The Africans (17 page)

“If they will only bring Amin here,” shouted a former Kampala city councilman, Rashid Kawawa, “we will eat him on the spot. Yes, we’ll roast him and sear his skin and pass around chunks of him. He was a cannibal, so he would understand what we were doing.”

Amin’s modest four-bedroom home was in the hills overlooking
Kampala, only a mile or so from Parliament Square, and the next morning I walked through its open front door. I felt as though I were entering a hallucination.

His bedroom, like that of a child, was covered with pictures of military aircraft, scotch-taped to the walls. There were cartons of hand grenades under Amin’s bed and bottles of pills for venereal disease on his bureau. One closet was stacked with reels of “Tom and Jerry” cartoons, and a file cabinet was stuffed with black-and-white photos of tortured Ugandans, gaunt, maimed creatures who hardly resembled human beings at all. Amin’s health records were strewn about the floor; they contained no mention of the degenerative syphilis that an Israeli doctor claimed he had, but they showed that he had been suffering from gout and obesity for years. “You need a rigid exercise program,” one doctor advised. Piles of never opened letters from foreign governments and his own embassies abroad littered the room.

“I think it is safe to say that medically Amin was crazy,” Solomon Asea, a doctor who had been Amin’s ambassador in Washington, told me. “He had a split personality. He could kill a person one minute and the next he’d be laughing and playing the guitar and he had no recollection of what he had done. In a medical sense, he wasn’t responsible for much of what he did. He should have been a patient, not a president.”

Sadly, the euphoria that engulfed Uganda in those first days of life without Idi Amin was short-lived and it soon became clear that there would be no miracles of reconstruction or reconciliation in Uganda. One nightmare had ended but another was about to begin. Uganda itself was about to complete the mission of destruction on which Amin had embarked.

The Tanzanian army that had come to save Uganda now set out to ravage it, the unpaid soldiers taking at gunpoint what they wanted. Soon every soldier had a Seiko watch and a shortwave radio. The economy collapsed, the food supplies ran out, the morgues filled up, and the stench of death hung about. Honest men became thieves, and gangs of Ugandan bandits roamed the cities, killing and looting to survive. Western diplomats armed their homes with shotguns, German shepherds and grenades, and on occasion fought off attackers from their bedroom windows. Matts Lundgren, a United Nations representative, stationed two guards with machine guns in the garden of his Kampala home, and Joseph Bragotti, a Roman
Catholic priest, started packing a .38-caliber revolver under his cassock. Chaos had given way to anarchy.

At Makerere University, professors stopped showing up for classes and spent their days scrounging for food. The hospitals ran out of medicine, and operations ceased because there were no anesthetics. Emergency supplies of food and medicine from international relief agencies poured into Uganda by the truckload but were hijacked almost as soon as they crossed the border. In the north, where drought and famine held the people hostage, and the cows seemed to have fared better than the humans, the Karamojong cattle herders routinely tossed the withered corpses of their little boys outside the villages each night. There were so many that the hyenas grew fat and lazy and the packs no longer fought and squealed over each feast. The boys were allowed to die because, when rations are meager, the Karamojong give the available food to their girls, who can be traded for cattle.

From their exile homes in Europe and the United States, thousands of young, ambitious and intelligent Ugandans answered President Lule’s call to come home and help rebuild their country. But the task overwhelmed them and, in the end, defeated them. The law of the jungle had reclaimed the soul of Uganda. There were no obtainable national causes left, only personal ones, and within weeks of becoming cabinet ministers and presidential advisers, the former exiles were demanding their 20 percent off the top of foreign grants and contracts. When someone spoke of “my people,” he didn’t mean Ugandans in general; he meant the people of his particular tribe. If he said things were improving, he wasn’t referring to the national economy; he was talking about his overseas bank account.

Lule was the one man who had a chance to save Uganda. He was honest, intelligent and, at the age of sixty-seven, cared little for the trappings of power. More important, he was a Baganda,
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Uganda’s largest and best educated tribe, and thus commanded the allegiance of the majority. Had he been a dictator instead of a humanist, he might have succeeded. But Julius Nyerere, the Tanzanian president and Uganda’s de facto ruler, had installed Lule as his socialistic stalking horse. When Lule started speaking with a voice that was both independent and capitalistic, Nyerere spirited him out of
Uganda, locked him up in a room without a telephone in Dar es Salaam and announced that Uganda would have a new president.

That man was Godfrey Binaisa, an attorney who had lived in New York and fallen on tough times, handling not much more than an occasional divorce case. I met him in the lobby of Kampala’s International Hotel, just after he had returned to Uganda. A once important official in the pre-Amin government, he was now portly and balding, and he wore a rumpled suit. Asked by an American journalist how to pronounce his name, he replied, “Be nisa to me.” He hung around the lobby, bumming cigarettes, chatting with the Western reporters, saying no, he didn’t know what he would do now that he was back, but he hoped he could find some work. The next day he was as surprised as anyone to learn that he had a job—as president of Uganda, having been appointed by a local committee, which decided that he seemed as harmless and as reliable as anyone available. One of his first moves was to hire an American public relations firm for $400,000 to clean up Uganda’s tarnished international image. An account executive from Washington, D.C., flew into Entebbe, brimming with confidence, carrying business cards that bore the notation “We can solve any problem.” He left a few days later, shaking his head. What Uganda needed was a mortician, not a flack.

The cycle was soon to be complete. Binaisa was ousted from office by Nyerere, and the military returned to power.
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Idi Amin was thrown out of Libya after his bodyguards had a shoot-out with some of Muammar Qaddafy’s soldiers. He moved to Saudi Arabia, with two wives and twenty-three of his children, and announced his willingness to return to Uganda “for the good of my people.” Meanwhile Obote, whom Nyerere had kept in waiting for just such a moment, had come home from Tanzania, won a fixed election and became Uganda’s president for a second time.
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“Today we raise the banner of democracy once more and proclaim the rule of law,” he said at his swearing-in ceremony. “The past is gone. We start a new
future.” This time, though, there were no celebrations. Within a few weeks Obote re-established the State Research Bureau, the security agency that was to Amin what Savak had been to the Shah of Iran. Torture became common again in the crowded prisons, people once more started “disappearing.” The newly independent newspapers were closed down, dissent was muzzled, the International Red Cross and resident Western journalists were expelled. Uganda teetered on the brink of civil war that would pit tribe against tribe, and in the outlying districts a new guerrilla group, composed mostly of Baganda, launched its first attacks against the government installations in an attempt to bring down the Obote regime.

Had the psychology and attitudes of an entire nation changed during its long nightmare?

“No,” the vice chancellor of Makerere University, Senteza Kajubi, told me one day after some thought, “I wouldn’t quite say that Uganda has produced a generation of moral cripples. But on the other hand …”

He fell silent, searching for the words. “On the other hand,” he repeated at last, “we obviously have been greatly affected by the experience of Amin and what came afterward. We have fallen so low that I wonder if we can ever climb back.”

To realize just how far Uganda did sink, it is worth taking a brief historical look at the country Winston Churchill described as “the pearl of East Africa.” Landlocked Uganda is one of Africa’s most beautiful countries. It is a fertile land of high plateaus and lush green foliage that reach from the shores of Lake Victoria—the source of the White Nile—to the dry plains of the north. Blue crater lakes are tucked among the terraced hillsides, and within a day’s drive of Kampala, like Rome a capital built on seven hills, some of the most splendid wildlife herds in all Africa roamed through national parks as large as Rhode Island.

“Uganda is a fairy tale,” Churchill wrote in 1908 after arriving by train from the Kenyan coast. “You climb up a railway instead of a beanstalk, and at the top there is a wonderful new world. The scenery is different, and most of all the people are different from anywhere else in Africa.”

The early Ugandan people were farmers and warriors who developed five centralized, prosperous kingdoms: the Buganda, Bunyoro, Busoga, Toro and Ankole. From the mid-nineteenth century
through to independence in 1962, the Baganda dominated Uganda. They were a proud, elitist people who considered themselves superior to other Bantu kingdoms in the Lake Victoria basin and to the Nilotic cattle-herding tribes of the north, the Acholi and Lango. They were ruled by a
kabaka
(king) and represented about 20 percent of Uganda’s population.

In 1894 Uganda became a British protectorate, and colonial administrators, utilizing the policy of “divide and rule,” bestowed special favors on the Baganda. They became the backbone of the civil service and the vehicle for carrying out colonial policies. The other tribes sought, but did not receive, similar privileges. Unable to win responsible jobs in the bureaucracy or to dent the Baganda-dominated commercial sector, these outsiders had the choice of remaining neglected or finding new avenues into the mainstream of civilization. The Acholi and Langi, for instance, cast their lot with the military and became the tribal majority in the colonial army.

Unlike neighboring Kenya and Tanzania, Uganda moved toward independence without any united nationalistic front. Indeed, the Baganda even considered secession rather than risk the loss of dominance in a new nation. This absence of central authority would later prove to be a major obstacle to political stability. But Milton Obote, a Lango schoolteacher, promised the Baganda autonomy and managed to put together a loose coalition that led Uganda to independence, with himself as prime minister and the
kabaka
as president.

It soon became apparent Uganda was missing another element that was to become important in Kenya’s success—European settlers. There were 43,000 whites in Kenya at independence, and more than 5,000 of them were farmers who had settled in the highlands north of Nairobi. Kenya was their home and they had a stake in making the new republic work. In Uganda the 8,800 whites were administrators; professionals and technicians. They would stay for three or four years, then move on when their contracts were up. The settlement of whites in Kenya had been a conscious decision of the British government for two reasons: Kenya was on the coast and more accessible to travelers than landlocked Uganda; and Kenya’s farmland, though not as fertile as Uganda’s, was less densely populated and thus did not require the displacement of large African groups. If the British had settled Uganda instead of Kenya, it is entirely possible there would have been no Life-President Idi Amin and no socioeconomic debacle in Uganda—and no mini-miracles of progress in Kenya. For, however much European settlers retarded
the Africans’ advancement, their presence represented strong authority, law and order, political stability—concepts that African colonies could carry with them into independence.

As it turned out, Obote had no intention of sharing power with the
kabaka
, Freddie Mutesa, a slight, elegant figure who had once served as a lieutenant in England’s Grenadier Guards. Obote wanted absolute control, and his accord with the Buganda kingdom erupted into confrontation; secession again became the Buganda cause. In 1966 Obote called on his army chief, Idi Amin, to put down the rebellion with minimum force. Instead Amin blasted through the
kabaka’s
palace with tanks, and King Freddie, the last in an unbroken line of ruling royalty dating back to the sixteenth century, escaped over a wall and fled to London, where he died a penniless alcoholic five years later. The monarchy was abolished, Obote became president, and Amin was now a man to be reckoned with.

Despite tribal rivalries, Obote’s misdirected leadership and the absence of exploitable minerals, Uganda had a great deal working for it in those early days of independence. Makerere was a superior university, referred to as “the Harvard of Africa.” The economy, based on agriculture and buoyed by the presence of 70,000 Asians, was healthy, the tourist industry was booming. The health system was one of the finest in the Third World: there were forty-eight hospitals, several hundred rural dispensaries staffed by paramedics, a surprisingly sophisticated facility for psychiatric care, a tropical-medicine institute of international note, and black Africa’s best city hospital, Mulago in Kampala. There were excellent hotels and game lodges, 1,000 miles of paved roads, and an extensive rail network that stretched to Mombasa on the Kenyan coast, six hundred miles away. Even more important, there were the Baganda, a people far less primitive than most other Africans in the neighboring countries.

The man responsible for Uganda’s destruction was born in 1925 to peasant parents who scratched a meager living from their two-acre plot. Idi Amin was a Moslem and a member of the small backward Kakwa tribe, a people noted for little except their lack of education and their penchant for soldiering. His parents separated shortly after his birth and Amin was raised by his mother, who lived sometimes in the barracks, with a succession of military men.