The road to Bulumbi massacre

Populist agenda. Former president Idi Amin drives in the streets of Kampala, Uganda with his soldiers as he waves to onlookers. FILE PHOTO

What you need to know:

Chilling. Forty six students were on April 26, 1979 massacred by Idi Amin’s soldiers after the regime was overthrown and the soldiers were fleeing.

Isaac Mufumba brings us the third piece of eye-witness accounts of what happened in the lead-up to the fateful day.

He unexpectedly makes a 180-degree turn and puts the index finger of his right hand across his lips.
Then using the index finger of his left hand, he pushes the lobe of his left ear forward. He is frantic. He wants me to listen attentively. I do, but cannot hear a thing.

“What is it?” I whisper.
“It is the sound of crying. The children who were killed normally cry out at around this point in time,” he whispers back in an early afternoon sun.
We continue walking down the footpath from Bulumbi Health Centre through a few maize gardens as I cast glances of disbelief and he of disappointment.

We eventually get back to the Busitema-Busia highway and make our way past a makeshift bicycle repair workshop and onto the verge of the road where sits a small monument that measures one-and-half metres tall and one metre wide.
The cement coating is greying and it is clear will peel off soon. The 35- year old monument could do with some sprucing if only to continue playing a relevant part in the narrative of the death 37 years ago of 46 young people who were gunned down in cold blood.
Two years later, on April 26, 1981, when the monument was unveiled, Education minister Prof Isaac Ojok, who represented President Milton Obote, and area MP Wilson Okwenje, who was also the Obote II Public Service minister, broke down wept on seeing the pile of bones.

On the monument are scripted the words: ‘In Memory of All The Gallant Youths Who Shed Their Blood Here at the Hands of the Murderous Amin’s Soldiers on 26th April 1979.’
Mr Charles Wafula, who along with his brother, Patrick Lumumba, and Mr Samson Mawero, were the only three students who miraculously survived the firing squad-type of killings and have lived to tell the story, says that during his speech, Prof Ojok promised the government would, in memory of the killings, pay compensation to each of the affected families and construct a Technical School or Secondary School in the area in memory of the dead.

Prof Ojok had also promised that government would every April 26 hold a memorial service in honour of the youngsters whose lives were cut short.
“The only thing we ever received were the plates of posho and few pieces of beef we were given on the day the monument was unveiled. The compensation did not come and the school was never built,” he says with an unmistakable tinge of bitterness.
Besides the monument is a eucalyptus tree that the community planted to mark off the mass grave in which the remains of the unclaimed were buried.
But Mr Wafula’s bitterness and the inscriptions on the monument do not tell the entire story of April 26, 1979, when different incidents in several places, but all related to the war that ousted Amin from office combined to inadvertently condemn the young souls to death.

Mr Fred Oundo, who was at the time a Senior II student of Rock High School in Tororo, was meant to have met his death on the same day, but he is alive thanks to a soldier who let him and five others out of captivity and let them go before the rest were taken out and killed.
He had from his hiding place in a deserted building on the Busia-Busitema road seen the bus belonging to Karim Bus Company leave town, but it appeared to be empty of any passengers.
“We did not know that they (students) had been forced to lie down in the bus,” he recalls.

The soldiers, who were under the command of Kikono, a soldier who was known for both his notoriety and a deformed left hand, which had led the community to nickname him Kikono, arrived in Bulumbi armed with Gewehr 3 (G3) rifles. The G3 is The G3 is a 7.62×51mm NATO battle rifle developed in 1956 by a German armament manufacturer. The rifles, which had ventilated hand guards butt stocks made from plastic or rubber, had also become the official weapons of the Uganda Army and Amin had on many occasions been caught on camera using the weapon during target practice sessions at firing ranges across the country.
One of the scariest bits about the G3 rifle was the sound of its shots. While most rifles have noise levels of between 155 and 157 decibels, the G3’s noise level stands out at 161 decibels, which is very scary, especially to the unarmed and untrained civilians.

Little wonder then that the wananchi fled their homes into the bushes once Kikono and his men arrived in Bulumbi, 16 kilometers from Busia town, and indulged in more than 10 minutes of rapid firing in the air before they embarked on their heinous mission.
The bus of death had begun its long drive to the students’ rendezvous with death in Mbale, picked up more passengers, mostly students in Tororo, before heading out towards Busia via a murram road that also passes by River Malaba.

Dison Mbakhulo, who was a Senior Executive Station Master of Tororo Railway Station and his cousin, Fred Oundo, were some of those who were on board. The bus was twice stopped at Buteba Sub-county headquarters and later around River Malaba before being commandeered to Busia Central Police Station.
After a brief torture session, all the captives were forced into different groups of men, students and women. The women were further split into groups of married and unmarried and those with children. The different groups were placed in different parts of the police station and subjected to different forms of torture.

One of the soldiers took pity on the youthful group and picked out five students from different parts of Busia and ordered them to leave. Among them was Fred Oundo, but no sooner had they left the station than they came across another group of soldiers, who ordered Oundo to carry a very huge battery towards the border with Kenya.
Back at the Police station, Lady Luck smiled on Mr Mbakhulo, as another soldier, who he personally did not know, came to his rescue.

“You man! I saw you in Tororo one day. Are you running away?” he asked.
“No. I am not running away. I am only going home on holidays. I had brought food to my school children in Tororo and I was going back home,” Mbakhulo answered.
The soldier ordered Mbakhulo to go pick up his shirt, shoes and other belongings and immediately leave the station, but like the case had been with his cousin, Fred Oundo, he ran into another batch of soldiers who ordered him back into the station.
After some brief haggling between the man who had set him free and those who had intercepted him, he was finally set free and, barefooted, he began on his homeward journey via the Busia-Majanji road.

At the other end of town, his younger cousin trudged along with the battery, but a few metres to the border, his captors came across on old man riding an old bicycle, which they grabbed and ordered him to put the battery on. They let Oundo go and ordered the old man to push the battery to its final destination.
Oundo was afraid of using the tarmac roads around the town for fear of coming across the soldiers. He made his way back to a deserted section and hid waiting for the flow of soldiers to reduce.
Mbakhulo had in the meantime managed to reach Dabani trading centre where he branched off to a mosque to take a break and let his feet recover from the strange experience of walking without the luxury of shoes.

Suddenly, he heard the staccato of gunfire and grenade explosions. A fratricidal fight had broken out between soldiers of the Uganda Army at Lwangosya/ Syangosya, at the border between Buhehe and Masaba sub-counties.
Some minutes later, several vehicles carrying some of the wounded passed through Dabani heading towards Busia town. Little did he know that the same group was heading out to Busia Police station from where they were to later bundle the 46 students onto the bus and lead them to their deaths.