A frightened president, courageous magistrate and the case against Neogy and Mayanja

Dear Tingasiga;
The arrest, 50 years ago, of Rajat Neogy, the editor of Transition, and Abubakar Kakyama Mayanja, a Ugandan parliamentarian, was collateral damage from a struggle for control of the ruling Uganda Peoples Congress that had started within two years of independence. This struggle had culminated in the coup d’état of 1966 and a highly unstable post-coup environment in which the country was under informal civilian-military rule.

It was in this milieu that Mayanja, the MP for Kyagwe North East, wrote a brilliant critique of the 1967 Constitution Proposals, which was published in Transition (No. 32, August September 1967). It was a masterpiece of legal argument, an example of outstanding literary exposition and an attempt to elevate the political debate that had been under siege since the events of 1966. Mayanja warned against the unchecked concentration of power in the presidency, creating a one-man dictatorship, and the Detention Act.

However, that critique was not what sent him to jail. Indeed, instead of punitive measures against Mayanja, Naphtali Akena Adoko, the chief of the civilian intelligence service, wrote a long response in Transition (No. 33, October-November 1967). It was a spirited defence of the new Constitution that had been promulgated on September 8, 1967. Mayanja was left alone.
What triggered the imprisonment of Mayanja and Neogy was an article by Picho Ali in Transition No. 36 (July 1968).

Picho Ali was a 27-year-old Russian-trained lawyer, who was working as the secretary for research in the president’s office. In his article titled, Ideological Commitment And The Judiciary, Ali argued against the normative school of jurisprudence, which viewed the law as independent of the political milieu.

Instead, he argued that the Judiciary needed to “conform with the aspirations and ideological orientation of the new state” and to be “a dynamic and revolutionary institution.”
Ali then took issue with the control of the Uganda High Court by non-Africans. “There have already come to light a number of incidents, which prove that the presence of expatriates as judges in our courts is to some notable degree, a manifestation of the absence of decolonisation in those organs of the state,” Ali wrote.

Ali’s article stirred up a hornet’s nest. The next issue of Transition (No. 37, September-October 1968) carried five long letters to the editor, all of them very critical of Ali’s article. Four of the writers were J. W. Onyango, a Kisumu-based lawyer, Eriya T. Kategaya, a law student at University College, Dar es Salaam, Dani Wadada Nabudere, a Mbale-based lawyer and political scientist, and John Wycliffe Kazoora, a famous Kampala lawyer. Kazoora pulled no punches in his scholarly argument that despatched Ali’s paper as the work of one who did not understand key legal concepts and the Ugandan judicial system.

The last letter was penned by Mayanja who, like the others, observed that the Government of Uganda seemed to be quite happy to retain the colonial laws, especially those “designed by the colonial regime to suppress freedom of association and expression.”
However, Mayanja’s offensive paragraph that sent him to jail addressed the delayed Africanisation of the High Court. In a not-so-subtle charge of tribal prejudice, Mayanja wrote:

“I do not believe the rumour circulating that the Judicial Service Commission has made a number of recommendations in this direction, but that appointments have for one reason or another, mostly tribal considerations, not been confirmed. But what is holding up the appointment of Ugandan Africans to the High Court?”
Obote struck back on October 18, 1968. Neogy and Mayanja were incarcerated and charged with “seditious intention of bringing into hatred or contempt or exciting disaffection” against the president and against the government. Their trial, which began on Thursday, January 9, 1969 was a dramatic battle of legal titans of the period.

Heard by Chief Magistrate Mohammed Saied, a Kenyan Asian, the prosecution was led by Godfrey Lukongwa Binaisa QC, the former attorney general of Uganda. Mayanja’s defence was led by Sir Dingle Foot QC, a distinguished jurist and former solicitor general for England and Wales. Neogy’s defence was led by Byron Georgiadis, a Greek-Kenyan who was one of East Africa’s most celebrated criminal defence lawyers.

In his judgment, Mohammed Saied agreed that the policy of Africanisation was a matter of public concern and its delay caused reasonable grievance. He held that the law of sedition did not encourage the creation of a servile press, but a press which possessed perfect freedom of speech so long as it did “not deliberately deteriorate into a malignant abuse.” Then in an unforgettable act of judicial courage and independence, Saied acquitted the accused. Within minutes, the police rearrested them.
Why did Obote want these two men in prison? Mayanja’s reference to the rumour that Obote was delaying Africanisation of the High Court because there were no qualified people from the “correct ethnic communities” touched a very raw nerve. To borrow from Queen Gertrude in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Obote didst protest too much, methinks.

On the other hand, Neogy’s arrest and re-arrest were triggered by the revelation, two years earlier, that Transition was one of the magazines funded by America’s CIA through the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom. In his book, The “Unlikely Diplomat,” Robert John Baker, a US Intelligence analyst, who was based in Kampala in the 1960s, writes: “The Ugandan government never used that funding as an excuse to close the magazine.

I suspect they were willing to tolerate it so long as Rajat railed only against dictatorship outside Uganda. There was lots of British intelligence, CIA, KGB, etc. money rolling around Uganda at the time. Doubtless, it was assumed all along in Obote’s government that Rajat was funded by some foreign intelligence service. It is a fact that several newspaper editors in Uganda were funded by communist intelligence services at the time. Many Ugandan officials were on various Western and Eastern intelligence payrolls. It was almost a perk of office.”

With Obote’s increasing sense of insecurity, amidst the power struggles that were continuing inside his government, and a shaky hold on power in the post-1966 period, the president’s tolerance for free speech had grown thin. Fear had gripped the rulers, accompanied by paranoia that missed the real enemy within. Neogy summed it up in a letter to the New York Times in November 1969: “Detention is gratuitous and the chilling fact is that there has to be no reason for it other than somebody up there got suddenly frightened.” It was true fifty years ago. It remains so today.

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