‘I Will Crush You’: The November 18 Kampala Massacre

By A. K. Kaiza

“If I can’t have you I’ll go out of my mind” -Whitesnake

Just how serious the moment was comes to you afterwards. Caught in the centre of the riot, the adrenaline high, the gauntlet of fire, smoke, tear gas and gunfire raging around you, you are shielded from the knowledge that this could be the day they kill you.

Afterwards, when you have escaped the bullet and the gas, and have made it home, and the adrenaline has worn out, the pain begins. What if I was among those that died?

It is the evening of trauma, the time for unanswerable questions. You look at the images coming in and think, a week ago, I stood by this mall searching for twine. I was at the same spot the retired lecturer, 71-year old John Kittobe, was cut down. How about the 15-year-old Amos Segawa, bleeding to death, killed on Kafumbe Mukasa Road where there are things I always need to buy?

There is more. The videos keep coming in. Where the yellow, sporty hatchback with the president’s poster drove into a crowd (Charlottesville-style) you too had wedged your way out between a Mercedes Benz trailer and an Isuzu Bighorn. At each Christmas, you regularly drive past the town the church laity Richard Mutyaba was killed in. And the sunny-faced Onesmus Kansiime was shot in a place I went past just a month earlier.

Is there a formula to empirically plot these events? How did the angels of death that roamed this bit of earth in mid-November bearing AK-47s look at a figure and decide that that body, that young man, that woman will die today?

Then comes the impossible matrix: what can I do to not be killed? Should I not raise a defiant voice, not write this article? But then none of those killed were rabble-rousers.

Talk, you die; keep quiet, you die

So why was it them and not me? Why did the shooting happen this week instead of last week when I was right there?

Then, survivor’s guilt: I should have been there holding the hand of that boy whose legs were crushed to smithereens. What right do I have to remain alive when they are all gone?

Perhaps this comes closest to answering these wearied questions: a sheer coincidence of missed appointments and of a malfunctioning carburetor that kept you parked by the roadside, you realise, was all that stopped you standing at the spot where the bullet went through Mr Kittobe.

Those that were killed led quiet, unprotesting lives. Talk, you die; keep quiet, you die. How about the rest of us noise makers, who write articles like this, the makers of music, the poets and activists who are frequently warned, “There is a plan for you”. Every day, you walk past your designated killer and even say good morning to him. “Your time will come. Be careful.”

You realise there is a bullet out there with your name on it. They just haven’t fired it yet.

The bridge

The hand of fate had me and a writer friend drive a few kilometers north of the city centre. Hard rain in the morning had kept me an hour behind my intended time of arrival. There were a couple of things I needed – and still need – in the downtown area that bore the brunt of the violence. But the rain had ruined my day so I cut the city centre out of my planned schedule.

Meeting done, and as the two of us were approaching the overpass at Bwaise at precisely 3 p.m, it was reported that Mr. Kittobe had been shot dead.

Every day, you walk past your designated killer and even say good morning to him. “Your time will come. Be careful.”

The pillars of black smoke rising everywhere did not yet register. A group of young men were running across the road hurriedly. But they do that in Kalerwe, no? A couple of police officers in heavy riot gear were waving their arms in command. That too has been standard in the last 20 years.

But past the gentle curving section that takes you from the Kalerwe-Mpererwe junction, the pile of burning tyres is ominous. Before we get there, there comes the smell of tear gas and a single shot. Burning tyres, tear gas and gunshots – the macabre trinity.

We remember the news of the arrest of Bobi Wine and understand it fully. The overpass raises the ground underneath us but we will never make it past it. We slow down. A young man shouts in urgent Luganda. We press on. At the top of the bridge, we see his point. Down beyond the overpass, the hundreds of unmoving vehicles are jammed. To our left, clogged up on Sir Apollo Kagwa Road, even more vehicles. To our right there is the actual event, the crackle of gunshots interspersed with shouts of heightened emotions. The only clear route out of this is behind us and it is filling up fast. We need to act.

Gunshots, and that eerie clarity when you know they are shooting to kill.

Now that we are fully aware, we start to notice, in every movement, an affirmation that the Museveni regime had not given up.

Something is building up, like an approaching storm. We must get out. We make the U-turn.

We never made it across the bridge. Below, a maelstrom. The uncrossed bridge, the bridge of burning tyres and missing phones.

Cassava, potato and banana gardens

The old Bwaise road is blocked by a massive, burning barricade. We swerve right in time to avoid the gridlock. I wrack my brain to remember the muddy, potholed backyards of Makerere Kavule, where I grew up in the 1990s. Lord, let it not be too far ahead. Just ahead, the biggest burning barricade we will see all day, in Makerere Kavule. The Lord is kind. We find the easy-to-miss byway.

“Enkuubo enfu”. The road is bad, a young man warns us.

“I know this place,” I reassure the poet and press on.

U-turns

Lesson learned: keep away from big, smooth roads. Cling to byways and earth ruts. You clamour up the back of Makerere hill on number one and number two, there with the ugly cassava and lianna side, with the burrs and forget-me-nots, the side of its hill that Makerere does not put on its admission prospectus. We intended to slingshot across the city westwards. But the Kikoni-Kasubi districts, from the ridge overlooking Makerere West, was a disturbed beehive of burning barricades and military and zero vehicular traffic.

An afternoon of U-turns. Rapidly back up, head directly south and at the Sir Apollo Kagwa Road (in Kampala you can’t escape Sir Apollo Kagwa, a relentless, tyrannical memory of the seminal betrayer of Uganda) and Makerere Hill junction, a sharp turn west. Cars rapidly going uphill on third gear, as quickly as they can before the inescapable Nakulabye junction is shut. And just in time to catch youths tearing the pavements, a troop of riot gear- and gun-wielding soldiers steadily pacing in their direction. The clash is inevitable. But the distraction buys us a few seconds. We shield behind a blanket of raging tyre fire and smoke, and leap onto Namirembe district.

From Sir Apollo Kagwa Road to Namirembe Cathedral, we have been in the open air of modern roads too long. Time again to dive out of sight on back roads.

In the backwaters of the Nateete-Mackway suburb, the air seems the most riotous – the giant barricades, youths clutching shirts, running, soldiers and police alert and trigger- happy. A quick left, and at the early Martyrs Church, searching an option route out west. It is more cassava, banana and potato fields and villagers watching curiously this unscheduled invasion of town cars in their shambas. But there are barricades even this deep. The difference is that there are no soldiers or police, so it’s a civilised pleading with the motorists – don’t cheat us poor people; don’t take our land.

The realisation comes that when the big moment of history approaches, there is no out of sight to fall into.

It is at the top of the ridge, just before Busega, when we feel out of the danger zone, that I realise how much trouble we had escaped.

After nearly an hour hunting through the sidelines of banana, yam and cassava fields for a way out of the city, a black Toyota Harrier stood thrumming ahead of us, not moving.

“Get out,” he yells.

‘Mr Bobi Wine I arrest you because you do this so many times’

In the days that follow, when all the headlines have been scanned and radio analyses have been listened to, and the unwatchable videos have been watched and re-watched, we all know what we have always known: We Ugandans are being punished for falling in love with Bobi Wine rather than with the other one who considers himself the more attractive suitor. Has this not been the story for four decades now? That Mr. Yoweri Museveni, having failed to win at the ballot box, has lashed out in violence?

It is said that the most deadly thing that Milton Obote ever wielded was a microphone. And in 1980, it is said, his listeners never stood a chance when faced with his killer tongue.

Kizza Besigye is like that. He stands up and moves a hand. Not a word said but already there are tears streaming down faces. He speaks and something moves in the crowd, an almost metaphysical, transcendental transformation.

It is different at Mr. Museveni’s rallies. At your kindest, you might call him a policy wonk, a man who likes to string off measures, deliverables, reasons and figures. He does not speak to the heart. Without the military reining the crowds in, as happened on the day Daniel arap Moi stepped down in Nairobi, he will move his listeners to jeer and boo him. He does not have the words that will make people feel warm inside. He has a pathological fear of elections. Thoroughly wooden, his best pick- up line is, “I will crush you.”

It is said that the most deadly thing that Milton Obote ever wielded was a microphone. And in 1980, it is said, his listeners never stood a chance when faced with his killer tongue.

At Besigye’s rallies, they jostle, push forward, slip and fall for the privilege of handing him some money, or a chicken. He makes them believe in something. But Museveni had him tear-gassed, beaten and blinded – to disfigure the face they found irresistible.

In Shakespeare’s play, Othello, the hatred-blinded Iago, unaccepting of the fact that someone he considers dark, ugly, without substance, and full of pompous emptiness can be attractive to someone else, says venomously:

He hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly But take Obote and Besigye and add them up. The combination is Bobi Wine, a man young enough to be Mr. Museveni’s grandson. Still the fear returns. The reaction of Mr. Museveni remains the same as it was when he faced off against Obote and Besigye. The deeply fear that they will speak and win.

On 18 November 2020, the insecurities of the past welled up in a bloody bout of peacetime carnage that Kampala will not wish to remember. (Just in case we forget, at the end of 2016, scores were massacred in the West town of Kasese, the likely site of the coming pogrom should Uganda break down.)

Kiwaani

I have never taken the time to stream Bobi Wine’s music. After November 18 and 19, I wanted to find out just what it is that endears a country to him and so hurts the other man.

As good a track to begin with is Kiwaani. Upbeat and sad, delightful and morose, it was Bobi Wine’s breakout hit in 2009-2010. You start to see that Bobi Wine, unbeknownst to us who did not pay closer attention at the beginning, but who was already sealing the love deal. Whilst Museveni basked in his 2006 triumph and prepared for another “Rap” in 2009-10, Bobi Wine was already placing the winning hand.

It remains perhaps his quintessential song, an address that spoke to Ugandans in ways we had not been spoken to since Philly Bongole Lutaaya and Okot P’Bitek before him (an inheritor then of poet laureate burdens). Dulcet, rising, in pathos, long-suffering, there was a song telling us what we were feeling. Back then, lines in it were quoted repeatedly to explain why things were unbearable. Kampala, it declared, was the place of failure.

A deceptively laid-back track, Kiwaani opens in classic Kadongo Kamu (one-man guitar) melody, seemingly to hark back to a bygone age. This is followed by rapid, brief strings. Then comes the rescuing poetry.

A melody taken off a slum kid’s chant of sowaani (the plate at feeding time), repurposed to say Kampala wears sheds, Bobi Wine put it to good effect. And there he is, in his element, seductive, laying it on thick, simplifying and pre-digesting inaccessible lyrics, a distillation of critical discourse – postcoloniality, duality, deconstruction, neoliberal philanthropy. It is all there. There is just enough straight Luganda to make you get it. For the rest, you just have to speak ghetto to get it.

His coming of age mood was dense, chewy, accessible, personable. He might have played nothing more beyond Kiwaani and stayed forever as the defining describer of Kampala. After you listened to that track, you could not take your eyes away from the dreadlocked lark.

A decade later, the melody is still haunting.

Mr. Money

Then there was the author of Mr. Money, at one time the undisputed anthem of Kampala. And you asked again, how did I not know how to put it into words what I see daily in this city? As if knowing what would become of him in later years, the young, twenty-something Bobi Wine had sung these lines:

Those who pursue me find me far ahead Rich and poor, let this music touch you

Before he was a political prisoner, he was a prisoner of conscience, and he quotes his tormentors: ‘Mr Bobi Wine I arrest you because you do this so many times I arrest you and take you to SPC and charge you with idle and disorderly”

Mr. Money is in many ways, the song that really tells it as it is. He is in his element. But it is still safe territory. He is belting out the Kadongo Kamu man’s craft, telling stories, not the mash and splash postmodernity of Kiwaani.

But the essential Bobi Wine is there, as he always had been, and would be in later years – rousing, exhilarating, musical, leading from the front.

I say man made money, money made man mad

He could have stopped at Mr. Money and been great.

Carolyn

He could even have stopped at Carolyn, and still been great. One of those required evergreen melodies no songster must go out without, Carolyn is a happy song, a party staple, like What A Wonderful World, or Here Comes the Sun, or the tenderest, caressing ballard of Tabu Ley’s Mireille Mwana, He is not only happy, he is doing happiness. There is Bobi Wine, happy, letting it rip; he is enjoying it, letting the melody run, run, run. A love song. A recollection of high school sweetheart nostalgia. A celebration.

But is he not channeling the late Kafeero with his slim, scanty-bearded, straw hat-wearing mien? What is he doing with the adungu, harp and rattle troupe? 1997 was a wonderful year.

She used to call me Master Bio because I used to handle money-o.

This man made beautiful songs. They love him for it. Before he stood for them, he serenaded them.

Kyarenga

The earlier joie de vivre expressed in Carolyn is resurrected in perhaps the most ambitious of Bobi Wine’s songs, Kyarenga, the eponymous song of the album for which the notorious crackdown of the 2018 launch cemented what would be the position of government going forward. Kyarenga is set as a love song. The strapping youth who has the village belle’s heart is challenged by variegated powerful and moneyed suitors. But he has the belle’s heart. The belle has eyes only for him.

This man made beautiful songs. They love him for it. Before he stood for them, he serenaded them.

The song, and the video (by this point Ugandan music videographers had come into their own), is a thinly disguised allegory of the moment, of the songster who has a nation’s heartbeat but is attacked and harassed by the powerful who think their position and money entitles them to love. Why force the nation to love you when who they want is me?

But does that explain this unhinged violent fear of voters choosing someone who steals their hearts?

Paradiso

The heavier, Mtukuzi-sampling opening, but Kiswahili-lyrics Paradiso pays homage to a different Uganda, Uganda, the East African country. A track with a kick, perhaps the lowest depth of Bobi Wine pathos. It speaks to the generation disinherited by neoliberalism, scattered in the face of the earth to look for fortunes, and returning, in the words of T.S. Eliot, to find alien people clutching strange gods.

Situka

The politically overt Bobi Wine comes out clear in 2015/2016. He releases Situka and declares,

When leaders become misleaders And mentors become tormentors When freedom of expression becomes target of suppression Opposition becomes our position

If he was speaking to Mr. Museveni, he was also speaking to Mr. Obote, Idi Amin and the grandest of all Ugandan tyrants, Sir. Apollo Kagwa. And this is a point lost in the heat of the moment. The fight that has raised Bobi Wine was a century in the making. Mr. Museveni need not feel it is directed at him. When he is gone, that war will still rage on. The things we need Bobi Wine for are not the things we require Mr. Museveni for.

He is the Ugandan musician who broke through his art into the public consciousness. But also, in this era, he is music breaking beyond the point Bob Marley left it. We can hardly think of a musician, anywhere, in recent times, who has caused such a stir in an uncertain, frightened world.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter.

‘I Will Crush You’: The November 18 Kampala Massacre

By A. K. Kaiza In eight weeks of lockdown, the psychological compression of confinement within a radius of five kilometres had built up to an unbearable pressure.

I had walked and bicycled the Entebbe peninsula almost daily, but how many times can you look over the same lake horizon?

The water was rising, locusts descending from the north, everywhere the virus, while a wizened septuagenarian was taking the country down with him. 2020’s dress rehearsal for the apocalypse, unlike the world’s health, was in fine fettle.

For some obscure, important reason, it seemed that the pressure cooker psyche could only be undone by going to Kampala. But there was a further, albeit light, tantalising draw. You could not drive, but you could ride a bicycle. The idea of cycling to Kampala came as a challenge that would not go away.

Getting out was one motivation. The other was that after half a decade studying Kampala, the chance to see it when emptied of human activity was irresistible. The opportunity rarely comes, in any one lifetime.

The last time the world convulsed this much was 1989-90. Those years marked the end of the period in Kampala’s life that had begun with independence, a period I only came to see in later years as its fourth age. By 1990, the forces of neocolonialism that had financed a civil war had taken control of the city, and used it as a base to set fire to Eastern and Central Africa, taking back control, as they now say, of their former colonies.

From the 1990s, the triumphant new ideology of economic neoliberalism set about preparing the city to serve new global masters. The banks, enterprises and industrial properties of the young Ugandan state were parcelled off to the lowest bidders; its people locked off in warfare, while former economic oppressors returned in the guise of “foreign investors”.

Since 2015, I have been tracing the development and expansion of Kampala’s streets. I have been reassembling the city, starting with the 1870s. Each epoch had left its architectural and planning mark on the city. (Planning’s intention was colonial exploitation.) Here in 2020 was a historical watershed moment bound to once again change the direction of the city, a moment at par with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the stock market crashes of 1873 and 1929. Those previous events had been precursor calamities for the world wars that happened in 1914 and 1939. Their impact had ricocheted down and significantly changed Kampala, as they did the world.

The excitement I felt for my Kampala project was, admittedly, shameful yet irresistible. The pandemic had handed me a chance to study the city in a lab-controlled experiment.

Understanding coloniality is an enormously difficult task. And not just because it is complexly contoured – no two colonised peoples experienced the same history. To talk of independence in Kampala is to refer to a very different event to what happened in Karatina. To speak of the “black” experience is to draw a very broad brush indeed. You cram Malcom X, Jomo Kenyatta, Apollo Kagwa, Omukama Kabalega and Yoweri Museveni into one basket, yet they had different experiences of colonialism, and their attitudes towards imperialism were so wide-ranging that some in that group do not even consider themselves black at all.

It’s all the more difficult because in countries like Uganda and in cities like Kampala, political independence failed to translate into decolonisation. Hence Ngugi’s anti-colonialism can only make sense in form, and not substance, among the educated, southern elite of Uganda. The reason this elite resisted and continues to resist the formation of an East African Federation is because the Kampala-Mengo colonial elite and their counterparts in western Uganda belonged to the same social and economic class and privilege as Lord Delamere. Delamere was not enthusiastic about decolonisation either; like them, colonialism made him a landlord.

Hence, what happened in Kampala in 1962 was administrative independence. There was to be no spiritual (religious) independence because the experience had not been genocidal in intent for them. The reason the very highly educated southern elite never contributed a single writer of substance to the African Writer Series despite the many Ph.Ds they produced is because Shakespeare was not a problem for them. In other words, there was no cultural independence pursued in Kampala. Economically, independence was a disaster for it.

The reason this elite resisted and continues to resist the formation of an East African Federation is because the Kampala-Mengo colonial elite and their counterparts in western Uganda belonged to the same social and economic class and privilege as Lord Delamere.

There remains in Kampala today, hence, that most heinous of colonial pandemics – amnesia. You have to dig very deep to know what colonialism meant here. Otherwise, as presented, it emerges as a tea party of going to King’s College Budo, riding in Rolls Royces in ermine and pearls and being called “Sir”.

Kampala is hence a very strange city, much like Johannesburg. The arrival of Boer settlers in Southern Africa came long before the imperial stage of colonisation, which is what happened in Kampala. The Bantu of Southern Africa and Kenya did not experience the same colonialism as the Bantu of Central Uganda. In addition, the class of British colonisers who settled in Kenya was not the same as that which came to Kampala. To this extent, a Joseph Muthee in Karatina was bound to fight for a different decolonisation from that which Joseph Kiwanuka fought for in Kampala.

The experience of black people in the USA may be colonial in itself, but it was not imperialism; it was not the imperialism that the Native American Sioux experienced. Settlerism was effectively a genocidal ideology, binding Southern African, Kenyan and American black peoples in a similar experience but not including those in Kampala, while imperialism was an expression of “superior” European culture and “civilisation”. Slavery and genocide are the opposite of imperialism since they seek to eliminate rather than wow the natives. While what happened in Bunyoro in Uganda was genocide, the experience of the Mengo elite can perhaps pass as the best example of imperial colonisation. Because the coloniser that came to Buganda was most representative of the high Victorian Age – a class that bought into the haute bourgeois ethos of its time a belief in science and industrial progress emancipated from “European” nativism, the product of the new form of education of the time – the colonising of Apollo Kagwa and Ham Mukasa produced a very curious sense of history in Buganda high circles.

For the Kampala elite hence, colonisation was one continuous tea party with Alexander Mackay and the governor’s wife. This party was then ruined by the likes of Governor Cohen, Milton Obote and Abu Mayanja Kakyama. Attempts by the independence government of Uganda to liberate the Buganda masses from land alienation has never been seen for what it was. It was seen as an attack on Buganda in general, although the struggle by the peasant, anti-colonial movement of Buganda was more anti-Mengo than even the politics of Obote. In conjunction with a similar aristocratic crust in Ankole and Toro (who signed 1901 Ankole Agreement and the 1900 Toro Agreement with the British), this elite, largely Anglophile/Protestant, and who pushed their their Muslim and Catholic kin to the marginal lands, rewrote independence history and successfully fought off attacks on their colonial-era privileges with the result that the peasants of Buganda are today more landless than they were in 1900. The stigma of signing away their people’s freedom lingered long into history, meaning that independence from British rule automatically led to their own loss of power. The fact that decolonisation also meant independence from powerful, African/black collaborators has not been studied properly. But colonial collaboration also meant they were the best educated under the British system and captured the propaganda war very easily, given their cozy relationship with western media and universities (Oxford and Cambridge chums).

The result is that without knowing history better, the views of these aristocratic collaborators is what you likely hold, after all, the BBC and British universities which are more or less British aristocratic establishment, continue to take their views as given.

Black Delameres (a class belatedled created by the British in post-independence Kenya) can only turn on their own people. This was what the Luwero war was about. Four decades later, the tragic irony is that the peasants of that very Luwero have nearly lost all their land today.

It is only in cities like Kampala, in which black elites betrayed black people, that presenters on a local TV station will wear “All Lives Matter” T-shirts. There is a solid history behind this.

It is a hard history to disentangle. By the time the pandemic broke, I had only reached Kampala’s 1930s. But even the bike journey into Kampala was a ride through history, the 36 kilometers a gauntlet through what the five ages of Kampala have left imprinted on the landscape: 15 kilometers out of Entebbe, in Kisubi, you encounter the first age of Kampala, with earlier structures going back to 1904. Entebbe itself, the first port of entry for the earliest Christian missionaries, has a curious collection of old churches, the first High Court (now a metrological school), and a clutch of early, brick and mortar structures hailing back to Allidina Visram, the Indian mogul who defined early colonial mercantilism.

Over the last three decades of the rampant Museveni-era land thefts, the Kisubi area has so far mostly been spared. The largest landowner there is the Catholic Church (itself a beneficiary of the first massive land grab of the 1900 Buganda-British settlement, so few innocents here). The air has a calm, unhurried placidity to it. It is only in cities like Kampala, in which black elites betrayed black people, that presenters on a local TV station will wear “All Lives Matter” T-shirts. There is a solid history behind this.

Towards the rising ground to Bwebajja, at 20 kilometers, you run into the latest, fourth age. A space open still to negotiation, these big, saddleback hills watching over moist valleys are neoliberal era developments, with the full complement of commercial bank-funded mortgages and Akright’s promises of bright, suburban futures, loans to be repaid over negotiated periods of time, families raised in garden cities, all as advertised. These dreams, still held onto a decade and more since the credit crunch, are so new that the concrete is still sluicing down muolds and the air is cement-grey and wet with enterprise.

Bwebajja, rather than colonial era religious land grabbing, is neoliberal era bank land grabbing.

Quickly, the air declines to a more pedestrian, urban mess as the road drops, then rises, to Kitende. And it is starting from these densely settled, unplanned, slum areas that the times begin to register.

What, beyond the abstract concept, is a lockdown anyway? Is it this listlessness you meet here, these anxiety-laden forms, the rabbity, scared eyes that search yours out (as you search theirs) asking for comity? As a Ugandan of a certain age, something of this reduction is familiar in the cut-off life, afraid of wandering beyond those hills. It is familiar to us when the dynamic sounds of enterprise suddenly become distant memories.

What we don’t remember is a time when dystopia was so omnipresent. In the darker days of civil wars, the world outside our borders had maintained their dynamism, with Nairobi, Toronto, New York, London, Paris, pulsating beyond our unique hell as steadfast beacons of hope. From there, our kin might send a dollar or two. Now, the world had no bright spots. The kin has come back sick and broke. The world is now one big Uganda circa 1987.

The failures of neoliberal economics – like the failure of the earlier original ideology, liberal economics, which it attempted to resuscitate hence the “neo” – has been spectacular.

Here is Kajjansi, a town packed tight as a tin of sardines, but whose chief feature, a clay factory, is listed on the stock market, as if in mockery of the poverty all around it. For a brief while, motor horns and din make Kajjansi feel lively. But its only a veneer. The people milling about are a combination of curious pandemic tourists like myself or parents escaping hungry families.

At the 28th kilometer mark in the steel rolling mill town of Seguku, you start to smell Kampala proper. There is great tension in the air the closer you get to the centre of power. The military patrols come in at ever closer intervals. There are more police roadblocks. Like the early 1980s, when the third age of Kampala was tottering to its demise, a sitting regime frightened of its hold on power was arming itself.

Now, as then, we are living out the final days of an ideology that has given up the ghost. In the 1980s, it was the remnants of the colonial economy. Forty years later, it is the debris of the neoliberal – but also neocolonial – economy.

I arrived in a ghost city and could not stay more than a handful of hours. Such was its sadness. Is there something we might have done differently back in 1990, when the ever so edgy American delusion of limitlessness started to be sold to us? Might we have questioned the usefulness to a poor country of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Rick Dees Weekly Top 40, tank tops, hamburgers and ESPN? Might all that money have been best spent on agriculture and education? Hot on the heels of Michael Jackson and Top Gun – but more abstract – had been Friedrich von Hayek. Barely detectable, he had steadily mined the waters of common sense, and implanted in our young people the lie that jeans, T-shirts, sneakers and an attitude would turn them into Steve Jobs (not saying that 400 years of slavery was necessary to build the war chest of capital for that to happen).

The Soviet counterweight was gone, an example was made of Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Which Third World ruler was foolish enough to spend money on health and education instead of on Tom Cruise, Macintosh and the NBA?

Now, as then, we are living out the final days of an ideology that has given up the ghost. In the 1980s, it was the remnants of the colonial economy. Forty years later, it is the debris of the neoliberal – but also neocolonial – economy.

One hundred and twenty years ago, Kampala had been in such tension. It bore the marks of civil war while all around it, people were dying like flies from genocide and disease (sleeping sickness). There are a handful of rammed earth houses from that age surviving in the areas around Mengo.

It may be hard to believe, but colonialism, like the neoliberal gospel of 1990, had in 1900,come to some as the ideological force for good. “Uganda” was praised as much then for embracing colonialism as it was under Mr. Museveni, who was lauded for welcoming neoliberalism.

The age began with the grabbing of African lands, notably in 1902 when the British, under the guise of sending Kagwa to England for the coronation of Edward VII, lied to the Lukiiko that the powerful Katikiro (Prime Minister) had okayed the chasing away of black land owners on Nakasero Hill. Kagwa could not complain much since he and his class got huge cuts of the land theft. (In later years, when the European and Asians depossessed by Idi Amin were compensated, no word was raised by the World Bank on the Africans who had been evicted from their ancestral lands, which is in keeping with the 19th century ethos of compensating slavers but not the slaves, the last compensation of which the Bank of England paid in 2015).

In a decade, rammed earth gave way to raw bricks, then to clay, fired bricks, and at the end of the era, in the 1920s, started to arise some of the earliest, still-in-use buildings in Kampala.

The railway had reached Kisumu. Heavier equipment, higher tonnage, could be transported overland and steamed in over Lake Victoria. In a sense then, the arrival of the railway to Kisumu led to the grabbing of Nakasero Hill, and gave breathing space away from the cramped quarters of Old Kampala.

The current Namirembe Cathedral is the fourth structure of the church, after the raffia and reed thatch earlier versions were struck down by lightning and represents the best of this period. Makerere Art School, the Government Chemist in Wandegeya, the Ministry of Agriculture in Entebbe, these make up specimens at the end of Kampala’s first age, the busy days of governor Sir Coryndon, creator of Makerere College. In 1990, I went to senior one in a building marked 1927.

The years after 1927 I think of as the second age of Kampala, the age of colonial consolidation. The First World War, the sleeping sickness epidemic and the eventual death of Sir Apollo Kagwa, mastermind of collaborationist politics and great enabler of British colonialism, in 1927 (in a Nairobi hospital) brought the uneasy 1930s.

It would await the 1930s for the railway to reach Kampala before the most characteristic feature of Ugandan towns emerged. The colony grew lucrative. Greater tonnage was shipped out. Bigger equipment steamed in.

Experiments with reinforced concrete, and increased earnings from plantation agriculture, the triumph of the poll and hut tax in forcing Africans into unwanted labour, brought in prosperity. By then, a new city plan had been drawn, covering the Nakasero area, long emptied of black people. To a large extent, this period remains the essential character of Nakasero Hill, a 1930s open-air museum. The venerable Old K’la Club, now an Ethiopian restaurant directly below Gaddafi Mosque, moved upmarket to the conjunction of Ternan Avenue and Baker Close, just past the Sheraton Hotel.

This was a busy, building period in the life of the city. (To get an idea of what Kampala was like before the 1950s international style arrived, travel to Jinja, Mbale and Soroti).

The pressure on the Protectorate Zone of Kampala city – which confined the Asian and European sectors to Nakasero Hill, and whose expansion in the early 1900s doubtless cost Kagwa his clout – happened slowly, one scalp at a time. The grabbing of the rest of Makerere Hill was to cost Prime Minister Martin Luther Nsibirwa his life.

The grabbing of Kololo Hill had awaited the passing of Daudi Chwa in 1939.

Prior to that, Kololo had been occupied by Africans with tended farms. The golf course began life as a green zone, for it was believed that the female anopheles mosquito flew 1.3 kilometres in a straight line, and after biting a black person, must not be allowed to land on white skin, hence, this cordon sanitaire was necessary to separate the still African Kololo from the European Nakasero.

By 1951, the combined Asian and European population of the Protectorate Zone (run under a different set of laws while the Africans were governed by “Native Law”) was around 20,000. For this population, the colonial administration allotted half a million pounds sterling (about 17.4 million pounds sterling today) in 1951 for town maintenance. The black area around it, with an estimated 200,000 Africans, was given 16,000 pounds sterling (in 2020, half a million pounds sterlings) for the same year. It is important to note that only the Africans paid poll and hut tax.

The impact of land theft, forced labour, extraction and unequal distribution, even inequality before the law, remains to this day. The line between the Protectorate Zone and the black settlements can be clearly seen once you cross from Katwe/Owino Market, over the Nakivubo Channel, or the Sir Apollo Road separating Makerere West from the university. From a distance, you can tell which bits of Kampala were black and which were white by tracing rust and opulence on a map.

The coming of the third age of Kampala, the 1950s, saw a flurry of international-style Bauhaus architecture. This bulldozed 1930s Kampala Road, and ran down many old structures. Tellingly, it is the age that characterises Kololo Hill, built from the 1940s, where art deco thrives.

This momentum spills over into the early independence years, prime examples being Uganda House and Apollo Hotel. But the telling feature of the fourth age was to be, rather, the desiccation of the past century. The black people coming into power made a beeline for the Protectorate Zone, and ever since, each successive coup saw the officer class grab properties in Nakasero and Kololo. An interesting subtext to this is the “Kololo residence” mentioned in news stories about soldiers, businessmen and hangers-on of the Museveni regime.

To this point, you could say that there is a missing age in the Kampala skyline, as the 1970s and 1980s, even the 1990s, saw nothing of significance built. Where are the Kampala equivalents of Upper Hill, the Hilton Hotel, the Cooperative Bank Tower, or the Lillian Towers of Nairobi? The coming of the third age of Kampala, the 1950s, saw a flurry of international-style Bauhaus architecture. This bulldozed 1930s Kampala Road, and ran down many old structures. Tellingly, it is the age that characterises Kololo Hill, built from the 1940s, where art deco thrives.

Rather, the legacy of those two decades is the decline of the colonial heritage. How else could a city created via racialist exploitation be maintained once the oppressed race has freed itself? The matter is not a paradox. Next door in Kenya, it was done via deals between the new black elite and the colonial era interests to maintain structural injustices as the lives of the Africans barely changed, or got worse.

This system of the oppressor-liberator cohabitation was the answer that returned progress and development to Uganda. They called it Structural Adjustment Policies, while the return of colonial economic interests was dubbed “foreign investment”. The result has been renewed land grabbing and the second phase of mass African poverty.

This time, the culture that came to characterise the fifth age of Kampala was American, consumerist, rather than British. The renewal of the development of Kampala followed where it had stopped in 1951 – northward and eastward expansion (not westward to avoid conflict with Mengo). The malls, the mortgaged, suburban plots, express motorways, and “Max” cinemas are more in keeping with Pax Americana than Pax Britannica. Interior decor, mansions, even baby names, are taken off American TV shows.

A new age came in which Will Smith, rather than William Shakespeare, is the balladeer, Joan Collins, not Jane Austen, the chief novelist, and rather than high tea, Coca Cola and fries. Washington did not wait to take the place of London, and the royal visit of the Clintons in 1997 came as reward for a kowtowing Kampala – but only after delivering the goods of the Congo Basin into American hands. Where Kagwa had earned his trip to London by decimating Bunyoro, Museveni won the visit from Washington by laying waste to Congo.

Fast-driving highways, factory-sized shopping malls, ad agencies, multi-channel TV packages – these have come to characterise present-day Kampala. And buildings have been erected to reflect these tastes. The Village Mall, on the Spring Road-Luthuli Avenue junction in Bugolobi, which perhaps best represents the turn Kampala took 30 years ago, may look as far as you can come from the cramped quarters of Delhi Gardens, which sits enclosed in a historical bubble just behind the Old Kampala Police Station, but they are ideological cousins.

Now that the neoliberal fifth age of Kampala is gone, we begin a prolonged period of uncertainty. It is likely a precursor moment to a greater global tragedy, and we cannot discount the collapse and descent into catastrophe of the Ugandan state. All signs point to it.

But as I cycled back to Entebbe that afternoon, and looked over the landscape, I wondered to myself what will replace the big shopping malls as the cathedrals of the future? What new bright ideas will the future people bring here and how will they divide the land?

What I was sure of was that when the current masters of Kampala’s fifth age are gone, the city’s sixth age will probably also not belong the common Ugandan man or woman.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant. The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter.

‘I Will Crush You’: The November 18 Kampala Massacre

By A. K. Kaiza

I did not return to the scene until 15 years had passed, by which time I was already more than twice as old as I had been when the events of 1987 abruptly ended my childhood.

In early February 2002, I was in the press pack that accompanied the inaugural East African Legislative Assembly on the inspection of the Soroti Flying School, once the property of the East African Community. I found time and nipped off to St Andrews Madera Boys School, where I had studied from 1985 to 1987.

Even then, in my mid-20s, the paradox was unavoidable: Had I truly left St Andrews the day that the Red Cross evacuated scores of us school children trapped behind the front lines in Soroti? Can a psychology shaped by the tragic knowledge of impermanence and strife learn to trust and easily move on? How could I say I had put the months of 1987 behind me when the first thing I did upon return to the school was to make way straight for the Stretcher House dormitory?

Standing there with my face pressed against the window, looking inside, it was the events of early August 1987 that came to mind, to that early morning when a teacher sent me and two friends to buy soap in the town with the absurd, early colonial name, Camp Swahili. And there, as we ask about, comes the single gunshot, the high whine of a military truck racing back to town, and then the preternatural sight of the men, the fighters of the rebel prophetess, Alice Lakwena, shirtless, in their black shorts, their torsos glistening in the sun from shea butter, which we later learned had been smeared to bounce off bullets.

The key event shaping a personal future starts at that moment. Explanations are not needed. You have learned a lesson; when the time has come, you must run, do not hesitate. We are going very fast. We cut through the Madera Seminary, which in ordinary times had been forbidden. We are reaching the school compound when the bombardment begins, and all over the town, when the shock of the explosion draws our attention, we see a pillar of black smoke, as if to announce the beginning of hell, habemus bellum.

We make it to the Stretcher House dormitory and dive under the beds. And there, for the next two hours, we track the movement of the front line by how close the sounds of battle are. We hear it recede from the town, come past the flying school, which is a mile from our complex of missionary schools. (Madera was set up in 1914 by the Mill Hill fathers and came to include a school for the blind, a girls’ school, a boys’ school, a technical college and a seminary.)

Shortly, the front envelopes us. Its progress is majestic, slow, following the sloping ground from Soroti town, going down a slight incline to dip into a swamp. This swamp halts the battle, as the army decides against pursuing the attackers beyond the Arapai ridge.

There is, intermixed with the terror, a character to war you read about but is the privilege of an accursed few who get to know it intimately. It is the macabre nature of war that men find irresistible, the grisly truth that a war in motion can also be attractive.

Yes, the sounds of war can be a terrifying, seductive symphony. The sharp mosquito-like buzzing sound of a bullet flying mere feet from your ears, the tearing, rocketing then shuttering register of mortar shells, the ear-splitting rending, as if a giant were holding a sheet of metal as one holds a piece of paper then rips it to pieces as missiles tear overhead. The inscrutable lopping repetitiveness of a machine gun that sounds like someone drumming on a home-made drum fashioned from an old aluminium saucepan. But everyone looks forward to the artillery, the big boy stuff, with dread fascination; the imperious rapid impatience of Katyusha rockets which come as if the earth were being cut up by a high-velocity grinder tool, and, target found, the centre of the world collapses.

In a lockdown, life loses meaning

But as I drew away from the window, my memory drained, I remembered that I had to leave to rejoin the delegation of East African MPs at the Flying School. Then a shot of the feeling I once lived with daily attacked me

How can one explain such a feeling? There’s the febrile malarial listlessness to it, a dry-throated longing, like having a nightmare whilst fully awake. That day in early 2002, I felt as I had for much of 1987 – that there was no point to life, that going on with it would only lead to a future of dystopian mediocrity. But if the 2002 reunion did not answer the question, then March 2020, when news came of the world locked down in fear, left little doubt. There, across the valley from my apartment in Entebbe, the planes stopped landing and taking off. The grass around the runway was starting to grow wild. Amidst the dead silence all around, I could sense the collective fear of humanity that was awaiting the calamity.

It reminded me of 1987. I heard once more the silence of the skies when the flying school Piper and Cessna planes stopped flying. I saw the spot of greenery on the runway. The school lawns, once meticulous, had become wilderness. And in the night, there were blood-curdling cries that registered in the morning as another funeral in the villages beyond the Catholic missionary complex of Madera.

This was the second time in my life that I was going into a lockdown. The first one lasted nearly a year and it was devastating. It was only in March 2020, 33 years later, that I began to learn that a certain part of me never made it past August 1987.

My mind went back to that day when I saw the fighters of the Holy Spirit Movement of Alice Lakwena. It was the first time I saw them; I never saw them again; I have never managed to unsee them since.

By August of 1987, northern Uganda had already been in a lockdown for many months. The savage war in Luwero, southern Uganda, had migrated to the north. And there, with changed fortunes, yesterday’s rebels becoming government and yesterday’s government forces the new rebels, the texture of the violence acquired a new complexion. And yet 1987 was early days in what would be a savage two-decade-long war that has not yet ended. But how could an 11-year-old boy whose chief interest in life was to see mummy know that?

The manner of the war meant we were liable to get trapped easily. Hitherto, northern Uganda had had a string of nationally enviable schools. The shutdown of the schools began in Gulu, and made its way east, as did the fighting. The result was that we who came from Lango and Acholi were at the initial stages, in the safety of Teso, by which calculation our parents thought it best we stay there. But no one had anticipated the rapidity with which the war would move. Within weeks, in late July 1987, the Holy Spirit Movement of Alice Lakwena had crossed over to Teso. That morning, we saw the rebels running down from the Arapai Railway station to Soroti town, where they aimed to take over the airfield of the flying school.

The lagging progression of the war had allowed parents from the east and south to pick their children via the road to Mbale in the east. We would have needed the road to the west, which was shut off. Hence, the first term break had come and we had stayed in school. The second term had started and it was thought best we simply continue with our studies.

But there was to be no second term. Barely had it begun than the parents returned, this time with the vigilance of birds not taking a chance with their nest again. Then the road to the east was cut. We were doomed.

We, the seven students who had spent the last six months at the school, felt the loneliness instantly. In a lockdown, the early days are the most lonely. You feel the prickliness of abandonment. After the warm companionship of crowds is gone, you become aware of your status. There is a grim numbness from which you emerge drained of everything, even fear.

Your concern is for it to end, for you to get your old life back. But that life is gone. Sterner times await you. You learn new ways, new languages, believe in new gods and causes. It is likely that you or the people you love or know will die. You will learn fear. When the school was empty, we, the stranded, knew we were preparing for something darker. The first month was the worst; we had hope. We spent hours watching the drive into the school, hoping to catch the familiar frame of a parent, the sound of the diesel 504 Peugeot from Aboke that would collect us.

One teacher, Miss Ekit, kept watch over us, like an aunt, but she had nothing to feed her relatives taking refuge in her house, let alone us.

For the next four months, the 400 by 300 metres of Madera Boys marked the confines of our world. We dared not, and were warned against, going into Soroti town. There was a railway station over the ridge of Arapai. There was no train. There was a flying school close by. Only the most connected parents airlifted their children away.

To stay locked down, to know that darkness is enveloping the world around you, is a terrifying reality whose greatest damage is not what happens or what does not happen to you in the months you spend alone. You go into isolation expecting the big moments, the war, the calamity, to come confronting you personally. More often than not, the extremes do not happen. But that is also a revelation; because the big things have not come to you, you grow to learn that you are but one insignificant soul. When the extremes do come to you, as they do to a few unfortunate ones, then that too is another revelation; you were but a mere speck of dirt in the great maw of history. You are personally ground into the dirt but war, or peace, plough on regardless.

A Do Me Good hangs us out like tethered goats

As the shutting down of the north began, hidden impulses and prejudices started to surface. The deputy head teacher of Madera Boys, a prickly little man we called A Do Me Good (which was what he called the cane he never walked without) separated all the Luo speakers from the rest. Our beddings and suitcases were taken out of the dormitory. We stayed under the trees during the day and slept in the classrooms at night. We were the dangerous breed. The Nilotics had been overthrown by their arch enemies. Now a punitive raid by the southerners in power against the Nilotes was feared. And in Teso, it was thought, associating with Luo speakers would draw the ire of the new rulers.

In the initial stages of the war, this fear was an extreme event. An attack did come, but it was from further north, and they came, not for us, but for the cattle of the Teso. The Karamojong cattle raids intensified, and we watched as Teso, once a rich, well-fed and proud region, lost its collective wealth.

Before we had even left, skin diseases of indescribable virulence had spread throughout the land. That had been during that ill-fated second term when we had remained uncollected in the school. And although the Ministry of Education had been informed of A Do Me Good’s doing, and we had been reinstated in the dormitories, what was coming for the north was bigger than the calculations of an obscure deputy headmaster in an obscure school.

Everyone one else left and so there were hundreds of beds left for us. As my childhood friend John liked to joke, there was now a bed for each of his fingers, toes, ears and teeth.

But something else stuck. To be foreign in a time of strife is to attract fear and suspicion. In our case, we had spoken the same language as the last regime’s, and the fear of association – for the Teso were as Nilotic as we were – stayed throughout the time we lived alone in the school.

The second month arrived. The delivery of maize meal and beans from the Ministry of Education ceased. The school store was broken into and the last morsels of food were taken. First we ran to the teachers. We returned with sticks of cassava. Some called us “Elangoit” (Teso for Lango) to our faces and chased us away. For me personally, it was a frightening time. (My name, Kaiza, is from my great grandfather three generations past who was Bunyoro, a culture and language my own grandfather barely remembered, but it meant I would be regarded as enemy by all sides). It did not take long for us to realise that it had been the same ministry delivery that had kept them fed.

There unwalked paths to the roads disappeared and the lawns had a return-to-the wild look. Unswept, the leaves played in the wind. There was a high season of large, egg-yolk orange sunsets. The dusks descended as harbingers of doom. We feared the nights for the dreams that awaited darkness. We feared the nights because children fear darkness. There was a cemetery close by and in the evenings, we thought we caught willow-the-wisps skirting the perimeters. (As I write this from Entebbe, power is gone, dogs are barking wildly and two days ago, a neighbour who returned from Europe with all his family, workers and dogs, was taken into quarantine.)

In the desultory daytime air, we kept to the shade. Towards the end (which you never see coming), we switched from fearing the nights to fearing the daylight. We started to long for the night. We knew the school very well and could stow away in safer corners at night, even inside the heavy branches of the mango trees, till morning.

In a last twist of the knife, one day, Okello, my second cousin, came running to Teacher Ekit’s house where we had taken water, and informed us that a military truck had come and taken two of the boys, the Ejuras, away. They were flown home in a helicopter. We came from the same town. Their father knew people. They left us behind. Now there were just five of us left – me, John, Okello, the portly Akona, and Ocen, a quiet little boy I never heard from since.

The going of the Ejura boys marked a turn for the worse. Corrosive silence took over. We played football less. Looking back, this was preparation for the next phase, and when it came, our own childhood deserted us. We aged prematurely.

Learning to live without food

Starvation is an event of immense clarifying power. It seems there are two types of human beings: those who have never faced starvation and so do not know many things; and those who have faced starvation and can see through the veneer of most things.

Whilst we had had the supply of maize and beans, we led sad lives, longing for home and fearing for our safety.

But when one day, Okwana, the school cook, did not show up, something switched. Three days went by with barely anything to eat. There was the shame we individually shared, when one by one, we disappeared – to forage in dumps, to gouge the backs of kitchens.

The suggestion might have come from John. He was the strongest-willed of our lot. His father was the doctor of Aboke, an imperious old man. John had the family haughtiness in him. It had come as a chance discovery one morning when while collecting fruits from the borassus palm trees fringing the school, I stumbled upon a root. John came to pull me up. But I had heard a snap in the soil. I went down and dug hands in. I came out with a large tube of cassava. Disbelief. Joy. The surreal moment.

But we had become wise to something by then. John bade me be quiet. We poked around and discovered that this garden, belonging to one of the teachers that had fled the war, had been badly harvested. We took what tubers we thought we could conceal. We ate some raw, but decided that it was best we steal over to the Madera Technical College, over the fence, to cook it, to avoid attracting attention. Along with some sweet potatoes we dug out of poorly harvested fields, we settled upon cooking in the soil. We dug up the ground, and lighting switches, waited for the bigger sticks to catch fire. We collected rocks and placed these in the fire, and placing the cassava and potatoes in with the rocks, we covered the lot and left. We returned and dug out baked cassava and potatoes.

We fed off the gardens around the school for about a month when the tubers stopped coming out. We collected tins, including paint tins, to cook with. But by then we had discovered the “carelessness” of the Teso farmer. That was our actual word. We set out to “correct them”. Hence the word “correction” was what we called our forage.

The word would have been from Okello, my second cousin. Okello was the genius. His marks for all four primary school subjects lingered in the 80s range.

The story from there took on its own character. It was what we became. The fear we had had of ranging out the school perimeter vanished. Hunger gave us courage we were unprepared for. We made our way past the school for the blind, correcting, gathering. We found groundnuts. We found patches of vegetables we recognised. We gathered tamarind fruits. We walked boldly past military roadblocks.

The groundnuts were a boon. We gathered skills we did not know we had. To turn the nuts into butter, we roasted the seeds in hot soil, taking the moisture out. We pounded the lot and ground them. With the vegetables we had sun-dried, the groundnut butter made for a delectable sauce, a far cry from the cassava.

We went past the flying school, going south of the prisons farm.

This manner of feeding became routine. And we used the correction walks to beg for salt from families we knew in Soroti town. The shutting down of the region was having a terrible effect as essentials and incomes ran out. By comparison, we in the school had space, the “correction” to live by.

But the town had its complexities, of course. There were the Asian families in Soroti town who never seemed to run out of things, whose shops remained well-stocked. There were the high civil servants in the senior quarters. There were the bars and restaurants that lined Jumbhai Road that our steps slowed down going past. The piles of chapati, samosas and roast chicken were set there as if to remind us of our status.

And so the discovery of a further truth in the life of decline.

In town, we got looks. We were shouted away from certain places.

It was John who understood this instantly. The state of us had deteriorated. We had no soap. We were malnourished, unwashed, and walking in town. We were a threat. Who knows, a piece of soap, a soda, precious things, might be snatched.

It was a long walk back to Madera. The looks we got began to register. Our hands were covered in scurvy. We had seen town children our own age playing with samosas and chapati and ice cream.

It was not the war that was damaging; it was what the war turned you into that did the harm.

Ice cream had become too good for us.

Till today, I do not understand by what miracle none of us came down with malaria or typhoid. In the state we were in, it would have taken but a little nudge for the ultimate to come.

By late 1987, banditry had taken hold. Internecine conflict had broken out between the Teso that supported the new Museveni regime and those that did not. Class differences turned Teso against Teso. We watched as even some of our own teachers put on military uniforms and joined either the rebels or the new regime and an intra-ethnic war raged. Each morning brought news of someone who had disappeared the night before.

There was a teacher, Mr Odongo, who had kept a distant, avuncular eye on us. He never approached us but hung about where we understood he was overseeing us. One evening, there was a gunshot, so close that the shock of its explosion silenced our little group. Later in the night, we heard a knock on the classroom door. Mr. Odongo may have studied our peregrinations and knew we no longer slept in the dorms. When we opened the door, there he stood, cradling his arm. He had been shot.

We did not know that the bullet had to be taken out. We did not know why he was running a temperature. But John, from watching his father, understood a few things. It was he who ran out for help. Mr. Odongo was taken by adults to hospital and we never heard of him again.

Another teacher, whose brother had joined the government militia, was not so lucky. The bullet got him square in the chest.

A bridge, a land mine

We became inured to life, which is a dangerous stage. One day, a skirmish broke out in Arapai but we just sat by the window, watching, wondering if they were killing many, in between talking about what they were eating back home.

Another afternoon, over at the girls’ school, where my sister was, but which was better provisioned because the nuns ran a tight ship, we heard screaming. In no time, we heard the gunshots and saw scores of men running with the mattresses they had stolen from the girls.

Shortly, we watched as, first, a helicopter sounded off overhead. Then, there was the piercing roar of what may have been a Mig15 fighter jet. John and I were sitting under the tall jacaranda trees by the football field. The Mig heeled up, then, in a terrifying moment, it pitched down, splitting the air, screaming and then it dipped below the tree line. Then it was coming up.

The explosion tore the air apart. We did not run. We had been told to stay put if soldiers or planes appeared. The fighter jet tumbled overhead, we saw it turn upside down, the head of the pilot showing.

In the commotion of jet roar, we had not noticed them. But a single shout drew our attention swiftly. The army had amassed by the football field. And in a straight line, shoulder to shoulder rather than single file, they started to march, sweeping into the bush.

We heard our names. It was Miss Ekit. We got up and ran to the dormitory. She pulled us in and shut the door. We all went under the beds.

There was something about that second battle, coming sometime in November, that was different. It did not sound as dramatic. In fact, it was dull. And it cleared off into the distance. But after that, masses of people disgorged from the countryside and Soroti town became a refugee camp. A Do Me Good disappeared.

We discovered that there had been far more people in the vicinity of Madera than we had known. All had been in hiding, but were now outed by a turn in the war that we did not understand.

People were listless. A faraway look diverted their attention from the immediate. A look like hunger, but deeper, more spiritual. Mute, dull, zombies. We had stopped noticing ourselves, but there we were. Our clothes were too big for us. We had taken to stripping bark off trees to tie our shorts in place. Our shirts were in tatters.

The next week, Miss Ekit told us to pack. She had heard me narrate my stories of travel, for before 1985, my father took me around the country on his business trips. I understood a bit about Kampala, as I knew Mbale very well. Ekit asked me about a friend of our family who was a high-level civil servant in Mbale. She had me repeat his name and the street on which he lived. I did not understand why.

The next day, a long truck drew up outside the technical school. Again, the amazement came. There were scores of schoolchildren hidden in many places whom we did not know about. We were packed into the truck. It drove out of Soroti. We did not speak. If we crossed Bukedea, the border between Teso and Bugisu, we would be safe.

But there was one last throw of fate before we left. We had not yet crossed Aoja Bridge when an explosion whipped our heads to the back. A van had driven over a land mine and lay on the roadside, burning.

The truck had missed it. We the Aboke group were left in Mbale. I took the group to the home of my father’s friend. My father came shortly afterwards and took us all back to the north, via Kampala. But not to our town. In my absence, my family had fled to a place near the Nile, where we still live.

In the coming months, Teso turned into hell, culminating in the notorious Mukura massacre, some of whose perpetrators were the first to die in the Rwanda war five years later.

I did not see John, Akona or Okello again till the late 1990s, and have not seen them since.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter. ‘I Will Crush You’: The November 18 Kampala Massacre

By A. K. Kaiza

“You cannot write about Mohinder without first mentioning his fundamental humanity – the abiding reality that he is an all-round lovely man.” — Jon Snow, presenter, Channel Four News

It was August 7th, 2008. The time would have been a little past 11 in the morning, the usual coffee, tea and cakes break hour at the literature festival in Nairobi that I was participating in. We had come out of the Braeburn School room onto the lawn for coffee, and also for the sun. And there, standing with his back to the sun, the sunlight turning his white hair into a shiny glow, was Mohinder Dhillon – ramrod straight, despite the walking stick. He carried about him the air of something profound about to happen.

The Braeburn School was on holiday and that had left it open for Kwani to hold the Kwani LitFest. A gathering of writers, guest speakers and would-be writers was holed in at the place. To an outsider, as I was, Nairobi was a little jarring. People seemed to get over-excited when talking, too shrill, too waxed. It was a society, as I later understood, that had never experienced civil war, and was struggling to find stability after the post-election violence of 2007/2008 that had shocked the nation.

Later that evening, at a drinking session with fellow writers, including Binyavanga Wainaina, Tom Maliti, Billy Kahora and Kalundi Serumaga, the Kenyan writer and journalist Parselelo Ole Kantai said, “There is this incredible fellow in my class. He has the most unbelievable story. He was a cameraman who went everywhere.”

This “incredible fellow”, Kantai continued, had been to the Congo, to Vietnam. He had also almost been shot at by a firing squad in 1964. He wanted to write a book about his life.

If I did not think about the “incredible fellow” that evening, in barely a month – and for the rest of my years in Nairobi – I was to think of little else. It took me a while to appreciate that the man who I spoke with at least once a week for twelve years had been one of the pioneers of international television news. Many of the places he went with his camera had never been filmed before.

He led a unique life.

Lunch at Sir Mohinder’s

Events seemed to have moved very fast after that August. In September, I moved to Nairobi and would stay there till the end of 2011. A week later, I was asked if I would meet a certain man the syllables of whose name came in one ear and went right through the other.

We were to meet him for lunch, somewhere in Westlands. We drove up to his house, in a place I was to know as Brookside Drive, which abuts the dipping curve of Lower Kabete Road as it begins the rise to Spring Valley. The house was a bungalow set on a half-acre suburban plot. What struck me, going up the rising drive, was the garden, its gaiety of colour, the bright birds of paradise, the heliconia whose deep red seemed otherworldly, the powder puff trees, marigold aplenty, a bud or two of amaryllis, and the roses, and yet more roses.

Mohinder was waiting for us outside. I notice that he has keen eyes and that up close, he is a giant of a man. But he carries a certain humility. The smile on his face is the smile of a man not totally sure of himself.

This “incredible fellow”, Kantai continued, had been to the Congo, to Vietnam. He had also almost been shot at by a firing squad in 1964. He wanted to write a book about his life.

He leads us into his house and to the circular dining table very heavily laden for just three guests. And in what I would later learn was his child-like fascination with everything, and a party trick he doubtless liked to put on show for his guests, he reaches out and gives the table a twirl. It is one of those dining tables with a swivel top. And as the table rotates, the aroma of salad dressing, grams, and mutton permeates the air.

A fellow foodie! Where had I been all my life when Mohinder’s house was the place to be?

This septuagenarian, in this very neat and attractive house, with the beautiful, tiny figurines and artworks that you are unlikely to run into daily, was saying, relax, be yourself, start from there.

I look out of the window, and see a bird feeder outside next to a wind chime. It is not only us humans who come to lunch at Mohinder’s. And when the sunlight streams in through the corner window, you can see in the light the shades of the flowers outside that the sun picks and dashes about on the walls. Whatever this writing assignment, my heart and soul have already said yes before Mohinder has even asked if it was possible. There is something rip-roaringly alive about him.

Leaving India

Food was a constant motif in the story of Mohinder’s life as we wrote it. Of the many facets of a life lived intensely, it was always food that came to mind as the thread running through a long, eventful life. There had been the street food in Vietnam that Mohinder described with such relish that I grew jealous of him. There was the dinner he had in Korea which he spoke about in such tones that the taste of it crept onto my tongue, as if it was just last week, rather than three decades back in 1974. There was the butter in Retla that his grandmother made. “She broke the milk,” was the way he described it.

He had fond childhood recollections, from his birth in 1931 in Punjab, in a hamlet called Babar Pur, named after the first Moghul emperor, but which was previously known as Retla. There had been the kite flying. He told me to watch the movie, The Kite Runner (which in 2008 was all the rage), to get an idea of the value placed on this activity/sport. He had been the kite flyer, and his brother, Jindi – later a Kenyan Olympian in the 1956 Sydney event, and now a British medical doctor – had been his kite runner. There had also been the game known as kabadi.

Food was a constant motif in the story of Mohinder’s life as we wrote it. Of the many facets of a life lived intensely, it was always food that came to mind as the thread running through a long, eventful life.

Then there was Raja, his champion fighting cock. In later years, Mohinder regretted keeping a fighting cock. But he and Raja, as is the case with pastoralists and their livestock, were soul mates. What hurt Raja hurt Mohinder even more. But Raja was not for eating. A neighbour, whose fighting cock had been decimated by Mohinder’s, had lured Raja to his place and broken his leg. The inconsolable Mohinder reset Raja’s bones, and fed him tumin and almonds till he got well. His grandmother complained about the extravagance on a cock. As I got to know more about her, I realised that his grandmother had shaped Mohinder’s life the most.

But the cloistered life he led during his childhood, so long ago, so far away in Punjab, would never return. His father had worked for the Uganda Railways from 1917 and decided to move his family to Kenya. The 1940s world in which Mohinder came of age was totally different. It was not until Mohinder came to East Africa that he learnt that there had been a World War. He first heard of Mahatma Gandhi when he was settled in Nairobi.

He remembered setting sail for Africa with his family from Bombay (now Mumbai):

“The bustle of Bombay – the first big city I had ever seen – was overwhelming. I was afraid to cross the road. On reaching a street, I’d just stand there, transfixed. Bombay was awe-inspiring. Everything was new to me. There was almost nothing in Bombay we could relate to, except the vegetables.”

In Mombasa, once the Khandala, a coaling ship, had deposited the family, he set out with one of his brothers, Inderjeet (later a media personality in Kenya who died in a tragic accident), and they followed, pied piper-like, men with stoves and clinking cups and the strong aroma of some strange drink that smelled like almonds. He was to discover much later, once settled in Nairobi, that it was on the streets of Mombasa that he first smelled coffee.

And so I had found the point of gravitation with Mohinder. This was not a story of woe and strife. Mohinder’s life story, and the book it would birth, I could see, would best be started off as a memoir of an enchanting childhood. How else, when the best memories of Mohinder’s life were those of the wide-eyed pleasure he experienced when seeing something for the first time?

***

When the Khandala drew close to the shores of Mombasa, Mohinder saw strange men in white furiously swinging sticks. They just kept swinging, as if sword-fighting, but against no one.

“David,” Mohinder tells me, his voice rising. “We knew nothing. That was my first time seeing golf being played.”

On the day they left Mombasa for Nairobi, on the train, his father, Tek Singh (fondly referred to in the home as Bau Ji) off-handedly commented on the strange, lopping bird out on the savannah. He said that one of its eggs could make an omelette for an entire family. It was the first time Mohinder had seen an ostrich.

“An omelette for the entire family? Father, what is an omelette?”

“That over there is a lion.”

“A lion?”

“Father, does a lion lay eggs?”

“The lion is the king of the jungle. It can do whatever it likes.”

Above all, Mohinder was a comedian, with perfect timing. We spent many afternoons digging up and dishing out jokes.

His first camera, when he started taking television news footage, was heavy. But he did not know it.

“It was a studio camera but I never felt the weight,” he said. “I grew up drinking buffalo milk.”

“There was one from 1979, oh, I already told the one about matooke at the Sheraton? How about fingernails?”

“Which one?”

“Oh, the ITN reporter I was with he said to me, ‘Mohinder, look how fertile Uganda is. You can put your finger in the ground and the nails grow instantly.’”

Idi Amin and the media circus

There was more than one from 1979. There was an entire world of experiences condensed into that year.

For Mohinder, 1979 was a very important year. It was, I sensed, the year when he made up his mind about many things.

The media circus. There was plenty of that. He had known Idi Amin all of the nine previous years. He had been genuinely scared of him, and even more scared of his henchmen. And so, upon the coup that felled his regime, they rushed to Makerere University where a British newspaper had reported that Amin’s soldiers had lopped off female students’ breasts.

“David, there were many terrible things Amin did,” he told me. “But the warden we approached told us, ‘Don’t make up stories about Amin. No girls had their breasts cut off.’”

For the international media, the “Third World” was fair game.

“It was a studio camera but I never felt the weight,” he said. “I grew up drinking buffalo milk.” One day, Mohinder told me that Ryzard Kapuscinski had sat down with him and told him stories about famines and huts and snakes. In the great Polish writer’s books appear minute details of what Kapuscinski had encountered in his journeys across Africa – details that mirrored Mohinder’s own journeys, which made one wonder whether Kapuscinski might actually have been describing Mohinder’s experiences.

My real job, as it quickly became clear, was to sit and listen.

Babar Pur. India. Vietnam, Robert Mugabe, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Congo.

Talking about Mugabe brought in Nyerere, as if to clear the air. Mugabe, the most complex character Mohinder ever turned his camera lens on, back in 1979-80. A man so wily, it was thought that not even the British, who spent so much time profiling him, could not tell what he was up to.

“What about Mobutu?”

“A fop, dressing to the nines.”

“And Patrice Lumumba?”

“I only met his son, a sad-faced young man, when he came to commission a bust of his father in Nairobi.”

“Laurent Desire Kabila?”

“I did not make much of him. It was in the 60s. He sat there saying nothing in the presence of Somialot.”

“Kenneth Kaunda?”

“Too emotional. The smallest thing about Zambia set him crying. The reason he kept a handkerchief constantly was so he could wipe away the tears. There was a joke in which Zambia rhymed with some beer. The drinking in his country made Kaunda cry too.”

“Idi Amin?”

On Idi Amin, there was not a straightforward a response, except that Amin liked to clown around as a kind of diversion. When he sentenced men to be executed during Ramadhan, the Saudis got upset so Amin faked a coma. They said he was hospitalised and there was going to be an operation. It turned out to be a cyst in his backside.

Names from a bygone era, Talbot, Indira Gandhi, the Queen Mother, Emperor Haile Selassie, a portrait gallery from the dawn of the Cold War.

Food and famine

Mohinder always had stories about food, laid out as state dinners, or as history-makers.

The 20th century, a century of great famines. The food that ran out.

In 1964, when what was meant to be a few days of getting images of the Simba rebellion in Eastern Congo, turned into a two-week nightmare in what was then Albertville, now Kalemie, on the western shores of Lake Tanganyika. It was two weeks during which he met a young man named Laurent Desire Kabila who turned up with Simba rebel leader, Somialot. Locked out, and with no transport over Lake Tanganyika, they ate fish and hard, inedible French bread.

There was the dinner in Kurdistan and in Afghanistan, with hosts he never forgot who were under Soviet and Iranian attack.

There was the crisis of the El Molo whose single diet of fish had ravaged the community, which Mohinder had captured on camera decades ago.

“Too emotional. The smallest thing about Zambia set him crying. The reason he kept a handkerchief constantly was so he could wipe away the tears. There was a joke in which Zambia rhymed with some beer. The drinking in his country made Kaunda cry too.”

And above all, there was the failure of harvest, in 1984, when an entire nation, Ethiopia, had no food.

The darkening of Mohinder’s vision of the world from 1984 left a shadow that hung over his head till the end of his life. Till his last months, whenever Mohinder spoke of the Ethiopian famine, he started to shake, as if he was going to go into convulsions. The image of the old man carrying a lifeless child to bury, and Mohinder, ever the witness, unable to properly carry his camera because tears are flowing down his own face. And in a charter plane doing the documentary, African Calvary, about the famine, Mohinder walks over to Mother Teresa and she takes his hand and consoles him, “My son, it is Calvary.” And so they name the film.

There had been the famine in Karamoja before that, in 1980. Between 1980 and 1984, the images that Mohinder captured on camera had inspired thousands of people to donate millions of dollars to buy food for famine victims.

Then there was too much of the wrong food: the matooke in Kampala in 1979 that they could no longer stomach. Kampala had been in lockdown following the Tanzanian invasion that flushed Idi Amin out of Uganda and the markets were shut. (Somehow, Mohammed Amin, a friend and rival, with whom Mohinder’s name had been intertwined in the 1970s and ‘80s, managed to get hold of some steaks and joints.)

The decline of Empire

There was the scale of time, of history and the insurmountable bulk of an empire that lay between me and Mohinder. He was already 44 years old when I was born; when he died this year, I was 44. Life experiences too vast to comprehend, even when explained.

He had along the way been given a knighthood, which is why he was Sir Mohinder. Well into his 80s, he received an honorary Ph.D, Dr. Mohinder Dhillon.

He counted in his circle an emperor, presidents, prime ministers, Nobel laureates. He had been the personal cameraman of Emperor Haile Selassie in the waning days of his life, when the Emperor was starting to become senile.

He had been there when Belgium crashed out of the Congo. He had been there for the independence of nearly all African countries, and there too, when the dominos continued to collapse as the structures of colonialism crumbled and gave way to newly independent states.

There he is, on 26th January 1971, a morning in Kampala. Idi Amin, likely drunk, on the morning after the coup, speech slurring, not yet fully comprehending what his coup means.

There he is as Belgian missionaries catch the last planes out of the Congo.

***

The last meal I had with Mohinder was a hasty breakfast on Riverside Drive, his last home, in 2019. I was in a hurry to catch a bus to Kitale. Mohinder insisted I first eat something. I gulped down a cup of coffee and snatched a banana. It had been many years since that lunch in 2008.

He counted in his circle an emperor, presidents, prime ministers, Nobel laureates. He had been the personal cameraman of Emperor Haile Selassie in the waning days of his life, when the Emperor was starting to become senile.

By then, his health had deteriorated. He barely left the house. But the big lunches had continued. Lunchtime, I had grown to learn, had been a favourite hour to visit Mohinder, as attested by the endless stream of guests who dropped in. Peter, his long-time cook, had been one of the most popular people in Nairobi, judging by the very eminent calibre of people who dropped in on Mohinder: academics, human rights lawyers, environmentalists, international television correspondents, Hollywood film stars, activists, chief justices. And as each came in, and sat at the rotating table, there was Peter, apron on, beaming, his forever-oily face advertising the goodness coming out of the kitchen.

But I sensed too that the reason Mohinder paid attention to meals, and taking care of his guests, was to keep alive the memory of his wife, Ambi, who died during the meningitis epidemic of 1990. It was she who had trained Peter. By all accounts, she had been a woman worthy of Mohinder, and when she died, he and his son Sam lost the pillar in their lives.

He greatly loved life, but he also longed to see Ambi again.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter. ‘I Will Crush You’: The November 18 Kampala Massacre

By A. K. Kaiza

The drama of picking up the book would have been wholly farcical were the circumstances not surreal enough already.

The ridiculousness of furtive telephone calls in which names were neither asked nor given, the long, curving drive that skirted the city, suspicion as to why the boda knocked the car, and then arriving at the drop-off point only to be told the delivery man would not make it, underlined just how psychologically precarious it is to be in Yoweri Museveni’s Uganda.

It was bound to be that way the day Stella Nyanzi was sent to prison in 2018. The activist and scholar had opened what amounted to a second front in the fight against the Museveni dictatorship. The means the way such a war is fought is rarely visible, so that while the placid surface of a society going about its quotidian slog remains even, nerves are getting chewed thin underneath. Along with Bobi Wine, one a poet, the other a singer, both of them versifiers, Nyanzi has deployed weapons and tactics dictators are wholly unprepared for:

The reaction of the state apparatus when it moves in on creatives is to always get it wrong. It may have looked like victory to the goonery when Stella Nyanzi was jailed nearly two years ago. But the result has been an Oxfam and PEN International award, and counting. This has been quickly followed by a poetry collection that will now underpin Nyanzi’s repute and bring to all the sheer courage of this woman. As with censorship of books, the argument that not imprisoning writers is the best way to silence them never gets through the collective thick skull of tyranny.

And yet the forceful Nyanzi had made it impossible for Mr. Museveni to not act. Her provocation – for it was, and Nyanzi proudly owns it – was delivered in such terms that Mr. Museveni was doomed to respond, even though he may have been aware of the folly of doing so. How this doctoral graduate with several degrees arm-twisted one of Africa’s more wily presidents into a fight he is badly losing is one we do not as yet fully understand. But the history of Big Man-badly- mauled-by-activist woman is a long one. The late Kenyan President, Daniel Arap Moi, might have heeded wise counsel and kept clear of Wangari Maathai. But as with Nyanzi, Maathai too had set her challenge in terms that cornered the late Moi into attacking her. The day he laid hands on her was the day she won.

The diatribe Nyanzi aimed at Mr. Museveni more than found its mark; it paralysed the warmonger who is so used to operating from the outer limits of decency (and being feted for it, by no less than the World Bank), that the bounds of propriety are lost on him, a man who set fire to four, perhaps five, countries, killing millions of Africans and comprehensively corrupting Uganda. He stepped on everyone.

How this doctoral graduate with several degrees arm-twisted one of Africa’s more wily presidents into a fight he is badly losing is one we do not as yet fully understand.

He stepped on Stella Nyanzi. Like the feisty girls highschool boys live in fear of, Nyanzi has shrieked out in pain. Here, she describes graphically where she has been touched in language so stark that her attacker remains disoriented. Mr. Museveni has since stumbled from one vaguary to another, like a man searching for firm ground. He led an absurd anti-corruption walk of shameless self- mockery. He went on an aimless self-promoting trek retracing his bush war days, returning to the mythical ground of his self-declared “liberation” war, in what can only be a para-Freudian return to a time when he did believe in something. It was the subconscious speaking louder than the man could ever admit – that he has led a life of hypocrisy. Since Nyanzi spoke, we who pay attention have noticed declining changes in Museveni. There is no going back for him.

And so the irony that a man who in the 1990s used the feminist cause to build an impregnable bulwark of political support has been taken down by a feminist. We can only imagine what went on in Mr. Museveni’s mind when Nyanzi used the Luganda words “lutako” and “butako” to describe him. International media picked and amplified the translation: The Ugandan president had been called a pair of buttocks

“If you put your hands in the anus of a leopard, you are in trouble,” Mr. Museveni said in the heat of election campaigns in 2015. He had dangled a bawdy, self-assured illusion of himself. He was the first to use an obscenity against himself, a “crime” for which he still walks freely. But he had left the scatological door wide open and Nyanzi did not need a second invitation.

And so here we are. A plummet from the heights of the Marxist speechifying of the 1980s, when he had been a frequent guest of Kim iI-Sung in Pyongyang, to the whiplash, road-to-Damascus conversion and pre-eminent neoliberal economic mandarin of the 1990s, a shift done without missing a beat (so we doubt how much he had understood of either) as though Karl Marx’s middle name had all along been Hayek. The Museveni regime had at last hit a literal bottom:

“Means of production”, “macro-economics”, “leveraging comparative advantage”, “stabilising the economic base” – words (for they had really been mere words) that had one time been stock- in-trade of clever revolutionaries, had been replaced by “anuses and “thick thighs”, “vaginas” and “buttocks”, the classic declining narrative of cinema that opens with high-end screenings but find that pornography sells more tickets.

This then was where things Ugandan had ground

State reaction to Nyanzi has been a stumble from botched inelegance to overcooked crudity. Two charges – cyber-harassment and disturbing the peace of the president – were brought against her. The double charge was the judicial fishing expedition to guarantee a conviction. There had been an earlier attempt at stifling Nyanzi via the coarse chicanery of a mental illness test, which we can only assume would have been rigged and would have seen her locked up to rot in a mental asylum.

The Directorate of Public Prosecution, whose head at the time has since been elevated to a judicial bench, further besmirched the reputation of an office not wanting for infamy by going ahead with that framing, and then not stopping there.

That test never went ahead. They attempted another ruse. They offered bail, that special form of clemency within the gift of state power. Nyanzi saw through this. Acceptance of the offer of bail would mute the campaign, show that the state had been just all the while.

Makerere University, a tragic shambles under its current vice chancellor, was pressured to dismiss her from her job (we writers have all gone through employers who are forced to let us go). Vice Chancellor Barnabas Nawangwe, a man put there to make the university look stupid, terribly botched the dismissal – not that anything other than botched can be possible with Mrs. Museveni as Minister of Education.

It remained for a judicial appointee to declare Nyanzi “obscene, indecent, lewd, and lascivious”. The judge called her an “immoral person” who “was not properly brought up”.

The tragic disconnect is how tyrannical state goonery never understands how writers see the world. Judges and prosecutors (judicial guinea fowl with eyes firmly stitched to their legalistic navels) see prison as the ultimate tool of ostracism, for is it not proof of guilt that you are locked up?

And so with alacrity they paid for Nyanzi’s 18-month writing retreat by sending her to prison. As a bonus, they handed this creative research scholar thousands of captive respondents via which to study Uganda. Might the advisory council to Mr. Museveni, creaking under its own dead weight, have pointed out to him the folly of putting writers in prison and how that has always turned out?

It remained for a judicial appointee to declare Nyanzi “obscene, indecent, lewd, and lascivious”. The judge called her an “immoral person” who “was not properly brought up”.

Prison has at last given us and Nyanzi what had always been missing – a substantial enough work from which to see her outside of the high voltage media filter. Had there ever been doubt about her intentions, that has now vanished, and Nyanzi joins a stellar orbit of writers like Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ken Sarowiwa, Jack Mapanje, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn whose voices were amplified.

Over the course of the past year, Stella Nyanzi smuggled dozens of poems out of prison. As she says in the book, dozens others were confiscated by prison officials, and presumably destroyed. Reading this collection comes with the urgent knowledge that there are bound to be consequences for Nyanzi and her colleagues.

No Roses from my Mouth has that rough and ready samizdat feel. The urgency to get it out was such that the conventions of publishing, the page-setting, the mulling over cover design, was not possible. Here and there, text overruns page, the guillotine chops words midway. There is no table of contents, and the wine-coloured cover feels more like a stain. All of which do not matter.

Of those that contrived to sentence her to a mental asylum, Nyanzi says, via the poem, They Must be Schizophrenic:

They want me to upbraid the Dictator with sweet Apples, To rebuke him with sweetened Milk and honey, To reproach him with a thick Slice of red velvet cake.

No! In the eponymous poem, No Roses From my Mouth, the last stanza sets the terms of this front:

There will be no orgasm Coming from my mouth Who cares about pleasure during war? Instead there is venom and acid

The fighting tone defines the work, as it defines the woman, through 159 poems, the urgency ranging across insights, observations, a haiku, a call to arms. We have not had a book like this in this region. It is hard to think of another writer doing what Nyanzi is doing. Her language is direct. It is more than direct. It long broke the boundaries of conventional politesse and set as its starting point the far reaches of the acceptable, and then it goes beyond that.

This attack on Mr. Museveni has been called obscene (see the judgment). But in the African tradition, it is acceptable, if not ritual, to shame or protest through nudity – the elderly women in Nairobi who stripped naked in public to protest Moi’s regime in the late 1980s were not mistaken for pole dancers. It is not uncommon. We don’t hear too much of it because the people at whom it is often aimed, being aged men in power, rarely dare push their way to the point that this is called for.

When an elderly woman strips naked or uses obscenities, we do not ask if she is mad. We turn to the old man and say, “See what you have done? Mr. Museveni, have you no shame that now women have to strip naked?”

Nyanzi’s poetry is that. It is textual stripping, textual ritual shaming for an old man whose heedless actions threaten to destroy society. This is how we must read this book.

Thus the heavy sexual allusions, the references to castration in Missing Jewels, the provocative threat to “bitch-slap” the “tyrant” in He Cries at Mere Poetry. These are verse equivalents of clothes coming off before the masses, reading in public as a mother declares that the man in power has taken everything society has, so what is left to cover up? What does decency mean when the fount of honour is dishonourable?

This attack on Mr. Museveni has been called obscene (see the judgment). But in the African tradition, it is acceptable, if not ritual, to shame or protest through nudity – the elderly women in Nairobi who stripped naked in public to protest Moi’s regime in the late 1980s were not mistaken for pole dancers.

But naughtiness too. Who Pinched My Buttocks? is arguably the funniest poem here. Nyanzi’s narrative skill is plain to see. A poem that opens as a plaintive call for understanding, Who Pinched my Buttocks? sets off rhetorically, asking for understanding, to each her own, saying Let me do my bit to the best of my ability/Do your bit, too, as well as you can. Hence, those who speak diplomatically should not stop those who sing ragga. The religious must not drive out the demons of nude protestors. So it goes on, with calls to writers of legislation not to stymie the writers of tweets and Facebook. Fair enough. Except, that opening line was suspended and reconnects to the final lines thus…But let me grow my finger nail that pinch/When my time comes I want to be effective/The dictator will say, “Who pinched my buttocks?”

It is the tone with which the collection opens, the clarion call to action of A Plea for Decongestion. (Sure enough, four verses in, the F-word appears). Nyanzi proceeds to describe how prisoners sleep packed like sardines as…

My thighs pressed hard onto someone’s arse My arse pressed hard onto another’s thighs This sequence of adult thighs pressing adult arse Is repeated in two rows of 30 women each

Nyanzi may be in prison, but her sense of humour is sharp at the ending of this poem:

If fighters of sodomy in Uganda cared at all They would start by decongesting the prison

We will be led down this path only for sombreness to end in jest, again and again. And we have to be thankful for it.

The collection is a totality of prison life. News arrives to Nyanzi that Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wanaina has died. She says in Is Binya Really Dead?:

Binya broke hard ground at a difficult time! Binya took the bull by the horns And inspired me with boldness. Binya inseminated my mind.

The closing sections of the collection are more personal and introspective. They are about Nyanzi’s family life. The lowest moments do come as she wonders in No Padlock on Your Loin whether her marriage will survive prison. Thoughts about her children come close to breaking her. She pulls up and says in How to Visit Prison that visitors to prison must not come with their tears because prisoners have trouble enough. Break down and cry after the visit is done.

It is painful to read Nyanzi retell how she lost her unborn child due to negligence by prison staff.

The more endearing poems in the book are Nyanzi’s portraits of fellow prisoners. The delicate dedications to the downtrodden include The Mango Seller, Ganja Girl, Escapee, Asio Died in Prison, Epileptic in Prison, Deaf and Dumb in Prison, The Debtor, Intersex in Prison, and Masitula the Fistula. These could be a separate collection by themselves. Though they are windows into the locked-away world of incarceration, they are really insights into the world outside. We count here what values society considers acceptable by examining the obverse. Solitary souls in prison, plucked clean off the margins of society from whence they had fought to survive, the mangos hawked by the roadside to feed the 8-month-old baby who must now survive six months motherless because the mother has been locked away, the young woman who needed just that stick of weed, just the stick from inside prison. The androgynous prisoner in Intersex in Prison, personalities viewed via versfication, poetry that captures snatches and glimpses of their being. It is their souls we feel, and what we feel lies heavy upon us. And then the realisation dawns: But is this not what it is all about? Nyanzi’s struggle, lest we forget, began with the backtracking of the promise by Mr. Museveni during the election campaign of 2015/2016 to provide sanitary pads to all school girls if elected president. Once duly declared the winner, he sent his wife, who had been elevated to Minister of Education, to say that there was no money for the promised pads. Hence the fiery Facebook post for which Nyanzi is in prison. We must ask how many women might not be in prison had their education not been interrupted by menstrual cycles?

That is the asking price here. It is the stiff penalty. If Nyanzi’s language ensures that we don’t casually look away from class, ethnic and gender violence, how do we then address a female Minister of Education who says there will be no pads for young girls under her watch? Which is the obscenity – the language of Nyanzi or Mrs. Museveni’s sentencing into poverty and abuse millions of school girls?

The more endearing poems in the book are Nyanzi’s portraits of fellow prisoners. The delicate dedications to the downtrodden include The Mango Seller, Ganja Girl, Escapee, Asio Died in Prison, Epileptic in Prison, Deaf and Dumb in Prison, The Debtor, Intersex in Prison, and Masitula the Fistula.

The furore surrounding Nyanzi’s work has nearly succeeded in obscuring her poetry, how it is conceived, how it works. The judge that sentenced her declared that it was not poetry. And although Nyanzi responds emphatically to this in Your Aesthetic Standards (a title surely missing an expletive) with Pooh to your bourgeois snobbery!/Your aesthetic what-what again? We have now come close enough to Nyanzi’s mind as a writer to know that she need not to have mentioned “standards”. Arguing over literariness is a cat-and-mouse game we can play in this collection, but we would be missing something more important.

That her writing is a radical, political position is underscored by the poem, Your Aesthetic Standards, where she writes, of her writing:

Bitch, I penned my pieces on the prison floors. My sounding boards were suspected vagabonds

…..

Druggies and junkies offered some rhymes

….

Convicts of common nuisance passed the meter Sex workers and fraudsters approved lines. Impersonators and thieves approved lines. Suspects of murder and assault gave symbols Suspects of manslaughter advised on ideas Political prisoners cried at some stanzas And just for size, Nyanzi adds Prison wardresses confiscated some poems.

Far from gratuitous iconoclasm, Nyanzi’s ethos is a time-honoured tradition of radical criticism, which is also at the very heart of Marxist thought, of historical materialism. Here, the human body, as the material, is posited as the central platform upon which history is generated. Stripped to its essential, the human body is the active reagent of politics and economics, from black legs, arms, torsos and heads (needed together and functioning) being sold into slavery to generate the capital in Western capitalism, it is the parts of the human body called upon to operate tools, fingers that pick cotton, the human body that is targeted as the primary digestive tool and fat storage for the fast food empire, the feet that are covered by Clarke’s shoes, legs, buttocks and arms and shoulders that Vuitton and Hugo Boss target.

The colour of the skin you wear will, in America and England, determine whether the police pull that trigger or not.

The human body is the generator and archive of culture, what we do with the hair on top of it, which bits of flesh are trimmed, shaved and cut off depending on gender and religious persuasion. The body of Christ, for Christians, is the ecumenicalism that binds the religion together.

The human body is power. Entire civilisations convulse at the showing of an ankle, shoulders, breasts. Priests and judges police the human body more than they police anything else. When a tyrant wants to show who is boss, it is the eyes and nostrils at which tear gas is aimed, the head is for the baton, wrists and ankles for manacles, the heart for the bullet of the firing squad.

The body carries everywhere it goes, from temple to a football game, a litany of “unmentionables”. Breaking the command of priests and judges (the perennial handmaidens of dictators) by baring some parts while covering others at once dissolves their source of power.

In Nyanzi’s collection, the body plays the vital role of offering insight into society. There is the transexual with both male and female genitals whose elusive category erases gendered response: Does he/she have power or not? The state must break the body to acquire power, hence, the prisoners must sit on the floor, stooped, kneeling before the upright standing guards.

Nyanzi returns us to the basics, disavowing metaphysics (the acceptable politics of “beyond the body”) that can and often comes riddled with falsehoods. A return to the body is, in political terms, a handing of power back to the masses – the working, labouring “body” of society, away from the ruling “head”.

A return to the body is a threat to the ruling ethos, for once covered up and policed, those that decide what we wear, which parts we cover up, or which words we can use, can misreport to us what the body says – which is what culture and law and “civilisation” more or less add up to. A return to the body is insisting on seeing the exhibits for ourselves, to judge if what we are being told about human society is accurate or not.

No Roses from My Mouth is published by Ubuntu Reading Group, with an introduction by the writers and activists, Esther Mirembe and Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire. It can also be purchased on Kindle.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter. ‘I Will Crush You’: The November 18 Kampala Massacre

By A. K. Kaiza

There is a driven, will-to poignance in the posturing of the friends Chiri and Juli, which captures a trenchant motif threading the writing of Kenyan writer, Billy Kahora, as seen in the recently released The Cape Cod Bicycle War, bringing works published over 15 years in one book.

A bathetic self-dramatisation whose more pathetic disposition conceals a desperate desire for a steadfast life, Chiri and Juli are that seeming paradox of African middle – why the self-inflicted misery when you really have everything?

The motif is immediate, and everlasting, and defines Chiri and Juli as it does the other characters created by Billy Kahora, who was a longtime editor of the literary collective, Kwani?. Take the statement by Juli:

“Even in Bibilia, Old Testament, wheat was God’s crop”.

Is the seeming grandness of this statement egged on by the place he says it in, the expansive, majestic landscapes of the Great Rift Valley, just gone past a laga where they had a glancing, violent run-in with a young, uncircumcised Maasai herdsboy? The Rift Valley can seem, and has been said to be, where God lives. Except Chiri (Eddie Muchiri Kambo) and Juli (Julius Rotiken Sayianka) are impressively, but irredeemably, given over to the profane. Their invocation of the Almighty must not be seen as anything other than a manner of speaking.

So is it money, the knowledge that this crop of heaven, and the Narok variety no less, when well- tended, can give two harvests in a year? If so, why would they go on a drinking binge which may well scuttle the entire enterprise? Not by any stretch of terminology are these characters saints. But they are not sinners either, at least, not for heavily indictable sins.

Even if all of the above were true, we the readers aren’t going to judge these characters that extremely. It is that kind of life then, pushing things too far because the worst isn’t going to come for them, after all, and even if it did, mummy and all the network of class and tribe will catch them when they fall. It is the summation of upper middle class cloud cuckoo land.

Chiri and Juli are after all, full of life, which in the long history of literature (and literature’s affinity for zestful sinners is well-established) is the closest you can come to saintliness. We follow in either direction (saintliness and devilry) only so far as metaphor allows. It is imperative we take it as given: A crop of the gods it is, two young men going out to sow it and this means we must start off by thinking their’s an ecumenical quest. And if there is a pile of dosh at the end of this, then is it any the less an evangelical affair to grow rich?

These questions and the twists therein serve a higher purpose; they may not make Juli and Chiri better humans, but they make them thoroughly enjoyable literary characters. Literature, with its sometimes contrary-wise moral alignment to everyday life, ought to come with the caveat to not try this at home.

Which is a tortuous way of saying that we have in our hands here, a book at the heart of which is satire. It is there in the life of Jemimah Kariuki; cynicism – satire’s evil twin – at full stretch is what holds together the life of Kandle Kabogo Karoki (arguably one of the more impressive literary creatures to come out of Kenya) in the story about Nairobi as the fallen city, Zoning; in the life of Khalid Ibrahim Hussein, in The Unconverted, an examination of religion and ethnicity, it darkens considerably; in the life of Alan Muigai, strutter extraordinaire in Shiko, the cynicism masticates, getting too edgy. And in the coming of age, campus fiction story, Motherless, it is the cynicism of others that presses into and threatens to scupper the life of Maish Boi.

Is this thread, the satire and the baked-in cynicism running through this compendium, what is possible in the public and private life of Kenya as Billy Kahora sees it? His writing, as we have seen it in Kwani? and in other places – and the stories here have also variously come from other publications – has surveyed these psychological realms. In his writing, things press at people. From youth, they are forced to navigate a world extensively sullied by bad faith and bad form; growing up, they are acquiring various degrees of deformity. At the fullness of life, there they are, bonkers already, or going bonkers, ex-ministers, retired professors. Their children are running away from the family name (‘Maish Boi’ is actually Joseph Mungai, son of disgraced ex-Moi minister), drinking themselves to bits, talking politics “through jiggling chins and stomachs,” the old men “with heaving man tits from goat meat and forty years of independence”.

Even for an uncompromising vision of a country, this is bare-knuckled stuff. What else, this vision has seemed to say, can emerge of such a history but lives lived in cynical disregard for decorum?

If there was decorum, no one here seems to know what it was. So keen are they on the business of taking and avoiding being taken advantage of, that you give up hoping for some good in anyone and marvel at the nerve of it.

The etymology of such a world view, when you have mined the writing of Billy Kahora, is that a shit- storm of some magnitude happened at some point just as the characters were being born. Hence, this supposed turbulence, which cleared the land of whatever moral rectitude had been standing, and which broke the embankments of propriety that had kept the life above board, happened to their fathers’ generation. It is in Billy Kahora’s writing, inherited infraction.

Whether or not this mining unearths an accurate account, the conclusion is not news to the characters that his work. To varying degrees, they are people who have already accepted that the best you can expect from the world is a messed up life that at least should not leave you too finished to not like your favourite whisky.

With the exception of a Maimouna Munyakei (who is not fictional and an aberration in this collection), Fr. Kamau and Komora Kijana Wito, Billy Kahora’s characters are hustlers because they must avoid being hustled. In literary terms, this would be something like incurable realism.

In the fifteen years he has been published short story writer, the code has been there, holding on steadily: accept that yours is a corrupt nation, that promises will be broken; they will come to take from you; your best friends, including your own family, will take from you. Fathers can’t be relied on, they are impotent. If your mother is a strong woman, you are lucky. Only mothers can really love you, although even they have a habit of turning up drowned and bloated down river.

Billy Kahora brings technical nous and organisation to his prose. That, in alliance with his grasp of the ins and outs of a certain Kenya, which I will dare call middle-Kenya, is what works for his writing. Combined with the writing chops, the knowledge of the language by which the sense of contemporary Kenya is passed along, the Kiswahili predilection for wisdom peppering his writing, there arises a vital sense of groundedness. There is the vocabulary of the drinkscape (booze flows through the writing in quantity enough his prose could be designated a distillery). There is the near- casual psychological violence committed on almost every page. It is a tough place, Nairobi. There is the practiced awareness of how far to push things, and none excels at this more than Kandle Karoki in Zoning, who has become a master at working a few weeks in a year and not getting sacked for it.

Billy Kahora brings technical nous and organisation to his prose. That, in alliance with his grasp of the ins and outs of a certain Kenya, which I will dare call middle-Kenya, is what works for his writing.

Billy Kahora’s technical approach to writing works at several levels. His stories show consistency in this regard. First, he posits a big picture, like a painter priming a canvas to decide whether to work from light to darkness, or darkness to light, before making tentative, thematic daubs. He starts to work at sketching out the elements that will later receive fuller treatment.

Take The Red Door, the story where Chiri and Juli appear (shortlisted for and published in the 2013 Caine Prize collection). It is a complex story told as character study. But it is also plot-heavy, bucolically-trained to the cultural nuances outside of Nairobi. It gets its Sheng working. It is the story of inter-ethnic, Kenyan settlement, in the crowded, fought-over Rift Valley. There Is the sheer magnitude of detail, like a Richard Onyango painting, an ambitious piece of work.

So how to hold it all together? One way, effectively, is symbolism. Wheat and a combine harvester get collared as the effective glue. We clue in on this early on. At some point, it reads less like a short story than long-prose with the late-stage introduction of Eastleigh and a wily Somali trader-kind, and a peerless satirical treatment of money-worship.

The Mirrors in Treadmill Love, a subtly heartbreaking story, introduce spine to the story as narrative aid and mental unguent to Kung’u who needs soft, mental cushioning. Buruburu, aka the country, got to him, in that Francis Imbuga obiter dictum, “when the madness of an entire nation disturbs a solitary mind, it is not enough to call the man mad”.

In We are Here Because We are Here, the war between the Indian Ocean and the Tsana River, by which the Indian ocean tsunami threatens to wash away African hinterland, only for the Tsana (Tana) river to push back, this application of symbol as plot device is transparently on show, at the expense of the consummate complexity that drives other stories. But as a symbol, the struggle between the ocean and the river is tantalising. Are we talking here about African history, of the colonialising, mercantile, force, the trade winds blow onto its coast, and the seemingly weak, yet resilient force with which the continent has always pushed back?

The bicycles in the title story are the more overt symbols offering us a ride through the story.

And the lived-in knowledge of middle-Kenya? This is the fraught element in Billy Kahora’s writing. Given the depth of ethnic feeling in Kenya, a Kenyan writer can never escape the charge of ethnicity. The divide et impera mechanism built into the nation’s DNA to make British exploitation of the country more effective might never go away. The country in Billy Kahora’s writing is only Kenyan by extension. He could more accurately be described as chronicler of middle class Kikuyu life. On the one hand, a writer needs to at least be grounded in a particular cultural context if only for locus. But on the other hand, it is also perilous to assume there exist elemental differences between “tribes”. The challenge of writing, is to find out how there not, rather than looking for how, there are differences. We therefore squirm through the presentation of otherness in We are Here Because we Are Here and in Commission. Really? You cannot help but ask. Is there such a thing as difference, and should we assume others speaking in childish voices because they are from another ethnic background, and hence less “normal” “us”? If I were the editor, I would have left out the two stories for further development. And more than that, I can see how this fact might make some uncomfortable accountability on the part of Mr. Kahora as a Kenyan writer.

But where it is concentrated, in middle class Kikuyu life, Billy Kahora is in his true element. The prose where he is not looking for the others’ voice goes with few glitches. Perhaps the most ambitious story Billy Kahora has thus far written is The Gorilla’s Apprentice. There is something of The Tin Drum about The Gorilla’s Apprentice. A heartbreaking rendering of dystopia, without the sentimentality that often mars such attempts, it may well be one of the most effective stories written of the post election violence of 2001/08. The narrative, prima facie, is of a dying gorilla, and of a boy’s (Jimmy) desire to speak to him, which brings him close to the darkly mysterious Professor Charles Semambo. But we become aware that the shouts, fires and smoke through which the story strives to move forward, but which our narrator does not pull to the foreground, is of the most serious Kenyan crisis since the Mau Mau uprising. Like with Gunther Grass’ book, the innocence and curiosity masks unhinging darkness, amplifying it.

There is the author’s cold distance from his subjects. Bright-eyed hopes are best taken with caution. In the tight universe of his writing, there exists a place, not quite a sin bin, not really a hell, in which characters with too much hope in life are sent to fester in. Kandle Karoki has found that place, the Zone. He got over it. Now he prowls through Nairobi like he owns the place. In literature, there are characters you will be eternally grateful meeting. Think May Kasahara in Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, Count Kaburagi in Yukio Mishima’s Forbidden Colours. Anti-heroes brighten up literature. Kandle aspires to that status. He leads a fallen life. He is not trying to get up. Why should he when fallen looks so good on him? He wears this status with such suave, commanding steadiness you must do a second take to be reassured the author is not pulling our legs and this is an actual, handsome devil. Literature can never have enough of handsome devils. Kandle lied to his manager at the bank. He has not shown up for work in forever. He took out a loan to service his time in the Zone. They know he has lied. He knows they know. They have cornered him. But Kandle was born a human corner. He knows his Nairobi too well to believe that anyone can be upright.

Billy Kahora is a writer of the impact of an age in Kenyan history. In his writings, you piece together the etymology and see that at soul, the stories begin in the first decade of Kenya’s independence. This is when the underlying psycho-social background of the characters and their stories stir. There was a promise made, however implicitly, that independence would bring a better world. Young men and women – the fathers and mothers of the characters Billy Kahora writes about – threw their lot at this promise; the awakening moment of black self-determination, the scholarship to Makerere, the elevation to a British university, that degree, that coveted job back home and then, the beginning of mortgages and property. The beginning, also, of a very rapid unraveling. It is against this national- domestic backdrop that our characters are born.

He could more accurately be described as chronicler of middle class Kikuyu life. On the one hand, a writer needs to at least be grounded in a particular cultural context if only for locus. But on the other hand, it is also perilous to assume there exist elemental differences between “tribes”.

Billy Kahora condenses this history into the founding of an estate. Buruburu as synecdoche set to represent the country, as the Promised Land in which mortgages and social security would flow like milk and honey. (In a way you feel, that if that is what they thought independence amounted to, then they really deserved the whacking after all. But that is another matter). Buruburu, ground zero for the characters created by Billy Kahora. The lives in these stories start in the sprawling Nairobi estate sold, post-independence, as a glorious opening to the good life. Buruburu more than fell. It decayed, translating, once putrefaction was underway, into the ashen dystopia it become, a refuse heap for ill-conceived dreams.

The independence generation that bought into the promise of Buruburu quickly reached the conclusion that with Moi in power, the best option was to send their children away. The well-off send their progeny to British and American universities. The non-winners – but by no means poor Kenyan families – send theirs to South Africa, to Rhodes, to Cape Town. It is where we start to meet them in Billy Kahora’s writing.

As to why there are mostly no fathers in his work, or if present, then barely alive, the grasping Professor Mundia in Motherless, a story set in the university town of the Eastern Cape, Grahamstown South Africa, offers some explanation: “Because of what Moi did to the country,” he says. “Moi destroyed the possibilities that were open to my generation”. But was it that straightforward? Or was the idea of independence grossly oversimplified? Did they expect that the exploitative structures of colonialism would painless stretch into independence? There were other players beside Moi, for it takes many hands to ruin a nation. He may be a victim of a regime, but Professor Mundia is not altogether a pleasant figure. As a professor, he wields his office with unbecoming power, a corruptor of young souls.

While the trajectory of Billy Kahora’s writing is a forensic aperçu into middle Kenya, it is also a continuation of a long-running African narrative, the encounter with empire, coming back to the continent uneasy, dislocated, falling to corruption. As with the 1960s generation of literary characters, here, return is the moment of disillusionment. As well-told in the story Shiko, and glancingly in The Red Door, the second generation knows they are going to have to learn to game the system in order to survive. Those who fail at it envy those that succeed at it. A trusting man is a dead man walking. World Pawa presents the fallen life as a semi-comical, tragic entreaty, in Zoning as macabre vitality.

The Cape Cod Bicycle War is published by Huza Press

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter.

‘I Will Crush You’: The November 18 Kampala Massacre

By A. K. Kaiza The last time I heard from Ali Zaidi was May 22nd this year in a message that blipped out from a long stretch of silence.

I sent an email in reply, I texted, I called. There was no response.

I had spent nearly a week in northern Kenya, and the poor connections prevented me from checking my mail. The events of 21st May had passed me by. A source I was due to interview in Turkana had abruptly travelled to Uganda and so in a hurry, I had caught a plane from Lodwar and flown to Eldoret to cut the 6 to 7 hour journey down to 30 minutes so that I could arrive overland in Soroti in Uganda, where he was, before nightfall. Right on the tarmac of Eldoret airport, with reliable connection back on, the news jolted me.

I went numb. I tried calling several people. The messages kept rushing in. The drive from the airport to Eldoret town itself seemed surreal.

An email sent the day before popped up. It read:

“David, sorry to have missed you. Listen, we want to put together a tribute next week. Care to do something?

He was so much fun.”

The emailer was Ali Zaidi. And that email was the first communication we had had in ages. It was also the last time I heard from him. His “sorry to have missed you” was from the fact that the week before, I had passed by the Nation Centre, where Ali worked, and been told that he had stepped out briefly. The “tribute” that Ali was referring to was what he was putting together for The EastAfrican following the untimely death of Kenyan writer BinyavangaWainaina, with whom he had a long and close connection.

Circumstances play a sadistic hand. The next email I got from Nairobi was nearly four months later. It was a request to write about my memories of Ali Zaidi, who had passed away a few days earlier. Two obituaries in a year of people I knew left me crushed.

I had written for The EastAfrican newspaper since 1999 but I only got to know Ali Zaidi in 2008. I had spent that decade in Kampala, so the occasional walk-ins into the Nation Centre were hurried, impersonal, encounters. But in 2008, my life had changed. Constant conflict with the Ugandan government over my writing made my career at the paper untenable. So I became a full-time writer, something I had always wanted. And in 2008, Nairobi was where actual writing was taking place. After I met Binyavanga and Billy Kahora in Kampala in March of that year, I moved to Nairobi in August.

Quite incredibly, having quit The EastAfrican where he was editor, here I was, landing in a circle at the centre of which Ali Zaidi played a critical role. There was no escaping the man – not that you really wanted to. This time, the formality of him being my boss was gone, and we could talk openly.

The 18th birthday of his son Hassan provided the occasion at which I formally met Ali Zaidi’s circle. It was a Saturday, a day that also coincided with the opening of the KwaniLitfest of that year. New and a guest of Kwani, I spent that weekend driving around Nairobi in cabs with Binyavanga Wainaina, the founder of the literary journal.

Kwani had organised a discussion on writing for magazines, which was being held at the Karen Blixen Museum in Karen, with Binyavanga and Yvonne Owuor sharing the stage. It was an interesting, writerly talk, but Ali had personally called and invited me to his house and I was getting anxious to leave.

Quite incredibly, having quit The EastAfrican where he was an editor, here I was, landing in a circle at the centre of which Ali Zaidi played a critical role. There was no escaping the man – not that you really wanted to.

We arrived at Ali’s well after 2 o’clock that afternoon. New in Nairobi, I could not believe how cold it was at that hour, right on the equator! But that had been my experience during my early days in Nairobi; cold all the time, and because of cold, also constantly hungry. My hosts did not seem too keen on food themselves, and I wondered about their lives, and just what it was I had stepped into.

Ali’s house in Loresho was not what I had expected it to be. It was also unsurprising that it was what it was. Informal, comfortably disarrayed, welcoming, unintimidating. Loresho was a gated estate far from the centre of the city, nestled in a thickly wooded “leafy” suburb.

It seemed that everybody was there. I recognised Lynn MuthoniWanyeki from her mugshot in The EastAfrican. A young, energetically bouncing writer (he wore his credentials too well) introduced himself as Parselelo Ole Kantai. Ali emerged from his house, and amidst the crowd (for it was a packed compound, very wide, with wood and stone sculptures all over), he spotted me and Binyavanga coming in. He stood waiting for us to approach. “David,” he said, smiling, warmly. He took my hand and led me indoors. “Let me feed you.” At last. Someone in Nairobi understood that people needed to eat.

But it was the sheer number of people in Ali Zaidi’s house that occupied my mind. From the sound of them (all eloquent), and the look of them (the tasteful but crumpled look of arty sorts) you could tell who the writer was, the filmmaker, the musician, the activist. Had he taken each one of them by the hand and said “let me feed you”?

Ali’s warmth spoke volumes about who he was. Firstly, his was a house full of children. And then books, and artwork enough to qualify as a museum. We went past the living room, and inside the kitchen, he introduced his children. There, where I was to often find him, was Hassan, marinating piles of meat. We went past him to more introductions – Franco, Emma, Tara (Ali’s children) to the backyard so I could see his wife Irene’s big marble sculpture, a work in progress.

Back to the front garden, which was enormous and punctuated with Irene’s sculptures, there were more introductions, hands to grip, names to exchange: Betty Muragori (soon to be Sitawa Namwalie who invited me to the opening of her poetry show, CutoffMyTongue), Wanyeki, Rasna Warah, Shalini Gidoomal. I forget the rest. The talk was a high, theory-studded tenor. You turned here and caught a whiff of postmodernist extrapolations that side someone in deconstructionist pique, and over there, postcolonial postulation. People held court, drew a circle, talked, then dispersed, sat by the fire, re- congregated around another forth-holder, filled glasses, opened another bottle.

As I was quickly learning, in that circle, you did not simply say things. There had to be an intellectual filter, an optic, a politics via which you saw the world. It was like living inside the pages of The New Yorker, or the Times Literary Supplement, or the London Review of Books. Books, titles, verses, quotes and much else flew about to emphasise a point, a name invoked to shore up a position, wedge in a definition.

And there was Ali Zaidi, walking in, resting on an elbow, listening, gathering a line, looking over shoulders, recharging an empty glass, then pulling over someone who might inject a new idea, an anecdote, drawing the embers out of an overcharged guest, keeping the fires burning. I thought of Anna Scherer in the opening scenes of War and Peace. Had the Tolstoyan character been less pushy and read Marx (a century before her time, admittedly but it might have saved the characters in that book!), her name would have been Ali Zaidi.

What he might have meant when he took my hand, might as well have been “let me seed you”.

As I was to learn over the next few years, this was Ali’s element. It was what he lived for. It was how, five years before that day, Kwani?, the literary magazine, had been born in that very garden. From Ali’s garden, the writers who created Kwani? went out with valuable tools to examine the society they wrote about and did it without asking permission from established hegemonies.

I don’t remember at what point Binyavanga left the party (he forgot his jacket there that evening, I recollect), so I caught a ride back to where I was staying with Parselelo well after 1 on Sunday morning.

To start life in Nairobi, I had to get pragmatic. I had shut down my workshop in Kampala, so I was not making anything to sell to pay the rent. During the week, I rung Ali up. He suggested lunch at Riviera Bar and Restaurant, a short walk from the Nation Centre. As I was to find out, Ali’s haunts were a circle of restaurants minutes from the Nation Centre, which allowed him to nip out briefly and then return to his desk.

I needed to write more regularly, I told him. Nairobi is expensive, I said. That year, I had also strayed into literary infamy and needed to explain myself.

As I was to learn over the next few years, this was Ali’s element. It was what he lived for. It was how, five years before that day, Kwani?, the literary magazine, had been born in that very garden. From Ali’s garden, the writers who created Kwani?went out with valuable tools to examine the society they wrote about and did it without asking permission from established hegemonies.

He chuckled. He may have intuited that already. It was lunch but all he had was a Spanish omelette. I told him I had some ideas about art and literary criticism. “Send in some stuff and let’s see,” he said, instantly looking worried. Perennial bet-hedgers, editors, I always found, reacted to writing proposals with alarm where writers expect gushing enthusiasm.

The closing months of 2008 were fascinating. What started as a weekly comment on this and that literary tradition and heritage turned into a ping-pong exchange of comments and counter- arguments with other literary commentators in Nairobi. We had a lovely debate about literature and history in the pages of The East African. It was the most engrossing bout of newspapering I can recollect.

Over the next few years, I was to see Ali in a way that had not been possible from a distance.

There was his personal/intellectual background and also the context in which it fit. For decades, to be an editor in Nairobi was to have occupied a serious position via which power and public life were mediated. From descriptions, one could hazard that the template may have been set as far back as 1902 when A.M. Jeevanjee hired the British editor W.H Tiller to man the African Standard (later bought by British interest and renamed East African Standard) as founding editor.

By many accounts a grasping man, W.H. Tiller was said to have run the place in the pugnacious mould that was to characterise the job thereafter. Post-independence Kenya was enlivened by a procession of print media editors whose reputations remain in the same ring as generals, CEOs and politicians: John Bierman, Hillary Ng’weno, Boaz Omari, George Githii, John McHaffie, Philip Ochieng, Joe Rodriguez, Gerry Loughran, Joseph Odindo, Peter Mwaura, George Mbugguss, Joe Kadhi. Dramas and epochs attach to each with the swing of Kenyan and East African politics.

Ali Zaidi brought his intellect and social gift to the role. He ran a newspaper whose reputation was without equal in East Africa and beyond. By convening and hosting a circle of writers who would have an impact on the arts and culture on the continent, Ali Zaidi was also outdoing his predecessors. As with all editors of note, you wrote primarily for Ali Zaidi, and only secondarily for the paper.

***

Ali Zaidi was born Aligarh in India and came to Kenya in the early years of President Daniel arap Moi’s rule. He did some teaching before finding his calling as an editor. He told me he could no longer live in India after witnessing the massacre of Sikhs following the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984. He had read economics at Master’s degree level at Delhi University.

I first heard the name Ali Zaidi when I joined The EastAfrican newspaper in 1999, still only 23 and not yet graduated from university. Ali likes this. Ali does not like that. He was not the managing editor. That was Joseph Odindo. But he was that éminence grise that all newspapers must have – that one in-house intellectual and grammarian commanding a battery of section editors. I saw him once in those early years, when I visited Nairobi in 2002, and not again till 2008.

Given its structure, and as a weekly, TheEastAfrican’s reporters were required to do hard news. What I really paid attention to was art and literature. It was how I came to the attention of Ali Zaidi.

By convening and hosting a circle of writers who would have an impact on the arts and culture on the continent, Ali Zaidi was also outdoing his predecessors. As with all editors of note, you wrote primarily for Ali Zaidi, and only secondarily for the paper.

He was not too enthusiastic about what I had to say about art and books. He must have thought me a novice all over the place with ideas. Whatever reviews I wrote were whittled down to reporterial bare bones. He also thought I wrote with too much flourish. “Just go down to town,” was his way of saying write simply. I was not too enamoured by him either. I had called him a philistine – not directly, but in words that amounted to the same. It took me a while to understand that the arts section mattered a lot to Ali.

Once settled in Nairobi, the bulk of my meetings with Ali consisted of the lunches at restaurants within walking distance of the Nation Centre. These provided a chance to talk. 2008 was the year of financial collapse. Capitalism, as we had come to know it, had ended. People were starting to talk about Marx again.

“You have not read Marx,” he stated.

I protested.

“You have read of Marx,” he modulated the charge.

I detailed to him what I had read of Marx. When I mentioned that I planned to tackle the Grundrisse, he scowled. “Stop telling lies. Read Marx.”

His vehemence gave me pause to reflect. It was not like Ali to insist so harshly. But it was then that I began to sense where his intellectual locus sat. I understood that when he said “you have not read Marx,” he meant I was not hewing to the Marxist school he was beholden to, the very typically Marxist internecine conflict to have. But what might that be? The answer was not a difficult one. He was a Walter Benjamin Marxist. (To boot, he was even a spitting image of the great German philosopher-martyr.)

I was hence starting from the beginning, fleshing out what it was that propelled the man. To begin with, the thorough-going, intellectual coherence of historical materialism always provided penetrative insight. It provided a structure of not only thought but also action that could have tremendous impact. Because it was critical, being as it were, on the offensive against an exploitative class, Marxism did not have to play hide-and-seek with history. Coming up with dodgy arguments to support personal wealth was the territory of liberal and neoliberal apologists, such as Maynard Keynes and his successors, Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek.

I got it that Ali understood the world in certain ways. Marxism provided him not only with a view into politics and economics, but also a view of society that was basically humane. For him, people were not for sale. The wealthy in Kenya, he insisted to their face, had profited from a fundamentally unjust system.

But what was it about Walter Benjamin that appealed to Ali and how might it have shaped how he saw the world?

The Jewish philosopher, whose death on the Spanish border when he was fleeing Nazis in 1939 remains a mystery and continues to divide Spain, had gone longer distances than most Marxists of his times in postulating a critical theory. Walter Benjamin’s idea of history, his “angel of history” (after buying the painting by Paul Klee, Angelus Novus) is his most powerful idea. The eponymous angel in the painting, Walter Benjamin wrote, “would like to say, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed”.

This insight into history was, to say the least, ultra-revolutionary. What it said, and how it has variously been interpreted, is that the past (lost causes) is not dead (defeated) as long as there are people still willing to fight for it. It is the closest one can come to resurrecting the dead, this idea of picking up the cause they died for and then refighting it. The catchy formulation being that the fate of the past lies in the hands of the present. In other words, the past is not dead as long as the living continue to believe in its ideas.

I got it that Ali understood the world in certain ways. Marxism provided him not only with a view into politics and economics, but also a view of society that was basically humane. For him, people were not for sale. The wealthy in Kenya, he insisted to their face, had profited from a fundamentally unjust system.

There was also his critical art theory: Walter Benjamin’s was a fundamental questioning of the concept of art, stripping it down to a matter of aesthetic, from which point open-ended questions become possible: as “Art”, it is an absolute in itself; but as “aesthetic”, it is the territory of the subjective, a thing you can negotiate with. An immensely liberating direction to take, for then, totalities, or what Ali liked to term “absolutes”, rapidly came unstuck. For the work of art, as Walter Benjamin argued, is tied to the question of tradition, what a people think of the object. What had been pure creativity in one epoch had in another age been an object of veneration, of spiritual significance; what had for one people been just a utilitarian, functional object becomes for another a work of art. Created objects are armed and disarmed as art, depending on the politics of a time. For instance, graffiti would in the 1990s be a nuisance scarring cityscapes. In a period of insurrection against the “one percent”, Banksy would be viewed as a great artist.

The work of art becomes tied to other larger aspects external to the object of art, making the metamorphosis from the spiritual stage to the political and the economic. Art in the industrial age hence takes on a new, urgent significance. It becomes the keeper of the forces of a spiritualism exiled from human relationships by the forces of production.

The work of art becomes the only safe place in which freedom, equality, community, and kindness will not jeopardise the profit motive of capitalism. For if these ideas are left within human society, they will inspire resistance against the exploiting class. The work of art begins to command vast sums of money because they are indeed storing the very lifeblood of human society. It might seem as though the capitalist patrons of art are missing the warmth of community they have destroyed. It is telling that global corporations give so much money to museums, not so much as a back-handed apology as ensuring that what is imprisoned in art stays there, to be viewed rather than lived.

According to this line of argument, the work of art is then slightly off-centre to the objet d’art. A sculpted stone is a stone with a shape. It will only become art when we will it to be art. That “will” comes from our political positioning, for it is the belief of our society, as well as the class we belong to, that tells us how to feel. Hence, art is not an intrinsic property of the object. All value is external to the object.

Ali Zaidi spoke often of Walter Benjamin’s examination of the work of art at the dawn of the modern era, the “mechanical reproduction of the work of art”, stating that a photograph of a famous work of art was no less valuable than the original itself. This was Walter Benjamin’s argument. An argument dangerous to a rising age of fascist nativism for which value must be intrinsic and inseparably innate to the volk. (Ali, who moved to Africa and married an African, an act that was anathema within the migrant Asian community, did not see race or tribe or class. His Marxism was a lived idea.) If all interpretations art, history, culture are political, then is it not hogwash to claim any one culture as supreme?

Ali would say things like “the destruction of the material cultures of African societies was central to the colonial enterprise”, a typically Marxist statement to make. But it swept away rhetorical verbiage and overheated, superficialities about identity. It went to the gist of history itself, that the struggle was not of “civilization” but of baser intent, for control of material resources, to put it crudely.

As I saw it, that was the point at which Ali operated his politics, as it were. It also made him a stranger to an age in which identity politics characterised everything. As far as I can remember, he had little to say about post-war philosophical politics and I tried unsuccessfully to get him to discuss Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.

The irony was that the intellectual set that gathered around Ali was deeply steeped in the postmodern identity politics spawned by their ideas. Most spouted it second-hand without knowledge of where it emanated from, the free-for-all, anything-goes “deconstruction” tool of reading that Derrida inflicted upon intellect.

I never came to know Ali’s views on postmodernism. Perhaps others did. But it was not a topic he encouraged whenever I brought it up. At any rate, extend the ideas of Walter Benjamin two or three decades into the 21st century and they likely end up there. He did not set out to influence anyone. That would have been not only crude but disingenuous. They would all have dropped him for that. It is not that he was too clever for that. Rather, Ali was genuine.

He was addicted to people. I could see that. He could not get through an evening without the company of at least half a dozen people. People were his element. He was happiest in large groups.

I’d like to think he found a home in East Africa. He believed in things, and he went out of his way to make it possible for creative, earnest and driven intellectuals to have a say. We appreciated that deeply.

He seemed happy. He often said: “In Africa, people accept you as long as they sense that you are genuine. Elsewhere, they see your face, your religion, and shoo you away.”

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter.

‘I Will Crush You’: The November 18 Kampala Massacre

By A. K. Kaiza Well into its fourth week, the bewildering showdown between Rwanda President Paul Kagame and his Ugandan counterpart, Yoweri Museveni, had predictably produced a heart-rending headline. The news reports said that a woman several months pregnant, an Elizabeth Mukarugwiza, had been chased across the border from Rwanda into Uganda by either the Rwandan army or police.

Eye-witness reports said that Ms. Mukarugwiza, 37, just about beat the Rwandan security to the border. Whatever it was had driven her, and we can only speculate (a prenatal visit to a clinic?), would have been that urgent. Had this episode occurred inside Rwanda itself, what happened next would not have been reported. Were we to hear of it, it would have come as rumor, a thing said of a closed country that without voices or images to back it up, quickly loses steam.

Take the story of three sisters:

As reported in The Observer newspaper, the sisters, daughters of a pastor Deo Nyirigira who lives in Mbarara in Western Uganda, had completed their studies at Ugandan universities and then returned to find work in Kigali. Their father, part of the group extruded from Rwanda in the 1959 upheaval that brought Paul Kagame himself to Uganda, had one time returned to the country after the genocide. After only a handful of years, Mr. Nyirigira realised that he could no longer live in his country. For a second time, he left Rwanda for Uganda. Given his influence as a pastor, the authorities in Kigali grew weary of him and wanted him back. Attempts at kidnapping him are said to have led to the shooting death of one of the suspected Rwandan kidnap squad.

Eyewitness reports said that Ms. Mukarugwiza, 37, just about beat the Rwandan security to the border. Whatever it was that had driven her, we can only speculate that it had been urgent (a prenatal visit to a clinic, perhaps?). Had this episode occurred inside Rwanda itself, what happened next would not have been reported. Were we to hear of it, it would have come as rumour – a thing that quickly loses steam without voices or images to back it up.

Back in Rwanda, and back in the present, with the rise in political tensions now, Mr. Nyirigira’s daughters, because the government could not touch their father, have reportedly been stripped of their jobs. In Rwanda, children may be punished for the infractions of parents; in the worst of times, the unborn were not spared either. One sister was already married with a child. The husband was ordered to divorce her. It was when their father sent them sustenance money that they were apparently taken into custody. But we hear of these events secondhand.

The fate of Ms. Mukarugwiza too would have been rumor were it not for the Ugandan media. But alas, escaping the Rwandan forces counted for naught. No sooner had Ms. Mukarugwiza made it across the border than she collapsed and died, she and her unborn baby.

A moment crackling with significance; there you had the picture, shared across social media, of what appear to be two Red Cross responders, white latex gloved hands, stooped forms, shocked, horrified faces wanting to have a look. The body covered in red, green, then blue and red Maasai blankets. The scene is slopping ground, a wooded glen, heavy jackets giving an idea of altitude and weather. Armed men hounded the expectant mother to death; just like in a gothic, B Movie, the fetus must not be born. It was as if 1994 were reclaiming the soul of Rwanda.

Trying to see it from the perspective of a Rwandan, to not miss-judge the act, however carking, was hard, the central question refusing to go away; in what way does the death of a pregnant woman contribute to the greater good of Rwanda? At 37, Ms. Mukarugwiza would have left behind other children. They will remember, so does that now make them targets to a regime that lives in fear of its victims? (“He who kills Brutus but does not kill the sons of Brutus,” a researcher once quoted the mantra to me). How many times in that country was it justified by saying that the child will be born an enemy? Too rebarbative to contain, and yet human sacrifice, after thousands of years, has still not lost its repugnance. Fascism, the conclusion went, had sunk deep roots into Rwanda, its president, irretrievably fallen to the dark side.

Ugly underbelly

The one link I could use to comprehend what happened to Ms. Mukarugwiza was two decades out of date. The first and last time I was in Rwanda, a few years after the genocide, was March 2003. The first thing I did in Kigali was look up my old classmates who had returned home post-1994. But the once humble, amiable schoolboys of the late 80s and early 90s, I failed to find in the men they had become. In turns brash, and rude, then commanding, suddenly distant, then calm, then uncommunicative, their mercurial, unstable character had caught me off guard in 2003. I took it with whatever fortitude I could muster at that age, rationalizing that few peoples had endured what the Rwandans had gone through.

But for a few years after that, and already disabused of my then, post-genocide, World Bank- sponsored naivety, garnished with western media manufactured facts about post-genocide Rwanda, I paid closer attention. I tried my best not to fall into the binary, this side good, that side bad routine. I read into each report, into each TV segment, the calamitous shift in the character of my old school friends. It was as if once you had seen into peoples’ souls, no mere shift in ideology nor mass media spin, can fool you.

We were not many in the newsroom, so on top of my other beats, I was dispatched to northern Uganda countless times where I spent time with refugees. Covering Rwanda and Congo was one of the most upsetting times of my career as a reporter. The end of the genocide had been heralded as a grand moment, yet in many respects, it signaled the beginning of other horrible events.

And then I paid too much attention. The years starting from 2003 would culminate with my departure from the media in 2006. They were the years of the unravelling of whatever post-Mobutu hiatus might have been in Congo. Congolese refugees were streaming out in all directions. And it seemed back then that the region was on fire. One of the worst massacres in the northern Uganda war came in that span of time. Sudan had just concluded its penultimate, bloody stage of civil war. Garang died in a plane crash. Back then, being a reporter meant that by default, you were a war reporter.

We were not many in the newsroom, so on top of my other beats, I was dispatched to northern Uganda countless times. I spent time with refugees. Of Rwanda and Congo, there began one of the most upsetting times of my career as a reporter. The ending of the genocide had been heralded as the grand moment. In many respects, it had been the beginning of the worst. In testimony after testimony, I heard something else besides what was said of the region. I was cruelly disillusioned about where this region would end up. I met the ugly underbelly of what was a disturbing, ethno- racial war. The silence of guns, if that ever came, would mean this zero-sum war being fought by other means.

We were all in it, Uganda, Rwanda, Congo, Burundi, so that events in any part of Congo would have meaning in all four countries. Those stocking the flames of the northern Uganda war saw it as a continuum for the outcomes in Rwanda, Eastern Congo, etc. How, as a reporter taught to not identify subjects by race or ethnicity do you approach that without also withholding the truth from the public? Calculating that if the combatants and their invidious backers in Kampala, Kigali and who knows which other cities quietly believed in their own ethnic superiority, why should the rest of us watching in confusion not know their full intentions?

Because Rwanda could rely on it, it took Uganda’s friendship for granted. However, by 2017 something had gone amiss. Kigali, it seemed, had overstepped its boundaries by interfering with the power dynamics of Uganda at a sensitive time when Museveni was struggling to assert his power.

It is one thing to fight a war of self-defense. It is another to wage a war of hegemonic ambition. The one is understandable; the other is a crime. I went for it. I reported what was a parallel, darker narrative to the sanitised news routine; the common approach was not courageous enough to tell the truth; rather than tell the world what accounted for the blinding human cruelty being meted out for what the perpetrators saw as payment for past ethnic traumas, it endlessly asked in faux naïveté, why people could be so inhuman.

The backlash

It was then the backlash started. The war may have been in Congo, but doors began to be shut in my face in government offices in Kampala. Shielding behind media ignorance and international lack of curiosity had enabled them wage wars in four countries with the comfort that the usual tropes of reporting Africa would shield them. The furiousness with which the reactions came left me stunned. I began to hear of the moves to get rid of me from the newspaper long before it happened.

Back in the day, the newspaper I worked for had yearly run country supplements of Rwanda. After a series of stories, on the troubles in Eastern Congo, the supplement hung in balance, the expected hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising threatened. As a reporter who may never earn that much money over a career, there is not much choice between your journalism and a paper merchant’s profits. I recollect the hostility at the paper itself, the kvetching from advertising salesmen who saw my reporting as financially ruinous. My notebooks disappeared. Journalist colleagues whose relationships to Kigali you had taken as a joke, took on a different character. Kagame’s reach, we understood, was everywhere, and newspaper offices are great places to plant eyes and ears. The failure of my paper to stand by me as a reporter, and the increasing telephone harassment, plus the decision I was reaching to become a fulltime writer, led me quit the media. If your editor and publisher cannot stand by you, there is little you can do about such matters.

I got busy finding ways of being a writer, including spending 3 years in Kenya. Rwanda receded from my mind. But I had gained a further insight. Legitimate, even useful scrutiny, let alone criticism, is not allowed in Rwanda, even if its well-meant. I immediately understood that Kigali’s temper tantrums would ensure that Kagame never ran out of enemies. Seeing enemies everywhere you look is not great leadership. There is a psychological term for it. I had not learnt anything new, really. I had merely joined the ranks of those familiar with the ugliness of our region’s politics, the people who expect any day to have to run into exile. I was not in bad company. I calmed down and moved on.

Till October 2017. That month, the big story (the month before Museveni had trashed the parliament) was that five Ugandan police officers had been arrested for the kidnap and extra-judicial deportation of Rwanda dissidents.

You had to have followed Rwanda closely enough, or been to school with some of the characters close to the show to have understood what that headline meant. There had always been much talk about the vaunted Rwandan security and intelligence, of their capacities and determination. I had always doubted that, particularly after enduring run-ins with a handful of them and taking note of how amateurish they were. I had also been in class with some, and they were not what you may describe as top of the class, as it were. They are good when you don’t fight back. When you do, they do precisely what Kagame has done; draw down the barricades and get nasty. Closer to the truth was that Rwanda is too small a country for others to spend energy worrying about. Some residual sympathy had perhaps led others to look the other way. It wasn’t that they were better; it was that others were benevolent towards them.

Toxic anger

I doubted that when it came to it, Rwanda could match the intelligence capabilities of say South Africa. Or Uganda, when it came to it. Slinking about dark corners and spiking people’s tea, sticking knives into “enemies” is one thing. The net effect is to get you marked out as evil and untrustworthy. It is another to have the economic and diplomatic clout of countries dramatically bigger like South Africa, or even small ones like Uganda whose economy you actually depend on. The problem of toxic anger the junta is afflicted with means they fail to tell friend from foe.

Because it could rely on it, Kigali took Uganda for granted. Either way, by 2017 something had gone wrong enough. Kigali, it seemed, had overstepped its bounds at last. You easily guessed that they had interfered with the power dynamics of Uganda. At such a sensitive time over his hold on to power, Mr. Museveni would have been unhappy.

This unease is to the extent that nearly everyone – not just politicians, lawyers and journalists, but even mobile money booth owners – is afraid to receive phone calls, especially from strangers, but also from anybody who is not an immediate family member. Friends are now suspecting friends. Like Rwanda, Uganda is an overripe boil.

We still do not know the full details of the matter. But former Inspector General of Police, Gen Kale Kayihura, perhaps the most unqualified man to have ever held the post, was said to have inadvisedly played a role in the matter, as rumor had it, getting too close to the Rwandans. His erratic behaviour in 2017 may now be clearer in hindsight. In effect, the general had appointed himself the government of Uganda, making the kinds of commands way beyond his ken, as if he had become prime minister, speaker of parliament, chief justice and chief executioner. Not even president Museveni exercised that much authority. It remained for even his boss to join the dots, follow the lines linking him with Rwandan high command to smell something off. What did a police inspector need a political base for; why did he need a foreign policy? Was CID so inadequate that he had to have his own intelligence network? The drama of Kayihura’s downfall added to the political unease in Uganda.

We live in a state of fear. Phone calls bring unease; who might be listening, who is reading the emails? Friends suspect friends; colleagues in offices are unsure of each other. Like Rwanda, Uganda is an overripe boil. Rwanda appears to be falling over the cliff first. We are not far behind.

The central charge against the five officers, and which charge in reverse facsimile ricocheted from Kigali as “Uganda detaining Rwandan citizens without charge” – Kagame’s primary casus belli, was that they were arresting and extra judicially deporting Rwandan dissidents.

For over two decades, Mr. Kagame had won wars in which the other side was not really shooting back, and waging undeclared espionage wars others weren’t too interested in. The risk of going too far was always there, of waking up governments with vaster reach and resources.

And that is what has happened. The blowback started in South Africa. We do not as yet know the extent of this drama unfolding in Uganda, but the alacrity with which Kigali reacted (remember the adage – whatever you do, don’t make any sudden moves) would seem to indicate that the Ugandans knew exactly where to go and which tender spots to touch. By barricading himself and the people he leads in, a move with serious repercussions, no matter which way this story heads, Mr. Kagame has betrayed his state of mind. What he has done is beyond serious. He has drawn unkind attention from the world, who read in this move, not sophistication, leadership, cool-headedness, but cruelty. It behooves a leader not a drop of good to be seen as cruel. It’s not the time to build walls, or close borders with countries to north and south of your country. You remind the world of what and who it wants to forget.

That’s the wider world for starts. In East Africa, this has drawn the scrutiny of people in Kenya and Tanzania for whom Rwanda was far away, a country to be sympathized with. The interruption of regional trade is touching constituents that once could be counted upon to remain distant and unconcerned which way things happened over there. In Uganda itself, Kagame’s action is bringing up sentiments that had plateaued into disinterest. It has also curiously given Mr. Museveni some boost of badly needed sympathy in Uganda. It’s a strange thing, nationalism. Now some of Mr. Museveni’s opponents suddenly understand that it is okay for them to criticize him; they don’t like it that much when a foreign president does the same. Kagame is attacking, not just the Museveni government, but their Museveni.

We can’t tell how it’s going down inside Rwanda itself. But there, the issues are immediate. Rwanda needs Uganda for education, for health, for food more than Uganda needs Rwanda. The drama has been coloured by stories, such as that of the three sisters, whose lives have been imperiled by the closure of borders.

Then, in the middle of it, word came that Mr. Kagame had also closed the border with Burundi.

Rwanda’s relationship with Uganda is centuries old. As with the current character of Uganda, the bits of the ancient story we understand starts with the narrative of the ancient empire of Bunyoro-Kitara, when at the height of inter-Africa migrations, peoples ran into each other. Scars from the dim mists of time fester today, with broad implications for inter-ethnic divisions in Uganda and beyond.

Whichever way these reactions go, it is still early days, the opening pages of a book of raw emotions. The real story is still to hit its stride. Part of the reason we cannot tell where it will end is because we may be too horrified to begin thinking of it.

Rwanda’s relationship with Uganda

But do we not lose perspective by getting caught up in the moment of the drama? Do we care enough to know the story of Rwanda?

Rwanda’s relationship with Uganda is centuries old. As with the current character of Uganda, the bits of the ancient story we understand start with the narrative of the ancient empire of Bunyoro- Kitara, when at the height of inter-Africa migrations, peoples ran into each other. Scars from the dim mists of time fester today, with broad implications for inter-ethnic divisions in Uganda and beyond. The peoples of Rwanda-Burundi, including bits of Eastern Congo, played parts in the stories of the formation of Ugandan kingdoms, and they did not emerge winners. But that is ancient history. Of immediate relevance is how Rwandans ended up living in Uganda in such numbers.

The colonial wars that the British fought in Uganda were some of the most serious in the region, along with the wars the Germans brought to Central Tanzania. By the 1920s, it is reported, the population of Uganda had been growing negatively for three decades. The religion-inflected civil wars in Buganda (which were actually class wars), the Bunyoro genocide, the wars of conquest in the East and North, and the collapse of pre-colonial medicine, along with the interruption of agriculture, more Ugandans had died than were born for close to three decades. Nothing new; all of it very British. They simply did not care that black people were dying because of their imperial strategies. It is what they did in the Americas, in Australia, Zimbabwe, Kenya, etc. Hence, the introduction of the cash crop economy foundered under severe shortage of labour. The British actively encouraged immigration from Belgian holdings. There are dramatic pictures taken at the time of the way stations doling food, medicine and shelter along the migration route from the Rwandan border into central Uganda. Shirtless, barefoot Rwandans, their beddings rolled up on their heads, are captured in grainy images making the two week walk from the border to central Uganda.

Writing in his book, Kampala-Uganda in 1951, the late American anthropologist, Edwin S. Munger, who died in 2010, wrote that “For thirty years, the principle labor (sic) migration route has been that travelled by the Banyruanda and Barundi from the Belgian mandates into Buganda. Historically, Ruanda-Urundi’s high, steep-sided hills have produced more people than food to feed them. In many years the issue was blunt: go or starve…a carryover from the old days of hardship is the attitude in Ruanda-Urundi that one mark of manhood is a trip to Uganda. The traditions of battling with lions and elephants, of fighting bandits, living off the country, and surviving where many died still give the emigrant prestige on his return home.”

The image in Uganda from the 1920s onwards of Rwandans and Burundians (the difference was subsumed under the generic “Banyarwanda”) that emerged was unfortunate and unfair. Xenophobia in Uganda, particularly in Buganda, served to see these immigrants not as victims of cruel colonialism as the Ugandans themselves were, but as peripatetic, woebegone itinerants who worked for a meal. There were many eager to blend in, to become integrated, if only to avoid the unkind stereotype.

Life in Belgian territories was unpleasant, even by the unpleasant standards of colonialism. Arriving in late colonial Uganda, with somewhat better amenities, was for other reasons beside just food and work. “Perhaps here is partial confirmation of the physical hardships of the route from Ruanda- Urundi to Mengo (now greater Kampala) District,” Munger goes on. “Whole wards of Barundi and Banyaruanda are hospitalised with tuberculosis and general malnutrition.”

The image in Uganda, from the 1920s, of Rwandans (and Burundians, the difference was subsumed under the generic “Banyarwanda), that emerged was unfortunate and unfair. Xenophobia in Uganda, particularly in Buganda, served to see these immigrants, not as victims of cruel colonialism as themselves, but as peripatetic, woebegone itinerants who will work for a meal. And many were those eager to blend in, to become integrated, if only to avoid the unkind stereotype. They were escaping similar circumstances, but in one of the failures of African societies, those they ran to did not treat them well.

Particularly in the metropolitan Buganda, where a mix of aristocratic and racial hierarchy (not unknown in Rwanda) had created a caste system under the British, the immigrants, penniless and ill, were despised, and the timidity this produced is to be found today, three generations later. And as Munger notes, intermarriage tended to happen mostly at the social margins, because the Rwandans (and the women later followed the men), meant lower dowries demanded at nuptials.

The Buganda government, under the indirect colonial rule which left it in charge of broad swathes of its subjects, viewed the arrivals ambivalently. They were refugees; they were badly needed labour. After a few years, the Kabaka’s government began to tax them as its other subjects, a tacit act of admission. Those who could, integrated swiftly, taking on new identities and names.

The more urgent immigration into Uganda, of Rwandans and Burundians, was yet to come. But it resulted in a multi-layered extra-Rwandan diaspora. There are the integrated, who bare Ugandan names, have Ugandan parentage and are largely unhappy about the way the later immigrants served to tarnish their image, to say nothing of complicating hard-won relationships.

Amongst those that broke off from the Ugandan army and returned to Rwanda, the spearhead group were not from this earlier exodus. This group of latter immigrants came in 1959.

Throughout, the Ugandans had not behaved well towards their guests. The country had not come without its share of pain. The love was not bottomless. And today, the integration is so profound that any Ugandan saying anything anti-Rwanda, may well be insulting a grandmother. They had learnt that not being accepted was not the worst that can happen. Keep your head down and blend in. Loss of identity was not the worst. And the worst did come. The 1959 migrants did not keep their heads down. The entire region paid a steep price for their indiscretion.

The second wave of migration and its consequences

With agricultural reform, by chiefly terracing the hills to stem soil erosion, the Belgians had managed to rein in famine in Rwanda. But the Belgians had ruled by divide et impera, elevating to the dangerous levels of ethnicity, what some have described as a class system, “Hutu” and “Tutsi”. They had favoured the “Tutsi”, for much of their colonial rule, with the “Hutu” treated as underdogs, who for instance were not allowed to acquire higher learning. By the racist means of the time, anthropologists and sociologists had said were non-African, non-negroid. But it was a difficult question. Nazi conquest and racial theory was so repugnant that the Belgians themselves abandoned the racialist bifurcation of their Rwanda-Burundi colony. Unfortunately, rather than create a level, unifying policy, they started to favour the Hutu instead. So that when it came, they handed over independence to the majority Hutu.

Almost immediately, the Hutu began to persecute the Tutsi. And it this crisis that led to the second wave of migration, in 1959. They were a different group now, not really peasant, but with a grudge in their hearts. In Uganda, Mr. Museveni recruited many from this group into his rebel army that fought against the Obote II government in the early 1980s. When Museveni overthrow the sclerotic Tito Okello junta that had itself overthrown the Obote government just six months early in 1985, he appointed many Rwandan refugees into government and the army. There was uproar in Uganda over the inclusion of foreigners in sensitive positions. Kagame himself had been head of a spy agency in Uganda.

Under pressure from Ugandans, Mr. Museveni understood he had to let them go. Hence, when they broke away in 1990, after helping set fire to Uganda, there was something of doom about it. They clearly weren’t coming back. But the worst was at the other end. Much as it has always been said that Mr. Paul Kagame, who inherited leadership of the Rwanda Patriotic Army rebel group after the death of its leader, Fred Rwigyema. After four years of fighting, which started in 1990, hardliner Hutu leadership unleashed the 1994 genocide. The militarization of politics in Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda and Congo, has meant that the four countries have been in one form of warfare or the other for nearly 60 years.

The matrix of governing a country with sharp divides, and doing it by force, is not one that Mr. Kagame’s temperament seems suited for. It may be gratifying to defeat your enemies. But you have to be a Nelson Mandela to win them over. You must win them over, for these conflicts are circuitous. Soon the other side can, and will, rise to power. It’s a question of time.

Increasingly intolerant governments have characterised Uganda and Rwanda, at a time when all over the continent, countries are settling down to stable governance. What is the point? What plans do Messrs. Museveni and Kagame have this region? Much as it is clear to all who pay attention that the unfortunate weaponising of ethnicity has perhaps trapped both men in power, it is still puzzling because there seems to be no end game in sight, except endless corruption and more militarization, which will require even more corruption to maintain the patronage system, and more militarization to fend off the disaffected. We have become trapped in a loop without exits. Decades ago, the citizens waited patiently because it seemed that real change could come. But if after these many years a pregnant woman has to sneak across a border, that begs the question, as Oliver Cromwell once asked of the British Parliament; have you not sat here too long for any good you can have done?

Shutting down the border is symbolic of the increasing pointlessness of the two regimes.

They came into power at the time that the cold war was ending. The period of rapid coups and countercoups in Africa, funded by the rival capitalist and communist power blocs ended then, with the result that whoever had been in power at that time, tended to remain so for a bit longer. Put simply, the power balance that might have kept the two men honest was not there. Crucially then, these quakes we now feel in Uganda and Rwanda, are not casual. They are the deep rumblings from shifting global tectonic power plates. In the past, when they were at loggerheads, the British Foreign Secretaries jetted in to knock their heads together. Agony “Aunts” Lynda Chalker and Claire Short, British ministers of the 1990s and 00s, would have been here already. But the British now have their hands full back home, and need benevolent foreign secretaries to go knock their heads together, enduring the cruel reversal of the foreign policy technique they so perfected, of keeping countries they wished to rule at each other’s throats. The absence of steadying British and American hands right now, in this conflict, has exposed the lack of political and management skills in Kigali and in Kampala. It has exposed the fact that Uganda and Rwanda have for decades now been run as client states. In the absence of the Anglo-Saxon power-meisters, Museveni and Kagame are learning cruelly the difference between monkey and organ grinder. It is left to the East African Community states, Tanzania and Kenya, to try and sort the situation out. But it takes a fool to bet on that strategy working. Twice, first in 1985, then in 1994, both Kenya and Tanzania attempted to sort political problems in Uganda and Rwanda out. But the rebel leaders then merely inked their names to agreements reached in Nairobi and Arusha, whilst using the interim to move their forces closer to the capitals. With spectacular disasters. Those rebels? They are now called President Museveni and President Kagame.

How does that now happen? Did Nairobi and Dar es Salaam ever forgive the slight? Do they trust the two men? But, that is the wrong question. The question is, what power backdrop are the two men now banking on? If we can answer that question, maybe we can predict how they plan to plunge us into new rounds of war. Global power dynamics have eroded the neoliberal economic system they had learnt to game. What is emerging now requires skills beyond wearing military fatigues and firing AK 47s at target boards.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter.

‘I Will Crush You’: The November 18 Kampala Massacre

By A. K. Kaiza The first and only time I saw him, Sir Vidia looked frail. Face like a mask, pudgy fingers suspiciously handling the microphone, and eyebrows firmly chiseled in place, he looked as though he had been dragged to school on a day he would have rather stayed home in bed. That day, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was at Makerere University, replaying the character he had played four decades earlier, as misanthrope in residence. The Naipaul event was immediately after lunch on a late March afternoon. The sun was beaming down directly over the equator and I remember the hall being hot with precipitation.

It’s a decade now since that March 2008 afternoon. Looking back, it seems that V.S. Naipaul, sitting there in Makerere University’s Main Hall, looked like a piece of wood carving. Like one of those giant Chinese wood reliefs, there was his grand magnificence. The brilliance of his finish was outstanding. And this magnificence, this brilliance, was all the more magnified because he was forever on the verge of becoming, tantalising the audience with the possibility that this rendering might come alive.

Arrested in 2D by a physique in distress, Naipaul’s dyspeptic mien marked the entire afternoon. He kept sinking into his chair, till at the end of the event we could only see his head and shoulders. Perhaps he had come expecting a hostile audience. Perhaps it was the heat and the stuffy air. Maybe he had been unwell. Maybe it was the sight of us, a room full of black people.

A farcical afternoon. Exhibit A: What was Naipaul doing in Makerere? Who comes to Makerere anymore? Even ten years before that, when I had been a student there, we had not thought we could rate a writer, even a third-rate one. And here was a Nobel laureate, Sir Vidia, in person.

Had he come to mock us – again? But seated there in plain sight, Mr. Naipaul looked done with mockery. He had mocked Trinidad. He had mocked India. He had mocked Africa. He had found Ugandans disgusting. He had been the founding CEO and majority shareholder of the flourishing global literary corporation of jibing sneers.

That was back in the day when he looked chipper, when Makerere – the university – had been of enough value to make a killing out of mocking. By 2008, Makerere (“Maka Ray Ray” as Naipaul reportedly pronounced it) was too far gone for anybody to be interested in mockery or disdain. By 2008, the mocking of black people for profit had been tarnished for a while, which meant that the days of Naipaul’s unqualified standing as a brilliant truth teller were behind him. “Controversial” had replaced “brilliant”, “controversial” being what you call an oaf you are too fond of to let go despite mounting evidence of his oafishness. Even in its time, “brilliant” had been used by certain British right-wing media in a way that you felt meant Naipaul gave the n****rs what they deserved.

We, the few hundreds of us, and Naipaul, who we had all come to stare at, could not have been more mismatched. Right there you could understand why the first time round in the 1960s, Mr. Naipaul had been unenthused about actually having to live in Makerere.

We, as no doubt our fathers’ generation had been then, were not very impressive specimens. Too black for our own good, we were too frayed around the racial edges. We squatted at the university, unable to fit in with the masonry and the woodwork, which had been cut for Europeans. Unaware of the value of glass windows and flush toilets, we had run down a once famous university. We came from the bush to line up for maizemeal and boiled beans in dining halls built for three-course meals with salad dressing.

There was everything imperfect about us. We had not invented the wheel. We had never manufactured steam locomotives. We still imported, rather than made, paper, which meant that we were still attempting to beat out novels on drums. Yes, we still did that, make drums, and still beat them. Civilisation was wasted on us. And outside the hall, footpaths crisscrossed the once immaculate green lawns laid out in the 1930s and 1940s by Oxbridge visionaries. Six decades after Prof. C.S. Turner transformed the technical school founded in 1922 into a university, tribalism had long become the most important criterion for staff appointments.

Naipaul’s coming hence, four decades since he had last been, could have been for any number of reasons. Self-flagellation would not have been the least of possibilities. Material for a new book? Why? He was a brilliant writer. Could he not have invented some sordid tales about us from England, where they had been inventing marvelous things (and steam engines) for centuries?

His was a complexity of prose, rather than of ideas, so why the effort? If he was gathering material for a book, why fly so far when he was already in his 70s?

Naipaul’s coming hence, four decades since he had last been, could have been for any number of reasons. Self-flagellation would not have been the least of possibilities. Material for a new book? Why? He was a brilliant writer. Could he not have invented some sordid tales about us from England, where they had been inventing marvelous things (and steam engines) for centuries?

And us? Why did we turn up? We had never been enthralled by any of the things he had said about us. The admiration we had for his prose style outstripped our love for his books. But we had admired him because we wished that the people with power liked us as much as they liked him. We wanted his good luck (which can look like agreeing with him). Were we self-flagellating too? Could we not have simply read his comments from the safety of our houses? Or was some sado-masochist strain still alive within us?

The collision was utterly unavoidable, a true literary crash. A room filled with the undesirable, coming to an unwanted event to see an unpleasant guest. And that, more rather than less, summarises Naipaul’s oeuvre. In this iteration, hostile questions from the audience: a university lecturer asking a clever question about Tagore, and Naipaul, sensing his Indian roots intruded upon, rapidly slaps it down. Poor chap, he had spent his life teaching V.S. Naipaul books, and had stayed awake all night choosing which question would be best for the event. Next, a Ugandan of Asian descent takes too long with the mic, speaking up too fondly, getting on Nadira’s nerves and deserving what was coming his way; Lady Naipaul cuts him cold and says, next question?

If nothing else, this ping-pong moment was it. Naipaul was in town, game on. Right on cue, Lady Naipaul took charge. She had become the moderator, leaning forward all afternoon while Naipaul slunk back in his chair. The real moderator must have wondered if he had come to the wrong stage.

Naipaul murmured his responses. One thing he said still rings clear in my memory. He said “Africa came to me intuitively. It was not by searching.”

And then the hall emptied. Naipaul shuffled out. The thick entourage that had brought him in taking him out.

Like everyone else present, my journey to that afternoon had begun long ago, albeit in my case, not far away from that hall. Two decades earlier, I had gone to secondary school at Makerere College School, tucked inside the university itself, and read my first Naipaul book there. On the morning of his visit, I had packed my copies of Naipaul’s books, just like you do when you go to a speaking event and the author will be present, and afterwards you line up and confess your besotted heart, and the author, having to wear a droll, heard-it-all-before face, nonetheless signs the books with a flourish. I looked at my collection: a 1957 edition of The Mystic Masseur that I had procured from a flea market and the still fresh-smelling Enigma of Arrival reissued after the Nobel Prize of 2001. I recollected the contents of that, and of another book, Sir Vidia’s Shadow (hatchet job on Naipaul by one-time disciple, the American writer, Paul Theroux).

I then remembered how the opening of The Middle Passage had alerted me to something alarming about Naipaul that only expanded in later books and became all you saw in him. Some things not even magnificent prose could conceal.

I left the books on the top of the workbench in my workshop and headed out for Makerere. Naipaul’s wife Nadira and the university’s literature department staff staged a praetorian guard around him, an impenetrable phalanx of reverence. Asking him to sign books was impossible. Naipaul looked like he would suffer a mental breakdown if an African spoke to him. By day’s end, he looked like he needed to see a doctor. Still, he might have persevered and signed the books, and you would have had to throw them away later.

There was something terribly Naipaulish about the university that stuffy afternoon. Eighteen years before, at the age of 14, when my journey to that afternoon commenced, I had read my first Naipaul, Miguel Street, on Makerere hill at Makerere College School. The edition I read had a foreword by Laban Erapu that mentioned Naipaul’s time in Uganda. I had assumed then that Naipaul was Ugandan.

Miguel Street – that sardonically cheerful primer, of which there had not been that many copies in the school – had exchanged hands many times among us kids and we talked much about it. It had been something of a staple. You had to know Miguel Street. Elias and the posse of Bogart et al, their comical putter, the mother with as many husbands as children. A sing-song toned collection of stories, curious names, absurd accents. Miguel Street was the book from a man who had a twinkly view of life as a thing to be had to the full. We related to these tales. We laughed.

It was in this mind-frame that five years later, in 1995, I had picked up from the university library an old copy of A House for Mr. Biswas. I half-expected to find in this book the loveable characters from Miguel Street. Certain things were similar. Mohun went off to England, to study, as Elias had dreamt. Back in the 1990s, with Empire still within striking cultural memory, we too had dreamt of going to English universities. We were starting off from the same place as Naipaul, his clutch of characters so recognisable to us, their sense of the future our own. You understood that fever in A House for Mr. Biswas.

What drove Naipaul’s characters was what drove us. Empire had emptied its subject populations of their subjective selves and their metaphysical heritage, which had been replaced by England, Oxford, high tea, biscuit and crumpets, Piccadilly. An equal opportunity impoverisher, the British Empire had left penury and hurt in so many parts of the world that a book from any of these parts tended to speak to all parts. What a Sir Hathorn Hall committed in Aden, or Trinidad, he repeated in Uganda – serial murderers leaving tell-tale signatures of their deeds dotted along the grim, imperial trail.

Naturally, we got Trinidad.

What drove Naipaul’s characters was what drove us. Empire had emptied its subject populations of their subjective selves and their metaphysical heritage, which had been replaced by England, Oxford, high tea, biscuit and crumpets, Piccadilly. An equal opportunity impoverisher, the British Empire had left penury and hurt in so many parts of the world that a book from any of these parts tended to speak to all parts.

Empire had taught us to believe in the same things and we had come to believe in them. We dreamt of red letter boxes. Oh, but these lucky red letter boxes lived in London.

As I read deeper, I began to protest. A House for Mister Biswas got heavy. Some leaded weight pulled down the mirth of Miguel Street to darker places. Still you soldiered on, expecting some lift, a sliver of sunlight. Yes, you would always remember Mrs. Tulsi. One day I thought I found her running a bakery in Kampala. And then I thought I met Mr. Biswas himself nursing big-time literary ambitions as a sourpuss editor in a newsroom.

The darkness in the novels was piling up, getting heavier, in that way readers know when the plot has advanced to that point where you size up the remaining pages and determine them too few for the story to work its way back to a different tenor.

I was young and not entirely appraised of what novels were capable of. As young readers tend to, I simply thought I had landed on the wrong novel. Another Naipaul might bring back that Miguel Street thing. In the meantime, A House for Mr. Biswas was teaching me just how serious novels could be. They could also detail stark-real ugliness. The novelist did not have to imagine, as a pot boiler author had to; he could simply observe. Mr. Naipaul made you see how it was possible to weld art into social reality. He made half a millennium of globalising history his material.

Naipaul could be called the Anti-Jane Austen. Miss Austen had examined the same history; you must see through her writing to know it is detailing crimes of history. But she had seen only the other side: the English manors, the indolence, the unbelievable wealth that the slave trade had made possible in the English countryside. She never questioned where the wealth of the characters in her novels came from. She never asked what those young men in need of a wife did when they went overseas. Naipaul laid out the exhibits.

The exhibits – the deformed progeny of Empire’s victims, the craven, the dehumanised – were his material (a Naipaul word). He looked with the dispassionate temper of a forensics expert. These novels were not for escapist reading. It seemed to me that this was as serious as writing would ever get. Naipaul’s craft made everybody else seem to be winging it, wanting it, sleight-of-hand bathos that quickly drained you of interest. Others write so their brilliance could be praised. Naipaul? His was meditation, a haloed temple of letters. He had convened a one-man caucus and solely written a constitution of looking. To have not seen the world as Naipaul had seen it was to have been guilty of sheer unconstitutional acts. The writer was chief justice, high priest.

There had been Graham Greene; but he could be unconvincing in the role, and he tended to overdo the disgust. There had been Joseph Conrad, but he had tended towards sentimentality. Ernest Hemingway had haunted the same geography as Naipaul. Against what Naipaul had to say, the American was a mere flower girl. Hemmingway loved Kenya; he just never saw Africans (natives, savages) the entire time. Naipaul saw Africans; he was grimly aware of us.

At the age of 20, when I read A House for Mr. Biswas, I could not as yet tell what that thing was, what had made Naipaul’s voice so stately, for I was sure that it was a stately voice. I had not found any of Miguel Street in it. Rather, I emerged from A House for Mr. Biswas overawed by grandeur. The plunge to pathos happened with the steadiness of a murderer strangling his victim. An unrelenting vision of dystopia.

There had been Graham Greene; but he could be unconvincing in the role, and he tended to overdo the disgust. There had been Joseph Conrad, but he had tended towards sentimentality. Ernest Hemingway had haunted the same geography as Naipaul. Against what Naipaul had to say, the American was a mere flower girl. Hemmingway loved Kenya; he just never saw Africans (natives, savages) the entire time. Naipaul saw Africans; he was grimly aware of us.

I was in my 20s when I got the full measure of Mr. Naipaul. By then, Uganda had begun to normalise; books were available once more and we had been liberated from borrowing dog-eared texts from friends and relatives. That was when I began to tell that the early books of Naipaul were fundamentally different from his later books, books of he wrote between his late 30s and into his 50s.

The overriding themes of the early books is escape from the colony. The barbs of later years were already there, the mockery, the casual racism; except back then Naipaul thought of them as jokes. The later books are about settling in, and once that project got underway, the books became about the world, its expansiveness. But also about sharpening. Mr. Naipaul begins to grind and file and sand his prose, the sharp defining of edges, the details focused on. His prose knows what to search for, with just the right emphasis, a few strokes that hint at a larger form without overstating. He was becoming a master craftsman.

The novels carry something extra, a certain uncheerful enjoyment even. Ralph Singh, the protagonist narrator of The Mimic Men, has that quality. The Mimic Men signalled the arrival of the man who would later write The Enigma of Arrival.

And then there were the travel writings. The Middle Passage brings to life the Caribbean in ways you, as an outsider, are grateful to Mr. Naipaul for, even though you have a pile of indictments against him. Then in India, in An Area of Darkness, Naipaul goes for broke. He writes with an urgency he has hitherto not displayed, nor will again. One feels, reading the travelogue, that Mr. Naipaul writes faster than he sees. He arrives in Bombay like a tightly-packed grenade, the ejector of a lifetime’s hearing, reading, expecting, ready to go off. This book defined Naipaul like no other. In comparison, there is something processional about The Middle Passage, a processionalness you find in his Caribbean books, novels and travelogues. Explosions, of theme and prose, don’t go off. But they contain the toxins and poisons that came out of Naipaul whenever he met black people.

Naipaul went out of his way, beyond necessity, in a Trumpian gratuitousness, to mock black people even when there was no discernible literary gain. He made no effort to engage with black people. He treated Indians with less contempt, but the derision was still there. It might look like he gave some thought to Ramnath the “steno” in An Area of Darkness, or to Jivan, but no. It is fascinating how decidedly uncurious Naipaul’s brand of curiosity was.

His first book on India may have been his most connected (Naipaul was drawn to India), but it was written by a man trapped in a certain view of colonial peoples. Even from the depth of Africa, we could tell that Naipaul failed to see that India was a bigger place than his commentaries offered. Jivan’s refusal to stop sleeping on the pavements despite having a job and owning a taxi is interpreted by Naipaul as India’s foolhardy attachment to the Gita, Hinduism’s religious text. To the rest of us, Jivan was displaying an imperviousness to colonialism’s and capitalism’s crass anti- metaphysics. For me, this vignette of Jivan was too two-dimensional. After all, by the 1960s, Naipaul’s view of “conquered” peoples was already antiquated, even amongst the ranks of colonial anthropologists, who had a more nuanced view of colonised peoples.

Naipaul went out of his way, beyond necessity, in a Trumpian gratuitousness, to mock black people even when there was no discernible literary gain. He made no effort to engage with black people. He treated Indians with less contempt, but the derision was still there. It might look like he gave some thought to Ramnath the “steno” in An Area of Darkness, or to Jivan, but no. It is fascinating how decidedly uncurious Naipaul’s brand of curiosity was.

In Naipaul’s world, we Africans are “Negroes” with “physique”, “nursing racial injustice”. There is always the hint of violence towards us when we appear in his books. In The Mimic Men, we show up at the British Council, garishly dressed up, the gold-rimmed spectacles Naipaul places on us are there so that they can clash against the darkness of our skins. We expect “sex” like a tribute, a right, because we are racially wronged. But that’s in the diaspora. In Africa, in A Free State (so now we come to Uganda, although the reason Mr. Naipaul came to Uganda in the 1960s was so he could write The Mimic Men), we are deeply indolent, with our bush ways and our lazy eyes. We are a backdrop to Europeans lives, and often the backdrop to breaking European marriages.

Deep into his career, Mr. Naipaul, like Ganesh Ramsumair in The Mystique Masseur, adopted the identity of an Englishman with an Oxbridge accent that replaced his Caribbean intonation. Ganesh, the shape-shifting artist, remains an enigma in Naipaul’s oeuvre. Who is he? What does he mean? What indeed do these middling characters in Naipaul mean? They people his writing entirely, the Jimmy’s of Guerrillas, the characters upon whom instances are mounted? As if of necessity, the author is decidedly nasty to these sorts. They are de riguer (a la Naipaul), angry, pretentious, dangerous, always without fail, dark-skinned. Naipaul is afraid of them. He is also violent towards them.

Is understanding these mid-level characters key to understanding the politics of Naipaul? Why is Naipaul afraid of them? One clue, but no overall explainer, is that they have a politics. They are confronting Empire. They are the reverse of the Naipaul hero, if that is not an oxymoron. They are not enthusiastic about Oxbridge accents. They are not changing names from Ganesh Ramsumair to G. Ramsay Muir (a typical Naipaul joke of the earlier books). They are changing names from James to Haji or Ngugi. But do we have a right to be brutal in our assessment of Mr. Naipaul? He was born at a time when Empire looked like extending and consolidating, rather than crushing. How deep did the psychology of that go? For him to have written as he did, to see the world through only one measure (Britain, Europe) – a measure in which other races failed to measure up, a measure in which being African (“bow and arrow people”), Arab (“Mr. Woggy”) was failure in itself, speaks of something other than penetrative insight. To not allow for the validity of a different world is to have been immensely delimited. But might Mr. Naipaul have escaped it? Was it necessary for him to have been the writer and the man he was in order for him to see with clarity?

It would be simplistic to say that the need, indeed, the entire undertaking of having to fight for liberation, was too much for Naipaul. His position on the most important movement of the 20th century (independence from colonial rule) might be described as ambivalent, except, if you are ambivalent about freedom, then what exactly are your values?

It could be as simple as this: Mr. Naipaul was that all-too-typical, but special, victim of Empire, the favoured colonial subject. There was divide and rule – some colonised people were considered less savage than others, people who displayed almost-white qualities. These divisions marked the entire breadth of Empire, from the aristocrats of Buganda (convinced into collaboration by effusive British praise), to the Tutsi of Rwanda (whose position the Belgians tragically imperiled by calling them semi-white Africans), to the Singhala of Sri Lanka (treated more favourably than the black Tamils). In the Caribbean, the indentured Indian labourers were taken to the Atlantic, not as slaves, as the black Africans had been. It is very important to remember that. It was this thin substratum of Empire that tended to oppose liberation movements. They actively collaborated, often virulently, as in the case of Kenya, against fellow Africans, in the fight for independence.

It would be simplistic to say that the need, indeed, the entire undertaking of having to fight for liberation, was too much for Naipaul. His position on the most important movement of the 20th century (independence from colonial rule) might be described as ambivalent, except, if you are ambivalent about freedom, then what exactly are your values?

In Empire, this modicum of elevation from the bottom was very important and so when the British said you were not that dark, not that negroid, your status protected you against slavery and forced labour. This bred its own psychosis. We may want to describe Naipaul in elevated terms, but his own unease once in India (he finds the land of his forefathers too unhygienic) speaks of this. The elevated elite in Empire knew that once they accepted the bribe of racial elevation, they would become accomplices. It was hence in their interest to perpetuate colonial rule, for once it ended, their position would become terribly exposed. The liberation fighters whom Naipaul mocks were a threat against the collaborator class.

In Empire, this modicum of elevation from the bottom was very important and so when the British said you were not that dark, not that negroid, your status protected you against slavery and forced labour. This bred its own psychosis.

When the worst came, the bargain was to choose the racialist humiliation because the patronising treatment at least guaranteed some goods. Mr. Naipaul’s English reviewers perhaps understood this – a brown man acknowledging the hegemony, affirming that the Empire was appreciated by the middle races (hence at least intelligent) as civilisation. They praised his books at a time when they were fighting a losing battle against their black subjects. You could understand the racism of Joseph Conrad. But Naipaul? The relationship of his narrators to Europeans is telling. It is always to prove how they are better than white people. There are the clueless young white people whom his narrators are proud to dominate intellectually. The white women in his books have to be degraded; the violence and contempt with which his characters treat them appears like the acting-out of suppressed rage. White people are his main audience and he must show them how he is neither Negroid nor Indian. These are the people who either granted or denied scholarships to the Eliases of Miguel Street.

It was thus easy to be bullied into calling V.S. Naipaul a brilliant writer. But you had to have occupied his very position – to have had an ambivalent position towards the colonial project – to have called him so. What you needed was just that much politic education to see that the 20th century was changed by the men and women despised in Mr. Naipaul’s books. To understand the minds of those who imprisoned Nelson Mandela for 27 years, you have to absorb Naipaul. His was one of the attitudes that had to be defeated for people of colour to become free.

It was important for me to go through Mr. Naipaul’s books after his death. But the realisation that I was reading him the last time in this involved manner, with the heat with which I once did when the writing was not yet done, when he was still around, was hard.

Now Naipaul’s forced racism – for it feels like that – does not really feel like that. Rather, it appears to be transactional right-wingery by a certain savvy type who knew there was a cash-paying audience that loved that sound.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter.

‘I Will Crush You’: The November 18 Kampala Massacre

By A. K. Kaiza A spine of low points in the land upon which Kampala sits runs from the Makerere hill north of the city centre, flowing past the foot of Old Kampala from where it enjoins Nakivubo Channel, and thenceforth, takes a long turn southeast, flanking the city in its race to deposit its drainage into Lake Victoria. A century ago, this malarial spine divided the Buganda kingdom headquarters from the fast-rising and apartheid-style white-and-Asian-only Protectorate zone, which is now the capital of Uganda.

Back then, Kampala still referred to the one hill, now called Old Kampala. But in 1902, the colonial government had violently annexed the biggest and longest hill in the area, Nakasero, and at the close of the First World War, it had firmly established its presence there. The handful of original streets, still named now as then, such as Kyagwe, Allen, Johnson, William, MacKay and Bombo Road, were already operational. The colonial arrangement had nominally left Buganda in charge of the bulk of the area. But by the 1920s all the lands in what is now a metropole city was already gaining the name Kampala.

Thousands of Africans were forcibly removed from Nakasero, and later Makerere, Kololo, and very much later, Naguru and Mbuya hills, to create room for Europeans and Asians. It was from this spine, whose central lumber would quickly become Kisenyi, that the first urban uprisings would occur, and also the last one. When anti-colonial feelings ran high, like when the era of mass taxation started in the World War I years, and when drafts to the First and Second World Wars drained African incomes and lives, troubles started from this spine.

These things don’t change. A hotbed of illicit brewing (yes, that prohibition era was bigger than America’s), thievery, prostitution, and worse, Kisenyi was outside the opulence of the Protectorate zone, outside of the control and native culture of Buganda; it was outside of the law, of morality even. Kisenyi was outside of care and love. The house servants labouring in the Protectorate zone lived in this slum.

It was here, Kampala’s seminal ghetto, that the former Ugandan president, Apollo Milton Obote, briefly stayed, and it was in Kisenyi that the late James Mulwana, who would become an industrialist after colonialism, started his business as well as his newspaper, and where the music genre, Kadongo Kamu (one man band) was born. And so when in July 2018 – a century after the British poll tax imposed unjust levies on every adult black male just for existing – the Yoweri Museveni government introduced a raft of taxes targeted at electronic economics (which is the new “land” for the new peasantry of electronic money), my mind ran to Kisenyi. Museveni was making enemies with that class of people all wise rulers try and befriend – the poor.

The poll tax (graduated tax or GT) and the hut tax had invented poverty in the colony, for poverty is a social relationship, not material dearth. The tax was designed to simultaneously collapse the African economy and force Africans to work for European and Asian capital to propel the growth of the monetary economy. The taxes broke families, introduced overcrowding, and with overcrowding, the communicable diseases which are still killing us. Neither Obote nor Idi Amin went after the poor. They protected them, no doubt one secret reason Museveni received clandestine support for his war from dark sources to fight them.

And so when in July 2018 – a century after the British poll tax imposed unjust levies on every adult black male just for existing – the Yoweri Museveni government introduced a raft of taxes targeted at electronic economics (which is the new “land” for the new peasantry of electronic money), my mind ran to Kisenyi. Museveni was making enemies with that class of people all wise rulers try and befriend – the poor.

Poverty, which is exclusion from communally-generated surplus rather than a product of laziness, is created by the law. Taxes relocate surpluses from the majority to the minority by taking away their matooke and their aspirins, both in short supply now. The essential act of decolonisation, seen without the political and social rigmarole, would essentially be the elimination of regressive taxes and the re-capitalisation of black African enterprises. Since the colonial system could not empower Africans and still be colonialism, the elimination of the colonialist was necessary for the survival of black people. And yet, one hundred years later, a small coterie in Uganda today is standing in the place of the colonial elite, the wealthy and the untaxed, whilst the majority are forced into poverty and the little they have is taken away. The moral odium of the Museveni koffle stinks a hundred times worse.

It may have been the most ideological thing Museveni did since starting his war, but the taxes, if we had cared enough to see, had been a long time coming. Museveni has been steadily reversing the gains of independence for reasons only he and his backers know and which have been kept from us, the citizens of Uganda. This reversal has been achieved by the steady build-up of foreign takeover of key enterprises, which then stop paying taxes.

Just like the British mass taxation created lasting poverty in Eastern Africa (and elsewhere via other policies), this new regiment of taxes has the impact, in one fell swoop, to eventually eliminate all the economic gains achieved since decolonisation. But it will do more than that. It has begun to legislate poverties which will doubtless take a century to overturn.

There is a very discomforting parallel between the Museveni government and the early colonial government in this country. Museveni has run a script so close to that of the preeminent colonial collaborator, Sir Apolo Kagwa, the Prime Minister of Buganda from 1890 to 1926, that it makes you more than uncomfortable. There is the fact that both men came to power through the gun (Kagwa in the late 1880s, Museveni the late 1980s) with the firm support of Great Britain; both men were praised as progressives by outside forces; both implemented land grabs on an industrial scale; both oversaw genocidal civil wars for decades; both turned their ethnic group into wealthy rulers over the rest of the country. And to further stagger the mind, both men witnessed land commission inquiries into land thefts they both instigated.

But the downfall of Kagwa had become inevitable by 1920, the situation he created having thrown Buganda into such calamity that deep into the 1930s, the British had to encourage immigration from Rwanda, Burundi, Belgian Congo and the West Nile to fill up the labour shortage from three decades of population decline – from the colonial war, famine, disease and forced labour. It was the 1890s, and not the 1960s, which crippled Buganda, but the kingdom never admits this.

There is a very discomforting parallel between the Museveni government and the early colonial government in this country. Museveni has run a script so close to that of the preeminent colonial collaborator, Sir Apolo Kagwa, the Prime Minister of Buganda from 1890 to 1926, that it makes you more than uncomfortable.

In 1918, it was poll tax and hut tax. In 2018, it is social media tax and mobile money tax. Both target the same people, the poor. At 1 per cent, the mobile money tax may look small to government officials who profit by graft, but in the real world, this tax is crippling the majority of Ugandans. Here is an illustration to explain why the country is burning:

For one week after July 1st, the young man (who I will call Nyanzi) who loads my mobile money account, did not send me the airtime I had already paid for. When I finally ran into him, he told me “things are hard nowadays. I have no float”. “Float” is the capital in a money agent’s account to enable him to transact.

That afternoon, around the 7th of July, I was on my way back from the market, wincing from the fact that a kilo of beef was selling at USh12,000, up from Ush10,000 the week before, a 20 per cent increase. The matatu from Kampala to Entebbe was now costing USh3,500, up from USh3,000. In the real world, 1 per cent meant job loss for Nyanzi. It meant an entire quarter kilo of beef docked from the scale, and in mileage terms, it meant you stopped 5 kilometers short of reaching Kampala.

I deliberately simplify the matter since other factors were at play, also to do with taxes, like the one on fuel. But there were tens of thousands Nyanzis in the country, and millions of Kaizas unable to balance budgets. How did the 1 per cent tax play out?

Take a theoretical USh1 million (US$267) needed to transport matooke from Bushenyi to Kampala. The truck owner sends money for fuel via mobile kiosk to his driver. The truck owner likely received the capital through his phone and transferred it to the farmer’s phone, and the farmer transferred it to a farmers’ SACCO, repaying the loan he had received to buy seedlings. The money – that USh1 million – would in one day have changed hands four times:

At the beginning of the day, when the purchaser received it on his phone, he lost USh10,000 to the tax man (that 1 per cent); the second transfer, to the farmer, the remaining USh990,000 lost a further USh9,900; USh 980,100 is docked down to USh970,299 at the end of the day, which means that USh29,701 has been lost in taxes. This is again simplifying it. There were the old mobile money transfer costs which the telephone company, the kiosk operator, and even the government, charged, meaning that since sums between USh0.5 million to USh1 million attract a USh12,500 withdrawal fee, the total withdrawal fee, minus the taxes, fetched up to USh 50,000.

The charges don’t stop there. There is also the USh8,000 sending fee each would have paid (assuming they are all registered mobile money users). So, in total, USh88,000 has been lost in moving USh1 million, that’s a total of 8.8 per cent, not 1 per cent. The sheer costs are likely equal to the total profits for that unit of matooke costing USh1 million. The final cost will be transferred to the consumer. But is the “final consumer” not a fictional persona?

The initial transfer began with Nyanzi, from whose kiosk the USh1 million was sent in the morning. But Nyanzi also buys lunch worth USh3,500 from Mama Sam each day, and Mama Sam bought a bunch of matooke transported with the money he sent. Mamma Sam paid an extra USh5,000 for matooke that day. She increases Nyanzi’s lunch cost to USh4,500 a plate on the day Nyanzi made 40 per cent less money because customers like myself preferred to carry money on our person, for when we want it. So even the original USh3,500 a plate would have been unaffordable.

Nyanzi cannot afford lunch now. He eats mainly matooke. He is not at liberty, like the farmer, the transporter and Mamma Sam, to ask customers to pay more. His margins are pre-set by the telephone company. Like his great-grandfather in 1918, who faced with the twin poll and hut tax, Nyanzi will leave his village and move to town to forage. In town, he will end up in a slum. There, he will eat one meal a day, for the final burden of costs faced by the chain of buyers and sellers is the poor man’s stomach. Nyanzi’s stomach is just like his great grandfather’s stomach in 1918. Nyanzi never finished school because his great-grandfather was unable to educate his grandfather. Thrown off their lands by Kagwa, his grandfather lived in poverty through the 1940s and ‘50s, and sent only one son, Nyanzi’s father, to school in the 1960s but could not pay fees beyond O’ Level in the 1980s. In the 1990s, his ethnicity prevented him from advancing, as did his grandfather’s race in the 1930s. His son, Nyanzi, dropped out of O’ Level in the 1980s.

These are the intricacies of taxation that governments generally keep common people from understanding, harping instead about law and order and hard work. The revolutionary moment comes when people on the streets or in the slums instinctively understand taxes, and connect them to their missing lunch.

It was via Kampala’s slums that Robert “Bobi Wine” Kyagulanyi rose up to become the most important challenger Museveni has ever faced. He is also that singular historical figure – the great simplifier.

These are the intricacies of taxation that governments generally keep common people from understanding, harping instead about law and order and hard work. The revolutionary moment comes when people on the streets or in slums instinctively understand taxes, and connect them to their missing lunch.

***

From the highest point on the curve, looping Butiikiro Road in Kampala, which sits on the old Buganda government territory, just edging Kisenyi, you still see the scars left by the politics of Sir Apollo Kagwa, from the rusty, dusty spine from Kisenyi to Kivulu slum below Makerere hill. On Monday, August 20th, this route was marked by rising black smoke. Smoke was also rising in other parts of Kampala and the country. A national protest movement had started. Unlike the 1950s, the movement had also become international, with people in South Africa, the United States and Kenya protesting against Museveni, a first for a Ugandan leader.

The connection between the most important tax since the colonial governorship of Coryndon in the early 1920s, and the violence in Arua, cannot be ignored. The killing of Yasin Kawuma, Kyagulanyi’s driver, in Arua, is like the shooting to death of five people in January 1945 by the British in similar protests around the country. What August 2018 has done is bring complex issues down to levels that are clear to everyone now: The political and economic elite will not take responsibility. They steal and pay themselves huge sums whilst the multinational “investor” corporations dodge taxes. The gates have been shut on forgiveness and redemption. The expansion of financial inclusion, which mobile money made possible, has been cut short, and with it, the lives of millions have been ruined.

There is something of the ancien régime in Uganda now; an arrogant monarch, an out of touch elite, poverty, disease, hunger, ruinous foreign wars. As if this was not enough, the government had to go ahead and impose a punitive tax.

The gruesome details of how Kyagulanyi was tortured made you close your eyes in horror (genital- pull and metal bar to the head). At the age of only 36, Kyagulanyi, aka Bobi Wine, who from since he was in his early 20s has been singing about the nastiness of Ugandan life, has become the biggest threat to Museveni’s political career in ways that Col. Kizza Besigye was not.

With Besigye, there was some kind of parity with Museveni. They had one time been comrades, had fought the same war and had been close to the same woman. You could read nuance into the struggle. Having followed Museveni for 18 years before the rupture, you could question Besigye’s judgment.

The gruesome details of how Kyagulanyi was tortured made you close your eyes in horror (genital-pull and metal bar to the head). At the age of only 36, Kyagulanyi, aka Bobi Wine, who since he was in his early 20s has been singing about the nastiness of Ugandan life, has become the biggest threat to Museveni’s political career in ways that Col. Kizza Besigye was not.

Kyagulanyi was not even born when Museveni started his bush war. Unlike Museveni and Besigye, he rose from the underclass, and made his own money the hard way. A great-grandchild of Apollo Kagwa’s victims, Kyagulanyi is a critic, not just of Museveni, but of the entire history of the making of Uganda. His fight is so deeply rooted, so fundamental, that despite his own claims to decolonisation, Museveni is only a detail in the war Kyagulanyi is fighting. Bobi Wine’s war is history, a battle in which Museveni now plays a bit part. The realisation that Kyagulanyi dwarfs him scares Museveni who, while auditioning for the part of Napoleon, has ended up playing Pol Pot.

People – Ugandans and non-Ugandans – even if they don’t know the intricacies of the history of poverty-creation in Uganda, instinctively understand this. The sub-plots tell important stories nonetheless.

I recollect writing in the July 2011 issue of the Nairobi Law Monthly, and in The East African during the Arab Spring, that the Walk2Work demonstrations in Uganda would leave Museveni untouched. I did not anticipate then that this was a mere precursor to bigger things in the near future. Museveni’s government was back then internally intact. He had not yet made tactical errors (anti- gay bill, lifting presidential age limits) which would cement in local and international minds what a few of those with insight into his regime had been saying for decades. Opposition to his rule had been top-down, the Kampala elite leading a few towns in opposition.

The “tipping point” was yet to come. And it arrived in September 2017 when Museveni’s bodyguards invaded parliament and beat up MPs, who included my mother’s elderly uncle, as well as Bobi Wine.

I need not repeat it, but another parallel with Apollo Kagwa is that it was around 1917 that real trouble started for Kagwa, the majority year when the child king, Daudi Chwa, in whose name Kagwa had pillaged and impoverished Buganda, and exported genocidal wars to Bunyoro and beyond, became a man. Kagwa was no longer regent and even the British could no longer ignore his greed for wealth and power. A century later, in September 2017, in another sterling parallel, Museveni engineered the removal of the age limit embedded in the 1995 constitution that he himself signed into force. To try and cement his wealth and power, Kagwa had attempted to create an upper chamber for the Buganda parliament, which he intended to stuff with his newly landed gentry cronies. This would balance the power between him and the now adult king. Opposition sprung up in places none had expected. This was during a year in which a spate of murders had exposed the degree to which his government was unable to govern.

The “tipping point” was yet to come. And it arrived in September 2017 when Museveni’s bodyguards invaded parliament and beat up MPs, who included my mother’s elderly uncle, as well as Bobi Wine.

But in 2017 the question was: If Museveni could not stop the killing of an Assistant Inspector General of Police and 22 young women, what did he want to govern for life for?

Museveni was in such a mess that he did not even need to commit new crimes for moods to sour against him. Lifting the age limit recycled and presented in bad light even the good he had done in 30 years. But he just had to go ahead and impose crippling taxes on the poor. That, at a time when multinational corporations and “foreign investors” had been enjoying tax holidays for decades.

The new, some say, “unlawful” (but law is what parliament says it is, so they are lawful), taxes are what Museveni should have studiously avoided. As long as opposition to his rule was led by elites like Col. Besigye, who came with the shadow of prior association with Museveni, he was in a safe place.

But Museveni is a proud man. He was at one time a savvy man too. Now he is tired. He has made Col. Besigye irrelevant. The people Besigye had attempted to lead are now leading themselves. The elite never trusted Museveni. Now the poor revile him.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter. ‘I Will Crush You’: The November 18 Kampala Massacre

By A. K. Kaiza

The era of President Yoweri Museveni, along with his undeniable influence in the region, has come to an end.

The countdown to the end of his presidency commenced on Wednesday, 27th September 2017, when two days of fights between lawmakers over removing the age limit for presidential candidates was violently broken into by the president’s own bodyguards who stormed the debate chambers. There had been a chance that the Ugandan president might retire peacefully; there is very little hope for that now. The body guards he sent to beat up MPs was his suicide note to the world.

Bar North Korea or some arrangement with a kindly Nordic state, we are puzzled when thinking about which government in today’s volatile political weather would risk welcoming as exile into its borders, a man who fell to the allure of such supreme imbecility. At the worst, we will be subjected to a Mugabe-style horror show of leader as flesh in progressive decay.

All through that Wednesday, the fever of what might happen in parliament had been building. We had seen snippets of the turmoil on news websites but the impact of the 7 o’clock news – a ritual hour indelibly etched in our collective conscience as the doomsday hour – had not struck yet. Seven o’clock came and the whole of Kampala was quiet, gathered around TV sets. The images of MPs beaten and hauled out of parliament, then tossed like sacks of potatoes into vans by musclemen struck each viewer like a personal blow. You winced, but it just kept on coming.

That Wednesday affirmed what we had felt all along – that the government had lost power. Power is the legitimacy of acceptance of their leaders by the people; the use of force is the very antithesis of power. You felt in the manner in which the crowds stood hushed before the screens that something had changed. That Wednesday affirmed what we had felt all along – that the government had lost power. Power is the legitimacy of acceptance of their leaders by the people; the use of force is the very antithesis of power. This feeling had been building since the beginning of the year, coming most forcefully in mid-March with the shooting to death of Assistant Inspector General of Police, Felix Kaweesi, a murder that still shocks the nation despite the fact that the past several years had been stocked with gruesome killings. Shortly after that, in April, we had our telephone lines severed.

There had been the Dr. Stella Nyanzi imbroglio (she of the salacious Facebook postings). She used language against the president and First Lady Janet Museveni that reflected the depth of contempt society felt for the power couple. The humiliation dramatised the extent to which the Museveni government was lost and is now flailing. The last of his cooler-minded bush war colleagues had deserted him. He was left surrounded by hyena-like henchmen. Some riposte was brewing. A proud and violent man, we expected Mr. Museveni to lash out blindly. Still, when the expected came, we were chilled to the bone watching it unfold.

It was a horror show, yet it was also a moment of redemption. Museveni’s act of self-castration was a double-edged sword; just weeks before that, it had started to look as if Uganda might fracture into pieces after his departure; history might have granted him the chance of posthumously gloating that without him, Uganda fell into pieces. He is not above such a thing. But in yet another moment of immense suspense, Uganda the nation proved harder to kill. It was not the first time that an ethnically divided country was brought together by a mad-man ruler. It happened in 1966 when his predecessor, President Milton Obote, attacked parliament in similar fashion and single-handedly rewrote the constitution. It came again in February 1977 when President Idi Amin murdered Archbishop Janani Luwum.

If I was being generous, I would say that Yoweri Museveni was an idea – albeit one that grew weaker and crumbled, and has now disappeared.

Collective horror at what they had allowed one man to get away with galvanised the country on both occasions. Sending his personal bodyguards to beat up MPs may have seemed like a show of force for Mr. Museveni, but only a depraved man living in an echo chamber can read such an attack as heroic. The shockwave will ripple through the country for decades to come, long after it has deposited Mr. Museveni and his coterie of goons onto the dung heap of history. After 31 years of trying very hard, this becomes the signal act of his presidency that will be remembered.

From rebel with a cause to dictator

Perhaps that history will be more measured than a citizen’s sentiment in its assessment of a man who rose from herdsboy to most influential ruler in East and Central Africa. History will show that he was a staple of Ugandan public life since the 1970s. He came of age in the revolutionary ferment of the 1960s, a man firmly lodged in leftist idealism. He swung into action instantly, mingling with the continent’s liberation fighters in Nyerere’s Dar es Salaam; there he was slipping south, AK47 on shoulder, to fight the Portuguese in Mozambique, and proudly announcing in his book, The Mustard Seed, that he killed his first white man in the anti-colonial struggle, there he was leading a band of young men to overthrow Idi Amin in 1972; there were midnight raids, car chases with squealing tires and gunshots in the dark – all very Che Guevara, the flaming revolutionary hero and comrade of Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

It was finally the discipline of structure and strategy that put him on the track to power, a slight shift from Marxist firebrand to Maoist strategist. The 1979 overthrow of Idi Amin brought him close to power as Minister of Defence in the interim post-coup government. But, that the military commission was only warming the seat for Mr. Obote’s return to power, stung Mr. Museveni to the quick. His four-year guerrilla war against the Obote government was a big gamble, so big and bold that it succeeded.

That he succeeded in his guerrilla warfare does mean that Mr. Museveni had mustered his Mao. If I was being generous, I would say that Yoweri Museveni was an idea – albeit one that grew weaker and crumbled, and has now disappeared. But he really did believe in something. The President Museveni of the 1980s was an ascetic, a puritan, a humble man (albeit one very proud of his humility). The revolutionary iconoclast of the 1960s was still in him. He taught Ugandans to denounce, to think anew. As a Marxist, his modus operandi was Maoist in praxis. The masterclass of guerrilla warfare had taught him to believe in the effectiveness of the masses, of mobilisation. Guerrilla warfare, given the asymmetry of power that necessitates it, is itself a school in social mobilisation.

This is the essential tragedy of the man. He started wars that killed millions of people in the region and yet was the first to turn his back on the raison d’être of his wars.

If he did not believe in the people, at least Mr. Museveni learnt not to ignore the fact that acting on the idea of people power had swept him into office. This by itself is a far-reaching teleological formulation, a belief that good can ultimately be attained – a humanist thinking of sorts, one that posits mankind as the summum bonum of human action – man as an end, a belief that the improvement and welfare of humanity is the end goal of social effort.

The tragedy was that he finally achieved power just as the political force of his idealism was on the wane. The collapse of global socialism – the Soviet Union basically – robbed Mr. Museveni of the kind of support he might have used. When power had at last come his way, he found allies in a philosophy with a teleology of its own. But the neoliberal capitalists that paid for his presidency believed in profit, in money as the end goal to which mankind serves as means. Hence, the cruel irony was that his first big act once settled into power was the implementation of economic reforms by the very enemies of his ideals.

The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank gave much needed financial support to the young government in exchange for forcing through the much-hated Structural Adjustment Policies, which in recent years have been given the less euphemistic tag of “austerity”, a policy now tearing apart the post-Cold War Western consensus. What was good for the African gander, turned out to be unacceptable to the British goose. This very split, by which the one-time mother country has shown that what they tell us is unacceptable, has far-reaching historical implications. We East Africans, once bullied by British imperialism, have lost the fear and acceptance of British leadership. But it leaves us naked and uncertain, our leaders groping in darkness.

It is at this point that complexity makes it difficult to make any assessment of Mr. Museveni. Is his heart capable of keeping its treasures – how deep does affection go in him? How hard did he try standing up to the World Bank to defend his ideas? Might he have become a Fidel Castro, an island of ideals against the pernicious excesses of neoliberalism? Could he have tried harder to build a materially poor but more egalitarian, healthy and well-fed nation?

This is the essential tragedy of the man. He started wars that killed millions of people in the region and yet was the first to turn his back on the raison d’être of his wars. Perhaps his growing violence, irritability and deafness to advice starting in the mid-1990s were outward signs of raging internal contradictions. But by abandoning his beliefs in exchange for money, we who live outside Mr. Museveni’s mind concluded that he was merely power-hungry, unfairly perhaps, but the mountain of evidence to this end is impressive.

The essential mistake Mr. Museveni made was his acceptance of an economic model that was bound to impoverish the majority.

There was another uglier price to pay for abandoning his beliefs: The people that followed him into his bush war, men like his childhood friend, the late Eriya Kategaya, Dr. Kizza Besigye and the former minister Bidandi Ssali, turned away from him. He came to depend on non-ideologues, people hungry for money – of which a lot of free millions were now availed by the IMF, which surely knew it was going to be stolen. Then he turned decidedly tribalist – the furthest distance you can get from Marxism. It may have seemed to him that blood kith and kin would provide bodily safety than the money-hungry henchmen. The result has been the most ethnically uniform government, perhaps in all of Eastern Africa, one in which entire ministries might conduct their business in Mr. Museveni’s mother tongue.

The essential mistake Mr. Museveni made was his acceptance of an economic model that was bound to impoverish the majority. And this is where the crisis in Uganda links hands with those in Kenya, Britain and the USA. The von Hayek formulation of economics, which came to be known as “Thatcherite” or “Reaganomics”, does burn brightly for the time it takes for national assets sold on the cheap to private interests to raise huge profits. But it concentrates wealth into increasingly fewer hands. In time, as we have learnt, it serves to delegitimise the political class, whose only goal seems to be making the rich wealthier.

The above point brings us to the fraught moments we are in, why it is Uganda and Kenya, rather than Tanzania or Botswana, that are on the edge of collapse, just like the USA and Britain, rather than Germany or Sweden, are in intensive care. It’s a pernicious, anti-people economic system and countries that swallowed them wholesale are paying the price. History has recalled the “greed is good” mantra. (No, Gordon Gekko, greed is gluttony.)

There is now a funereal air over Uganda, for we know what has died and must be buried.

The trajectory via which the small band of the 1980s Ugandan revolutionaries’ fervour dissolved into narcissistic greed and bloated rank corruption might have been predicted. There is now a funereal air over Uganda, for we know what has died and must be buried. It was the third moment of unmitigating clarity in post-independence Uganda. Obote started it in 1966, Amin continued it with the murder of Luwum in 1977. Like the previous two events, every Ugandan now knows the script. Just like it did those previous two times, Uganda united against a madman. The sting of insult – for that is what Museveni has done – has sent all eyes smarting in anger.

The epitaph? Yoweri Museveni aimed to make history. He had the potential to achieve that status but he fell short. In his own words, from his book, Sowing the Mustard Seed, he “was found wanting”. He found power but that power sunk him.

By A.K. Kaiza A.K. Kaiza is a Ugandan writer and journalist. Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter.

‘I Will Crush You’: The November 18 Kampala Massacre

By A. K. Kaiza

Not since January 25, 1986 had I felt the slow-burning, debilitating fever that I did on May 20 this year, a fever you would know if you are Iraqi, Syrian, or Ugandan over 20, or South Sudanese of any age or era:

Although akin to malarial lethargy, it is not a proper fever, its toll on your body and mind operating at a remove from the latter. It will neither ground nor kill you, but as with malaria, you are sapped of energy, you have no appetite, the joie de vivre by which you claim membership to life has flown away. You want to withdraw into a dark corner and curl up.

I am labouring to describe in unfamiliar, personal terms, the physiological experience of being caught up in a violent military coup. To live through such a moment, is to experience war compressed into hours, days or weeks. There is a prolonged bath in adrenaline that is physically and mentally draining. There is the upending of routine and rule that kills your spirit.

So on May 20 this year, when I left the house and went to town, and this fever suddenly broke out in me, I instinctively understood that Uganda had turned a corner from which return may not be possible. And yet the trigger could not have been more trivial: My telephone line had been cut.

I had expected that to happen. In fact, I had wilfully participated in the loss of my line. An announcement had been made in early April saying that all phone users must re-register their lines or be cut off in seven days. I refused to comply. On the sixth day, the Prime Minister’s Office said the deadline had been extended by a month. I stayed home. The month came to an end and promptly, the lines were cut.

The people at the mall trying to get their phones reconnected were largely upper crust, in government, in cushy private sector, NGO, UN, jobs – expatriates, well-to-do locals, denizens of Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, well-fed and secure in their status. But now their faces reflected fear mixed with confusion

When I got to town, I was more staggered than I could have expected. There at the mall, standing in ragged lines with the sun beating down on them, was a mass of people, local and international, who could no longer make or receive calls. It was the look on their faces that reminded me of 1979, 1985 and 1986, the coup years. It was the look of people in the midst of a calamity beyond prevention.

Betrayal of the docile consumer

I had refused to comply with the directive. But those in the lines had complied; was it just inefficiency or had they been guilty of forwarding memes the state disliked? It mattered not what had happened. There at the mall, with its high-end branded products, something heartbreaking was happening:

The people there were largely upper crust, in government, in cushy private sector, NGO, UN jobs – expatriates, well-to-do locals, denizens of Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, well-fed and secure in their status. But now their faces reflected fear mixed with confusion. This was their thing, this government and the economic ideology it espoused. Many had got their jobs by following regime diktats, not making noise, not being seen with noise-makers.

The economic encyclical they knew by heart had said that capitalist excess was good. Investors and consumers were protected by the regime. Yet now, the telephone, which had brought vast investments into the country, with its millions of dollars in taxes, had been switched off.

The regime had for over 20 years touted its openness. It had enthusiastically done what the IMF and World Bank had asked it to do, back in the early 1990s when it carried out what was then clothed in the euphemism of “structural adjustment policy” but today goes in the explicit nudity of “austerity”. It had punished its people with gut-wrenching impoverishment so it could please the Western powers and avoid regime change. Over the decades, barriers to “free trade” had come down. Uganda, the IMF told all who cared to listen, was business-friendly. So to wake up that Saturday morning to the reality of a ham-fisted regulation, one that could strangle any multinational co-operation, was astounding. The faces in that mall asked all these questions but in the abstract: What had we done wrong? Had we not consumed (and done so conspicuously) like all well-brought up boys and girls are taught to? Had we not behaved like responsible adults by heeding Gordon Gecko’s dictum that greed is good? Had we not volunteered our energy and time on earth as a good, mostly Christian country and devoted our energy to making the rich richer? Why this punishment now?

In lieu of competitive politics, Museveni’s first decade in power had operated under a ‘broad-based’ system, a serious attempt at an ideology, a kind of reconciliation by which the soviets set up at parish level (going by the name of Resistance Councils) could also include, rather than execute, kulaks

To such exemplary behaviour were due such little rewards as walking into the most expensive restaurants, not so much to eat, as to snap pictures of the dinner for Instagram. Going out the door each day was a Facebook challenge. Now even that was no longer possible. I saw in their faces horror at the prospect of returning to the anonymity of the 1990s, to operating VCRs and having to twirl cassette tapes on a Bic pen to rewind them.

We always knew the military would turn around and bite us

The Museveni government had acted out of character. What had been concealed and contained for 31 years of his time in power had at last erupted, very publicly. We had lived with a military government for a full generation. One day, we always knew, it would turn around and bite us. If you had watched the Museveni regime for the past three decades, you would have noticed that at the close of each decade, his rule shifted gear in consequential ways. We were at the start of the fourth decade, which meant a new tempo had been embarked upon.

The first 10 years had been unchallenged rule by the complete set of ideologues he had brought with him from the bush war. They were the gushing, forward-rushing youthful stage during which the government could do no wrong and genuinely tried its best not to. That was the forward-rushing youthful stage. In lieu of competitive politics, the decade had operated under a “broad-based” system, a serious attempt at an ideology, a kind of reconciliation by which the soviets set up at parish level (going by the name of Resistance Councils) could also include, rather than execute, kulaks. The “good leadership”, “political will” by which Museveni has been described, were products of this period. Victory had brought goodwill and he was eager to show it.

The period ended with the passing of the 1995 constitution, the biggest goodwill of all. And then it started. Looking back, it would seem that Museveni’s longer lasting troubles began with that document. Ugandans had given the regime the benefit of the doubt in the first decade. Now they wanted something in return. The 1990s ended with the now famous “missive” Dr Kizza Besigye wrote in 1999 declaring Museveni a dictator. Besigye’s courage took Museveni aback, as did the massive crowds Besigye attracted when he first ran for president in 2001, dwarfing the numbers Museveni attracted, for the first time giving the president an undiluted assessment of what Ugandans thought of him.

The departure of Besigye from the war veterans’ camp opened the door for the haemorrhage of Museveni’s bush war colleagues, a bleeding he and the Movement were never to recover from; what was worse, the end of the second decade marked very emphatic victories against him from a Uganda Museveni thought he had vanquished. Through a series of legal battles, lawyers of the Uganda People’s Congress and the Democratic Party, doyens of the anti-colonial years that had been banned from operating, revealed the contradiction between Museveni’s claim to have returned constitutional rule to Uganda, and his refusal to obey the same constitution. In an attempt to pre-empt the return of political parties, the government had organised the infamous Referendum of 2000, whose cloying rationale fooled few. The banned opposition parties, unwilling to lend political legitimacy to Museveni, refused to participate, whereupon the government propped up straw parties to act the part of the Yes side while it hogged the No role. In a poorly attended exercise, 90.7% of those that bothered to vote, estimated at 30 % of registered voters chose a “No Party” Movement system against the 9.3% who chose a “Multiparty” system.

To show how much it believed in multiparty democracy, the government needed a stronger Yes than the 90% garnered by its No side the last time. It allowed a Yes percentage figure of 92.44 %. Some 4 million democracy-shy Ugandans now resoundingly allowed multiparty politics to operate

The result served as legal cover for one-party rule (described now as “no party rule”). But in 2004 a seven-judge panel of the Supreme Court declared it null and void. As if to save face, to show that it had known what it was doing, the government organised a second referendum on the same question, in 2005. This time, it was a little tricky. The government decided it wanted parties back, which meant that it was now sentimentally on the same side as the parties it had banned. It therefore invited the parties, which by law did not exist, to take the government’s side in declaring that it, the government, had been wrong. The parties refused to agree whereupon the government stood alone in acting the Yes side. But for the suffrage to be legal, there had to be a No side. For two decades, the government had said No. Now the government was saying Yes and therefore no one was saying No. Once again, props had to be found and money found to fund their No.

To show how much it believed in multiparty democracy, the government needed a stronger Yes than the 90% garnered by its No side the last time around. It allowed a Yes percentage figure of 92.44%. Some 4 million democracy-shy Ugandans now resoundingly allowed multiparty politics to operate.

Nobody loves the jackboot

Having kept them under the military jackboot for 20 years, Museveni now castigated the parties for refusing to support their own return to life. They were “not contributing to Uganda’s development,” he said.

That was the spirit in which Museveni ruled for 20 years, that play-acting at magnanimity, the third- rate theatre by which he blarneyed his way through, year after year. He was after all a “good” leader and that called for “good” behaviour. It is easy to forget, but in the first two decades, Museveni cut a figure somewhere between a likeable clown and a deadly fighter.

The judicial humiliations of 2004-2005 were not isolated events. The end of his second decade in power presented Museveni with new realities neither he nor Ugandans could have anticipated. This period of irrevocable change started in 2003 and did not end until 2006-2007. Museveni’s perennial bogeymen, the figures he could invoke to frighten Ugandans into obedience, Idi Amin and Milton Obote, died (2003 and 2005), deaths that left him exposed. Suddenly, he was left alone. The shadows of the past gone, he would now be judged by his actions alone.

And then the war in northern Uganda jolted to an abrupt end. What had provided political ballast, the spectre of Nilotic rule that had made the Bantu southerners so uneasy, faded rapidly. To further complicate life for Museveni, the end of the northern war left him without a diversion to distract restless, politicised military officers, nor cover for the classified budgets to defence that had hitherto provided a useful slush fund.

But not as yet. An election was still looming in 2006 and Besigye had learnt nothing from the beatings and imprisonment he had suffered. Yet if the returned political parties were triumphant, the electorate did not share this triumph. The 92.44% voters who wanted them back did not show up for them. The crowded field of presidential candidates, which included Milton Obote’s widow, Miria Obote, played supporting roles to the protagonists.

Museveni, realising that the constitution he had nursed to life would not be on his side, began to make the moves that would lead to the funereal pall of May 20, 2017. He appointed one General Kale Kayihura as Inspector General of Police. The disastrous militarisation of the police had begun. Kayihura had made his name as commander of the Revenue Protection Unit, which went after smugglers and tax dodgers with methods that threw the operation into disrepute. He was not a nice man.

Kayihura, Uganda’s longest serving IGP https://www.theelephant.info/uploads/2017/06/Uganda-Police.mp4

Footage courtesy of New Vision TV

Not forgetting what it had done to him, Museveni also moved against the judiciary through appointments and outright humiliation. In a striking display of what would characterise the next decade in power, the so-called Black Mamba squad invaded the High Court and rearrested 22 suspects granted bail by the judges. They were allegedly part of the People’s Redemption Army, allegedly linked to Besigye.

Newer global forces, particularly ‘terrorism,’ provided fresh nomenclature. Now Uganda was an ally in the ‘war on terror.’ Renewed support from Washington boosted the regime and may well have bought it a decade extra in power. Sending troops to Somalia served to divert the military and inject income-replacing lost revenue from Congo and northern Uganda

The drift away from constitutionalism had begun. It is still unbelievable, the degree of violence that the army and the police deployed in this, Museveni’s third decade in power, from the brutal actions on the streets during the 2011 elections, to the disarmament of Karamoja pastoralists. Whoever was in charge, was not of the calibre of Besigye, whose stewardship of battalions in the first decade of Museveni’s rule had won so much respect in most parts of Uganda. These were a raw, untempered lot. As the decades piled up, principled men and women refused to work with Museveni, leaving the dregs to exercise power.

The cost of doing politics in Uganda goes up

And then, 16 months before the 2011 elections, something exceedingly alarming happened. In September 2009, the King of Buganda, Kabaka Ronald Mutebi, set off to visit a district his kingdom claimed as part of its territory. Kayunga, home to the Baruli community, had been a vassal state in pre-colonial Buganda, so the visit provided ironies all around, not least for Buganda, which was demanding the return of its properties from the Uganda state, the same kind of demand the Baruli were making of the Buganda Kingdom. The government blocked the visit, upon which Buganda erupted. The extremely ethnicised nature of the riots that followed were a frightening demonstration of what people felt, that Museveni and his ethnic group were “oppressors” hell bent on a massive land grab. It brought out fears of the kind that lie just under the surface of African politics.

The cost of doing politics in Uganda had gone up. In the run up to the 2006 elections, plainclothes operatives had fired live bullets and killed a man, just yards from where the Kabaka stood next to Besigye. It had been the single most chilling episode of that campaign period, one which left the Buganda, long mass supporters of Museveni who had in the previous two elections voted overwhelmingly for him, in no doubt of what they were facing. The 2009 riots were a delayed reaction. The country became a less happy place, if it had been happy in the first place.

But newer global forces, particularly “terrorism,” provided fresh nomenclature. Now Uganda was “an ally” in the “war on terror.” Renewed support from Washington boosted the regime and may well have bought it a decade extra in power. Sending troops to Somalia served to divert the military and replace lost revenue from Congo and northern Uganda. The modus operandi of Museveni has been that there must always be a war; as rulers throughout the ages know, war enriches soldiers and is also a neat way to get rid of problematic officers.

The opposition had gained traction by now. The public had seen a side to the regime it would not forget. Only voter intimidation and rigging ensured the ruling party stayed in power in 2006. In 2011, in a bizarre move, Museveni courted northern Ugandan voters. The ballots returned significant gains for the Movement. It was a shocking event, for Museveni had always ignored the northern vote. But now, he had also lost southern support. The cost of buying the northern vote, as well as the amount of fear-mongering needed to secure it, was too high. It was not tried again in 2016, when the opposition returned to its previous sweep of the region.

Newer global forces, particularly ‘terrorism,’ provided fresh nomenclature. Now Uganda was an ally in the ‘war on terror.’ Renewed support from Washington boosted the regime and may well have bought it a decade extra in power. Sending troops to Somalia served to divert the military and inject income-replacing lost revenue from Congo and northern Uganda

However, it must be noted that faith in elections ended in 2001; whatever little remained burned out in 2006. What the government may have missed was that by participating in the 2011 elections, the opposition was in effect, simply looking for a casus belli – daring the government to show its hand – by which to justify its next move. The state duly obliged. The world and the judges agreed that the elections had been a sham. The demonstrations that followed (this was Arab Spring season) in the well-reported “Walk to Work” protests in which political leaders “siding” with the poor ditched their cars and walked to parliament, initiated a novel approach to Ugandan politics. It also neutralised the use of armed force. It was a battle of image for which Museveni the guerrilla-fighter could not have been more ill-prepared.

Neoliberalism begins to unravel

It was also in this decade that the economic policies adopted in the early days of the regime had so endeared Museveni to Western powers, began to unravel. The failure of neoliberal economics to deliver promised “trickle down” benefits had done its damage in the Third World countries forced to swallow it. But following the 2008 banking crisis, the failures of that ideology had crept up from its Third World laboratories into the heartlands of extreme capitalism. While it had never really had a chance to work in a country like Uganda, the crisis meant that the lifeline of foreign aid that had tube-fed the Museveni government suddenly ran dry. Incapable of providing the patronage he had once dispensed, and with poverty underlining the degree of income inequality, things had come to a head by the time the third decade in power was coming to a close.

Enter Amama Mbabazi. He had been Museveni’s co-tribune, a Movement pillar and prime minister from 2011 to 2014. It had always been rumoured that he had been the organiser, the man who made things work. He first publicly expressed his presidential ambitions back in 2000 when he accused Besigye of jumping the succession queue. Had there been a pact between him and Museveni that he would be president after him? And how patient was he going to be? In 2015, when it became plain that Mbabazi had presidential ambitions, the Movement machinery whirred into action to do what it had rarely, if ever, done. It turned against its own.

The crisis meant that the lifeline of foreign aid that had tube-fed the Museveni government suddenly ran dry. Incapable of providing the patronage he had once dispensed, and with poverty underlining the degree of income inequality, things had come to a head by the time his third decade in power was coming to a close

The subsequent ejection, failed presidential candidacy and fall of Mbabazi quickly faded out of sight and he was not to become a subject of public discussion afterwards. The essential rebellion had been Besigye’s 1999 missive. There was to be no repeat. Attention remained focused on the latter, whose arrests and trials continued apace.

That was on the surface. Underneath, the ouster of the cringe-worthily naive Mbabazi, as it is now turning out, was to provide the essential plot and character for Museveni’s entry into the fourth decade in power. It is the thread that led to the fear I read that afternoon of May 20:

The ouster of Mbabazi was accompanied by a purge of the government and of the Movement system of alleged Mbabazi supporters. The high-level paranoia that underneath his own system, rebellion was growing, denied Museveni trust in a system as complex as a government needs in order to function. And yet it had been that trust the knowledge technocrats had that the president was both reasonable and supportive, that had delivered the key achievements of his early days in office, like the economic recovery and the fight against HIV/Aids. These achievements had in various forms not survived beyond the first decade but the original impetus had created a momentum of goodwill, for the image of “good leadership,” once earned, is hard to lose, if only because society is desperate for it. At any rate, Museveni had always profited by the inexhaustible store of goodwill extended to him.

It was inexhaustible until it ran out. By 2014, when Museveni made the ill-advised and very public move to sign the so-called anti-gay Bill, there had been a considerable body of international opinion that he was not exactly a democrat. By inserting himself needlessly into the Western cultural wars, Museveni had blundered in a costly fashion. He may have calculated that it would improve his electoral chances back home, but his opponents were never going to support gay rights to start with. The advantage was cancelled out. His detractors in the West had their opportunity. They pounced.

Aid money was cut left, right and centre. They needed the money for their own people. What had been billed as economic recovery was revealed to have all along been baloney. Uganda under Museveni had never improved its productivity in real terms. It was an aid-money autarky all the time.

By the time the 2016 elections came and went, it was undeniable that the country was in serious trouble. Police and other civil servants, not least teachers, nurses and doctors, went months without pay. Medicine was unavailable in hospitals. At the same time, the internal witch hunt in government, and the air of fear and suspicion following the ouster of Amama Mbabazi was causing a cave-in from the other end: There was no money to pay public workers; at the same time, people in high office became afraid to work, in case they were seen to be ambitious.

Fear and intimidation take over

Museveni’s innate instinct, the use of force and intimidation, seems to have taken over. The perennial troubles of Kasese, the Rwenzururu Kingdom, which predated colonial Uganda, and which had been handled diplomatically since the Obote I government in the 1960s, now met military force. More than 100 people were gunned down. It was not as if such a small kingdom could have caused national damage (its cause remains obscure outside the Rwenzori region), but it reflects what one analyst told me is the mentality of those whom the president now puts trust in – use maximum force.

Every ministry, from Health, Education, to Energy, is feeling the chill wind of administrative paralysis, but not all of them have as yet displayed incompetence in the manner in which famine in eastern Uganda has shown up the Ministry of Agriculture. But it is coming

Without respect and trust in the seasoned technocrats who shepherd political masters through the jungles of laws and acts and regulations that are effectively the “system,” a number of odd things have been happening in Uganda. Foremost among them is the failure to manage a looming food crisis in eastern Uganda. The coming environmental crisis, the first of which is the developing collapse of fish stocks, could have been avoided had the civil service been allowed to do its work. Every ministry, from Health, Education, to Energy, is feeling the chill wind of administrative paralysis, but not all of them have as yet displayed incompetence in the manner in which famine in eastern Uganda has shown up the Ministry of Agriculture. But it is coming. The spectacular bungling of telephone registration brought these issues to the fore.

A boyish, almost flagrant informality

An order was given that telephone users “verify” their numbers. However, Ugandan citizens were told they could not use driving permits, passports, work IDs, local council IDs, only National IDs. It was a telling admission that the Ministry of Internal Affairs was inept, that its identity documents were a sham. A properly functioning government would have been advised against such a move for the demands of one arm of government must be reconciled across all government arms to ensure systemic uniformity. It is the reason there is a prime minister and a Secretary to the Cabinet. This one was a weird call, until it was revealed that the call came from the IGP’s office.

At his first press conference back in 2005, which I attended as journalist at The EastAfrican, I watched Gen. Kayihura’s demeanour. I observed his short attention span, his easily distracted manner, twiddling with his phone in the middle of taking press questions and his affinity for a boyish, almost vagrant informality. It was a frightening projection of things to come.

In 2017, you could see Gen Kayihura’s hand in that telephone debacle. A chess piece moved at the end of the second decade in power, had showed its own hand at the beginning of the fourth decade in power.

What it said, and what precipitated that fever that we felt on May 20, was the fact that the administrative state in Uganda, had been overthrown by the security forces. There had been a coup. The Office of the Prime Minister, which supervised the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which supervised the Police, was forced to humiliatingly “follow” the orders of a policeman; parliament recognised its own impotence by attacking the line minister who formally made the announcement, knowing well that the minister had simply been following the orders of the IGP, whom they dared not touch. Prime minister, parliament and line minister were all to be further humiliated when the NRM parliamentary caucus overruled all of them. Four days after shutting down phone lines, they switched them on back again, and said we would have three more months to comply with the registration order.

It has become clear now that, going into his fourth decade in power, Museveni has effectively shut down the Uganda state and is intent on ruling through a secret and sometimes not so secret cabal of gunslingers, chief among them his IGP

There is the misled belief that an Orwellian-sized national biometric database will give the state means to track everyone and prevent an Arab Spring-style social media uprising. Sources say the government’s investments in electronic surveillance have been extensive. When it first asked citizens to acquire National IDs in 2013, very few people bothered to register. Then someone had a brain wave – threaten to take away their phones, that will bring them running. And so for all of April and May, the entire country was thrown into turmoil. We wait to see what happens in August when the three-month extension runs out.

It has become clear that there are now two centres of power in Uganda, President Museveni and IGP Kayihura. Everyone else, from the vice president to district officers, has gone quiet. In a sign of how disastrous this leadership model is, the “old” model was forced to intervene after President Museveni jumped protocol and directly accused fictitious Chinese diplomats of ivory trafficking. The incensed Chinese put their foot down and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which had not been consulted when the letter of accusation was sent out by the president’s office, apologised publicly to China. What it demonstrated was the manner in which Museveni now micro-manages Uganda.

It has become clear now that, going into his fourth decade in power, Museveni has effectively shut down the Uganda state and is intent on ruling through a secret and sometimes not so secret cabal of gunslingers, chief among them his IGP Gen Kale Kayihura. But even in there, things are not going swimmingly, which may explain the ultra-violent execution of Gen Kayihura’s deputy, Felix Kaweesi, on March 17 this year. It was the killing that provided the justification for shutting down telephone lines. There is a deadly power struggle even within the securocratic redoubt into which Museveni’s fourth decade is retreating. The new front of cyber security and fear of the power of social media has meant that a new front of enemies has opened up; it is no longer just past leaders, Nilotics or opposition who are “against development”; it’s also now a teenager with WhatsApp who must be closely monitored.

There is a general realisation that time is running out. Those in positions of power and opportunity are taking as much cash out of the public and through their offices as they can while they still have the chance. Principled and seasoned individuals are opting out, leaving a bevy of the callow and ethnically loyal to take positions of authority. The centre retreats into self-serving fiction.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future. Follow us on Twitter.