless, a traveller whose ambiguity the peasants can only countenance when – out of necessity, all else failing – they turn their face to magic. Looking up from where they are bent at their plots, hoes in hand, to the strange figure passing on the roadway – the baby wrapped in a colourful calico bundle on her back – they recognize what Pepsi is. They call her to them, bid her service, and feed her for it. Then, the next morning, send her on: Lugazi, Buikwe, finally Jinja.
The father, he is unknown, most people believe he was a soldier – a trooper, with trooper’s ways. Perhaps, beer on his breath, rifle leaning against the chair, he pierces Pepsi against her will, brushing aside a whimpered plea for payment. Or perhaps they make love with mutual joy and care, each softening like tallow the pain of the other’s hard life. Or perhaps the noble fellow means to spill his sons on the bed but sloppily forgets. That being so, did 300,000 deaths ensue from a single accident of birth, or would another tyrant have come, certain as the steam engine or automatic flail?
Ah well, I have said it before: the cause – that is the place where we cannot go.
So the father disappears, as fathers do, and the mother plies her wares in Jinja – King’s African Rifles town, town of factories and godowns, town of foul vapours and gunny sacks, town of the source of the Nile and the great railway lumbering up from the coast. Idi, he thrives here, beefy enough from an early age to make his mark in the dusty scraps that kids get into.
Then a gap. Some say Idi is briefly a bellboy at the Imperial Hotel in Kampala, bright buttons shining. Some say – he has said, in fact – that he sold sweet biscuits in boxes by the roadside.
In any case, by 1946 he has enlisted in the 4th King’s African Rifles. The KAR, E Company. A thumbprint is the accepted signature for enlistment. Rations and equipment are issued. Idi works his way up for seven years, perhaps for some time as a cook. But his military merits soon become apparent, and he is made company sergeant-major.
What a passage that must have been. In idle moments, I have often pictured Idi in the training camps, climbing netted gantries. Or, on the barked command, running full-tilt, bayonet at the ready, at the wooden rick where men filled with straw are hung by the neck. Then retiring, his gear trim at the foot of the green truckle bed, to sleep soundly on a belly full of rice and beer.
Already a six-footer, he is noted for keeping his uniform neat and clean, and for excellence in sports. Boxing and rugby are his forte. He would later become boxing champion of Uganda; later still, I understand, he would challenge Muhammad Ali to a bout.
As for real work: 1953-1954, operations in Kenya against that country’s notorious Mau Mau freedom fighters. I recall the occasion he explained, those great paws describing the motions from the podium, his special garrotte technique to the horrified Organization of African Unity conference, Kenyan delegates included. Later on, there is hunting-down of cattle poachers among the nomadic tribes, the Turkana and the Karamojong, who inhabit the far north of East Africa. The pursuit of shifta – bandits with ancient First World War rifles or home-made ‘daneguns’, bound with wire and muzzle-loaded – is said to take his patrol across the borders of Somalia and Sudan, trudging through the desert landscape, razing villages or, still under the British aegis, looting them for food.
An eccentric Scottish officer, meanwhile, has put some of the KAR into khaki kilts. This, and subsequent involvement with Scottish soldiery, has a significant effect on Idi. Later in his career, asked by a Canadian reporter why he has demanded Scottish bodyguards from the Queen, he will reply: “The officers who promoted me to major were all Scottish. One, I think, is now commander-in-chief in Scotland and I would be happy if anybody came from there to be an escort to me or a bodyguard…and I will be talking to them about their traditions, because I have been with them for a very long time and they are a very brave people in the battlefield. I remember very well that when they are going to war at night they played their pipes and they were very brave. I am very happy to remember what we had with them during the Second World War, in North Africa.”
Like Cecil Rhodes’s Cape-to-Cairo Railway, Idi’s penetration into northe
rn Africa in those days is the matter of myth, extending itself in the telling: there is one tale of a beating in a brothel in Mogadishu, Somalia’s Italianate capital. Which seems unlikely. North, as idea, is important to Idi, though; it is this country that suckled him, these borderlands of Arab and Bantu Africa where things are unsure. Here the Nubians live, the Moslem Nubi, the colonies of black mercenaries imported years ago by Captain Lugard, the crafty British soldier, to do his dirty work. It is this translated people that Idi will draw on, too, bringing them down in lorries for enlistment into the army or to fill the cohorts of the Public Safety Unit and the State Research Bureau – latterly as part of his Moslemization programme. Alarmed at the prospect of an independent Uganda in which, as colonial bloodhounds, they have no place, they are only too happy to comply.
By 1959, after taking a course in Nakuru, Kenya (where he learns English), Idi has been promoted to ‘Effendi’, a junior officer. On the eve of Independence, as Obote takes up the reins of power, the small matter of the murder of some Turkana tribesmen nearly comes to court. But it is all swept under the carpet by the British administration. These are new times, after all. The big day is only six months away.
Uganda’s kingdoms are all to come together, in the blueprint, under a federal government. And so it is, on 9 October 1962, that the flag of free Uganda is raised. Idi, promoted to captain, his misdemeanours forgiven, is put in command of a battalion in the new Uganda Army. He is sent to Britain on an officer-training course, at the School of Infantry in Wiltshire and also up to Stirling, where, as he later said, “The warmth and kindness of the Scottish people increased my love for them.”
Most intriguing of all, Idi makes a trip, in these early years, to Israel – for a parachute course. He is, so the story goes, awarded his wings without making a single jump.
Oh Israel, who could have been Uganda. I’ve often wondered what would have happened, actually, if it had been so, if the Zionist homeland had been there, as was mooted – if there had been synagogues on the savannah, kibbutzes in the bundu. If it had been Africans, not Arabs, who had fought for their territory. If it had been in Kampala that Eichmann was arraigned.
It was not so. Instead, Israel takes an interest in the land it could have been, in the shape of military and economic aid.
Another tribe, the Baganda, represented by the Kabaka Yekka (“the King, he only”) party in the Cabinet, is meanwhile trying to shore up its own position. This follows the reinstatement of the Kabaka himself, Mutesa II, King Freddie, whom the British have deported following a political spat. Now he has returned, Edward William Frederick David Walugembe Luwangula Mutesa II – Professor of Almighty Power and Knowledge, Lord of the Clans and the Land, the Father of All Twins, the Blacksmith’s Hammer, the Smelter of Iron, the Power of the Sun, First Officer of the Order of the Shield and Spears, the Cook with All the Firewood – is ‘back on seat’.
And Obote doesn’t like it. Just as the King didn’t like Obote. “My first twinge of foreboding,” he wrote, “came as I watched Milton Obote raise the flag of independence. My anxiety had no precise form or cause. It was more the sensing of an unfamiliar shift of emphasis, a gap between what was fitting and what was not.”
Grandest of all the old Uganda kingdoms, a mighty dynasty in its time, Buganda had given its name to the country. It was King Freddie’s great-grandfather, Mutesa I, who had received the explorer John Hanning Speke, opening his tall gates of reed to greet the ragged traveller with ceremonious majesty.
“I cut a poor figure in comparison,” wrote Speke. “They wore neat bark cloths resembling the best yellow corduroy cloth, crimp and well set, as if stiffened with starch, and over that as upper cloaks, a patchwork of small antelope skins, which I observed were sewn together as well as any English glover could have pierced them.”
Speke gave a rifle as a present to Mutesa, who forthwith had a servant try it out on the first passer-by outside the palace gates. It worked. So did the presents that others brought: a bicycle, its best Brummagem spokes spinning in the red dust, and a music box. This last – bequest of another Scot, Alexander Mackay – tinkled out Haydn’s Creation under the shade of a mango tree.
But now the machinery is not turning over quite so well. With Obote making inroads into its power, Buganda attempts to secede. Loyalists are rumoured to be arming themselves, with a view to throwing the federal government out of the kingdom. In May 1966, Obote responds by ordering Amin, by now Army Chief of Staff, to shell the Kabaka’s palace. King Freddie flees to England, where he dies of alcoholic poisoning, according to the coroner. The Baganda believe Obote’s agents have slipped something into his wine.
1969, a key year. An assassination attempt against Obote. The bullet goes through his cheek, but he survives. Amin hears the shooting, thinks it’s he that is the target, and runs for his life. Climbing, barefoot, the barbed-wire fence of the garden, he tears his pink soles. Obote, recovered, as if out of piety institutes a ‘Move to the Left’, a ‘Common Man’s Charter’.
In Washington and London, Tel Aviv and Johannesburg, officials ponder at their desks. Now, only true-blue Kenya stands between South Africa, where Communist demons lurk, and the Arab north, where Saudi and Libyan oil money fuels the flames of anti-Israeli sentiment. Otherwise, a red band of Soviet client-states tightens across the middle of Africa. Something has to be done, the men at the desks say to themselves.
Amin, meanwhile, pursues his own agenda, building up an individual network of support, staffed with Nubi and South Sudanese personnel loyal only to him, funded by his profits from selling ivory and diamonds and gold. Brought in by the lorryload across the border, the loot is supplied by Congolese rebels, who willingly exchange it for arms. Amin feels secure enough to go on pilgrimage to Mecca. Obote, suspecting him, orders his arrest, and then flies off to Singapore. But it is too late. Amin’s plans are already in place.
H.E. himself told me later, in one of our taped sessions, how they found an armoury at Obote’s house on the night of the coup, in crates bearing the legend: A Gift of the Red Cross of the Soviet Union. “It proved Obote was a Communist,” he said. “That is why he went to Tanzania.”
Obote, at the time, tells the newspapers that Amin himself has gone through his belongings: “He blew down the door and then went in and took everything – including my underpants and my books – some seven thousand volumes. I don’t know whether he is going to read them.”
With his mechanized battalions in control (some in tanks given to the Ugandan military by Israel), Amin calls a meeting on the veranda at the Command Post, as he has renamed his house on Prince Charles Drive in Kampala. His supporters sit around him, waiting to see what he will do. Waiters serve tea and coffee.
A policeman, a good man, loyal to his service, is introduced among the party. The waiters pour him a cup.
Amin leans back in his chair: “I had this Obote man brought to me. I could have had him killed. But I didn’t. I gave him coffee.”
The policeman looks anxiously from side to side. He begins to hyperventilate, and collapses to the floor, dropping his cup and saucer, which smash on the hard parquet. The waiters are too afraid to rush forward.
Ignoring it all, Amin continues: “You see, I am not ambitious. Nor am I a tribalist. I have three wives – all from different tribes – living with me here in this house.”
The assembled company, soldiers mostly, and a few civil servants, find themselves looking towards the entrance from the veranda into the house itself, as if they expect the wives to appear and parade in front of them. But they do not.
“I,” says Amin, “have ordered the soldiers to help the people. If all the wananchi die, who is left to rebuild Uganda?”
Outside, the sound of gunfire shatters the night.
“That,” Amin says, as if on cue, “is my men firing into the air. They are very joyful.”
He looks around, nodding, as if daring anyone to gainsay him. The policeman is sitting on the floor in a pool of coffee, holding his
knees into his heaving chest.
And then Amin takes up where he left off. “Indeed, the instantaneous public jubilation that everywhere has greeted my takeover has left everybody in no doubt whatsoever that my take-over is a very popular move. Otherwise what could be the cause of all this public joy and excitement?”
He pauses again. Everyone else pauses, too, or freezes: it’s as if they are playing a schoolyard game…until Amin answers his own question.
“I will tell you. The public has reacted in this way because they felt a great relief at the overthrow of an oppressive and unpopular regime. A great heavy weight has been lifted off the shoulders of the general public, so they have gone almost wild with joy.”
He puts his hands on top of his head and moves his scalp to and fro, as if thinking hard about what to say next. He looks up at the ceiling, which a gecko is slowly traversing. And then he continues.
“Obote’s regime was one of great hypocrites. He was anything but a socialist. Obote had two palaces in Entebbe, three in Kampala, one in Jinja, one in Tororo and one in Mbale. All these palaces had to be furnished and maintained at great public expense, and yet all but one remained idle and unused almost all of the time. It is no wonder the people of Jinja in their great joy attacked and damaged the so-called President’s Palace at Jinja, total destruction of the palace being prevented by the army. Obote’s mode of living was also anything but socialist. He heavily indulged in drink, smoking and women, and carried a big retinue wherever he went. Furthermore, Obote’s Move to the Left, the Common Man’s Charter, is a lot of hot air.”
Two waiters help up the gasping policeman, and carry him off, one taking each arm. Amin smiles…
“You see, my Government firmly believes in peace and the international brotherhood of man. The masses who are now rejoicing at the overthrow are remembering Obote’s misdeeds, also his inaction, his ineptitude and political impotence at times of great need. Time will no doubt reveal more of his weaknesses galore. For my part, I can only wish great luck and good sailing to the Uganda Second Republic. If anyone troubles us from outside, they will get booted. Our air force is good, our army is mechanized. We are preparing a warm reception for invaders. We will fight them and we will fight them effectively: we will meet them on the ground.”