When Uganda’s file went missing in heaven

It was the worst of times. It was the hardest of times. It was the most nightmarish of times. Common sense, logic, and rationality were at a loss. As a coping mechanism, therefore, we baffled inhabitants of the bleeding soil who were still surviving, instinctively coined – with due sardonic humour – the startling concept that our country’s ‘file had gone missing in heaven’.

And the times were none other than Uganda’s ‘brave 1970s’, headed by an extraordinary Field Marshal Life President. It was the unique decade of the first gun-wielding capture of state power, and the establishment of the pioneering military ruling dynasty - in the land at the continent’s heart renowned for its luxuriant and multi-colour vegetation and infinite animal variety atop underground mineral wonders.
 
Preceding ‘the brave 1970s’, the ‘arrogant 1960s’ had betrayed us. Between them, Prime Minister Obote I and President Kabaka Muteesa II, diplomacy and statesmanship  had in 1966 irretrievably broken down – with Mengo Palace going up in horrific flames, ‘desecration of a kingdom’, the Kabaka’s fugitive fleeing of the country, and his lonely death in exile in 1969. 

Like ‘the kicks of a dying bull’ were Obote I’s desperate ‘Pigeon Hole’ Constitution of 1967;  his ‘Common Man’s Charter’ of 1969, championing ‘the man who eats from the sweat of his brow’; his ‘Nakivubo Pronouncements‘ of 1970’, with their stress on ‘ the Move to the (Socialist) Left’, which outlined increased nationalisation of major industries; and his placing of Brigadier Idi Amin under house arrest on suspicion of his involvement in looting gold and ivory from neighbouring Congo, and of killing fellow Brigadier Okoya of Gulu.  

And like a vengeance, Idi Amin, an Al Hajj, stormed Uganda’s political stage: on the special day dedicated to St Paul (the lead Apostle to us the Gentiles) in the Christian calendar, January 25 – while God presumably looked on! 
Oh, yes, our country’s file was nowhere within the expansiveness of heaven, in ‘the brave 1970s’! And if it was missing in heaven, where could it be – ‘somewhere’ else, or ‘nowhere’? And ‘where’ was that?  Thus did we marvel.

Then came the darkest year of 1977 – the emotional climax of the decade. Yes, that was the climax, while 1979 provided the action ‘denouement’, the ‘resolution of conflict’, which took the form of the showdown between Idi Amin’s inferior guns and Mwalimu Julius Nyerere’s superior saba saba guns – and their aftermath of the distribution of well-deserved rewards and punishments, respectively to both the good boys and the bad guys in that high drama of the clash of cosmic values played out on our tiny native spot.

But how come it was or had to be 1977? In the course of the preceding five years, there had been a build-up of horrific disappearances and killings of Ugandans high and low in their thousands. 

The year 1972 alone had witnessed the blatant disappearance of Chief Justice Benedicto Kiwanuka and Vice Chancellor Frank Kalimuzo, plus the broad-day-time shooting and slitting of the throat of Masaka Mayor Francis Walugembe. In Mbale, we had seen the chilling remains of John Busawule, the headmaster of Mbale SS, who had been clinically sliced up, limb by limb, and damped in a nearby forest.

So, there we were, in 1977. The main actor of the year was the Church of Uganda. For several years, it had been making elaborate arrangements for colourful, self-congratulatory commemoration of a century of Anglicanism in Uganda, CMS missionaries having first arrived in the country in 1877. 
And then, suddenly, on February 16, Archbishop Janani Luwum was struck down by Amin’s horrific guns, alongside Cabinet minister Charles Oboth-Ofumbi and former Inspector General of Police Erinayo.
                                Oryema.
A prompt government bulletin stated that the three ‘well-fed gentlemen’ had died in a night car accident as they were being shepherded to their safe custody. And Uganda’s file continued to be missing in heaven.

Prof Wangusa is a poet and novelist.                  

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