Another Fine Mess

America, Uganda, and the War on Terror

Helen Epstein

• Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780997722932
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Is the West to blame for failing Uganda?In this powerful story of Uganda and its war-torn neighbors in eastern and central Africa, journalist Helen Epstein chronicles how America's naïve dealings with African strongmen and single-minded focus on the War on Terror have themselves becomes sources of terror, short-circuiting the power Ugandans might otherwise have over their own destinies.More than 20 years ago, Epstein set out for Uganda to work as a public health consultant. The $20 billion in Western aid poured into the country since then has done little to improve the well-being of the Ugandan people, whose rates of poverty, illiteracy, and mortality remain staggeringly high. Instead, much of this money has been used to shore up brutal and dangerous dictatorships in the region. ANOTHER FINE MESS offers a new way of thinking about the crises that have ravaged Uganda, Rwanda, Congo, Sudan and Somalia and suggest the true heart of darkness lies not in Africa, but in Western centers of power.

Uganda’s Origins: From Many, One and From One, Many

A king, good or bad, will go the way he comes, for he will never rule over your laughter and your tears.

—Ejigayehu Shibabaw

Lawrence Nsereko’s father Joseph was a Ugandan aristocrat. His suits bore not a single wrinkle, and although his accent was poor, his English grammar was impeccable. His pompous habit of correcting others earned him the nickname Mungereza, meaning Englishman in the local Luganda language. Joseph’s grandfather had been a collaborator during the early years of colonial rule, and in exchange for ensuring the locals complied with British policies, he received a large tract of land, much of which Joseph eventually inherited. Some was used to grow coffee for export; some was reserved for family gardens—maize, yams, beans, bananas—some was used for grazing cattle, and the rest was rented. Joseph also owned some grocery stores, so money came in easily.

Joseph had at least seven wives, perhaps more—Lawrence isn’t sure. Some of the women lived together in the same house; others lived on their own, but they shared everything and all of them referred to Lawrence and each of his more than 40 brothers and sisters as “our child.” Lawrence moved around from the house of one co-mother to another, usually, he says, depending upon who was cooking chicken, his favorite food. When one co-wife’s maize patch ripened late, she would notify another that she was taking some from her garden. No one asked permission or kept accounts. Joseph would sometimes bring babies home “from wherever,” Lawrence says now, presumably the product of one of his numerous affairs. Lawrence’s co-mothers would raise these children as their own as well.

Today, Lawrence puzzles over this arrangement. There was great animosity among the co-wives in many other families. Sometimes Lawrence’s last and youngest co-mother could be cantankerous as well, but the others never seemed angry, either at Joseph’s philandering, or at each other. Only two of his co-mothers remain alive, and if he ever manages to return to Uganda, he’d like to ask them what they were thinking. All could read and write, but they seemed immune to modern individualistic competition. When AIDS began spreading in the 1980s, Lawrence, by then an adult, moved his biological mother Agnes into a modern house some distance from his father and the others, hoping to protect her from the scourge. After a year, she sold the house and moved back in with a co-wife.

Lawrence’s family was nominally Catholic, but Joseph knew that his philandering ways prevented him from taking Holy Communion. “I can’t afford for you to be sinners too,” he told his children, “So you must all go to Heaven and pray for my soul.” Every Sunday he sat on a stool outside the church and looked in through the window to ensure all his children took the wafers and wine.

Lawrence’s people were Baganda, Uganda’s largest tribe. When British explorer John Hanning Speke first arrived in Buganda—as the Baganda call their territory—in 1862, he found a vast, well-organized kingdom ruled by a Kabaka (or king) named Mutesa who could recite the names of his forebears back 32 generations. Mutesa was advised by a prime minister known as a Katikiro and an appointed parliament of chiefs known as a Lukiiko. Below them were clan heads, known as Bataka, and below them peasants and at the bottom, slaves captured during raids on neighboring tribes. The Kabaka’s palace was a huge circular dome crowned with a magnificent shag of grass thatch. Ordinary people lived along straight roads in gracefully constructed houses made from woven reeds and wore hazel-colored draperies fashioned from the inner bark of the ficus tree pounded until it was as soft as felt.

Because of Buganda’s isolation, the economy was virtually static. The only way to elevate oneself was through warfare: conquering others and demanding tribute, looting ivory, livestock, and slaves and occupying land. The ivory and some of the slaves were sold to Arab traders from the coast of what is now Tanzania in exchange for beads from Europe and copper from Katanga 1,000 miles away. One explorer even reported that a piece of cloth labeled “Wachusetts Mills” that had come all the way from New England, hung in the Kabaka’s palace. But the most coveted Arab imports were guns, percussion caps and powder.

Mutesa had no standing army, but his war drums could summon 250,000 men and hundreds of war canoes. Military might was all. Cowards were ostracized or killed. Even today, Ugandans have an inordinate respect for their military heroes. It’s hard to imagine an American rap musician trying to seem cool by calling himself Colonel and performing in uniform alongside a CIA director or member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but such things happen in Uganda, where it’s also normal for army officers to turn up at fashionable discos or appear on TV opining about religion, love, and romance.

In his memoirs, the nineteenth-century explorer Henry Morton Stanley boasts of his special relationship with Mutesa, but it was not Stanley’s charm alone that attracted the Kabaka. Mutesa was worried about Egyptian garrisons to the north, and pleaded with his Welsh visitor for weapons with which to defend himself. Instead, the explorer sent missionaries. Mutesa grudgingly allowed them to teach reading and writing to his young pages, the 400 or so teenaged boys who ran errands for the royal family and guarded the palace. Catholic missionaries arrived from France two years after the Anglicans, and Arab holy men also vied for the Kabaka’s favor.

The newcomers were impressed by the Buganda court, but also shocked by its cruelty. Sometimes the Kabaka seemed to kill his subjects just for sport. During the 1840s, an Arab trader named Ahmed bin Abraham bravely told Mutesa’s father Kabaka Suna that his victims were Allah’s creatures, and it was wrong to destroy them. Suna replied that he knew of no other way of preventing conspiracies and keeping his subjects in awe of him.

Mutesa died in 1884 and his hemp-smoking 18-year-old son Mwanga ascended the throne. Mwanga saw the emerging religious movements in his kingdom politically, and was deeply concerned about the growing power of the Christians. He chafed at his Bible-reading pages, who exchanged their white kanzus for more elaborate dress, sneaked out of the palace at night and gossiped about Mwanga behind his back. The Arabs stoked the young Kabaka’s fears. The missionaries were an advance guard, they said, and were turning his pages against him; the orphans they cared for were a secret army; reinforcements would soon come from the coast to annex Buganda, force everyone to marry only one wife, and free their slaves.

Between 1885 and 1887, Mwanga had 45 Christian pages put to death. First, their arms were severed and then they were slowly burned alive, singing Christian hymns as they died. Some were accused of spying for the missionaries; others, having learned that sodomy was a sin, were killed for refusing to perform this act upon the bisexual Mwanga. Their abstinence seems to have enraged the young Kabaka less than the thought that their new religious faith was stronger than his own mystique.

A shrine to the Uganda Martyrs now stands at Namugongo, a village just east of Kampala. In 2014, the Ugandan government passed a law imposing harsh penalties on homosexuals. The law was born out of an internecine power struggle among Ugandan politicians not worth explaining here, but fear of homosexuals remains widespread in the country, where there has been little modern sex education and where the idea of homosexuality evokes historical memories of a mad young king at the dawn of modern times, whose territory swirled with rumors of approaching armies.

After the Martyrs’ execution, a series of ferocious battles among Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims rocked Buganda. The causes remain poorly understood, but everything began to settle down after the arrival in 1890 of British Captain Frederick Lugard who armed the Protestants against the others, planted the British flag, and exiled Kabaka Mwanga to the Seychelles, where he died in 1903.

The British, using the Baganda as a sub-Imperial force, eventually conquered four smaller kingdoms within the borders of what became the Ugandan Protectorate: Toro, Busoga, Bunyoro, and Ankole—along with numerous smaller tribes and clans that did not have kings such as the Acholi and Langi of northern Uganda and the Teso in the east. The locals did not yield without a struggle. Historian Ogenga Otunnu has detailed how the British, their Baganda troops, and Sudanese mercenaries committed numerous atrocities including mass rape, the torching of entire villages, the herding of people into concentration camps, the theft of cattle and the humiliation of local leaders. In Acholiland, Acting Commissioner J.R.P. Postlethwaite, nicknamed “chicken thief” by the Acholi, publicly strung up a rebellious chief and lowered him head first into a pit latrine until he died. In a British-backed operation against the Bavuma people, “such was the enormity of the slaughter,” wrote historian Michael Twaddle, “that, not only were sections of Lake Victoria ‘all blood’, there were so many dead bodies bobbing up and down in the water that their heads resembled a multitude of upturned cooking pots.”

The colony was overseen by a British governor, who was soon joined by British teachers, doctors and others. There were few settlers so race relations, though hardly smooth, were not as bad as those in colonies like Kenya and Rhodesia where large numbers of Africans were thrown off their land to make way for white-owned farms. However, the British did introduce a tribal caste system, the legacy of which still divides the nation today.

Although the Baganda had helped them conquer Uganda, by World War II, the army comprised mainly northerners such as the Acholi and Langi, who made up 70 percent of all Africans enlisted for the Allies.

Meanwhile, the Baganda and other southern tribes, deemed by the British to be more civilized, received more education, grew crops for export, staffed the civil service and considered themselves superior to the northerners.

As soon as Lugard’s gunpowder cleared, Baganda elites began building brick houses, learning to ride horses, wearing shoes, carrying umbrellas, eating with knives and forks, serving tea to visitors, writing on typewriters, marrying one wife with a ring, and giving their children Christian names like Benedicto, Boniface and Polycarp—or at least western sounding ones like Yusufu, Yacobo and Yokosofati. Outward appearances were one thing, however; inner attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors another. The Baganda, and the people of Uganda’s other ethnic groups thereafter existed in multiple worlds. They looked up to their betters, but mocked them in proverbs and songs; they professed the ideal of monogamy, but didn’t always practice it; they respected truthfulness, but their folk hero was the hare, the eternal role model of the oppressed, who outwits his more powerful adversaries with charm, cunning, and deceit.

If Uganda’s post-independence whirlpools of revenge have a source, it lies not in Uganda but at Lancaster House, a solemn Georgian mansion near London’s Green Park. There, in early October 1961, Britain’s Secretary of State for the Colonies Ian MacLeod presided over a gathering of some 50 Ugandan delegates to discuss the fledgling nation’s future constitution. The British had created the trappings of a democratic system, with a Parliament, a system of local government, and a hierarchy of courts with judges in horsehair wigs, but at that meeting, they kicked the foundation right out from under it.

Topping the agenda was the mechanism for choosing representatives to Uganda’s National Assembly (the precursor of its Parliament), which would then elect the prime minister. On one side were the modernizers who favored one-person-one-vote suffrage; on the other were the traditionalists who wanted MPs chosen by representatives of tribal kingdoms, such as Buganda.

Underlying this technicality was a profound question that has yet to be answered, and not only in Uganda: How should people be governed? Whose leadership will they respect? Even today most Ugandans rely upon tribe, clan, and family for just about everything, from jobs, to justice, to social security from birth to death as well as for a sense of identity and meaning in life. Uganda was about to become a modern state, with a government that was supposed to provide many of these things, but few Ugandans understood how this would work in practice. Nor did they trust people they didn’t know to govern fairly. Certainly the colonial government favored some tribes over others. Their fellow Ugandans could only be expected to do the same.

The main advocate for a tribally appointed National Assembly was Buganda’s Kabaka Edward Mutesa II, Mwanga’s 37-year-old, Cambridge-educated grandson. Fearful that a strong Kabaka could be trouble, the British had molded Mutesa II into a weak, pampered royal like one of their own. He and his circle had benefited enormously under the Protectorate, and were loath to surrender their privileges. The colonial administration paid their salaries, funded the activities of the royal administration, and built the fine white palace at Mengo from which it operated. In England, they put the Kabaka up in the best hotels, introduced him to Princess Margaret, and bought him a Rolls Royce with ivory knobs fashioned from the tusks of elephants he shot himself. There was a natural affinity between the Baganda aristocracy and the laid-back upper class British civil servants who arrived to administer the Protectorate. Life at the palace during the six decades of colonial rule sometimes seemed like an endless round of shooting parties, picnics, and outings on Lake Victoria. When matters of policy came up, they tended to be dealt with in whispers on the periphery of cocktail parties.

In 1952, Andrew Cohen, a young progressive governor, arrived to prepare Uganda for independence. When the subject of one-person-one-vote suffrage came up, Mutesa II informed Cohen that he was having none of it. He and his hand-picked Buganda legislature, known as the Lukiiko, didn’t want to be represented by commoner Baganda or—perish the thought—men from other tribes. If they couldn’t appoint Buganda’s MPs themselves, they’d happily secede from Uganda. Cohen sent Mutesa into exile, hoping his subjects would soon forget their quisling king. But to his surprise, the Baganda staged vehement protests and boycotts. Farmers went on strike and nearly shut down the economy. The Kabaka retu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Map
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Timeline
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Uganda’s Origins: From Many, One and From One, Many
• Chapter 2. Warlords in Northern Uganda
• Chapter 3. A Visit from the U.S. Department of Agriculture
• Chapter 4. Prelude to Apocalypse
• Chapter 5. A New World Order
• Chapter 6. Invasion
• Chapter 7. The Old Leopard
• Chapter 8. A Sudden Departure
• Chapter 9. A Leopard in Winter
• Chapter 10. Breeding Ground
• Chapter 11. A Good Man in Africa
• Chapter 12. Museveni Finds a New Terror Trove
• Chapter 13. A Long Distance Relationship
• Chapter 14. Murder in Uganda
• Chapter 15. The General Challenges the Dictator
• Chapter 16. Interrogation
• Chapter 17. Another “Election”
• Chapter 18. The General Returns
• Conclusion
• Further Reading
• Notes