Murder most foul befalls Mbale

The esteemed readers of this column were last Sunday, October 16, frankly presented with a sample day in 1976 that witnessed horrific abductions of prominent civilians in broad daylight in Mbale Municipality by thugs donning military uniforms. 
Last week’s segment ended with the scenario in which my co-driver and I unwittingly overtook one of the killer vehicles conveying some of the abductees to Kampala – and how, upon being angrily flashed with full lights by the driver of that vehicle, I instantly sensed the grave danger that we were in, and quickly outdistanced him by shooting through Mukono Town at breakneck speed.

But more was yet to come! Just as we put Mukono behind us and were propelling our way to the trading centre of Seeta, a short distance before the junction to Ntawo District Farm Institute – there ahead of us was the blue Volkswagen beetle belonging to the abductee Abner Wangwe being driven by a fellow, the only occupant of the said car, who was roguishly wearing his cap back to front. Intuiting that all the abductors in the various vehicles could be on telephone network and monitoring our progress on the road, I considered the Volkswagen driver a possible new source of danger and shot past him with increased acceleration. 

At Kireka, some 10 miles after Namawojjolo and seven miles to Kampala, I swerved at right angles to the right onto Namugongo Road – upon a sudden brainwave, or adrenaline-induced instinct for survival – made a 180% turn within the next 100 feet or so, stopped while facing the main road but kept the ignition running just in case, only to see in less than one minute the Volkswagen and the two abductors’ vans whizz past us at break-neck speed with minimum distances between them. 

“O my God,” I sighed, immensely relieved, “there go the killers!”
“What a narrow escape, Uncle!” remarked Mwalye, feeling as equally relieved.
But was it an escape yet? We were so shaken that we decided not to proceed to our dwellings in Makerere University but instead to spend the night with a friend on the eastern outskirts of Kampala. We only covered the remaining leg of our homecoming the following afternoon after ascertaining that no thugs had yet gone to my residence or workplace looking for the registered owner of a certain Nissan Datsun SSS of such-and-such a number-plate.
All efforts throughout the subsequent many days by family members and friends of the abductees to locate them and plead for them were fruitless. They were never seen again, alive or dead, neither were their cars. They joined the hundreds of thousands of innocent Ugandans who were demonically made to ‘disappear’ from this world by Idi Amin’s monstrous regime of terror.

But the horror of horrors of 1976 for Mbale Municipality was yet to happen! It took the form of the abduction and horrendous killing of my friend John Busawule, of perpetual good cheer and unique woven whiskers, the prominent first African head teacher of Mbale Senior Secondary School. Taken from his house at gunpoint in the middle of the night, by morning Busawule had been brutally killed and cut up into pieces in the nearby eucalyptus forest of Munkaga on Mbale-Tororo Road, barely one and a half miles from the town centre. 

At his funeral at his home township of Magale, we mourners were chilled to the core by the spectacle of wailing, almost demented women of the clan, four of whom severally carried and waved about in the air the severed arms and legs of the late Busawule! Before the commencement of the Church-led funeral service, the limbs were placed back in the coffin to join Busawule’s other remains.
That heart-rending, blood-cuddling spectacle of the wailing women wielding parts of Busawule’s dismembered body in the air would indelibly persist in my burdened memory… 

Prof Timothy Wangusa is a poet and novelist.