by David Lamb
This is the Sudan, Africa’s largest country, nearly a third the size of the continental United States. But this is “the other” Sudan, the southern Sudan. The north is Arabized and wealthier and more developed. The south is African, a Christian and pagan region as big as Texas and New Mexico combined where there are only 17 miles of paved roads and where government workers still tap out Morse code messages to Khartoum, the nation’s capital in the north, a thousand miles away. The economic and cultural differences between the north and south led to 150 years of distrust and bloodshed, culminating in 1955 in the south’s seventeen-year war for autonomy. The conflict, largely ignored by the world and given scant attention in the international press, claimed the lives of 400,000 Sudanese and created a million refugees.
One of the prominent southern guerrilla leaders of the war, Mading Degarang, was sitting with us on the hotel verandah in Juba that evening. He heard the Arabic chants and he saw the African dancers ambling toward their ceremonial grounds. Two different worlds, two different cultures, two different religions thrown together in a single country. But, he mused, the peace was holding. It was a fragile peace, but it was holding. The Arabs and the Africans had found room for compromise and understanding. The wounds of the continent’s second longest civil war (the Eritrean war in Ethiopia is the longest) were slowly healing.
“Ten, even five years ago, no one thought it could work this well,” Degarang said. “Of course, one man was really responsible for ending the war and one man is responsible for keeping the peace, and if something happens to him—well, we could only hope.”
That man is Jaafar Numeiri, a dictator president who practices compromise and conciliation, a rare pastime for an African leader. Numeiri, a strict Moslem who believes Allah chose him to lead the 18 million Sudanese people, prays five times a day and has given up the occasional glass of whiskey he once enjoyed. His father was a messenger for a British company during the colonial era, which ended in 1956 in the Sudan, and the young Numeiri’s rebelliousness was always something of an embarrassment to his family. In 1946, when he was seventeen, he led a political strike that closed down his secondary school for seven months, and in 1957 he was suspended from the army for sixteen months for leading an abortive coup. He staged another coup in 1969—this one succeeded—and three years later made the concessions no previous Sudanese leader had dared to make, thus ending the civil war and sowing the first seeds of unity between the Arab-dominated north and the black south.
Rather than insisting on absolute victory, he granted the south regional autonomy in most matters except defense and external affairs. The two warring armies became one peacetime army, the two very different regions became one nation, held together by the leadership of a single man. Later, in 1978, Numeiri took another unprecedented African step as part of a national-reconciliation program and granted a general amnesty to dozens of Sudanese who had emerged in the postwar years as his political enemies. It made him a circus ringmaster surrounded by unpredictable and potentially dangerous tigers, held at bay by one man with the whip.
Every Thursday, Numeiri plays polo with a former soldier who devoted a good deal of his time to planning Numeiri’s assassination. “That away, Sadiq, you’re looking good,” Numeiri will call when his elegantly attired former adversary makes a skillful shot. Sadiq al Mahdi, a former prime minister and head of a group of fanatical Moslem warriors, was condemned to death for plotting the overthrow of the Numeiri government—and the death of Numeiri—in 1975 and 1976. But Numeiri asked him to end his exile in London and return home to work toward building a united Sudan. At about the same time, Numeiri freed the Sudan’s twelve hundred political prisoners and permitted his former enemies to run for the People’s Assembly. Several were elected.
On the nights when he cannot sleep—which are most nights—Numeiri rises by four o’clock, slips out a back door of State House and wanders alone and unannounced through Khartoum, whose streets are laid out in the pattern of the British Union Jack. He pauses by the bridge spanning the confluence of the Blue and White Niles—referred to in Arabic poetry as “the longest kiss in history”—and strolls into the open-air marketplaces that are just beginning to stir.
Dressed in a white Moslem robe, his bronzed face bearing traditional self-inflicted tribal scars of his initiation into manhood, he stops to question the surprised merchants, asking them about their lives, their problems, their hopes for the Sudan. “What are your children learning in school?” he asks one woman selling cabbages. “They must be educated, you know. The country will need them.”
Numeiri, though, is no soft touch. He retains the rank of army general, and for years used a network of spies and informers to keep track of his enemies. In 1975 he approved the execution, after trial, of ninety-eight Libyan-recruited black mercenaries who tried to overthrow him. In 1983, after government troops crushed a mutiny near Juba, he had the rebels shot in “batches of six,” his ministry of information announced. He maintains strict control over the national press in his one-party state and remains very much in charge of the Sudan’s day-to-day affairs.
What sets Numeiri apart from other African presidents is his willingness to experiment and his ability to change. While other presidents have solidified their power, Numeiri has loosened his. While other presidents tend to blame colonialism for all Africa’s problems, Numeiri believes the causes of failure are rooted closer to home. Numeiri flirted with Marxism until a Soviet-inspired attempted coup almost succeeded in 1971; then he moved abruptly out of the Moscow camp. He nationalized the economy, and finding that the move stifled development, once again encouraged free enterprise, thus attracting considerable foreign investment from the Arab and Western worlds. He may not have produced any miracles—agriculture remains stagnant, the bureaucracy inefficient, the South a potential flashpoint, the international aid projects generally unproductive—but he nevertheless has given his people a precious gift, a sense of unity and purpose that grew from the ashes of a shattered nation.
One of the first lessons a Western journalist learns in Africa is not to make predictions; they are usually about as reliable as weather forecasts in New England. Perhaps Numeiri has been too liberal and the tigers wait only for an unguarded moment. Perhaps the Sudanese peace rests on the shoulders of just one man, and if he fails, so will the country. But I would like to think that there is no turning back for the Sudan. It has gone too far at too great a cost to fail now.
Numeiri has shown his people the benefits of conciliation. His benign dictatorship could be the forerunner, instead of the tombstone, of a democratic, socially just political system. It is, I believe, the Numeiris, not the Bokassas or Machels or Nyereres, who symbolize Africa’s hope for the future. For Numeiri has made national contributions that will outlast the man himself, and that is the mark of a worthy president on any continent.
* Dacko lasted less than two years in his second stint as president. He was overthrown in a bloodless coup in September 1981 by his own soldiers, who complained that Dacko was incapable of managing the economy. Dacko was allowed to stay in the country. Bokassa slipped out of France in 1986, returned to Bangui, and was promptly arrested at the airport.
* Bokassa was expelled from the Ivory Coast in December, 1983, after trying to rally political support back home. He took up residency in his chateau outside Paris while the French government tried unsuccessfully to find any African government that would offer him refuge.
* Quoted from the New York Times (June 8, 1980).
* Kenyatta’s English wife, Edna Grace Clarke, and son did not remain long in Kenya and returned to England. He also had three African wives, at different times, spending his final years with a dashing spouse named Ngina. He never divorced his previous wives.
* A German colony from 1891 until the end of World War I, Tanzania was originally known as Tanganyika. It gained its independence from Britain in 1961. Three years later Tanganyika and Zanzibar, a small island republic twenty miles off the coast, merged into a
single country called Tanzania.
† Zanaki translates as “Those who came with what?”
* Machel was killed in 1986, when his Soviet-piloted plane crashed inside South Africa on a flight from Zambia.
THE GHOST OF IDI AMIN
Hitler was right about the Jews, because the Israelis are not working in the interests of the people of the world, and that is why they burned the Israelis alive with gas in the soil of Germany.
—IDI AMIN,
former Ugandan president
THE DATE WAS JANUARY 25, 1971, and by the tens of thousands Ugandans poured into the streets of Kampala to celebrate the overthrow of their president, Milton Obote, a hard-drinking tyrant who had ruled the country since independence. The mastermind of the coup d’état had once been, as is often the case in African revolts, the president’s trusted ally. He was a military man who had worked his way up through the ranks, establishing rapport with his troops and keeping his distance from politics and ideology. “I am not a politician but a professional soldier,” the general said in his first address to the nation. “I am, therefore, a man of few words, and I have been brief throughout my professional career.” He went on to say that his was only a caretaker administration, that power would be transferred to a civilian government as soon as elections could be organized. Ugandans were relieved. Neighboring African countries were reassured. The West was pleased. Almost everyone, in fact, agreed that this new man, Idi Amin, would make a steady, decent president.
Idi Amin was forty-six years old then, a mountain of a man with a cheery disposition and an earthy, barracks-style sense of humor. He had a second-grade education and spoke the smatterings of five languages, but handled only his tribal tongue with any degree of fluency. His former commanding officer in the British army, Colonel Hugh Rogers, remembers him as “a splendid and reliable soldier and a cheerful and energetic man.” Others described Amin as a man with neither pretense nor ambition. What no one mentioned, though, was that Amin had all the qualities that make a dangerous leader in Africa: his instincts were primitive, his loyalties tribal, his orientation military.
Strange things started happening in Uganda almost from the day he took over. First, Brigadier General Suleiman Hussein, the army chief of staff and a potential rival to Amin, “disappeared.” Permanently. Then Uganda’s chief justice, Benedicto Kiwanuka, was dragged from his chambers in broad daylight by Amin’s soldiers and was never seen alive again. The vice chancellor of Makerere University also disappeared, and the beaten body of Amin’s personal physician was found dumped along a road. Bodies floated down the Nile and turned up by the hundreds in Mabira and Namanve forests. The prisons filled up and prisoners were forced to stand in line and beat each other to death with ten-pound sledge hammers; the last man was shot. Entire villages populated by the Lango and Acholi tribes, which had supported Obote, were wiped out. The screams emanating each night from Amin’s secret-police headquarters became so regular and so blood-curdling that the French ambassador, who lived next door, lodged a complaint, and his wife, unable to sleep for nights on end, returned to Paris. Cabinet ministers, university professors, Christians, Asians, Jews—almost everyone except Amin’s inner circle of Moslems and Kakwas—experienced the wrath of a man gone crazy with power, a man obsessed with reducing Uganda to the lowest common denominator, his own.
Ugandans coined a word—Aminism—to describe the terrible happenings in their country, and by the time the Aminisms ended in 1979, an estimated 300,000 Ugandans—or one Ugandan in every forty—were dead. The carnage was tantamount to murdering the entire population of Louisville, Kentucky. It was as though Amin had studied presidential protocol in Papa Doc’s Haiti or Pol Pot’s Cambodia. And in the process the Ugandan people learned how to survive but forgot how to feel. “Killing was so commonplace,” a grocer in Kampala told me, “that if you heard your brother had been picked up by the police, you knew that was the end of him. You’d say, ‘Too bad,’’ and you’d feel bad for a few days, then you’d just go back to work and forget about him.” A single human beast, as playful as a kitten, as lethal as a lion, had managed almost single-handedly to destroy a nation of 13 million people.
Eight years after the celebrations that marked Amin’s rise to power, Ugandans once again returned to the streets of Kampala in joyous revelry. Old friends embraced, and surprised to find the other alive, exchanged an eerie greeting: “You still exist!” Their nightmare was over. Amin—the nonpolitician who became president-for-life, the professional soldier who became a common murderer—had fled to Libya, chased from Uganda by a ragtag army of invading Tanzanians and a handful of Ugandan rebels. It was V-J Day in Times Square, African style, and standing there on the steps of the parliament building, among thousands of dancing, singing Ugandans, I thought I was witnessing the rebirth of a nation. I felt good for Uganda and good for Africa. If ever an African nation had a chance and a reason to set aside personal ambitions and tribal suspicions in order to reconstruct a heritage, Uganda did.
The sun had just broken through a heavy overcast in Kampala that afternoon, April 11, 1979, and from the shadows of Parliament House an elderly man stepped forward, removed his glasses, bowed his head and asked his gathered countrymen to pray silently “for those who have died at the hands of Idi Amin.” The crowd fell silent in prayer.
Yusufu L. Lule’s fingers fidgeted at the side of his blue safari suit as he prepared to take the oath as Uganda’s interim president. His eyes swept the crowd in Parliament Square and he spoke slowly, his voice quivering. The horror, he said, had ended. With the overthrow of Amin a new era of national reconciliation had begun. Lule, a distinguished academic who had come home from exile in London, stepped down and the throng went wild. They hugged, cheered, kissed and hoisted the Tanzanian soldiers to their shoulders, snaking through the parliament courtyard to the beat of drums. The leader of the Ugandan guerrillas, David Oyite-Ojok—who Amin once said was the “only man besides God” he feared—waved his rifle overhead as he was swept onto a mass of shoulders and a thousand voices joined in the country’s new national anthem: “O Uganda, the land of freedom, our love and labor we give …” In the distance a church bell sounded. Then another and another, until finally a clanging chorus from the steeples swelled through all Kampala.
“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.
