The shamba boy who taught Museveni how to handle a gun
Museveni takes a close look at the weapon in Kyankwanzi early this year. Photo by Faiswal Kasirye
President Museveni is one of the leaders in the world who has been photographed many times while carrying a gun and this has earned him both tags of freedom fighter and gunman. But just when did Museveni first handle a gun? Sunday Monitor’s Faustin Mugabe digs up the archives to bring the story of the Mozambican shamba boy who taught Museveni how to use a gun.
President Museveni and John Batume Kawanga, a retired politician who represented Masaka Municipality in Parliament were perhaps one of the first recorded Ugandan university students to receive military training in African.
The first ever Ugandan university graduate soldier was Dr Albert Kaggwa, who after graduation in Britain, joined the British army during World War II. Albert was the son of the famous Apollo Kaggwa, the former Katikkiro of Buganda. He was born in 1918 and died in 1963 at the rank of a Captain.
While Dr Kaggwa was from the aristocratic family of Buganda and was thus privileged to go and study in a UK university and later went to a military academy in Britain, Museveni, son of a pastoralist from rural south-western Uganda, received initial basic military training from guerrilla fighters in the jungles of Nangade District of Cado Delgado Province in northern Mozambique.
First instructor
Museveni’s first instructor, Julio Mateus, was not a professional soldier, but a revolutionary fighter who two years earlier, had been a shamba/house-boy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
When the 1964 Front for Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) independence war broke out, he abandoned his job as a shamba/house boy to join the struggle.
In December 1968, Museveni led a group of seven undergraduates from the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to the Frelimo liberated areas of northern Mozambique in a special study tour. Museveni and Kawanga were from
Uganda, Emmanuel Dube and Owen Tshabangu from Zimbabwe, Andrew Shija and a one Msoma were from Tanzania and Kapote Mwakasungura, a Malawian.
The seven were from the University Students’ African Revolutionary Front (USARF), a university student Pan-Africanist group, which was formed in late 1967 and elected Museveni its leader.
While the group had gone for a ‘special study tour’, they did not only get revolutionary awaking, but military training as well. Museveni was later to write on how he learnt how to use a gun in his 1970 thesis titled: ‘Fanon’s Theory On Violence: Its Verification In Liberated Mozambique’. Museveni was inspired by an Algerian scholar Franz Fanon who wrote The Wretched of The Earth’ which was an inspiring anti-colonial book across Africa.
Museveni’s undergraduate research work was among the best chosen by the University of Dar es Salaam in 1975 and compiled into a book called Essays in the Liberation of South Africa’. This was after Museveni’s had played a role in an attempt to oust Uganda’s dictator Idi Amin through military struggle. Within months of its launch, the book sold out. It was used as a propaganda tool by those fighting for independence or against dictatorship, especially in southern Africa.
When Museveni launched the Luwero Bush War, on February 6, 1981, the University of Dar es Salaam reproduced it in 1982 and again sold out. On how he learnt to fire a gun from Mateus, a former house-boy, Museveni wrote: “There we were, six [seven] university undergraduates of Dar es Salaam probably reactionary puppets of neo-colonialism in the making with more than 15 years Western education behind us getting rudimentary lessons in the science of liberating our people from a man who was considered but a grown-up child in the colonial days. There he was, watching over us and patiently correcting our faltering moves in handling a gun.
Our long stay in the western citadels of ‘learning’ notwithstanding, we learnt the ABC of national liberation from a former house-boy. This is what authentic national liberation means – making the first last and the last first. This commander had become a history maker, while we were history students…”
When this reporter contacted Kawanga, he said: “It was an epic journey from the Tanzania-Mozambique border through the wild to the Frelimo camps. And I remember Museveni was more known to the Frelimo leaders than us and while there, we were given different instructors to teach us the military science. However, I did not know that one of them was a former house-boy. What I know is that we were more educated and scientifically enlightened than them, especially in hygiene”.
Learning the gun
However, on how he first learnt how to use a gun, President Museveni in 1997 wrote in his autobiography Sowing The Mustard Seed, which contradicts his earlier mention in his university thesis Fenon’s Theory On Violence: It’s Verification In Liberated Mozambique’ authored in 1970. In his autobiography, he mentions of how in 1969, he interacted with North Koreans in Tanzania who offered students paid trips to their country. To him, he accepted the trip on condition that he should be given military training once he reached there.
On page 32, he wrote: ‘When I got to Korea, I found that nobody there had any idea about my military training. They were more interested in mobilising delegates in their polemical war with China, at the time undergoing its ‘Cultural Revolution’. However, I pestered them so much that eventually, a Colonel was detailed to give me a short course in weapon-handling, using a rifle and a pistol. I was taught how to load, unload and clean the weapons, and given a little target practice. It was the first time I had ever handled a weapon and at that stage I was not a very good shot, although later on I improved’.
President Museveni is probably one of the leaders in the world who have been photographed many times while carrying a gun; he understands the power and politics of the gun than many other leaders.
During the 1980 presidential campaigns, while in Jinja, he was quoted by the Uganda Times of July I, 1980 as having said: “The gun should be an instrument of politics but it should not command politics”. No wonder after the disputed 1980 elections, he used the gun to capture power.
Ever since his pistol saved him from Amin’s special forces on January 27, 1973 in Mbale, he learnt a memorable lesson – and has kept his gun at an arms-reach whether as a guerrilla fighter or as President of Uganda.
President Museveni was once in Bangkok, Thailand from July 13 to 17, 2004, for official visit and a WBS TV journalist Irene Birungi had an exclusive interview in his hotel room and she was quoted by the New Vision newspaper, saying during the interview, she saw a pistol protruding under the pillow.
President Museveni has since 1968 mastered the dynamics of the gun. Undoubtedly, this has contributed immensely in his political career – perhaps the reason his tenure as President of Uganda by far exceeds all his eight predecessors combined.
