Looking back: “when I realised that my life was in danger, I accepted and slept on the woman—four soldiers had slept with already, my friend Combi under the same threat was waiting for me to have his turn— one of the stories reads. “The commander did it, he raised the panga high above his head and brought it down on the back of the girl…the body was halved into two—” another read. “His penis had been chopped off and planted in his mouth...he smokes a pipe…his testicles had been slashed off and deposited on a plate and given as chips and sausages…”
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Book: Looking Back Editor: Patricia Harward Publisher: Fountain Publishers Kampala Publication: 2009 Reviewer: Yusuf Serunkuma Kajura Price: Ush10,000 Available: All leading bookstores |
This is the hard history the current generation inherited from its post independence leaders; quite harder than the grimy times of imperialism. The publication of these books serve as a thorough demonstration of the claim that Uganda has come so far and has seen so much—but is she safe against seeing more?
Over 50 stories of woe and death are collected in these two volumes under the telling title; Looking Back. All the stories point to the enormity of danger in the absence of law. Almost all narrators are haunted by gloomy resonant reminders of absent friends and relatives, who died under mystery—a reality of the blindness of bad leadership and double-standards.
One, subtitled Tragedies of Ugandan Women and Children 1970-2000, records the hidden and visible tears of Ugandan women and kids and the other; Personal Memories of Uganda’s Troubled Past 1970-2000, narrates memories of atrocities suffered by the country—not out of natural disaster, nor out of the scramble for territories by colonists, not even ritual killings by stone-age kings, but by greedy and men at war—
As Albert Camus, the legendary French philosopher and playwright wrote; we live in an absurd world, a world where we are lost of memories of the past and are uncertain of the Promised Land to come; Uganda has seen these times. The times when Maseruka-Rwenduru who narrates Detained in Nakasero, jailed for belonging to a wrong tribe—a Mukiga—a tribe from western Uganda; the times when police held the reputation of transporters of woe in Julius Owinyo’s Walking Chimney’s Legacy. Men hunted and killed for their wealth, their wives or their friends. Joshua Kato narrates in Dumping Ground, a story of a sons’ futile search for their father which gives them the vivid impression of the numerous body bins, which are mildly called dumping grounds.
The reflections of women are sadder. So many women became widows with many mouths to feed as orphans. A story of a man widening a girl’s vagina with a blade to allow entry of his enormous manhood is far excruciating than what the ears can bear. This is the far Uganda has come and the much it has seen.
These books, cast against Uganda’s political history, of tyranny and guesswork, of coups and election theft; boda bodas and potholes, collect in the main, personal reflections of men and women who, by a whisker, escaped the turbulent times of Milton Obote and Idi Amin and in part, the times when President Museveni failed to control the Lord’s Resistance Army rebels and sometimes his own men who would turn into wops and hogs.
The presentations are raw, hard and brutal, in very domesticated English. The intensity of atrocity committed during the times of the rampaging State Research Bureau (SRB), the ravage of UNLA or the horrors of the insurgency in northern Uganda. The pictures created are excruciating; men forced to feed on, in some parts, decomposing human corpses —of a killed, dismembered and cooked relative or friend; stories of men in uniform, in national barracks plucking money from citizens who are on a vain attempt to search for a loved one.
Paranoia, selfishness, corruption and tribalism are common lines in this tragic script. The deliberate and irretrievable collapse of institutional governance—the government becoming the president and the president the government—men judged by the sound of their names as it happens in the story To Russia Without Love—are the pavements on the road to catastrophe, the books are lucid.
These narratives point fingers—at the UPC and the government that was led by Amin. In a story Mistaken for Guerrillas, Caroline Kabasindi pronounces; “these UPC men were very wise and determined to kill”. The National Security Agency (NASA), the General Safety Unit (GSU) and the Special Force are named in several stories as having been the sources of tremendous danger. It is said for example, that under their wide eyes “many people were erroneously sectioned as being rebels, they were arrested and very few of them left the torture chambers alive.”
But as they do the finger pointing, these memoirs are the long awaited addition to the complete stabilisation of society; a through democratisation of Uganda and commitment to official ethic.
Perhaps they remind, teach or scare office bearers from misbehaviour and retracing the blood-paths—a broken politics where men lead by virtue of their whims and the size of their gullets and not the precision of law.
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