Spine-chilling terror and random killings became part of everyday life during Idi Amin's reign, writes George Seremba
I did not know Nanziri Bukenya. And yet I felt I did. She was a warden of Africa Hall, one of the two places where the female students of my alma mater, Makerere University, Kampala, resided. Ms Bukenya was a woman of remarkable courage. Indeed what happened to her is one of the reasons why there will be no tears from me on the death of Uganda's genocidal tyrant: Idi Amin Dada. He who once bragged about fearing "nobody except God" finally went to meet his maker.
In the nightmarish Uganda of Idi Amin (1971-1979) a lot of the news (that mattered most) was never in the newspapers or the radio. We got it through "Radio Katwe" - in my play, Come Good Rain, I write of "Katwe" as "the grapevine telegraph through which (we) got the news behind the news". Katwe was also the voice of the people and barometer of the pulse of the troubled nation.
Through the proverbial grapevine I first heard the story of Nanziri Bukenya. A story that would come back to me late one night last month when I first got the news that the self-styled field marshal and president-for-life was on the brink of losing his life in the sterilised, air-conditioned confines of a Saudi Arabian hospital.
I knew there would be many Ugandans at home and abroad who like me would not weep for Idi Amin but inevitably revisit those eight long years of spine-chilling terror that had become the rhythm of life during Amin's reign. Nanziri Bukenya's name is one among myriads of others who perished at the hands of Amin's colossal coercive state apparatus.
The story started with two female students at Makerere University. They were from neighbouring Kenya. Those students, whose names I unfortunately cannot recall, disappeared at the hands of Idi Amin's secret police. According to Radio Katwe, the two young women were last seen in the company of some top brass in Amin's army who may have "had their way" with them and disposed of them when it dawned on them the women would talk. The fact that the women were foreign nationals seems not to have deterred the steel-helmeted predators but may have accelerated their tragic end. Either way, their murderers may have concluded, dead people's tales are easier to refute or dismiss.
But the indomitable Nanziri was not one to let the matter rest. The students were under her charge after all, and it was her solemn obligation to protect and recover her flock, their remains in this case. Her reasoning may have gone something like this: Even if they were already gone, the only way their souls were going to rest in some semblance of peace and give their anxious, grieving parents and siblings a kind of ritual closure, was by getting to the bottom of their murder. The acknowledgement of the deed perhaps and even the release of the remains may have become the best to hope for on Nanziri Bukenya's part. Tragically, whatever the conscientious warden found out was enough to send her too to the kingdom of the dead.
Nanziri Bukenya's remains, we gathered through the grapevine telegraph, were soon found on the banks of the Sezibwa, a river that runs through the lush, green, banana and coffee country of Bugerere. Bugerere is a part of Buganda, a kingdom that thrived for over 400 years before the British arrived and formed the new nation of Uganda. Nanziri was also an expectant mother, as pregnant as the proverbially fertile land on which her remains were dumped. Her life and that of the baby came to a rapid end on the banks of the Sezibwa.
That for me is more than enough reason why I certainly shall not weep for Amin. Other than his family, his apologists and those who worked for the atrocious regime, I cannot imagine of a thinking Ugandan or human being who would weep for this ferocious monster that the British and Ugandan Prime Minister and later President, Milton Obote, bred and nurtured.
This is a time to remember with all the burdens that come with memory, particularly the tragic memories of the 200,000 to 300,000 that went to their deaths in the killing fields of Uganda. My tears will be for them all. For Byron Kawadwa, for instance, the devastatingly satiric playwright whose offence was a play that Idi Amin himself attended and whose run was extended at his orders. Kawadwa went to his death soon after his spectacular abduction in broad daylight by Idi Amin's notorious State Research Bureau.
I shall weep for Jessie Kasirivu. Michael Luzinda. For my teacher Chris Karuhanga, who went to his death in front of a public and televised firing-squad. I salute the Tanzanian army and the Ugandan exiles who dislodged Amin and liberated our beloved country. I salute their compatriots who fell in the process.
But my salute to the Tanzanians is tempered by the role their government played in the return of Milton Obote to power in Uganda. Milton Obote had become President in 1966, was overthrown by Amin in 1971, and would eventually return to power in December 1980. For the next five years of his rule and misrule the rhythm of life would once again become the rhythm of death.
In today's Uganda too it is heartening to learn that Amin was told he could return only as long as he was prepared to, in effect, go on trial. There is a limit to forgiveness. How can you forgive the unforgivable?
I would like to salute our glorious dead and to thank the ancestors and the gods of ancient Africa with the hope that Uganda, Rwanda, Somalia, Liberia and Zimbabwe will not be recurring stories of unrelenting horror. To all those that lost their loved ones and were robbed of justice and closure while Amin enjoyed a luxurious life in Saudi Arabia, I say: live on, you triumphed just as much by surviving, live on, and tell these gory tales.
One day, soon perhaps, the Ugandan government will erect a shrine or memorial where we can all go and commune with our loved ones and say never again to the killing fields of our beloved country. Never again to Idi Amin, to Obote, to dictatorship, to what Wole Soyinka once described as "the gaping yaws of black inhumanity". May the gods bless Africa and the world.
George B. Seremba is the author of the award-winning play, Come Good Rain, and a PhD student at the Samuel Beckett Centre, TCD