On the deaths of Mayanja Nkangi, Maumbe, and why they mattered

On Monday, Joash Mayanja Nkangi, a good Ugandan, who served his country in dozens of roles, including Buganda Katikkiro in the 1960s, and more lately minister of Finance, died at the age of 85. I liked Nkangi a lot. As a young journalist, he had a lot of time for me and we became friends.
Exactly a week earlier, someone who I also first got to know as a journalist, (Jack) Maumbe Mukhwana died, aged 78. Maumbe too was many things. He was a freedom fighter. Was with (President) Yoweri Museveni in the anti-Amin Front for National Salvation (FRONASA). He served in the post-Amin National Resistance Council, was deputy minister in Obote II, and also Resident District Commissioner after Museveni and NRM took power.
On the face of it, the two men could not be more different. Nkangi was a conservative politician, in the ideological sense. Maumbe was a leftist. Nkangi was gregarious. Maumbe was taciturn. What interests me today, however, is what the two men represented and what their deaths mean.
I had just returned to Uganda a few days when the July 1985 coup d’éta against Obote II government happened. Kampala was dead, so I was sitting around at my brother’s house in Mbuya when now-FDC man Wafula Oguttu arrived. The Sapoba Press supremos (then Bidandi Ssali and Kintu Musoke) were restarting Weekly Topic and they had heard rumours I was back in town. They were rounding up anyone who had had anything to do with Weekly Topic to restart it. I had been involved with it while a student at Makerere University.
The rest, as they say, is history.
The Tito Okello regime, seeking to find legitimacy, and faced with an NRA energised by the anti-Obote coup, rushed to appoint several influential political figures in the Military Council government.
Bidandi was appointed minister of Sports and Culture! Nkangi was appointed minister of Labour. And, in what was to be an endless source of scoops for us on the Nairobi peace talks, Sam Kutesa as Attorney General.
The next six months, the NRA slowly closed in on Kampala.
One day Bidandi said I should go and meet Nkangi in his Labour ministry office and talk about how a new Ugandan constitutional order might be crafted. So I did.
Outside everything was falling apart, but a calm Nkangi offered me tea in Victorian chinaware, stirred with gleaming antique teaspoon! He wore a pin-striped three-piece suit, and his whiskers were marvelously coiffured.
My reading of history had left me with the impression that Nkangi was, how shall we put it, a “Buganda nationalist” (i.e. ethnic champion).
My surprise then was to discover that he wasn’t. He was Anglophile and deeply conservative, in the ideological sense.
In a meeting that lasted over two hours, Nkangi lectured me on the virtues of small government and why we should never trust in men, but laws. He explained why decentralisation was what Uganda needed.
And, of course, on how people should work hard, and those who succeeded should enjoy the fruits of their labour without the state overtaxing or seizing it in a socialist binge. Classic conservative orthodoxy.
The thing is that even by 1985, if someone like Nkangi made that argument, many people would hear it as a claim to Buganda privilege not a case for the free market and limited government.
It was only with the liberal economic reforms of 1988, that such argument made by southern landed gentry were freed of their baggage, and seen as legitimate political philosophy in Uganda.
Nkangi, then, was among the last, pure conservative political theoretician in Uganda.
Maumbe, on the other hand, was a statist. He believed that for everyone to enjoy the benefits of citizenship, the State had to put a finger on the scale.
Maumbe believed that the State should be organised to benefit the masses, the peasants, not the owners of small and big capital, as Nkangi would have it.
Still, the two men were not different. Being a fellow from the mountains, Maumbe’s mindset was partly shaped by the arduous labour he witnessed peasants undertaking to produce some of the best coffee in Africa on the slopes of Mt Elgon.
Unlike in the southern plains, on the mountains, you need collective effort to eat. Solo efforts won’t get you far.
It would have been surprising if Maumbe, therefore, didn’t privilege labour. There were other factors at play, but now we partly begin to understand why Maumbe was taciturn, and Bugisu gave us other radicals like late Dani Nabudere, and in the 1960s Mbale was one of the hotspots of Marxist thought in Uganda.
Nkangi and Maumbe represented different faces of a same Ugandan coin. Understandably, then, I was disappointed that there was no Wikipedia entry for either Maumbe or Nkangi when I checked!
Onyango-Obbo is the publisher of Africa data visualiser Africapedia.com and explainer site Roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3