The Africans

by David Lamb

  The roads cracked and filled with potholes; the factories closed; the wildlife herds were machine-gunned by soldiers for meat and ivory; the coffee plantations stood idle; Mulago Hospital became a scandal, its toilets stopped up, its water taps dry, its sixty-bed wards jammed with three times that many patients and filled with rats, cockroaches, lice, fleas and bedbugs. The country’s sixteen psychiatrists—along with as many as 100,000 other Ugandans—went into exile, the rural health clinics closed, the tourist industry evaporated.

  Even in its dying days, Kampala was a lovely city, laced with tree-lined avenues, waving palms and municipal gardens. The skyline was dominated by the sixteen-story International Hotel and a fine mosque. The Anglican and Roman Catholic cathedrals stood atop two of Kampala’s hills, and on a third, Kasubi Hill, were the tombs of four kabakas, including King Freddie, whose body Idi Amin had had exhumed in England and flown home to Uganda in an early attempt to win Buganda backing. On the sides of the hills, just a five-minute drive from the downtown square, were some of the most gracious suburbs in all Africa, their stately mansions covered with ivy and set back from the road, surrounded by gardens that seemed always in bloom. There were sidewalk cafés such as Chez Joseph to enjoy on warm summer nights, frequent choral and dance performances at the National Theater, and the campus grounds of Makerere University were as pleasant and as pampered as those of any rural American college.

  If you had flown over Kampala in a helicopter, the capital would have looked as tranquil and attractive and everyday normal as, say, Medford, Oregon. It was only on ground level that you realized what was happening. In the shop windows were impressive stacks of cans of paint, cartons of small electric appliances, boxes of liquor; but the contents all had been emptied and the displays were only a façade. The 300-room International Hotel—formerly called the Apolo, Obote’s middle name—looked like any Holiday Inn, but the restaurant served only bread and instant coffee. The electrical generators had broken down and guests huffed up fourteen flights of stairs by matchlight. The water system was out of service too, and if you wanted to take a bath, you pulled the fire hose down the corridor and filled your tub from the emergency tank on the roof. The performances ended at the National Theater; waiters in white jackets stood in the cafés with soiled napkins over their arms but with no customers to serve; the large clock in Independence Square stopped, ticking off not a second over the course of several years.

  Amin’s Entebbe State House on the shores of Lake Victoria—the Ugandan equivalent of the White House—appeared immaculate outside to passers-by. Inside, though, sofas were covered with cigarette-burn holes, drapes had been pulled off the windows, beer bottles cluttered the closets, grease covered the kitchen floor and bullet holes dotted the ceiling of the living room, where Amin regularly used to blast away with his revolvers to summon his staff.

  The worse things became in Uganda, the more adaptable and accepting the Ugandans seemed to become. If there was no food in the stores, they picked fruit and ate steamed, mashed bananas, which are served with local spices and are known as matoke. If the phones didn’t work, they did their business in person. If friends and relatives died for making ill-chosen comments, they became silent. If there was no public transportation to get them to their city jobs, they walked. They did so without complaint or apparent anger. “Shauri ya Mungu,” they said—Swahili for “It’s God’s will.” To a Westerner, such fatalism might be dismissed as passivity. But there is more to it than that. Like so many Africans, the Ugandans had lost control of their lives. They lived in a feudal-style system in which one’s well-being depended on an allegiance to a man or a group of tribal barons, and that attachment did not include the right to question. The tradition of giving all power to a village chief, the era of colonialism, and the repressiveness of men like Obote and Amin had taught them obedience, even servitude. They had learned the art of survival.

  Tragically, Amin would not have lasted as long as he did if Africa had had the courage to isolate him, and if the East and West had cared less about their own interests and more about Uganda’s. But Libya helped train Amin’s army and sent military advisers and civilian technicians. Saudi Arabia promised Amin $2 million in the dying days of his regime in the name of Islamic brotherhood. The Palestine Liberation Organization provided personal bodyguards as a reward for Amin’s anti-Israeli ravings. Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh sent university professors for Makerere, doctors for Mulago, engineers and other professionals. The Soviet Union gave sophisticated weapons, East Germany trained the secret police.

  The West’s interests were economic. The United States—which to its credit did institute a trade embargo shortly before Amin was toppled—was for years the biggest purchaser of Uganda coffee. Western companies supplied the country with petroleum. Britain, Uganda’s largest trading partner, sold Amin everything from radio technology to drugs to military uniforms. It was not until Amin ordered the murder of Uganda’s Anglican archbishop and two senior cabinet ministers in 1977—Amin said they died in a car accident—that world opinion turned solidly against the man who had once seemed such a good-natured oaf.

  Amin was facing pressures at home, too, at the time he killed the archbishop. His army was restless, and tribal fighting broke out in the barracks. Amin needed to put his soldiers to work. The solution he came up with was to start a war. On October 30, 1978, the Ugandan army invaded northwest Tanzania, annexing 710 square miles without opposition. The occupation, Amin announced, was “a record in world history,” completed in the “supersonic speed of twenty-five minutes.” Julius Nyerere responded that Amin was a “snake” mentally damaged by syphilis. He summoned his generals and ordered a counterattack. The initial results were a case study in how not to wage war.

  The first day the Tanzanians mistakenly shot down three of their own planes. A week later the counteroffensive had to be halted entirely because no one was sure where the ammunition stockpiles were. One Tanzanian battalion never got the word of the delay and headed off for Rwanda, planning to veer north into Uganda. But the unit got lost in the Rwandan forests and wandered for days, unable to find its way either into Uganda or back to Tanzania. Most of the Tanzanian military vehicles broke down, so the generals had to commandeer buses, Land-Rovers and cars in Dar es Salaam, 850 miles from the front. The convoy finally got rolling. Many of the vehicles ran out of gas en route. The soldiers abandoned them and finished the journey on foot.

  When the two armies at last caught up with each other a few weeks later, there was little enthusiasm for any fighting. Soldiers just set up camp on either side of the Kagera River. Nyerere, though, was determined to complete the job, and in the spring of 1979 he brought the twenty-eight Ugandan exile and liberation groups to a conference in Moshi, Tanzania. They included Marxists and monarchists, socialists and capitalists, tribalists and nationalists, men who were united only in their resolve to rid Uganda of Amin. Nyerere scraped together a 50,000-man people’s militia, composed largely of illiterate youths pulled off the streets and out of the bush. It was more a mob than an army, for its members had no rank and little training, but together with a handful of Uganda rebels they pushed north, crossed the Kagera River and moved into Uganda. Amin’s soldiers—supposedly the best armed and trained in East Africa—threw down their weapons at the first sound of gunfire and fled. Several hundred Libyan soldiers, dispatched to Uganda by Colonel Muammar Qaddafy in an eleventh-hour attempt to save Amin, took up the front-line positions around Kampala. They broke and ran too, and the capital fell without a battle. Amin escaped on a military flight to Tripoli, and Yusufu L. Lule stepped out of the shadows of parliament to speak about the new beginning that was never to be.

  Uganda no longer exists today as a viable nation. It has disintegrated into a cluster of tribal states. Its cities have become frontier towns, terrorized by bandits who will kill for a Seiko watch. Its government is a collection of outcasts and misfits serving only themselves. Most of the bright young Ugandans who came home after Amin’s ov
erthrow already have returned to exile. There was nothing left to rebuild. The economy, the governmental infrastructure, the spirit of reconciliation had all been destroyed. The Ugandans had committed national suicide and by the summer of 1983, upwards of 200 people a day—most of them women and children—were dying as government troops and antigovernment guerrillas leveled villages, ambushed buses, shot up churches, raided houses and did their utmost to make sure the legend of Idi Amin was not forgotten.

  I telephoned Amin one day that summer at his modest villa outside Jidda, Saudi Arabia. He was living on a dole from the Saudis, did his own sweeping and cooking—“I’m an excellent chef now,” he said—and spending his ample free time studying Islam. Every Friday he prayed at Mecca or Medina, unrecognized in his Muslim robes and lost among the crowds. Wherever he went, he carried a satchel filled with world maps which he would spread on a table when he wanted to discuss a particular region.

  “I’ll tell you this,” he told me. “I have studied a lot here, and I am convinced that democracy is much better than being—what is it the press called me?—a dictator. People in the United States and the United Kingdom have the freedom to express themselves. This teaches me a good lesson.

  “That’s what Uganda needs—democracy. Of course, I can see that democracy would not work immediately in Uganda. It would take two or three years. Security is very bad there now, and there are many problems. But a tough person with military knowledge like me could teach the people discipline and prepare them for democracy.

  “I think you will see from this example that I was not responsible for what went on. Obote is in power now, right? Can anyone say that he himself is killing all those people? No. I found myself in that same particular situation.

  “The problems in Uganda are tribal, economic, selfishness. Obote should sit down with me and the opposition, and we could discuss Uganda’s problems. But this Obote man”—and on the phone line from Jidda there was an impish chuckle—“he is very afraid of me. If he even heard my voice on the telephone, he would be scared.”

  Uganda raises many troubling questions. Is it an isolated case or is all Africa destined to follow the same course of self-destruction? Can Uganda ever recover? What should the role of the West be? What lessons should Africa have learned from watching the sorry spectacle of a prosperous country fall a millennium behind the times?

  To be sure, Uganda represents the ultimate horror of what a tribalistic, misled, primitive country can become. But it would be unfair to say that Uganda has any more lessons for Africa than Northern Ireland does for Europe. The failing is a human one, for no continent has a patent on the injustices man inflicts on man. Africa produced Amin, but Europe gave us Hitler. Uganda, a nation for only two decades, dug its own grave; Cambodia, part of a great empire dating back eleven hundred years, dug a bigger one. The lessons of Uganda are for all mankind, not just for Africa.

  Because of its great agricultural potential, Uganda has an economic base that could be revived with foreign assistance. That alone holds out hope that Uganda could, in a generation or two, forge some kind of meaningful nationhood. Recovery, though, can never begin until the Ugandans themselves are given control of their national destiny and the Obotes and Nyereres retire to the sidelines.

  A first step in this direction would be to bring in a foreign peacekeeping force—from the United Nations, the British Commonwealth or Africa itself—to supervise fair elections, an exercise Uganda clearly is incapable of handling on its own. The country should be disarmed, and a new army reflecting a tribal balance should be formed. Only then can tribalism be diminished, for until all thirteen major Ugandan tribes believe they have a stake in their country’s political and economic future, there can be no Ugandan nation. Uganda had this opportunity when Lule became president and Julius Nyerere took it away in imperial style. But Africa is a land of second chances, and the choice is still Uganda’s.

  The United States and other Western powers quite wisely curtailed their promised financial assistance when Uganda’s rulers started playing musical chairs. To invest a nickel in Uganda, other than that needed for emergency food and medicine, would have been to throw good money after bad. This was not the time to build dams or repair roads. To think that Uganda’s problems could be solved with money was about as foolish as giving King Freddie another bottle of whiskey to cure his alcoholism. Uganda is a derelict and no one can get it to the rehabilitation center but the Ugandans themselves.

  One afternoon before Obote’s return to the presidency, I stood on the patio of a young accountant’s home, talking about the demise of Uganda. I remembered how good I had felt when Lule took office, and I now knew I had been naïve. Uganda had individual concerns more pressing than national integrity. There was, it seemed, nothing any outsider could do to alter the inevitable. I suddenly felt detached, as if I had been walking through the Bowery in New York and knowing that that alien world belonged to no one but the unfortunates who inhabited it.

  I asked Richard Mulondo, the accountant, how it had all happened. He had no explanation for the past, he said. But what he did know was that the present was terrifying. He had sold some of his furniture to get food—he was still working but the Uganda shillings he earned were worthless—and at night he and his family slept in the backyard, wrapped in newspapers. They armed themselves with machetes and they took turns standing guard, ready to flee at the sound of a breaking twig or a whispered word. Kampala belonged to the thugs with guns. As we talked, a yellow dump truck moved slowly along the street. It was full of corpses and on its door someone had scrawled in red: “Kampala City Body Removal.”

  Mulondo watched the truck stop. Two men sauntered out of the cab, picked a body off the curb and flung it onto the pile of corpses. It bounced off and tumbled back onto the pavement. The men grumbled and tossed it on again. This time it stayed and the truck moved on. Mulondo remained silent for several moments. Finally he asked, “What can you say except that Amin turned us all into savages?” Then he went inside and locked the door.

  * The kingdom is Buganda, the people are Baganda, their language is Luganda.

  * By the summer of 1982, Binaisa was back in New York, trying to resume his legal practice. Lule had returned to his exile home in London.

  † Obote’s people were in firm control of the ruling Military Commission. Even before the Ugandans cast their first ballot, the electoral commission simply awarded seventeen seats in parliament to Obote’s Uganda People’s Congress Party. When early returns showed Obote trailing, the chairman of the Military Commission, Paulo Muwanga—a front man for Nyerere and Obote—announced that he alone would count the ballots and decide the validity of the election. Two days later Obote was declared the winner.

  * Amin gave the Asians’ shops and businesses to his army cronies. As happened in Zaire, many of them simply sold the existing stocks and closed up permanently. The Asians were never compensated for the loss of their businesses.

  IN SEARCH OF UNITY

  These summits are a waste of time. All anyone does is talk. Sometimes, sitting there, listening to all the talk, I think I will scream.

  —PRESIDENT EL HADJ OMAR BONGO OF GABON

  EVERY SUMMER in early July, fifty men who hold the world’s riskiest political jobs gather in an African city to discuss the affairs of the continent. This is the annual summit of the Organization of African Unity, and for the heads of state it provides a forum to confront—or more often, side-step—the immense problems retarding Africa’s development: war and famine, superpower intervention and border disputes, failing economies, inadequate leadership, ideological differences, human rights violations, political instability, soaring birth rates. The meeting starts with brotherly embraces and pledges of unity and ends three days later with the presidents and generals flying home in a huff, having accomplished little except the denunciation of apartheid in South Africa, and having found no consensus other than agreeing to disagree.

  “Trying to get these people to agree on anyth
ing,” said Sir Harold Walter, the foreign minister of Mauritius, after one OAU summit sesson, “is like trying to play a violin by pissing on it.”

  The OAU was founded in 1963 roughly along the lines of the United Nations. All African states, except white-ruled South Africa, are members.* In the ideal, the OAU gives black and Arab Africa an opportunity to speak with a single voice and provides a forum to study and resolve African problems. Among the purposes stated in its charter are the “total advancement” of the African peoples through political and economic development, the eradication of colonialism in all its forms, and the promotion of African unity. It is an important marketplace for the exchange of ideas, and however few its achievements thus far—its major one is simply to have survived—it does hold out hope that all Africa one day may move with a common resolve to right the injustices and inequities of past and present.

  Unlike the United Nations, though, the OAU has no Security Council and no provisions to give its decisions teeth. It must depend on persuasion rather than punishment, or consensus through cooperation rather than correction through condemnation. Its authority is all but crippled by a charter clause stipulating that member states cannot interfere in each other’s internal affairs. The intention is a good one, but by interpreting the clause literally, African leaders have denied the OAU any mechanism to settle wars, impose sanctions, pressure barbaric rulers or encourage unity.

  When President Idi Amin kills upwards of 300,000 Ugandans, as he did between 1971 and 1979; when six wars engulf Africa, as they did in 1981; when Ethiopia stuffs its jails with 30,000 political prisoners, then the OAU’s loudest response is silence. To speak out, individually or collectively, would be internal interference, violating an unwritten code in the fraternity of Africa’s presidents: Leave me alone to run my country the way I want, and I’ll leave you alone to do the same; that way we’ll both stay in power a lot longer.