Christmas peace, happy New Year Uganda: You were gone for long!

Today is December 18. In a week, Christians will observe the birth of Jesus Christ, and we will all holiday until the New Year.

Christ’s birth date is a little like that of our own President Museveni’s, which was officially set decades later considering a series of events and stories told around the time of his birth.

Christ’s was likely September, but December 25th was chosen because, we learn, it was already popular in pagan religious celebrations as the birthday of the sun.

I must say I kind of like this Museveni and Jesus approach to birthdays, because it allows you to locate it in a socially significant moment. What use it is being born at 3am when it is raining heavily outside, and no one, not even thieves, are doing anything? How can a serious person enter the world like that?

Let’s digress. The point of this is that, especially if you are lucky to be paid before December 20, the last two weeks of the month in Uganda are mostly chill these days. This boring and or peaceful December is a relatively new thing for us.

Consider that Frederick Lugard, British soldier, mercenary, explorer, and colonial administrator who was a pivotal chap in the British imperial enterprise, arrived in Kampala on December 18, 1890.

A story in the Daily Monitor in March 2012, part of the paper’s “Uganda at 50” series, said Lugard “arrived in the company of 50 Sudanese soldiers, 70 Somali soldiers and 270 porters.

“He did not carry any of the customary presents for the Kabaka [Buganda king] but had with him an old and functional Maxim gun which…had changed the dynamics of warfare wherever it had been introduced to conflicts on the continent.

“Where other foreign visitors had politely asked the Kabaka for permission and land on which to set up their homes, Lugard picked a choice spot on present-day Old Kampala Hill and set up his camp, overlooking Mwanga’s palace at Mengo.

“Then he sent word – not permission – across the valley to Mengo that he was now ready to see the king.”

He would try to use “kifuba” to get Mwanga to sign an agreement effectively giving away his kingdom. The staunchly nationalist Mwanga refused.

But being a man who understood power and was fascinated by adversaries who projected strength, we are told that “Mwanga was [nevertheless still] impressed by Lugard’s confidence.’’

You will notice that in the 1890s, we already had Somalis arriving in Uganda, and another wave of Sudanese, the latter following on the earlier ones who arrived with Samuel Baker in northern Uganda in 1869. And, also, why neighbouring Kisenyi became the main village of early generation Somalis in Kampala. (The other was in Karamoja).

All those factors came to impact Uganda significantly. Also, note that Lugard had been appointed Military Administrator of Uganda not by the British government, but a company, the Imperial British East Africa Company. The IBEAC was set up, to use today’s language, to monetise British colonialism.

Eighty-two years later, on December 18, 1972 military ruler Idi Amin nationalised 41 foreign-owned farms and tea estates, including several British ones.

He was bringing down the curtain on the expulsion of Asians and seizure of their businesses that had started in August 1972.

The political and economic ripples of that are still being felt today.
Eight years down the road, Uganda held the controversial December 1980 election, on the back of which Milton Obote and the UPC controversally stole their way back to power.

The moment when it all came down was on December 18, 1980, when the Commonwealth Election Observer mission announced that, in its view, the election had been largely free and fair.

Museveni, who had lost his deposit in the election as the Uganda Patriotic Movement presidential candidate, weeks later took to the bush to begin the war that brought him to power in January 1986.

He’s still firmly with us, cutting a “capitalist”-civilian-military figure not too dissimilar to Lugard’s – but our Lugard.

Before he could become president, Museveni had to deal with the 1985 peace talks between his rebels and the Military Council of the Okello generals, who had deposed Obote a second time on July 27, 1985.

The peace talks were held in Nairobi under the chairmanship of then President Daniel arap Moi between August 26, 1985 and December 17, 1985 when it was signed.

As a young eager journalist then, we didn’t celebrate Christmas in 1985. The peace agreement had unraveled. We were keeping a war watch.

This year, I will be bird watching (got myself a new set of binoculars), counting butterflies, reading Malcolm Gladwell, and eating “magira” in the quiet of a village in Tororo.

Ah, December in Uganda, how mellow you have become!

Mr Onyango-Obbo is curator of the “Wall of Great Africans” and publisher of explainer site Roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3