Professor who chewed his national ID

Yes, the pity and wonder of it, my esteemed readers of a latter day national dispensation – such was the nightmarish politico-military regime of the day in Uganda that a full-fledged professor was one day pressed to the point where he had to chew his national ID. He chewed his identity to a pulp and – you guessed right – spat it out. He spat out his nation as well as himself. And by that act, he instantly became a person of no image, a Mr Nobody!

And ‘yours truly here’ was the single witness to this tragic and absurd episode. (Two years later, he and I could sure afford to laugh about it, under the dramatically changed atmosphere of post-Saba Saba guns over Kampala.) The year was 1977, in the week which followed the overnight gruesome military regime killings of Archbishop Janani Luwum plus former Cabinet minister Charles Oboth-Ofumbi and former Inspector General of Police Erinayo Oryema.

The esteemed Makerere professor (who respectably remains anonymous), a Ugandan hailing from ‘the northern axis’, was particularly and rightly perturbed in feeling that more hell still lay ahead for certain categories of Ugandans as defined by their ethnicity and religious faith. And so one evening he paid me a visit on Makerere campus, where we both resided, and asked me – since I was in the habit of often travelling eastwards to my ancestral home – for a lift to Tororo and possibly Malaba on the Uganda-Kenya border, ostensibly on his way to Nairobi for an academic conference. The truth of the matter was that he was fleeing into exile. 

As his ‘lucky star would have it’ (or would you say, as ‘as divine alignment would have it’?), I offered to drop him right inside Kenya, in Bungoma Town, and so avail myself the opportunity of paying a visit to my aunt Khatundi, the only surviving sibling of my father; and to my aunt Yulita, the only surviving sibling of my mother – both of whom were married the other side of Lwakhakha River.

Ah, let no one tell my still infant-and-teenager spirit that Uganda and Kenya are two different countries! How could the land of my closest and most loving relatives be another country? Throughout the 1950s, almost on a yearly basis, my two immediately elder brothers and I fondly visited our two aunts, crossing and re-crossing Lwakhakha River, riding bicycles or walking all the way. Funny enough, I was told one day that the part of Masaaba’s Mountain/Mount Elgon that tapers away into the horizon on the far right was in Kenya – and I refused to concede that our mountain could be in two countries.

Then came the high-point year 1954, when my two aforementioned brothers declared their candidature for ‘the knife of manhood’, and a group of us youngsters supporting their resolve walk-danced them with song to the homes of our aunts, and returned with sundry gifts – plus the balls of a slaughtered he-goat and a slaughtered bull held high on two talking flag-sticks as emblems of the impending conversion of boys into men!

But back to/or forward to 1977, and the professor and I making our way to Malaba. Completely unprepared for them, two utter shocks awaited me that day: one at the beginning of our journey; and one as we neared the border. The first one was that the professor turned up utterly disguised for the journey, like God’s beggar-man, masikini wa Mungu: in old khaki shorts and shirt, motorcar-tyre sandals, and a faded flabby hat!

The second shock was that about two kilometres to Malaba check-point, the professor abruptly checked all his pockets and, finding his Graduated Tax ticket in one of them – he frantically threw it into his mouth, wildly chewed it, and spat the pulp out of his window! He was now hopefully a nameless nobody, beyond identification by Amin’s horrific thugs!

Prof Wangusa is a poet and novelist.                  [email protected]