by David Lamb
From their exile homes in Europe and the United States, thousands of young, ambitious and intelligent Ugandans answered President Lule’s call to come home and help rebuild their country. But the task overwhelmed them and, in the end, defeated them. The law of the jungle had reclaimed the soul of Uganda. There were no obtainable national causes left, only personal ones, and within weeks of becoming cabinet ministers and presidential advisers, the former exiles were demanding their 20 percent off the top of foreign grants and contracts. When someone spoke of “my people,” he didn’t mean Ugandans in general; he meant the people of his particular tribe. If he said things were improving, he wasn’t referring to the national economy; he was talking about his overseas bank account.
Lule was the one man who had a chance to save Uganda. He was honest, intelligent and, at the age of sixty-seven, cared little for the trappings of power. More important, he was a Baganda,* Uganda’s largest and best educated tribe, and thus commanded the allegiance of the majority. Had he been a dictator instead of a humanist, he might have succeeded. But Julius Nyerere, the Tanzanian president and Uganda’s de facto ruler, had installed Lule as his socialistic stalking horse. When Lule started speaking with a voice that was both independent and capitalistic, Nyerere spirited him out of Uganda, locked him up in a room without a telephone in Dar es Salaam and announced that Uganda would have a new president.
That man was Godfrey Binaisa, an attorney who had lived in New York and fallen on tough times, handling not much more than an occasional divorce case. I met him in the lobby of Kampala’s International Hotel, just after he had returned to Uganda. A once important official in the pre-Amin government, he was now portly and balding, and he wore a rumpled suit. Asked by an American journalist how to pronounce his name, he replied, “Be nisa to me.” He hung around the lobby, bumming cigarettes, chatting with the Western reporters, saying no, he didn’t know what he would do now that he was back, but he hoped he could find some work. The next day he was as surprised as anyone to learn that he had a job—as president of Uganda, having been appointed by a local committee, which decided that he seemed as harmless and as reliable as anyone available. One of his first moves was to hire an American public relations firm for $400,000 to clean up Uganda’s tarnished international image. An account executive from Washington, D.C., flew into Entebbe, brimming with confidence, carrying business cards that bore the notation “We can solve any problem.” He left a few days later, shaking his head. What Uganda needed was a mortician, not a flack.
The cycle was soon to be complete. Binaisa was ousted from office by Nyerere, and the military returned to power.* Idi Amin was thrown out of Libya after his bodyguards had a shoot-out with some of Muammar Qaddafy’s soldiers. He moved to Saudi Arabia, with two wives and twenty-three of his children, and announced his willingness to return to Uganda “for the good of my people.” Meanwhile Obote, whom Nyerere had kept in waiting for just such a moment, had come home from Tanzania, won a fixed election and became Uganda’s president for a second time.† “Today we raise the banner of democracy once more and proclaim the rule of law,” he said at his swearing-in ceremony. “The past is gone. We start a new future.” This time, though, there were no celebrations. Within a few weeks Obote re-established the State Research Bureau, the security agency that was to Amin what Savak had been to the Shah of Iran. Torture became common again in the crowded prisons, people once more started “disappearing.” The newly independent newspapers were closed down, dissent was muzzled, the International Red Cross and resident Western journalists were expelled. Uganda teetered on the brink of civil war that would pit tribe against tribe, and in the outlying districts a new guerrilla group, composed mostly of Baganda, launched its first attacks against the government installations in an attempt to bring down the Obote regime.
Had the psychology and attitudes of an entire nation changed during its long nightmare?
“No,” the vice chancellor of Makerere University, Senteza Kajubi, told me one day after some thought, “I wouldn’t quite say that Uganda has produced a generation of moral cripples. But on the other hand …”
He fell silent, searching for the words. “On the other hand,” he repeated at last, “we obviously have been greatly affected by the experience of Amin and what came afterward. We have fallen so low that I wonder if we can ever climb back.”
To realize just how far Uganda did sink, it is worth taking a brief historical look at the country Winston Churchill described as “the pearl of East Africa.” Landlocked Uganda is one of Africa’s most beautiful countries. It is a fertile land of high plateaus and lush green foliage that reach from the shores of Lake Victoria—the source of the White Nile—to the dry plains of the north. Blue crater lakes are tucked among the terraced hillsides, and within a day’s drive of Kampala, like Rome a capital built on seven hills, some of the most splendid wildlife herds in all Africa roamed through national parks as large as Rhode Island.
“Uganda is a fairy tale,” Churchill wrote in 1908 after arriving by train from the Kenyan coast. “You climb up a railway instead of a beanstalk, and at the top there is a wonderful new world. The scenery is different, and most of all the people are different from anywhere else in Africa.”
The early Ugandan people were farmers and warriors who developed five centralized, prosperous kingdoms: the Buganda, Bunyoro, Busoga, Toro and Ankole. From the mid-nineteenth century through to independence in 1962, the Baganda dominated Uganda. They were a proud, elitist people who considered themselves superior to other Bantu kingdoms in the Lake Victoria basin and to the Nilotic cattle-herding tribes of the north, the Acholi and Lango. They were ruled by a kabaka (king) and represented about 20 percent of Uganda’s population.
In 1894 Uganda became a British protectorate, and colonial administrators, utilizing the policy of “divide and rule,” bestowed special favors on the Baganda. They became the backbone of the civil service and the vehicle for carrying out colonial policies. The other tribes sought, but did not receive, similar privileges. Unable to win responsible jobs in the bureaucracy or to dent the Baganda-dominated commercial sector, these outsiders had the choice of remaining neglected or finding new avenues into the mainstream of civilization. The Acholi and Langi, for instance, cast their lot with the military and became the tribal majority in the colonial army.
Unlike neighboring Kenya and Tanzania, Uganda moved toward independence without any united nationalistic front. Indeed, the Baganda even considered secession rather than risk the loss of dominance in a new nation. This absence of central authority would later prove to be a major obstacle to political stability. But Milton Obote, a Lango schoolteacher, promised the Baganda autonomy and managed to put together a loose coalition that led Uganda to independence, with himself as prime minister and the kabaka as president.
It soon became apparent Uganda was missing another element that was to become important in Kenya’s success—European settlers. There were 43,000 whites in Kenya at independence, and more than 5,000 of them were farmers who had settled in the highlands north of Nairobi. Kenya was their home and they had a stake in making the new republic work. In Uganda the 8,800 whites were administrators; professionals and technicians. They would stay for three or four years, then move on when their contracts were up. The settlement of whites in Kenya had been a conscious decision of the British government for two reasons: Kenya was on the coast and more accessible to travelers than landlocked Uganda; and Kenya’s farmland, though not as fertile as Uganda’s, was less densely populated and thus did not require the displacement of large African groups. If the British had settled Uganda instead of Kenya, it is entirely possible there would have been no Life-President Idi Amin and no socioeconomic debacle in Uganda—and no mini-miracles of progress in Kenya. For, however much European settlers retarded the Africans’ advancement, their presence represented strong authority, law and order, political stability—concepts that African colonies could carry with them into independence.
As it turned
out, Obote had no intention of sharing power with the kabaka, Freddie Mutesa, a slight, elegant figure who had once served as a lieutenant in England’s Grenadier Guards. Obote wanted absolute control, and his accord with the Buganda kingdom erupted into confrontation; secession again became the Buganda cause. In 1966 Obote called on his army chief, Idi Amin, to put down the rebellion with minimum force. Instead Amin blasted through the kabaka’s palace with tanks, and King Freddie, the last in an unbroken line of ruling royalty dating back to the sixteenth century, escaped over a wall and fled to London, where he died a penniless alcoholic five years later. The monarchy was abolished, Obote became president, and Amin was now a man to be reckoned with.
Despite tribal rivalries, Obote’s misdirected leadership and the absence of exploitable minerals, Uganda had a great deal working for it in those early days of independence. Makerere was a superior university, referred to as “the Harvard of Africa.” The economy, based on agriculture and buoyed by the presence of 70,000 Asians, was healthy, the tourist industry was booming. The health system was one of the finest in the Third World: there were forty-eight hospitals, several hundred rural dispensaries staffed by paramedics, a surprisingly sophisticated facility for psychiatric care, a tropical-medicine institute of international note, and black Africa’s best city hospital, Mulago in Kampala. There were excellent hotels and game lodges, 1,000 miles of paved roads, and an extensive rail network that stretched to Mombasa on the Kenyan coast, six hundred miles away. Even more important, there were the Baganda, a people far less primitive than most other Africans in the neighboring countries.
The man responsible for Uganda’s destruction was born in 1925 to peasant parents who scratched a meager living from their two-acre plot. Idi Amin was a Moslem and a member of the small backward Kakwa tribe, a people noted for little except their lack of education and their penchant for soldiering. His parents separated shortly after his birth and Amin was raised by his mother, who lived sometimes in the barracks, with a succession of military men.
In 1946 Amin joined Britain 4th King’s African Rifles as a kitchen helper. Knowing that the British did not favor the Kakwa, he listed his tribe on the registration forms as Acholi. Amin never fought in India and Burma, as he later claimed to justify the medals dripping from his uniform, but by all accounts he was a tough, courageous, unquestioning soldier. He fought well during the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya in the 1950s and later was promoted to lieutenant, an unusually high rank for an African in the discriminatory colonial promotion system. “Idi was a fine chap,” one of his British officers remembered, “though a bit short on the gray matter.”
By 1962, the year of independence, Amin had displayed the first signs of the brutality that was to become his trademark. As a platoon commander, he was assigned the task of ending a tribal war between two neighboring people, the Turkana of Kenya and the Karamojong of Uganda. He accomplished that job, but a month later several bodies were disinterred from shallow graves in the village where Amin’s unit had operated. Villagers had been tortured and beaten to death; others had been buried alive.
“Some pretty fearful things have been going on in Turkana,” Kenya’s deputy governor, Sir Eric Griffith-Jones, said, “and it looks as if there is some evidence apparently that one of the Uganda army people has so brutally beaten up a complete Turkana village, including killing, that I think we shall have to take criminal proceedings against him.”
The name he mentioned was Idi Amin. But Sir Walter Coutts, the British governor of Uganda, on the advice of Prime Minister Obote, quashed the charge. Amin was one of only two African officers with the British army in Uganda, and with independence only weeks away, a court-martial could have been embarrassing to all concerned. It was the gravest misjudgment the British made during their sixty-eight years in Uganda.
The Uganda flag replaced the Union Jack over Kampala on October 9, 1962. The new banner bore the national emblem, a crested crane, and a series of horizontal stripes: a black one for Africa, a yellow for sunshine, a red for brotherhood. There was irony in each symbol, for in time Obote’s country would slaughter much of its wildlife for food and profit, Africa would turn its back on Uganda, sunshine alone would not be sufficient to make the farmlands flourish, and brotherhood would become fratricide.
Obote was a resourceful and strong-willed man, a socialist and a theoretician. A decade earlier he had been offered a scholarship to study law in the United States, but the colonial authorities refused him an exit visa on the grounds that knowledge of American law would be useless in Uganda. Now Obote had his chance to experiment. He crushed the monarchy and nationalized the economy. He got his attorney general—the Bagandan who would later resurface as president, Godfrey Binaisa—to rewrite the constitution, consolidating virtually all powers in the presidency. Uganda, Obote said, was putting distance between itself and the stereotyped European systems. Indeed it was. And the tribes grew restive, the economic foundations quivered, the army waited.
In January 1971 Obote flew to Singapore for a Commonwealth meeting to rally support against Britain’s decision to sell arms to South Africa. Before he left he made a fateful mistake: he ordered Amin and his defense minister, Felix Onama, to explain in writing the disappearance of $4 million in army funds and weapons. The demand hastened the inevitable, and on January 25 Amin and his soldiers seized power. The result was tantamount to arming a mob of twelve-year-olds and telling them they were now running a country.
Perhaps not surprisingly, it was Amin the buffoon, not Amin the butcher, who first caught the world’s attention. A hulking six-foot-four 240-pounder, he raced around Kampala in a red sports car, plunged fully clothed into swimming pools during diplomatic functions and promised to make Uganda more prosperous than Japan. He divorced three of his five wives en masse in 1974—the dismembered body of one of them, Kay, was later found in the trunk of a car—and fired his winsome foreign affairs minister, Elizabeth Bagaya, accusing her of having had sexual intercourse in a lavatory at Orly Airport in Paris.
“The problem with me,” Amin said, “is that I am fifty or a hundred years ahead of my time. My speed is very fast. Some ministers had to drop out of my government because they could not keep up.”
To students at Makerere University he said: “Now I have got a couple of rockets for you. You are responsible for teaching people hygiene. You must make yourself very smart, very clean, very healthy. I find that the VD is very high. If you are a sick man, sick woman, you had better go to hospital, make yourselves clean or you will find that you will infect the whole population. I like you very much and I don’t want you spoiled by gonorrhea.”
And to Lord Snowdon, after the breakup of his marriage to Princess Margaret, he wrote: “Your experience will be a lesson to all of us men to be careful not to marry ladies in very high positions.”
The world chuckled, Africans applauded, and Ugandans died, often at the rate of 100 to 150 a day.
From politician to peasant, no one was immune. Education, money or influence was enough to mark a person for death. Social gatherings, even close relationships, were best avoided because Amin’s spies were everywhere, in the ministries, the shops, the airports, the bars, the hotels, the taxis, the schools. To survive, one stayed quiet and unnoticed, melting into the crowds regardless of his station in life.
“Sometimes my husband and I would talk quietly in our bed about what was happening to Uganda,” said Judith Mulondo, the mother of two young boys. “But we’d never mention our feelings or Amin’s name in front of our children. They might have let it slip at school. Then there would be a knock on your door, and those knocks were the same as death notices.”
One undercover agent, in a document I found in Amin’s house, used these words to pass along an execution order to his superiors: “This person is so close to me that I cannot take any action on him. So if action is to be taken, it should be carried out in such a way that I am not discovered.”
An attorney told me of walking to work every morning in
a T-shirt and tattered slacks so that he would not draw attention to himself as a member of the upper class. A businessman left his Mercedes-Benz in the garage and bicycled to work for the same reason. University students interviewing for jobs would identify themselves as high school dropouts because Amin apparently was intent on eliminating the country’s intelligentsia.
Big Daddy, as the international press called him, evoked a peculiar response in black Africa and became for a time a sort of perverse folk hero. Savage though he was, he had qualities that Africa’s unsophisticated leaders rather admired: he dealt with anyone who crossed him as casually as a child would squash an ant; he said all the right things about nationalism, economic development and human dignity, and the fact that what he said was either outrageous or spurious was immaterial to his presidential peers; he humiliated the Asians, expelling Uganda’s entire community of 70,000 in 1972;* and he toyed with the Europeans, once forcing British residents in Kampala to carry him on a thronelike chair. Many African presidents would have loved to have the gall to be as crudely blunt.
But the price Uganda paid! Amin declared himself a doctor of philosophy and the chancellor of Makerere University, and the onetime “Harvard of Africa” became a university of semiliterates, acquiring not a single book for its library or classrooms between 1976 and 1979. Inflation rose more than 1,000 percent during Amin’s eight-year reign, while basic wages went up only 54 percent. By the time Amin was overthrown, a man earning the minimum wage of $34 a month had only enough money to buy ten loaves of bread.