by Tim Jeal
On 21 November 1969, after some heavy drinking around the time of his forty-fifth birthday, the kabaka collapsed in the evening, and was put to bed by Major Katende, who did not check up on him until several hours later when he was found to be dead. John Simpson, then a young BBC journalist, had seen Mutesa earlier in the day and would later declare that he had been sober and apparently in good health when he spoke to him. Although a coroner gave the cause of death as ‘alcohol poisoning’, Major Carr-Gomm stated that Mutesa was neither a heavy drinker nor an alcoholic and that he personally suspected that the kabaka had been poisoned. A young Ugandan policewoman, posing as a student, but working as a spy for Obote, had visited the kabaka’s flat several times during the preceding couple of weeks, but Carr-Gomm could not prove that she had ever been alone with Mutesa in order to administer a slow-acting poison. Lord Boyd, who had been Secretary of State for the Colonies at the time of the Kenyan Mau Mau rebellion, went with Carr-Gomm to ask Sir John Waldron, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, to launch an official inquiry, which he declined to do. The commissioner genuinely believed that the deeply unhappy kabaka had drunk himself to death. This was almost exactly a century after Speke had sat staring for an hour at his all-powerful grandfather in Mengo.
After a funeral in the Guards’ Chapel, Wellington Barracks, Mutesa was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery. Two years later, after Idi Amin’s coup against Obote, Amin offered the late kabaka a state funeral in Buganda, which his family accepted. So Mutesa II was exhumed and reburied with his ancestors at Kasubi. His family, and Carr-Gomm, who was the guardian of several of his children, attended the funeral and were struck by the irony of occasion. General Amin, who was orchestrating proceedings, would have killed Mutesa on the spot if he had caught him in his palace three years earlier.14
Mutesa II, kabaka of Buganda, at his coronation. He was known in
Britain as ‘King Freddie’.
In retrospect it is easy to see that Obote, and Amin after him, used the army to make themselves the sole inheritors of the all-powerful centralised colonial state. Obote abolished democracy, and all Uganda’s monarchies, after his coups of 1966 and 1967. An era of tyranny ensued. In time it would become clear that former princes and monarchs often made better rulers of independent states than the new African politicians like Kaunda, Nkrumah and Obote with their academic qualifications and scorn for the backwardness of kings and chiefs. Nelson Mandela, a Xhosa prince, Haile Selassie, the Ethiopian Emperor, and Seretse Khama of Botswana, who had come to the Tswana throne as a child, were all successful leaders.15
Uganda might have stood a better chance of good governance if Britain had given the kingdoms and territories something very close to autonomy. Clearly the Westminster-style first-past-the-post electoral system was wholly unsuited to Uganda’s realities. Only federal power-sharing would have had any chance of working.16 Yet with rulers like Obote and Amin determined to mobilise their northern ethnic support, which was concentrated in the army, it is hard to imagine any constitutional framework surviving their attempts to subvert it. Just as Obote had purged the army of Baganda officers and packed it with Acholi and Langi, Amin (from the north-west of the country) increased the number of West Nilers in the officer corps. To make room for these Lugbara and Kakwa, he liquidated many of Obote’s Acholi and Langi officers.17
Once the army had become an instrument of domestic politics, the nightmare predicted by Chinua Achebe in his prophetic novel, A Man of the People, came to pass and a succession of African leaders stole the state from the people and appropriated its assets for themselves. Richard Dowden, the Director of the Royal African Society, has dismissed the claim that Africa’s dictators have simply been imitating their former colonial masters. The dictators have real power, whereas the power of the British governors ‘was largely an illusion projected by display and ceremony’. European District Commissioners had typically ‘travelled their domain by bicycle’ wearing shorts and open-necked shirts. ‘Their successors as local governors in many parts of Africa today wear dark suits and travel in a black Mercedes Benz escorted by heavily armed military convoys. Anyone on a bicycle is driven into the ditch.’ Nor can the dictators excuse themselves because famous African rulers in history such as Shaka, Mzilikazi and Mirambo were tyrants. In pre-colonial days, the powers of lesser African chiefs had typically been limited by headmen and ngangas.18
After Amin’s fall in 1979, Obote returned to preside over five more years of chaos, persecution and civil war, which only ended when the Acholi/Langi alliance within the army unravelled and General Tito Okello, an Acholi, mounted a successful coup against Obote, becoming the first ever Acholi president. His ascendancy would not last a year. A canny and dashing guerrilla leader, Yoweri Museveni, understood far better than he how to make crucial alliances, and in January 1986 he toppled the Acholi generals and seized Kampala, where he was received as a liberator. For the Acholi, the victory of this southerner from Ankole was a disaster. Massacred by Idi Amin in the 1970s, and then back in favour under the returning Obote, the Acholi once again lived in fear – this time fear lest Museveni should decide to take revenge for massacres their soldiers had committed. According to Matthew Green, a journalist, who knows Acholiland well: ‘When Museveni’s followers marched north, burning granaries and executing civilians, many Acholi believed he planned to wipe them out.’19
Indeed annihilation seemed to be the ultimate fate which the Acholi had always been doomed to experience ever since being typecast a century earlier as ideal soldiers by British governors. Once again, Britain’s failure to give Baker’s Equatoria its own identity was punishing another generation of northern people for a sin not theirs. In the aftermath of Museveni’s victory there was widespread antagonism nationwide towards the northerners, who were often called Anyanya, an insulting expression deliberately implying that the Acholi and Langi were not Ugandans but southern Sudanese – as indeed, ethnically they were.20
As Museveni’s troops hunted down Okello’s soldiers, a number of rebel defence movements sprang up in Acholiland. One of these was led by an Acholi apprentice nganga with a wispy beard and sad eyes. The name of this 25-year-old was Joseph Kony, and his rebels would soon be called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Other rebel groups were defeated by Museveni’s troops but not Kony’s with its ostensible purpose of establishing a Christian theocratic government based on the Old Testament. To Kony’s rage, Acholiland did not rise up for him against Museveni, so he launched a campaign against Acholi ‘collaborators’ (in reality they were no such thing) abducting children and forcing them to commit unspeakable crimes against their own people. Noses and ears were cut off and people killed in cruel and barbarous ways. On several occasions, children were taken from Sir Samuel Baker School in Gulu, where Baker’s name was still honoured for driving away the slave-trading enemies of the Acholi.
In the mid-1990s, the Sudanese government armed and paid Kony to attack the ‘rebels’ in southern Sudan. Though these men were fighting for their beliefs and their country, and some were even Acholi, Kony nevertheless obliged the fundamentalists in Khartoum by attacking his own kith and kin. After this shameful episode, Kony’s LRA returned to ravage Acholiland afresh, abducting an estimated 30,000 children and displacing 1.6 million people by 2005.21 In his book about Joseph Kony, The Wizard of the Nile, Matthew Green blames Museveni for failing, with all the military assets at his disposal, to defeat Kony’s insurgents. Museveni often claimed in the press that ‘the bandits had been crushed’, when clearly they had not. Green blames him for prolonging the conflict for twenty years as a form of punishment for his northern enemies. Museveni never acknowledged the genuine grievances nursed by the Acholi. By 2003, 800,000 people, 70 per cent of Acholiland’s population, had been placed in camps by Museveni, supposedly for their protection from the LRA, although these government camps were regularly attacked by Kony’s men, and in them thousands of refugees died of disease.22 Since 2005 the situation has steadily improved with 80 per
cent of the internally displaced persons having returned home from the camps by 2010. The International Criminal Court issued a warrant for Kony’s arrest in October 2006, but he is still at large, probably in the northeastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo.23
The Ugandan north-south divide is no longer at the top of Yoweri Museveni’s list of intractable problems. He now faces a stern test in the south, which may, if he fails it, destroy his political future and tear Uganda apart. In 1993 he restored the monarchies of Toro, Bunyoro and Buganda, without returning to them the federal status they had enjoyed under the original 1962 constitution. Although Museveni allows individual candidates to stand at elections, they are not permitted to represent regional or political parties. This ‘no party system’ is very like a typical African ‘one party system’, and hands an immense advantage to the incumbent president. Despite this, Museveni has needed Buganda’s votes in three general elections and will need them again in future.24 As he is a southerner, the support of all the kingdoms and regions of the south has been vital for him politically, since he will never inspire anything but hatred from the north. His new problem is that King Freddie’s son, Kabaka Ronald Mutebi, who was enthroned eight years ago, is determined to regain Buganda’s federal status.
In September 2009, Kabaka Mutebi was forcibly prevented by the central government’s police from travelling to a youth rally within the borders of his own kingdom. This police action was seen as gross interference by Mutebi’s subjects. Riots broke out and twenty-seven people were killed and 600 arrested. Museveni claimed that the police had acted because Mutebi’s safety could not have been guaranteed at the rally. The Baganda found this laughable and feared that Museveni’s intervention in their affairs could presage even more unwelcome intrusions by the central state. Inevitably, there have been renewed demands for a federal Uganda with additional powers for Buganda’s parliament. In recent years Museveni has become, in one commentator’s words, ‘increasingly autocratic, running a patronage system favouring family members and loyal supporters and obstructing any real challenge to his rule – just like other Big Men’.25
For Museveni, giving in to Buganda would mean agreeing to a reduction in his presidential power, and would be a blow to national unity. His recently passed Land Bill has paved the way for the imposition of regional administrations. If introduced, these will leave the kingdom of Buganda without political power. So a bitter struggle in the south is likely. Whether Museveni will ultimately reprise Obote’s role, or whether he will seek a compromise with Uganda’s uniquely important monarchy remains to be seen. His victory in the February 2011 Presidential Election, despite allegations of vote rigging, will have strengthened his hand.26
Undoubtedly, the disastrous British decision to divide Equatoria between Uganda and Sudan still causes seismic reverberations in both countries – as does the whole colonial composition of both nation-states. However, it is also clear that their leaders have chosen their own paths, and have repeatedly rejected compromise. Britain should have stayed longer in Africa, should have spent more money and better prepared Sudan and Uganda for independence; but with the USSR describing all European colonial nations as imperialist exploiters of territories which, for the most part, made no money at all, the choice had been between getting out or staying and facing a nationalist guerrilla war financed by the Soviets. The Americans too – even before they had desegregated their own Southern schools – attacked colonial rule as an affront to human dignity. On the ground, British administrators felt that they were betraying Africans by leaving prematurely. But ‘one man one vote now’ was not an easy refrain to argue against in the Mother of Parliaments.
The colonisation of one other country was also part of the legacy of the Nile explorers. Speke’s and Grant’s visit to Uganda, and more especially Stanley’s, and his appeal for missionaries to come and live with the kabaka, had been essential links in the chain of causation that led to Lugard’s intervention on the side of the Protestants and to the subsequent declaration of a Ugandan Protectorate. Before 1900, British East Africa – the future Kenya – was seen primarily as the route to Uganda. But how could the cotton, ivory, tea and coffee of Uganda be transported to the coast, and European goods and personnel be carried in the reverse direction, without involving dangerous journeys of several months’ duration?
Obviously a railway would have to be built from Mombasa on the coast to Lake Victoria. This had been realised even in the 1880s. The Masai might have thwarted the building of the railway when it was stretching across the northern part of their grazing grounds, but thanks to British caution and to an incident known as the Kedong massacre, they decided to be cautious too. In a violent clash with a Kikuyu railway workers’ caravan and their Swahili porters in November 1895, the Masai killed nearly 600 men. An outraged Scottish trader and former employee of the British Imperial East Africa Company, Andrew Dick, who had happened to be encamped nearby, went with two French travellers and attacked the victors, shooting a hundred dead before he too was killed. He was very likely unaware that the caravan had been attacked in response to the rape of several Masai girls. But the predominant feeling of the famous Masai laibon, or religious leader, Lenana, was not anger but shock that three men had been able to kill so many of his warriors.27
The Uganda Railway, which William Mackinnon had dreamed of constructing, was built a few years after his death, between 1896 and 1901, and would eventually reduce the cost of transporting Ugandan cotton to the coast from a staggering £200 per tonne to one per cent of that.28 Its purpose was also to secure the headwaters of the Nile once and for all against all comers. Africans in the bush called the railway ‘the iron snake from the coast’, as if they intuitively understood that as well as bringing goods to the interior, it would suck resources, goods and people away from the periphery into the towns. When it proved impossible to persuade Africans to work on the railway (known as the ‘Lunatic Line’ because of its steep gradients) the British government remained determined to get it built somehow. With no concern for the long-term consequences, Lord Salisbury and his colleagues decided to risk altering the balance of East Africa’s population by introducing the 1896 Emigration Amendment Act which would permit a massive influx of Indian labourers and their families.
Forty thousand of them built the railway, laying 582 miles of track, constructing 162 bridges, digging 326 culverts and erecting 41 stations. Over a hundred were eaten by two lions – the famous man-eaters of Tsavo – which were shot after several anxious weeks by the chief engineer, J. H. Patterson, a tall, moustachioed young Englishman, whose diary describes the men’s refusal to go on working and his own desperation as he lay in the dark, ‘hearing the lions crunching the bones of their victims’. Unable to see the predators, he could hear them purring in thick undergrowth as they ‘licked the skin off, so as to get the fresh blood’.29 Eventually Patterson shot both lions, to the great joy of the work gangs. The Indians went on to prosper in business – so much so that in the post-independence era, they would be discriminated against in Kenya and expelled from Uganda as an entire community by Idi Amin.30 Britain took in 30,000 Ugandan Asians in the 1970s with a further 10,000 being accepted by various European countries and by the USA and Canada.
While the Indians had become the businessmen of East Africa, causing tensions in the wider community as well as creating employment and prosperity, the other great unintended consequence of the railway was its immense £5.5 million cost to the British taxpayer. Could any of this money be recouped for the Treasury? With Africans reluctant to sell their labour, economic growth and taxes could not be expected to come from their labour for many years. The solution chosen by the colonial authorities was to encourage white settlers to come out and start farming. They could then be taxed and would bring new spending power to the country. Kenya with its elevated Rift Valley – the White Highlands – was considered more suitable for European settlement than Uganda and other equatorial countries, so large numbers were expected to a
rrive. They did not. Although by 1914 only 5,500 settlers had come (and by 1923 10,000), both the Masai and the Kikuyu would be dispossessed of about 60 per cent of their land. It would be this more than anything else which, as the historian Piers Brendon has put it, ‘kindled a slow-burning anger that would eventually burst into flame’.31
If Uganda had not contained the source of the Nile, it would have lost all its value for Lord Salisbury, and there would have been no Protectorate. In that event there would have been no need for Britain to create Kenya Colony and build the Uganda Railway. It was to pay for the Lunatic Line that white settlers had been summoned, and if there had been no settlers, ultimately there would have been no Mau Mau rebellion and no brutal suppression of it. Before that, the colony’s administration had been caught for decades in a political stalemate – with the settlers’ opposition to all political change making it impossible for the civil servants to push on with Kenya’s development.32 Yet, despite the Uganda railway’s unintended legacy, an independent Kenya would become one of Africa’s most successful states, surviving not thanks to oil or diamonds, but through the intelligence, work ethic, education and entrepreneurial skills of its people.33
