Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission

“The Tank Hill Party”: Generational Politics and Decolonisation in East Africa

Edgar Taylor, CISA, Wits

In November 1963, five young single white men – all British citizens aged between 23 and 32 – met at the Kampala Sports Club to plan a party for December 11th, the eve of neighbouring Kenya’s independence. They drafted an elaborate invitation card that read: “We the League of Ex-Empire Loyalists do request and require your presence, at a bottle Colonial Sundown on Wednesday December 11th, commencing at 9.00 p.m. to celebrate The End of the White Man’s Burden.” The dress code would be in the style of the iconic colonial apologia film, “Sanders of the River.” The location was to be “the neo- colonial style residence” of a British insurance salesman “(by his reluctant consent) on the quarry road, Tank Hill.” Guests were instructed to “R.S.V.P. by native bearer in cleft stick or tom-tom” or to “send a shrunken head” to any of the five men, who gave their home and office phone numbers alongside nicknames such as “Gin-sling”, “Let-them- eat-cake”, and “Churra Sahib.” The men arranged for a printing company to produce several hundred cards, in a hodgepodge of ornate fonts on fancy paper, which they then distributed to select friends and acquaintances. By all accounts, the party attracted between 150 and 200 Europeans, many of whom carried on in drunken merriment until 6 o’clock the following morning.1 Over the next three weeks, “the Tank Hill Party” would become the focus of visceral debates over the integrity of African sovereignty, the future of British presence on the continent, and the basis of postcolonial racial and generational hierarchies. Stories circulated around Kampala alleging that the partygoers sang songs mocking Africans, dressed a dog in the Ugandan and Kenyan flags, and dishonoured East African heads-of-state with offensive effigies among other acts. Members of the ruling Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC) Youth Wing declared the party an insult and a threat to the young nation’s independence. Politicians, journalists, civil servants, activists, and reading publics in Uganda, Britain, and across Africa questioned the organizers’ motives, speculated what actually transpired at the party, and debated how the Ugandan state should respond. As they did so, they exposed how the raw emotion of colonial injustice could threaten to dislodge a postcolonial elite’s moral authority, sever diplomatic relations between Uganda and Britain, and unsettle arenas of polite sociality through which Uganda’s independence had been negotiated. The Tank Hill Party provoked a collective recognition of the emotional wounds created by racial injustice at the heart of colonial governance and sociality.2 However, despite their disgust with the party, many Ugandan and British officials feared for the fragile bureaucratic and social orders through which they governed the country. A shared desire for administrative continuity and disdain for colonial culture led Prime Minister Milton Obote and British High Commissioner Sir David Hunt to mitigate the party’s damage to Anglo-Ugandan relations. Fourteen attendees, including the five organizers, were swiftly deported. When UPC Youth Wingers burned down the house

1 Rhodes House, Oxford (hereafter RHO) MSS Afr. s. 2195 Taylor [5]. 2 Timothy Parsons, The Second British Empire: In the Crucible of the Twentieth Century (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 233.

1 Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission where the party was held, conservatives in Obote’s government cracked down on young radicals and reaffirmed demands for British aid and technical assistance. By attacking what they perceived to be the plebeian antics of both young Britons and young Ugandans, officials from both countries sought to uphold the contract through which Uganda had achieved independence in October 1962. In so doing, they tried to block youthful attempts to shape the parameters of postcolonial relations.

Independence and Administrative Continuity

For many Britons in the Overseas Civil Service, the private sector, and voluntary organizations in Africa, the formal end of colonial rule did not mark an immediate rupture in their professional lives. African civil services continued to recruit young Britons even as Africanization policies accelerated in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Tony Lawrence, a 27 year-old road engineer, landed a job in Kampala in 1958.3 The pay was nearly triple that of his previous salary in England and came with additional perks such as housing, a lower tax rate, and a pension. He had grown up in the industrial English port of Southampton and followed his father’s profession as a chartered surveyor and engineer. In an uncertain post-war economy, he felt pressure to move frequently. “If you stayed somewhere more than a year, you were almost a failure,” he recently recalled. The Overseas Civil Service offered no long-term job stability, but ambitious young people like Lawrence expected to move frequently regardless of where they worked. He took numerous jobs around southern England and then rapidly changed posts within Uganda, moving to Masaka in 1960 and becoming Town Engineer of Mengo in 1961, a position he continued to hold after Uganda’s independence. Countries like Uganda thus remained part of a wider geography where mobile young Britons could build their careers. British overseas civil servants at this time were assigned to assist with the promotion of African colleagues along a constantly accelerating timescale, which exacerbated the former’s anxiety about their future. Lawrence felt, “We were expatriate, but we wanted to give the locals independence, which we gave them slowly. But it was a mistake.” Newcomers like Lawrence entered the top of a late colonial racial hierarchy under strain from nationalist politics and the rapid promotion of African civil servants. Their older colleagues had more stable pensions, had longer relationships with Africans, and had seen political change coming over time. Longer serving officials thus concentrated their advocacy through the European Civil Servants Association around maintaining racialized pay scales and retirement benefits.4 Younger colleagues were often less diplomatic in how they expressed their views about Ugandan politicians and decolonization. Britain’s first High Commissioner to Uganda was appalled both by the numbers of Britons still in independent Uganda’s civil service and especially by “the younger and more footloose element … [that] cannot be persuaded to alter their old

3 Interview with Tony Lawrence, Bournemouth, 5 June 2016. 4 Uganda’s “European” and “Asiatic” Civil Service Associations each formed in March 1919 in response to the Colonial Office’s proposal to gradually build up a primarily African civil service. Nizar Motani, “The Growth of an African Civil Service in Uganda, 1912-1940” (Ph.D. thesis, SOAS, University of London, 1972), 108.

2 Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission habits and ways of talking about Africans.”5 Thus while mobile young men like Lawrence were most invested in the day-to-day work of training African colleagues, their fleeting commitment to Uganda meant that many did not feel concerned about protecting their long-term security in the country by deferring to the changing political climate. Meanwhile, colonial commitment to Africanization was considerably less vigorous than the tide of political change. In October 1957, Governor Frederick Crawford reported to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, “There was a constant clamour for Africanization and if self-Government were to come in 10 to 15 years time, it was necessary to start now getting Africans in to the Civil Service as fast as possible, possibly by lowering standards slightly, while British tutelage was still available.” Crawford declared, “to hand over an efficient machine … some 25 years [i.e. the year 1982] would be best.”6 This policy did see increases in the number of Africans appointed to senior posts, rising from 5 in 1952 to 130 in 1961.7 However, as Crawford privately acknowledged by 1959, “The blunt fact is that political development is outstripping the development of the Civil Service.” As a result, he emphasized the need to retain and recruit “European staff who will not only have to carry the main burden of Government business but will also have to train the local staff to take over from them.”8 If the solemn transfer of the constitutional instruments of independence to Prime Minister Milton Obote on October 9th 1962 represented a dramatic transfer of sovereignty to a democratically elected African government, it also signalled commitment to administrative continuity. In the preceding years, Obote had used his position in the Legislative Council to push for the rapid Africanization of the civil service. In 1959, Crawford warned that the “Pan African emotionalism” of politicians like Obote could sabotage development efforts, undermine administrative efficiency, and ultimately require Britain to offer “capital and recurrent assistance” after independence. Obote, however, struck a more cautious tone as he assumed his new position. “We believe in a policy of appointing local people in the civil service to as high positions as they are available,” he told a Uganda Argus reporter. “But we will continue to refuse to appoint local people to high position just because they are local people.”9 At independence, Uganda retained upwards of 800 British civil servants in addition to hundreds of others employed on short-term contracts. Obote declared, “We need them desperately and it would disturb me if even one were to decide to leave.”10 Meanwhile, Britain’s new High Commissioner Sir David Hunt worried about ordinary British civil

5 BNA DO 213/41 Hunt to Walsh-Atkins [8], 3 January 1964. 6 British National Archives (hereafter BNA) CO 822/1436: Extract of Record of a Conference of East African Governors (18), 8 October 1957. 7 Anthony Kirk-Greene, Britain’s Imperial Administrators, 1858–1966 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 256. These “more responsible posts” included “all Administrative, Professional and Higher Technical appointments.” BNA CO 822/1649: Crawford to Lennox-Boyd (24), 18 March 1959. 8 BNA CO 822/1649: Crawford to Lennox-Boyd (24), 18 March 1959. 9 “The Strong ‘Can’t Kill Our Spirit’,” Uganda Argus 10 October 1962, 2. 10 BNA FCO 168/37: Uganda Fortnightly Summary, Part 1 9th-18th October 1962 [3a], 18 October 1962.

3 Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission servants’ maturity but boasted, “Our technical experts are almost always our best ambassadors.”11 While Obote reassured British diplomats of British civil servants’ security in independent Uganda, he also depended on the support of colleagues who regarded the latter as threats to the new nation’s sovereignty. In June 1960, UPC’s new Secretary- General John Kakonge decried European civil servants as treasonous saboteurs for seeking to entrench racial disparities in government pay.12 In the weeks preceding independence, Obote’s cousin and Minister of Information Akhbar Adoko Nekyon called for the immediate replacement of all non-African civil servants. This led to the appointment of four African permanent secretaries in ministries overseen by Nekyon and his allies.13 Kakonge and Nekyon’s radical politics were shaped in part by their involvement with anti-colonial South-South political networks thanks to Indian government scholarships to Delhi University and the University of Kerala respectively. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru regarded such scholarships as a means of advancing the political education of young African activists, in line with his pedagogical leadership style.14 At his inaugural address to the African Students Congress in Delhi in December 1953, he instructed the assembled students, “Instead of putting that education for self- advancement, … direct it in a manner which will make masses of [your] continent to march ahead.”15 As president of the African Students Association of India, Kakonge not only met frequently with Nehru, but he also forged connections with students and politicians from across Africa and India. As his colleague in the UPC and at Delhi University, Ally Muwabe Kirunda Kivejinja argued, “Nekyon and Kakonge had the rare opportunity to complete their education in conditions that exposed both of them to situations unknown to their schoolmates in this high school of future aristocrats,” as he regarded Ugandan colonial education.16 While leftists demanded the total replacement of foreigners as a precondition of decolonization, British civil servants found defenders among Ugandan cabinet ministers who were educated in Uganda and Britain and invested in the politics of colonial patronage and respectability. Their strongest advocate was Minister of Internal Affairs Felix Onama. Onama had studied at Makerere University College with Obote until 1949 before spending a decade as an officer in the colonial Department of Co-operative Development.17 While radical, Indian-educated ministers focused on labour and youth politics, Onama led a group of Ugandan and British educated colleagues concerned with

11 David Hunt, On the Spot: An Ambassador Remembers (London: Peter Davies, 1975), 134. 12 BNA CO 822/2064: Monthly Intelligence Report for June 1960 (E8), n.d. 13 BNA DO 168/28: “Pit-falls in Uganda” (25), September 1962. 14 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Legacies of Bandung: Decolonization and the Politics of Culture,” in Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010), 54. 15 “Appendix II: Nehru Speaks to African Students” in Hari Sharan Chhabra, Nehru and Resurgent Africa (New Delhi: Africa Publications, 1989), 156. 16 A.M. Kirunda Kivejinja, Uganda: The Crisis of Confidence, Second Print (Petaling Jaya: Excel Vision Education, 1995), 75. 17 E.G. Wilson, ed., Who’s Who in East Africa 1965-66, Second Edition (Nairobi: Marco Publishers (Africa) Limited, 1966), 92.

4 Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission security, administration, and investment. This internal alliance between former clerks and civil servants from the north and anti-royalist leftists from Uganda’s southern kingdoms had itself taken power through a fragile coalition with the royalist Kabaka Yekka (King Alone) party of Buganda Kingdom. Obote and Onama were careful that Africanization of the civil service and police would not unduly privilege Baganda, who were disproportionately favoured in colonial education. They also feared that any significant rupture in the security services could imperil law and order.18 British diplomats thus believed that Onama was “well disposed to us” and would protect British interests and personnel from the demands of the UPC’s radical wing.19 British civil servants in independent Uganda represented both a political challenge and a resource for nationalist politicians. Like his contemporaries across the continent, Obote had argued that political self-determination was both a matter of political rights and racial justice. He fashioned himself the champion of “the common man – the African” whose dignity was endangered by “non-Africans [efforts] to perpetuate racialism.”20 The presence of British citizens in Uganda’s civil service reflected colonial racial hierarchies that kept Africans out of positions of administrative and political power. Yet many Ugandan and British officials, including Obote, welcomed their continued service. They not only ensured continuity in security and day-to-day administration; they also provided a focus for negotiations between the British and Ugandan governments, while helping to defer the consequences of ethnic favouritism in colonial education and employment. Impatient young radicals, supported by leftists like Kakonge, disliked this order and searched for ways to undermine it.

Youth Wingers and Urban Respectability

Youth politics are largely missing from professional scholars’ accounts of Uganda’s troubled early postcolonial past. Many historians conclude that the polarization of ethnic patriotism and military violence weakened idealist young radicals.21 Rural patronage and greater rural-urban mobility than in neighbouring countries meant that

18 In February 1964, sixteen months after independence, Onama reported that there were “89 non-Ugandan expatriates” in the Uganda Police in addition to “12 non- Ugandan African[s].” Official Proceedings of the National Assembly [Uganda], 11 February 1964, 1090. 19 BNA DO 168/36: Hunt to Sir Saville Garner [76], 27 December 1963. 20 BNA CO 822/2275 Legislative Council debate [10E], 19 March 1960. 21 On violence as the organizing theme in postcolonial Ugandan historiography, see Alicia C. Decker, In Idi Amin’s Shadow: Women, Gender, and Militarism in Uganda (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014); Derek R. Peterson and Edgar C. Taylor, “Rethinking the State in Idi Amin’s Uganda: The Politics of Exhortation,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 7, no. 1 (February 2013): 60–3; Samwiri Rubaraza Karugire, Roots of Instability in Uganda, 3rd ed. (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2003); Abdu Basajjabaka Kawalya Kasozi, The Social Origins of Violence in Uganda: 1964-1985 (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1994); Phares Mukasa Mutibwa, Uganda Since Independence: A Story of Unfulfilled Hopes (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992); Holger Bernt Hansen, Ethnicity and Military Rule in Uganda (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1977).

5 Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission urban male youth were not a visible organized threat to UPC rule by the peak of global youth politics in the late 1960s. Yet from 1962 to 1964, the UPC Youth Wing was a potent force in the country’s politics, raising concern in equal measure among government ministers, opposition politicians, and foreign diplomats. The most common charge was that intemperate youth, supported by self-serving benefactors, were undermining the constitution and rule of law, which were the basis of legitimate authority in a fragile postcolonial order. “We consider the Constitution which is the supreme law of the land is being trampled underfoot in the eyes of the Government by the youths,” warned MP Stanislaus Okurut.22 Kabaka Yekka MP Daudi Ochieng also alleged that Obote was using the Youth Wing in order to overturn the constitution and thus enable autocratic rule.23 The British High Commissioner regarded moderate ministers such as Onama as fragile safeguards against the Youth Wing’s incursions into national politics. Struggles between aspiring nationalists and youth activists were not unique to Uganda. Andrew Ivaska and Andrew Burton have each shown continuity between Tanzania’s colonial and postcolonial ruling elites’ efforts to push idle urban youth into the countryside, precisely because, as Ivaska notes, “the nationalist political elite … themselves were deeply invested in laying claim to the town as respectable urban citizens.”24 In Uganda, Milton Obote and his closest UPC colleagues shared similar aspirations and anxieties. In 1959 and 1960, a populist anticolonial campaign swept across central Uganda’s towns and trading centres to boycott non-African owned shops and foreign consumer goods. Obote and his Democratic Party counterpart Benedicto Kiwanuka feared that such populist urban activism undermined the authority of politicians who sought recognition as office-bearers in political parties and the Legislative Assembly.25 Even as they criticized the denial of civic rights to Africans, Obote and Kiwanuka demanded a stronger police response to crush the boycott.26 The boycott’s reliance on informal networks of young enforcers threatened to undermine the arenas of polite negotiation (lubricated by bottled beer and imported cigarettes) that enabled politicians to secure concessions for their constituents. It also challenged a vision of the town as a site of urban respectability flawed only by the exclusion of elite Africans. The line between youth agitator and respectable statesman was hardly clear or fixed. In 1958, colonial intelligence officials had regarded Obote as “primarily a mob

22 “They Fear for Uganda’s Reputation” Uganda Argus 4 January 1964: 3. 23 Kirunda Kivejinja, Uganda: The Crisis of Confidence, 77. 24 Andrew Ivaska, Cultured States: Youth, Gender, and Modern Style in 1960s Dar Es Salaam (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 16; Andrew Burton, African Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime & Colonial Order in Dar Es Salaam (Oxford: James Currey, 2005), chap. 12. 25 Edgar C. Taylor, “Asians and Africans in Ugandan Urban Life, 1959-1972” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan, 2016), chap. 2. 26 The Chief Secretary reported, “Obote indicated in pretty extreme terms that he thought the action which we have taken in Buganda to deal with the boycott and the violence resulting from it, is not nearly strong enough.” BNA CO 822/1353 Hartwell to Webber [72]: 23 July 1959. On Kiwanuka, “Barrister to help Uganda to self-rule” Uganda Argus 11 August 1959: 1, 3.

6 Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission orator of some skill,” who was “bitterly and childishly anti-European.”27 By contrast, a few years later, British diplomats agreed that he “was a man who disliked cant, and avoided it as much as is possible for someone conducting a popular government.”28 The contrast reflected shifting priorities between Colonial Office and Foreign Office officials as well as a long history of racist British efforts to pathologize the inner lives of politically powerful Africans, both of which shaped British reactions to the Tank Hill party. However, British re-evaluations of Obote also reflected Obote’s own political transformation. The UPC attracted followers by describing a nationalist vision in contrast with the feudalism of Buganda Kingdom’s aristocracy or the conservative Catholicism of the Democratic Party. After making a strategic alliance with its ideological enemy, the royalist Kabaka Yekka, the UPC relied increasingly on a coalition between non-Baganda Protestant aristocrats and young radicals disenchanted with their elders’ claims to authority. Obote managed to retain control of the party by appealing to both wings as a charming networker and as a charismatic public speaker. UPC’s nationalist and nominally socialist ideology appealed to young men who rejected the politics of reciprocal obligation that bound elder patrons and their dependents. John Kakonge’s fiery advocacy of youth empowerment against chiefly authority put him among the few politicians with strong party support in all regions of the country at independence. His distaste for hierarchy and ethnic patronage had a long family history. Despite being born into an aristocratic Nyoro family, his father joined the Balokole born-again movement that swept through western Uganda in the 1930s.29 Balokole sought community unencumbered by the demands of colonial and chiefly authorities, who attempted to pin them down as ethnic subjects.30 Awaiting end-times, Balokole rejected the politics of deference and respectability by loudly cataloguing their own and others’ sins. Derek Peterson concludes, “Revivalism was a form of dissent premised on movement, on the distance that self-directed people could put between themselves and their native communities.”31 Balokole revivalism had faded by the 1950s, but John Kakonge set himself in motion and sought distance from the divisive politics of Bunyoro’s aristocracy by taking up a scholarship at Delhi University. While there, he studied economics and was inspired by Marxist denunciations of feudalism and inequality. At South Asian universities, African students built nationalist networks that aimed to transcend legacies of bifurcated colonial rule in their home countries. While in India, Kakonge met two fellow Ugandan students Ally Kirunda Kivejinja and Jaberi Bidandi Ssali, who would become active leaders in the UPC Youth Wing. Kivejinja came

27 BNA FCO 141/18363 Apollo Milton Obote Special Branch Report [12a], 13 August 1958. 28 Hunt, On the Spot, 141. 29 Andre De La Rue, “The Rise and Fall of Grace Ibingira,” The New African 5, no. 10 (December 1966): 208. 30 Derek R. Peterson, Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent, C.1935-1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chap. 3; Kevin Ward and Emma Wild-Wood, eds., The East African Revival: History and Legacies (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2010); Kevin Ward, “‘Obedient Rebels’ - The Relationship Between the Early ‘Balokole’ and the Church of Uganda: The Mukono Crisis of 1941,” Journal of Religion in Africa 19, no. 3 (1989): 194–227. 31 Peterson, Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival, 76.

7 Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission from a royal Basoga family and Ssali’s parents were Baganda landowners, but both resented the biases they faced as Muslims in a colonial education system where there was only one Muslim junior secondary school.32 All returned to Uganda in the early 1960s intent on “develop[ing] a unified voice that would serve as a basis on which to ask the colonial government to leave Uganda.”33 Full of energy and radical ideas, Kakonge, Kivejinja, and Ssali built up a power base within the UPC that quickly antagonized its aristocratic supporters and party leaders trying to hold the delicate coalition together. Recruiting among workers, teachers, clerks, and students, the UPC’s young turks quickly drew the ire of their elder colleagues. Kakonge denounced Milton Obote in 1961 for diverting 6000 shillings to his girlfriend when party workers had not been paid for six weeks.34 Championing the cause of the UPC’s lower ranks strengthened Kakonge’s position in the party and that of his young supporters. When party leaders, led by the British educated Munyankole aristocrat Grace Ibingira, attempted to remove him as Secretary General two months before independence, unions and local party officials came to his rescue.35 “Party headquarters virtually rioted,” recalled Kivejinja. “Party members streamed all over the country asking about Kakonge.”36 As Kakonge’s strength enabled his supporters to operate independently of central party control, their political weaknesses became increasingly visible. The young men from diverse backgrounds who formed the UPC Youth Wing in 1960 shared a common enemy in the colonial state but were divided over their relationship with UPC ministers and their regional patronage networks. Akiiki Mujaju, a political scientist and himself a Youth Winger in the early 1960s, has argued that divisions coalesced between younger students from Buganda and western Uganda on one hand and slightly older school leavers from the east and north on the other.37 The latter group of unemployed graduates and dropouts from economically and educationally marginalized regions devoted their initial energies to labour organization. However, without previous experience or connections in the fractious world of Ugandan trade unionism, their influence was sporadic outside of Kampala.38 Unable to expand their base beyond party activists, the two factions grew further apart, pejoratively referring to one another as the “Dollar Wing” funded by Ibingira and the “Communist Wing” supported by Kakonge. Without a mass base outside the party, the Youth Wing factions relied on dramatic actions that challenged party bosses’ legitimacy and attracted sensational press coverage. In so doing, they appealed to the sense of pride and honour that Obote

32 Kirunda Kivejinja, Bidandi Ssali, and Kintu Musoke, The Sapoba Legacy: A Story of Ideals and Idealism in Ugandan Politics and Family Life, ed. Minah Nabirye, Patrick Hanks, and Gilles-Maurice de Schryver (Kampala: Menha Publishers, 2014), 19–22, 65– 7. 33 Ibid., 25–6. 34 BNA CO 822/2064 Intelligence Report for November 1961 [E32], 6 December 1961. 35 Akiiki Mujaju, “The Role of the UPC as a Party of Government in Uganda,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 10, no. 3 (1976): 459. 36 Kirunda Kivejinja, Uganda: The Crisis of Confidence, 37. 37 Akiiki Mujaju, “Youth Action and Political Development in Uganda” (Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1972), 121–38. 38 Roger Scott, The Development of Trade Unions in Uganda (Nairobi: East African Institute of Social Research, 1966), chap. 12–13.

8 Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission and his ministers had promised would accompany independence. For radicals like Kivejinja, Uganda’s independence ceremony revealed the entrenchment of colonial hierarchies. “So do you think we celebrated the Ugandan Independence Day? No! … The British civil servants had organized the entire independence celebration on their own terms.”39 In the following months, Youth Wingers chastised government officials for their timidity in defending symbols of Ugandan sovereignty. On one occasion, they summoned reporters in order to denounce City Council’s sluggishness in renaming streets. The youths “said they would take paint and brushes and do the job themselves. … ‘By dawn tomorrow Kampala streets will bear African names.’”40 Their proposed replacements placed Milton Obote alongside leaders they held up as principled defenders of African independence, including Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba. The move was intended to inspire Obote to chart a more radical course. UPC Youth Wingers devoted much of their energy to testing senior government officials’ willingness to defend non-Africans accused of disloyalty and racial discrimination. This strategy took two forms. First, the young Marxist Raiti Omongin led efforts to foment labour disputes at Indian- and European-owned businesses in Kampala.41 His supporters decried continuity in labour conditions for African employees and demanded these businesses be turned over to African Ugandans. When Youth Wingers assaulted managers and employees at two auto showrooms, police arrested several of them including Omongin.42 His colleagues responded by storming the office of Felix Onama, detaining him for over an hour, and denouncing him as “an imperialist stooge.” Bidandi Ssali warned the Minister, “As long as a demonstration [is] in the interests of all Africans who influence the Government there is no law” to stop it.43 The Youth Wingers’ second strategy was to monitor Europeans’ behaviour for signs of disloyalty and to bring into public view the condescending and racist attitudes that had defined colonial society. They spent much of 1962 and 1963 inspecting shops and offices to ensure that the Prime Minister’s portrait had replaced that of the Queen. As Mujaju describes it, they “wanted to ensure that the white business and other communities in Uganda showed respect to those who had been their subjects.”44 Ssali and Kivejinja recruited networks of informants among servants in European homes and businesses.45 The evidence they collected was used to condemn collusion between racist foreigners and government ministers, which called into question the latter’s fitness to lead an independent postcolonial government. Following the Tank Hill party,

39 Kirunda Kivejinja, Ssali, and Musoke, The Sapoba Legacy, 30. 40 “Youths Will Re-Name the Streets” Uganda Argus 1 January 1964: 5. 41 Though Omongin’s educational background is unclear, a colleague in the late 1960s, Yoweri Museveni, later wrote, “He thought he was a communist - I think he had even been to China!” Yoweri Museveni, Sowing the Mustard Seed: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in Uganda, ed. Elizabeth Kanyogonya and Kevin Shillington (Oxford: Macmillan, 1997), 54. 42 Akiiki Mujaju, “The Demise of UPCYL and the Rise of NUYO in Uganda,” The African Review 3, no. 2 (1973): 298. 43 “UPC Youths Yell at Minister” Uganda Argus 22 November 1963: 1. 44 Mujaju, “The Demise of UPCYL,” 298. 45 Interview with Jaberi Bidandi Ssali, Kampala, 24 June 1964; Kirunda Kivejinja, Uganda: The Crisis of Confidence, 43.

9 Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission the Youth Wing’s allies declared that such an incident could never transpire in a truly sovereign African country. MP Paulo Muwanga demanded of the National Assembly, “Now do you require any further evidence to prove that amongst ourselves we have these foreign elements who are prepared to engage in subversive activities?” By contrast, “Never in Ghana can a Ghanaian allow a foreigner to point a scornful finger at his leader.” Another member then interjected, referring to the Tank Hill partygoers, “These whites do.”46 Renaming streets, inspecting offices, and spying on homes not only threatened ministers’ claims to be faithful custodians of Uganda’s sovereignty; these acts also attacked legacies of urban segregation. Postcolonial Kampala was an amalgam of two towns, the Kibuga under the authority of Buganda Kingdom and the colonial city dominated by European and Asian commercial, administrative, and residential buildings.47 The authors of Kampala’s 1919 and 1930 town plans worked with a legal architecture in which Africans were subjects of predominantly rural Native Authorities which precluded recognizing their permanent residence in cosmopolitan cities.48 Officials used health laws and building codes to enforce de facto if not technically de jure racial segregation, but such efforts masked the weaknesses of colonial urban administration. While hundreds of non-Africans lived in the Kibuga, with African landlords and technically subject to Kiganda law, Africans carved out residential and trading communities on the periphery of European and Asian areas.49 Ernst May’s 1947 plan provided only one residential quarter for Africans outside of the Kibuga, in what would become Naguru Housing Estate.50 It was in Naguru that the youth activist Bidandi Ssali lived upon his return from University of the Punjab.51 Meanwhile, the spacious bungalows of business elites and administrators dotted hills such as Kololo, Nakasero, and Muyenga. The movement of Youth Wingers and their informants took them across the city and into both commercial and domestic spaces once reserved for European elites. As the Youth Wing attempted to disrupt the seclusion of white colonial life, government officials often saw themselves as the rightful heirs to these spaces,

46 Official Proceedings of the National Assembly [Uganda], 20 December 1963, 796; “Why Was the Party Held?” Uganda Argus 21 December 1963: 6. 47 Peter Gutkind, The Royal Capital of Buganda: A Study of Internal Conflict and External Ambiguity (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1963); Richard J. Reid and Henri Médard, “Merchants, Missions, & the Remaking of the Urban Environment in Buganda C. 1840- 90,” in Africa’s Urban Past, ed. David Anderson and Richard Rathbone (Oxford: James Currey, 2000), 98–108. 48 Fredrick Omolo-Okalebo, “Evolution of Town Planning Ideas, Plans and Their Implementation in Kampala City 1903-2004” (Ph.D. thesis, Makerere University / Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, 2011), 69–70. 49 Gutkind, The Royal Capital of Buganda, chap. 5; Aidan Southall and Peter Gutkind, Townsmen in the Making: Kampala and Its Suburbs (Kampala: East African Institute of Social Research, 1957). 50 Kai K. Gutschow, “Das Neue Afrika: Ernst May’s 1947 Kampala Plan as Cultural Program,” in Colonial Architecture and Urbanism in Africa: Intertwined and Contested Histories, ed. Fassil Demisie (London: Ashgate, 2009), 247, https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/gutschow/materials/03e%20May.pdf. 51 Interview with Jaberi Bidandi Ssali, Kampala, 24 June 1964.

10 Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission including Tank Hill. The radicals Kakonge and Kivejinja “went and told Obote that we wanted to occupy some of the houses that used to be reserved for White people. We got the keys and were able to choose the houses that we wanted.”52 The young government minister William Kalema and his wife Rhoda instead sought to forge their own elite neighbourhood on the edge of the enclave of Tank Hill in Muyenga. Tank Hill’s fifty, mostly European, households fought to protect the respectable status of their neighbourhood throughout the late 1950s and 1960s. Residents often complained about the neglect of their primary access road with its foot deep potholes.53 In 1959, the fifty families living there formed the “Tank Hill Residents’ Association”, led by a Mrs Newman, a self-described housewife. The Association collected fees to upgrade the road and threatened to erect a tollgate “to exact a due if officialdom wanted to use it.”54 The residents’ defence of suburban respectability involved “people of all races” including the Kalemas who constructed and moved into the first house on the southern slope of the hill in April 1959. Rhoda Kalema frames their move in the language of frontier exploration. “That was still green hill. Kalema was kind of an explorer – what would you call it? – a settler, a new settler.”55 Her narrative of combating snakes and mosquitoes while struggling to install water, electricity, and telephone lines centres their pioneering struggle to carve out a respectable modern home in a racially segregated city, followed by a “scramble for the surrounding land around us” by upwardly mobile Africans.56 Youth activists gained political traction in the early 1960s by attacking what they saw as aristocratic government ministers’ collusion in the perpetuation of colonial racism. Unable to compete with rural patronage networks and disenchanted with feudal hierarchy, they focused their attention largely on symbolic causes that dramatized the alleged hollowness of Uganda’s independence. For new ministers in charge of state bureaucracies and security, Youth Wingers threatened the very order that enabled them to lay claim to political power and to Kampala as a site of urban respectability. However, government ministers were equally sensitive to the slights of colonial discrimination and racial insults. As Obote looked for a means of uniting the disparate factions of the UPC, the Youth Wing attempted to give him one in the form of opposition to European racism.

The Party and its Aftermath

As African politicians and Youth Wingers tussled over expressions of Uganda’s sovereignty, young Britons regarded the new nation as a haven of racial harmony. Many of the 3000 Britons in Kampala found it to be an exhilarating place in the early 1960s full of dizzying social change and rousing fun.57 “Uganda was a wonderful multi-racial

52 Kirunda Kivejinja, Ssali, and Musoke, The Sapoba Legacy, 27. 53 “Tank Hill Road Conditions” Uganda Argus 23 April 1959. 54 “Kampala’s ‘forgotten householders’ plan to fight back” Uganda Argus 29 June 1959: 5. 55 Interview with Rhoda Kalema, Kampala, 4 July 2016. 56 Rhoda Kalema, “Building a Home” in Autobiography, forthcoming. 57 For the figure of 3000 Britons in Kampala from 1964, see Kabale District Archive (hereafter KDA) C INT 1. “Internal Security – General Correspondence” Monthly Intelligence Report ending 16 January 1964. This figure excluded tens of thousands of

11 Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission country at the time,” recalled Christine Partington née Dove, the country manager for Save the Children Fund from 1958 through 1963. High Commissioner David Hunt noted, “Relations [between the British community and Africans] have always appeared so sunny.”58 While the pace of Africanization worried civil servants like Tony Lawrence, others felt energized by the seeming pace of change. “You know, people were whizzing about,” Dove remembered. “It was a very exciting time. But it was very restless, and it was difficult to pin people down.”59 Political transition seemed to promote an entrepreneurial ethos on which aid groups and private companies thrived. Even Lawrence and other civil servants felt that racial antagonism was restricted to a few opportunistic politicians. “The Africans there, they’re a very nice people. I mean the ones who deported us were not nice. They’re politicians.”60 Under the veneer of elite multiracialism lay bawdy British youth culture, irreverent toward an earlier generation of colonial paternalists and contemptuous of African claims to political maturity. Dove’s enchantment with Ugandan multi-racialism centred on her work life and dinner parties. Such arenas allowed her and her officemate Rhoda Kalema to cultivate their friendships and thus claim Kampala as a place of multi- racial urban respectability. However, neither Dove nor Kalema were cocooned in such spaces. Dove’s relationships with two British commercial employees introduced her to Sports Club, an exclusively European venue notorious for some of its patrons’ lewd behaviour. Diplomats like the British High Commission’s First Secretary regarded it as a “hotbed of anti African feeling” among “young European businessmen, many of them East African born.”61 For Dove and her partner John Partington, however, Sports Club was one of several venues where it was possible to meet and socialize with an assortment of expatriates and mysterious figures over drinks. It was Sports Club where Tony Lawrence first met John Steed, Colin Sibley, Simon Saben, and Michael Rogers, who together drew up plans for a party in Tank Hill. As one expatriate recalled, “[It was] impossible to imagine East African society without … parties. Not just dinner parties but full-blooded occasions with … eating, drinking, conversation, dancing, and the usual aura of potential adultery.”62 Such parties were generally not occasions for celebrating multi-racial harmony but rather for young Europeans to suspend norms of respectability. The Tank Hill party of December 11th 1963 was hardly an exceptional event for most of its attendees. The organizers had held a costume party the previous year with the theme “Hannibal crossing the Alps” and identifying themselves as the “Sludge Drinkers Syndicate,” referring to the nickname for draught beer recently introduced in East Africa.63 Fancy invitation cards, in the style of those distributed for formal balls and official functions, circulated for both events. In November 1963, one of the organizers

British Asians who held British passports but were forbidden entry to the United Kingdom without special vouchers. Taylor, “Asians and Africans in Ugandan Urban Life,” chap. 5. 58 BNA DO 168/36 Kampala to CRO [57a], 24 December 1963. 59 Interview with Christine Partington, Sherborne, 4 June 2016. 60 Interview with Tony Lawrence, Bournemouth, 5 June 2016. 61 BNA DO 213/42 WG Lamarque [ledger], 23 March 1964. 62 Gordon Dyus, Twilight of the Bwanas: An Account of Life in East Africa during the Colonial Period (Bloomfield: Xlibris Corporation, 2011), 177. 63 BNA DO 168/36 Report by Miss Christine Dove [80], 28/29 December 1959.

12 Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission reportedly arranged a party in Nairobi with a colonial theme similar to the Tank Hill “End of the White Man’s Burden” premise.64 Attendees often spent considerable energy planning and preparing their carnivalesque costumes. Christine Dove, her partner, and a group of friends mapped out their attire and possible performances for the Tank Hill event. The arrangement involved her partner dressed as a ragged British colonial officer holding a rope attached to three women dressed in Kiganda busutis and Indian saris.65 The organizers secured Union Jacks and portraits of Queen Elizabeth along with tapes of speeches by Winston Churchill to add to the party’s theme. Tony Lawrence supplied tapes of dance music, highlighted by Chubby Checker’s “The Twist.”66 Investigations into what exactly transpired at the party were impaired by the fact that by the early hours of December 12th, its attendees had consumed vast quantities of alcohol. Over the following weeks, there were written reports of the event by the organizers, Christine Dove, the Uganda Police, and the British High Commissioner. The only points of agreement were that Christine Dove had worn an African dress and a rope affixed somewhere on her body and that attendees had interrupted the proceedings at midnight – the exact moment of Kenya’s independence – to sing “God Save the Queen.” The organizers denied that any other songs were sung, though police confiscated lyric sheets from their houses. There were also conflicting reports about speeches and other performances. Some mentioned that alcohol was served out of a toilet bowl. At least one guest took the invitation card literally and RSVP’d with a wooden head. There were flags present but accounts differed over which ones and how they were used. According to one account, a British “Passport Office lad[y] who, having gone dressed as Britannia in a costume consisting largely of the Union Jack, fled from the party at 11.30 p.m. after hearing two other guests discussing the ‘flag lowering ceremony’ which was to take place at midnight.”67 People came and went. Dove left just after one in the morning and later wrote, “The party was quite a normal one.”68 The hazy details of the night did not remain confined to its guests for long. While partygoers were all Europeans, at least seven Africans were present throughout the event. Lawrence later told a British reporter, “The only Africans there were two houseboys and two club stewards who thoroughly enjoyed themselves all evening.”69 Three night watchmen were also present outside.70 Guests speculated wildly about who leaked details of the party to politicians. The list of suspects included Israeli military advisors, an ambitious British businessman, a jealous (and politically connected) lover,

64 BNA DO 213/41 Hunt to Saville Garner [12], 7 January 1964. 65 Two of the women ended up not attending the party, leaving just Dove and her partner, John Partington. Interview with Christine Partington, Sherborne, 4 June 2016; BNA DO 168/36 Report by Miss Christine Dove [80], 28/29 December 1959. 66 Interview with Tony Lawrence, Bournemouth, 5 June 2016; RHO MSS Afr. s. 2195 Taylor, Police Statement, 17 December 1963. 67 BNA DO 168/36 EG le Toq to CRO [34a], 20 December 1963. 68 BNA DO 168/36 Report by Miss Christine Dove [80], 28/29 December 1959. 69 Quoted in BNA DO 213/41 Kampala to CRO [10a], 6 January 1964. 70 RHO MSS Afr. s. 2195, Taylor Police Statement, 17 December 1963.

13 Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission and an objectionable Dutchman who had been left off of the invitation list.71 However, Bidandi Ssali, the UPC Youth Wing activist, reveals that the party “was drawn to our attention by the house-keeper. … We hired, as I say, an African attendant of the residence … this man in charge of the house, their houseboy called Musso. So as soon as [the residents of the Tank Hill house] left [on holiday], the fellow came to our office and narrated the incident.”72 Musso makes no appearance in archival or other public records, except possibly as one of the servants that Lawrence claimed to believe had enjoyed the festivities.73 As the source of information within Ssali’s narrative, however, he occupies an important role in the party’s transformation from a “normal” social occasion into a perceived assault on Uganda’s sovereignty. In Ssali’s recollection of Musso’s description, “A group of Europeans … gathered and enjoyed their booze. … During these celebrations, they got cloth in the colours of the Kenya flag and clad it on their dog. … So there was the booze, there was the song of the nation of the Kenya national anthem and there was the dog around which they were dancing. You know white people, booze.” The story infuriated Ssali and his fellow Youth Wingers. His colleague Kirunda Kivejinja believed, “The purpose [of the party] was to mock the independence of the black man” and thus “ridicul[e] the very essence of African claims to Independence.”74 Ssali concluded, “So we were young. We took it on as something that was serious.”75 Kivejinja described their next step: “The youth were alerted. Raiti Omongin deployed his forces, dug out every detail, and provided full information to the government to act on.”76 Omongin told police that the party had been a subversive meeting and demanded an investigation.77 As Youth Wingers demanded government action, they triggered the involvement of Uganda’s police force and government bureaucracy, which tested the loyalties of British expatriate officers. Lawrence’s first encounter with the police regarding the party came on December 16th, when a British Police Superintendent, Leonard Taylor, searched his home. Taylor and Lawrence had frequently played squash together at Sports Club, and as a result of their familiarity, Taylor found the search “by no means easy” as Lawrence badgered him to reveal the name of the police’s informant.78 The investigations were overseen by Uganda’s Inspector General of Police Michael Macoun, another British citizen, who covertly kept the British High Commission informed of his progress. Another British officer, Gerald Murphy, secretly showed the High Commissioner copies of Ugandan CID reports.79 Macoun and Murphy in turn reported to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, whose Permanent Secretary was Michael Davies,

71 BNA DO 168/36 EG le Toq to CRO [34a], 20 December 1963; Interview with Christine Partington, Sherborne, 4 June 2016; Interview with Tony Lawrence, Bournemouth, 5 June 2016. 72 Interview with Jaberi Bidandi Ssali, Kampala, 24 June 1964. 73 The Ugandan police’s full dossier does not appear to exist among Uganda’s catalogued government archives. Fragments made their way into British archives thanks to British officers in the Uganda Police at the time. 74 Kirunda Kivejinja, Uganda: The Crisis of Confidence, 43. 75 Interview with Jaberi Bidandi Ssali, Kampala, 24 June 1964. 76 Kirunda Kivejinja, Uganda: The Crisis of Confidence, 43. 77 Mujaju, “The Demise of UPCYL,” 299. 78 RHO MSS Afr. s. 2195 Taylor, R 50-52 [1]. 79 BNA DO 213/41 Kampala to CRO [26], 14 January 1964.

14 Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission another private source of information for British diplomats.80 The Minister himself was Felix Onama, whom British officials regarded as an ally and whom Youth Wingers derided as a defender of stability through elite collusion. As police investigated the party, they searched Europeans’ homes where they recorded statements and collected objects, which were then opened to new interpretations by politicians and wider publics. Among the objects described in a report delivered to Prime Minister Obote on December 17th was “a piece of wood-work intended to represent the head of an African,” a cleft stick, lyric sheets and song recordings, the busuti dress worn by Christine Dove, and copies of the invitation card. No one involved regarded these as objects that needed concealment from public view. As police were leaving after an initial search of the house where the party was held, the residents presented them with two wooden heads.81 The lyric sheets that police collected from Colin Sibley’s residence contained a song that was reportedly popularized at European clubs in Nairobi five years earlier and subsequently sung frequently at Sports Club.82 The busuti had been lent to Dove by her friend Rhoda Kalema, whose husband would soon be appointed Minister of Works.83 Hundreds of invitation cards had circulated around Kampala for weeks. One organizer reported, “One or two educated Ugandans to whom he had shown the card had thought it was quite amusing.”84 As Obote read the police report to his cabinet with some of these objects sitting on the table in front of them, the objects and the party took on a sinister character that provoked deep anger among many in the room. In light of Musso’s report, via the Youth Wing, of subversive behaviour at the party, Obote read the invitation card as evidence of a conspiracy. It referred to the hosts as “the League of Ex-Empire Loyalists.” Obote stated that the evidence “clearly showed that the organisation had a hostile and contemptuous attitude towards Africans and African governments.”85 Though the organizers claimed that the reference was an innocuous joke, to Obote and his ministers it resembled the real international organization called the “League of Empire Loyalists,” which aimed to use small numbers of activists to spur Britain into reclaiming its lost colonies.86 Until recently, the League had included a branch of Britons in Uganda.87 As the cabinet met, Uganda had been independent for barely fourteen months, and the men present were acutely familiar with British opposition to Ugandan self-government. They resolved to treat the party much as the Youth Wing suggested, as a meeting whose

80 High Commissioner Hunt warned officials in London not to publicize their knowledge of Ugandan intelligence assessments due to the “awkwardness [that] … my sources of information were principally expatriate officials in the Uganda Government.” BNA DO 213/41 Hunt to Saville Garner [12], 7 January 1964. 81 RHO MSS Afr. s. 2195 Taylor, R 50-52 [1]. 82 BNA DO 168/36 MG LaMarque [ledger], 24 December 1963. 83 Interview with Christine Partington, Sherborne, 4 June 2016. 84 BNA DO 213/41 WG LaMarque [ledger], 10 January 1964. 85 Uganda National Archives (hereafter UNA) Confidential box 39 file 1b, Minutes of Cabinet Meeting [Minute 669], 17 December 1963. 86 Paul Stocker, “The Postwar British Extreme Right and Empire, 1945-1967,” Religion Compass 9, no. 5 (2015): 168. 87 BNA DO 168/36 Hunt to Saville Garner [76], 27 December 1963; Official Proceedings of the National Assembly [Uganda], 20 December 1963, 790.

15 Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission

“main purpose [was to] ridicul[e] African personality and Independence.” Despite one unnamed minister’s cautionary note that mass deportations “might harm the reputation of the country abroad,” the cabinet resolved that all of the party’s attendees, or roughly 180 people named on an invitation list found at Lawrence’s home, should be deported. “All Civil Servants who attended the party, and those whose wives attended although they themselves did not, should also be deported.”88 The resolution reflected the strength of the cabinet’s more radical ministers led by Adoko Nekyon, who, despite their suspicion of the Youth Wing, supported the rapid replacement of expatriate civil servants. As stories about the party circulated more widely, they sparked visceral anger among Ugandans across political divides, beginning with the Prime Minister. Barbara Saben, Kampala’s last colonial mayor and Obote’s long time friend and colleague, hoped that she might use her influence to help the case of her son, Simon, who was one of the party’s organizers. She found that with the possible exceptions of the moderate Felix Onama and conservative Grace Ibingira, Obote and his cabinet had taken an “extremely grave view.”89 Simon met Obote the day after the cabinet meeting and later stated, “The Prime Minister had been so angry that he had scarcely listened.”90 During their 35- minute meeting, Obote reportedly expressed particular anger at the invitation card’s use of the phrase “white man’s burden.” When Saben attributed it to a joke over Rudyard Kipling, Obote allegedly replied that he had never heard of Kipling and did not accept Saben’s explanation. He also took offence at some of the organizers’ subsequent appeals for leniency. He later stated, “The theme of the party having been clearly anti- African, it is most insulting for the deported persons to attempt to appeal to the sentiments of the people by using the name of the President [sic] as if the President [sic] is not an African.”91 When the British High Commissioner David Hunt met with Obote two weeks later, Obote was “gentle and friendly” but “left me in no doubt that he had been touched on the raw by the party.”92 The party elicited angry responses from the UPC Youth Wing and Obote’s cabinet, but it did not accelerate into an object of widespread public debate until he addressed the National Assembly on Friday December 20th. Over subsequent days, many in Kampala’s British community speculated that he and his colleagues manufactured their anger as part of a political strategy. Many contended that Obote brought the affair to public attention in order to distract from opposition to an unpopular education policy, agitation against coffee prices, growing tensions with Buganda Kingdom, poor news coverage of his recent wedding, and his diminished stature in East African politics compared with that of Jomo Kenyatta and Julius Nyerere.93 The political scientist Ali Mazrui argued that his strategy was part of an unsuccessful “long-term attempt to multiply the occasions about which Ugandans could

88 UNA Confidential box 39 file 1b, Minutes of Cabinet Meeting [Minute 669], 17 December 1963; RHO MSS Afr. s. 2195 Taylor, Police Statement, 17 December 1963. 89 BNA DO 168/36 Kampala to CRO [32a], 19 December 1963. 90 BNA DO 213/41 WG Lamarque [ledger], 10 January 1964. 91 Quoted in BNA DO 168/36 Kampala to CRO [84], 30 December 1963. 92 BNA DO 213/41 Hunt to Walsh Atkins [8], 3 January 1964. 93 DO 168/36 Hunt to Saville Garner [76], 27 December 1963; Interview with Tony Lawrence, Bournemouth, 5 June 2016; Interview with Christine Partington, Sherborne, 4 June 2016; Dyus, Twilight of the Bwanas, 183.

16 Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission share the same feeling.”94 According to this interpretation, the party offered a means of uniting diverse political factions around a defence of national sovereignty while placating an increasingly emboldened Youth Wing. Whatever his political motivations, Obote’s address to the National Assembly reflected the same disgust he had expressed to his cabinet and to Simon Saben. After reading the invitation card, he referred to demeaning “paintings at the party of Africans,” and noted, “Some had the temerity to wear kanzu and busuti.” As he spoke, a wooden head, a cleft stick, and a copy of the invitation card sat on the desk in front of him in full view of the parliamentarians and guests in the gallery. He devoted much of his address to reciting three verses of a song found at the home of one of the organizers. Entitled “Uhuru and How Uhuru is good for an African,” the song mocks Africans’ aspirations for power and respectability. Obote summarized the first two verses: “Once Uhuru is obtained in Africa, the African hopes and prays for the white man’s shamba and also for the white man’s shiny car,” all paid for by “ask[ing] for dollars from the United States of America,” since there will be no taxes or rent. The song continued with jarringly offensive imagery that ridiculed the very project of apprenticeship in which many of the party’s attendees were involved as civil servants: The sewerage works will soon break down. The place will stink like mad. That is not mbaya. That is not a bad thing for the African. It is what we have always had. We are bound to make a few mistakes. We have not got the brains and also it is undignified for men to clear out drains. By bringing the song from the confines of Sports Club into the National Assembly, Obote confronted the politically divided House with a text that insulted their collective desire for political self-determination and social respectability. He also opened the vulgar and racist sociality of some Europeans in East Africa to wider public scrutiny. He concluded, “I think I have shown you enough to prove that this was not an ordinary party and this was not a mere joke.”95 Obote’s description provoked revulsion among the assembled MPs. Many attempted to describe their visceral responses to the material presented by the Prime Minister. “I was so stupefied, I became so mad that I just did not know what to do,” Stanislaus Okurut explained. After recalling a visit to Jamaica where he had heard how colonial authorities concealed a murder by members of the “League of Empire Loyalists,” he stated, “I would not like to go far because I have not got breath, but I am utterly disgusted.”96 Shaban Nkutu, the Prime Minister’s Parliamentary Secretary summed up his feelings, asserting, “I am terribly disturbed.”97 The material that Obote presented fit into a genre of racism with which all were acutely familiar. Shafiq Arain, a young UPC MP of Asian descent, arose to describe the “humiliations” suffered by everyone “born and bred in the country under the colonial regime.”98 Kabaka Yekka backbencher Ali Kisekka referred to Africans who had died or were imprisoned for demanding independence.99 Others added examples that fit in a wider repertoire of

94 Ali Mazrui, “Leadership in Africa: Obote of Uganda,” International Journal 25, no. 3 (Summer 1970): 563. 95 Official Proceedings of the National Assembly [Uganda], 20 December 1963, 771-2. 96 Ibid., 791. 97 Ibid., 799. 98 Ibid., 799. 99 Ibid., 790.

17 Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission racist speech. Anyoti declared, “They have been calling us black monkeys. I have heard the story of one speaking abusive language saying that his private part is better than an African.”100 Opposition MP Francis Mugeni speculated that the partygoers regarded “the African [as] an animal with four legs. … This is the sort of thing we cannot stomach.”101 The MPs challenged the government’s decision to deport the attendees, claiming it was far too light a sentence. Medadi Omani asked, “Sir, is our independence a mockery?” If not, he demanded that Minister of Internal Affairs Onama draft a detention act immediately to imprison all the attendees for 100 years. “Hell is where they should go.”102 Opposition member Barisigara called for a law to prohibit private meetings among Europeans.103 His colleague Vincent Rwamwaro declared, “It is useless to regard any longer any white man who is here as a friend.”104 Kisekka provided detailed instructions for how the partygoers should be assembled at Independence Arch and publicly flogged.105 Okurut declared, “This is treason of the highest order. These people should be lined up and the worst thing that could happen to them should be done.”106 Such calls for extreme punishments provided fuel for young UPC MPs who supported the Youth Wing’s efforts to discredit moderates like Onama and senior frontbenchers. Mr Chemonges declared, “Surely, Mr Speaker, a nation without proper Youth Wingers lets these people [the party’s organizers] play and we must have now the Government and the leading side of the Youth Wingers to discipline these people. … They must be given a few strokes of the Kiboko [hippopotamus-hide whip].”107 Erikya Lakidi asserted, “This was an insult to the Front Bench alone because they know our Front Benchers here are very weak.”108 Paulo Muwanga sounded an ominous note: “I underline the personal risk of those people because tempers are running high. Leave these people at large tonight, see what happens.”109 British High Commissioner Hunt, who watched from the gallery alongside Inspector General of Police Macoun, described the “angry debate” as the “most heated ever in Uganda Parliament.”110 The charged Parliamentary discussion, which was quoted widely in East African newspapers and radio, gave energy to Youth Wingers who were dissatisfied with what they perceived to be their aristocratic UPC colleagues’ defence of social and administrative continuity with colonialism. An editorial in the African Pilot, a newspaper edited by Youth Wing allies, attempted to use the incident to expose the contradictions of Uganda’s postcolonial order. “Some of the police officers who were sent to make investigations were the very people who arranged the party.”111 Rumours

100 Ibid., 795. 101 Ibid., 794. 102 Ibid., 797. 103 Ibid., 798. 104 Ibid., 793. 105 Ibid., 790-1. 106 Ibid., 791-2. 107 Ibid., 792. 108 Ibid., 793. 109 Ibid., 795. 110 BNA DO 168/36 Kampala to CRO [34], 20 December 1963. 111 BNA DO 213/41 African Pilot Tuesday December 24 [8a], 24 December 1964.

18 Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission spread that the British High Commissioner had organized and attended the party.112 Taifa Empya’s editorial took up a similar line and proposed “halting our good relations with different races” should such collusion continue.113 As the MPs spoke, Raiti Omongin and another Youth Wing colleague were being released early from jail, where they had been held for assaulting an Italian auto firm manager.114 Angered by the Uganda Argus newspaper’s failure to call the Tank Hill party subversive, Omongin quickly assembled a group of youth who dragged the paper’s British editor from his home and marched him to a police station where they demanded his arrest for “treason.”115 Over the weekend, Bidandi Ssali met with his colleagues, who “discussed the issue and decided to go and burn down that house” in Tank Hill. Ssali claims to have had the support of MP Paulo Muwanga, who lent a car for the mission. “We went to Muyenga, burst into the house, poured petrol everywhere, on the sofas, on the plates, the entire house, and up to outside. … Then one of our boys set the house ablaze,” sustaining “superficial burns” in the process. He describes how they drove to another hill by Kololo airstrip “where we stood and watched the house burning.”116 The virulent speeches and violent actions of Uganda’s politicians and activists provoked “a great deal of nervous tension in the European community,” according to the Inspector General of Police Michael Macoun.117 Macoun worried that “drunkenness over Christmas [would] add to danger” of violence.118 He later told British diplomats that in the days immediately following Obote’s presentation to Parliament, the “situation was ‘on razor’s edge’; he feared arson, indiscriminate assaults and looting.”119 Rumours circulated that there were plans for preventive detentions of Europeans.120 In a meeting with High Commissioner Hunt, a group of “leading members of the British community” expressed concern for the future unless “the UPC Youth Wing is kept firmly under control.”121 After the National Assembly debate, Hunt wrote to Obote expressing the British government’s “deep regret at the occurrence of an episode so damaging to friendly relations between our two countries“.122 Reports of this “apology” drew hostility from many Britons not only in Kampala but also in Kenya, Tanganyika, and Sierra Leone, who felt that such deference threatened their positions.123 In Dar es Salaam, one expatriate reported, “Most of us … were startled to realise that a bit of

112 BNA DO 168/36 Kampala to CRO [46], 23 December 1963. Hunt was in Nairobi for Kenya’s independence festivities at the time. 113 “Akaba kaali ka bujoozi nnyo” Taifa Empya 23 December 1963: 2. 114 “U.P.C. Youth Wing leaders freed” East African Standard 21 December 1963: 7. 115 Mujaju, “The Demise of UPCYL,” 299. 116 Interview with Jaberi Bidandi Ssali, Kampala, 24 June 1964. 117 Michael Macoun, Wrong Place, Right Time: Policing the End of Empire (London: Radcliffe Press, 1996), 70. 118 BNA DO 168/36 Kampala to CRO [41], 22 December 1963. 119 BNA Do 213/41 Kampala to CRO [25], 10 January 1964. 120 BNA DO 168/36 Kampala to CRO [41], 22 December 1963. 121 BNA DO 168/36 Kampala to CRO [76], 27 December 1963. 122 BNA DO 168/36 Kampala to CRO [38], 21 December 1963. 123 On Tanganyika: BNA DO 168/36 Dar es Salaam to CRO [67], 27 December 1963. On Kenya: BNA DO 168/36 Nairobi to CRO [85], 31 December 1963. On Sierra Leone: BNA DO 213/41 Freetown to CRO [10a], 6 January 1964.

19 Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission harmless fun had gone down so badly with the new powers-that-be. It could just as easily have happened in Dar.”124 The Tank Hill party spurred Africans and Europeans in Uganda and across the continent to reflect on the significance of independence for social relations and the exercise of political power. In the midst of the ensuing crisis, expatriates in Uganda occasionally expressed surprise that British diplomats did not exert the same influence as their colonial predecessors. The frustrated high commissioner observed, “The simpler-minded think we should have forbidden or prevented deportations ([former Governor Sir Walter] ‘Coutts would have’).”125 For Ugandan cabinet ministers and MPs, the deplorable nature of the party seemed to justify extreme expressions of sovereignty through deportation, imprisonment, or physical violence. In the days after the initial shock of Obote’s revelations to Parliament, Ugandan politicians and British diplomats grappled with the implications of these impulses for their countries’ relationship and Uganda’s postcolonial political and social orders. Sensing the fraying of the tenuous alliances that had guided Uganda into self-government, they quickly worked to reign in unruly youth and restore cordial diplomatic and social relations.

Restoring Cordiality

Left here, the story of the Tank Hill party might suggest the power of young activists to mobilize shared feelings of disgust and anger with colonial racism against a postcolonial ruling elite dependent on administrative continuity. However, the Tank Hill party marked the beginning of a steep decline in the Youth Wing’s influence in Ugandan politics, which became increasingly characterized by violence concentrated in the hands of the military and police. Kakonge, Ssali, Omongin, and other young activists antagonized the UPC’s royalist Kabaka Yekka allies as well as the aristocratic conservatives and bureaucratic bourgeoisie that constituted the UPC’s two other main factions. UPC ministers and British diplomats feared that an empowered Youth Wing lowered the morale of the police and of expatriate civil servants.126 The importance of government control of the security services and British assistance became intensely evident barely a month after the Tank Hill party furore when Obote was compelled to invite British troops to put down an army mutiny.127 Over the objections of both the British deportees and their Youth Wing critics, Uganda’s leaders and Britain’s diplomats worked to relegate the Tank Hill party to the dustbin of history. Obote’s address to Parliament set off questions over the integrity of the police, fear of widespread racial violence, and a struggle over the future of Uganda’s relationship with the British government and expatriate civil servants. Much changed over the following weekend: angry Parliamentarians were preparing to go back to their constituencies, Youth Wingers had threatened the police and Uganda’s expatriate communities, and the cabinet’s decision to deport the partygoers had proved too lenient for MPs and too draconian for British diplomats. Meanwhile, after his address to

124 Dyus, Twilight of the Bwanas, 184. 125 BNA DO 168/36 Kampala to CRO [76], 27 December 1963. 126 Kasozi, The Social Origins of Violence in Uganda, 68–71. 127 Timothy Parsons, The 1964 Army Mutinies and the Making of Modern East Africa (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003).

20 Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission

Parliament, Obote retreated to his home in a bout of ill health (reportedly influenza) and refused to see visitors for over a week.128 In the circumstances, the Minister of Internal Affairs Felix Onama opted for a cautious approach, informing the British High Commission that the government would only deport the five organizers and no more than a dozen others even as he led the rest of the cabinet to believe that all attendees would eventually be deported.129 His cabinet colleagues agreed that the government should issue a statement condemning lawlessness but resolved that Onama should not personally address the police or publically condemn the Youth Wing.130 The ministers refused to take any substantive collective decisions about the partygoers or the Youth Wing without instructions from the Prime Minister. In the Prime Minister’s absence, cabinet ministers debated whether the Tank Hill party should mark a new rupture in Uganda’s relationship with Britain and the British Overseas Civil Service. Some pushed for punishments in line with those suggested by Parliamentarians. Hunt reported speaking to one minister who “was furious at [the party organizers’] being merely allowed to leave [the country] instead of being punished.”131 An expatriate officer was assigned to draft criminal charges against the remaining partygoers in anticipation of Obote’s authorization.132 British officials later learned that the cabinet had considered a proposal to break off diplomatic relations with Britain. Minister of Health Emmanuel Lumu reported, “It had powerful support.”133 The momentum for such drastic measures grew out of the shock that the Tank Hill party revelations had elicited. However, the consequences of such action became increasingly clear in the subsequent days. There were immediate costs of dismissing over a hundred civil servants. Anyone compelled to “retire in the public interest” would be entitled to a pension from the Ugandan government. Anyone otherwise dismissed could request a disciplinary hearing with an independent magistrate.134 Moreover, Uganda was preparing for negotiations over an aid package from the United Kingdom.135 There were also political costs to conceding to the Youth Wing’s demands. Youth Wingers’ violence drew a sharp rebuke from the UPC’s coalition partner, Kabaka Yekka, and exacerbated the party’s deep unpopularity in Buganda Kingdom.136 By the following weekend, moderates in the cabinet began to push back against their more

128 BNA DO 168/36 Kampala to CRO [76], 27 December 1963; BNA DO 168/36 Kampala to CRO [83], 31 December 1963. 129 BNA DO 168/36 Kampala to CRO [41], 22 December 1963; UNA Confidential box 39 file 1b, Minutes of Cabinet Meeting [Minute 675], 23 December 1963 130 UNA Confidential box 39 file 1b, Minutes of Cabinet Meeting [Minute 679], 23 December 1963. 131 BNA DO 168/36 Kampala to CRO [54], 24 December 1963. 132 The officer secretly reported about his instructions to the British High Commission. BNA DO 168/36 Le Toq to Aspin [71], 27 December 1963. 133 BNA DO 213/41 Hunt to Walsh Atkins [45], 21 February 1964. 134 UNA Confidential box 39 file 1b, Minutes of Cabinet Meeting [Minute 675], 23 December 1963. 135 BNA DO 213/42 Le Toq to Lamarque [55], 6 May 1964. 136 “K.Y. Deplores Violence” Uganda Argus 24 December 1964; “Mengo Slams Lawlessness” Uganda Argus 24 December 1964.

21 Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission radical colleagues. Minister of State George Magezi assured Hunt that “he only wanted more British officials.”137 By the close of the month, Obote and High Commissioner Hunt had assured one another of their shared commitment to restoring morale among British civil servants in the Ugandan government and to suppressing the youthful excesses of young expatriates and the Youth Wing. When Hunt noted that the episode “had given [a] grievous blow to morale of [the] whole remaining British community, Obote blinked slightly at this.” He then assured Hunt that there would be no further deportations beyond the fourteen that had already taken place in his absence. Vowing to publically reassure British civil servants, he “hoped we had heard the last of Tank Hill.”138 In a rebuke to those who sought to sever diplomatic ties with Britain, he issued a statement declaring, “We have no quarrel with either the British Government or the British High Commission in Uganda over this matter. Our relations with the British Government, the British Community in Uganda and the British High Commission remain cordial.”139 Meanwhile, he declined to issue a pardon for the Youth Wingers who were arrested for attacking the Uganda Argus editor. There were reports that they were severely beaten while in custody. Obote’s chief of intelligence Akena Adoko summoned the editor, William Buse, to his office, where he suggested that Obote was “very worried about the strength of the Youth Wingers and proposed to deal with them.”140 The career diplomat Sir David Hunt regarded this as a satisfactory conclusion to “the most wretched affair I have been concerned with in the course of my service.”141 Like his counterpart in Nairobi, he regarded the partygoers as “callow young people” whose behaviour reflected “too little change here from colonial days.”142 Hunt’s liberal disdain for plebeian colonial culture papered over his own preference for older British officials and businessmen who owed their positions to Britain’s very recent colonial rule. It also dismissed the excuses put forward by the party’s attendees that the intended object of ridicule at the Tank Hill party was the paternalistic Colonial Service.143 For a few days, public debate over the Tank Hill party seemed to expose both the fragility and injustice of postcolonial generational and racial hierarchies. The bawdy party-going habits of young white expatriates, when brought into public view, undermined projects of multiracial urban respectability. Youth Wingers’ efforts to expose racial arrogance among expatriate civil servants called into question politicians’ claims to be faithful custodians of Uganda’s sovereignty. Such expressions of youthful irreverence and disruption ultimately proved unacceptable for Ugandan politicians and British diplomats. The aristocratic minister Grace Ibingira formed an alternative youth organization and briefly gained the Prime Minister’s support to purge the Youth Wing’s benefactors from the party.144 When John Kakonge later returned to the UPC fold, he

137 BNA DO 168/36 Hunt to Saville Garner [76], 27 December 1963. 138 BNA DO 168/36 Kampala to CRO [83], 31 December 1963. 139 Quoted in BNA DO 168/36 Kampala to CRO [84], 30 December 1963. 140 BNA DO 213/41 Hunt to Walsh Atkins [27a], 13 January 1964. 141 BNA DO 168/36 Hunt to Saville Garner [76], 27 December 1963. 142 BNA DO 168/36 Nairobi to CRO [55], 24 December 1963; BNA DO 168/36 Hunt to Saville Garner [76], 27 December 1963. 143 BNA DO 213/41 RM Hunt [ledger], 6 January 1964. 144 Mujaju, “Youth Action,” chap. 6.

22 Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission rejected urban radicalism and instead sought to push idle youth into the countryside and “reorientate the attitude of our youth towards agriculture.”145 In Britain, several of the deported party organizers later lobbied their British MPs to demand that the Foreign Office repudiate Ugandan objections to the party’s humour.146 “We were only trying to be funny, not subversive,” one explained.147 However, the British government responded by declaring the party “a serious error in judgment” and expressing hope that it “can get back into the obscurity that history may accord it, because what is important is that the future of Uganda and of this country should run smoothly.”148

145 “Glorify Agriculture” The People 14 December 1968: 1. 146 United Kingdom, Parliamentary Debates, vol 687 cc 397-8 (16 January 1964). 147 An unnamed organizer quoted in “Spinepad Party” Reporter: East Africa’s Fortnightly Newsmagazine 24 December 1963: 17. 148 United Kingdom, Parliamentary Debates, vol 689 cc 583-4 (13 February 1964).

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