Amin killed Luwum, Kiwanuka, Kalimuzo, Theresa Nanziri - but they didn’t ‘die’

Last weekend marked the 42nd anniversary of the murder of the Archbishop of the Church of Uganda Janani Luwum by military ruler Idi Amin’s security agents.
Many accounts claim that Luwum was shot by Amin himself, on February 16, 1977, and his body placed in a staged car crash, but that has never been established. Besides, like many dictators, information indicates that Amin liked to sub-contract the dirty and bloody side of his business to loyalists.

Beside, killing in dictatorships is a patronage vehicle. If you kill for the big man, he owes you, and the fact that you know where the bodies are buried gives you some power over him. Also, if you are the chief’s executioner, it gives you clout over the other people in the system, who fear you, and you leverage that to profit yourself. In a time when there was extreme scarcity of goods, as during Amin’s time, it was bread and butter, because it got you ahead of the queue in getting essential commodities.

Soon, it will be 40 years since the ouster of Amin in April 1979. The death at the hands of Amin’s agents of Luwum, and others like Makerere University Vice Chancellor Frank Kalimuzo, Chief Justice Ben Kiwanuka, and Africa Hall warden Theresa Nanziri Bukenya, to name a few, seems to be so long ago, we now have the growth of Amin revisionism. It is common to hear people say and write online, that the “economy was better under Amin than under President Yoweri Museveni”, or that “Museveni’s government is worse than Amin’s”.

A lot of it is driven by spite, and it is a sharp slap in the face for Museveni and his government to be compared less favourably to Amin. But nothing could be further from the truth. Even at its worst, I do actually think the Museveni government is still better than Amin’s at its best.
The reason these comparisons persist is that Museveni’s 33-year authoritarian, and lately very corrupt and sectarian rule, is enough to embitter many, otherwise, levelheaded people into losing perspective. But also, there is really no decent Amin scholarship and, generally, history writing is almost dead in Uganda. It is hard to find writing with the gentle intelligence and evenness of mind that is the hallmark of Lwanga Lunyigo, or the memorable and colourful irreverence of Akena Adoko.

It is rare to encounter a work on Amin that resists the temptation to delve into the macabre tales about him keeping heads of his victims in the State House fridge, which was unlikely.
But also, people were probably too traumatised to note the popular and understandable expressions of that difficult period, that are still with us, and we don’t question them. Take two uniquely Ugandan “inventions”, both with roots in the Amin period, and which eventually spread to other parts of the continent, starting with Kenya.

There is the kafunda, a small off-licence intimate drinking place. It was born of scarcity. If you got an allocation of beer (maybe two or three crates), you couldn’t put it out in the open, as it would be finished in minutes. Secondly, because it was scarce, you charged up to twice and more the official price. And you would be arrested, and probably killed, if you were caught doing that. Therefore, you had to sell the beer in a hidden or private space where you and your clients were bound by a common trust. You offered them a rare and valued commodity, and in turn they were willing to pay higher and be discreet. Over time, a bond developed, in much the same way it develops openly today among fans of a football club in a sports club. And, at a wider level, part of this played out in the Ugandan habit of drinking on the verandah. Until 1971, Ugandans drank “properly” inside a bar.

It was disappearances that changed that. People started drinking on verandah so they could see Amin’s goons coming to arrest someone, and sometimes he was tipped off and fled. Or, if they were unlucky, and were seized, at least many people would see as the victim was bundled into the boot of a car and taken away. Your family would receive the grim news; bamututte (they took him), and begin looking for your body in Namanve Forest, River Nile, or Lake Victoria. These defences continued into Obote II.

It was not a consolation, but at least they would know why you didn’t, and would never, return home, and that at some point they had to stop waiting and hoping. When Kenya got bad in the 1980s and early 1992s, they adopted the same survival mechanisms. Today, it is the cool thing to have an outdoor drinking place. Maybe the young ones would be more thoughtful, if they knew that it grew out of a place of pain.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is the publisher of Africa data.
visualiser Africapedia.com and explainer site. Roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3