The Africans (19 page)

When the two armies at last caught up with each other a few weeks later, there was little enthusiasm for any fighting. Soldiers just set up camp on either side of the Kagera River. Nyerere, though, was determined to complete the job, and in the spring of 1979 he brought the twenty-eight Ugandan exile and liberation groups to a conference in Moshi, Tanzania. They included Marxists and monarchists, socialists and capitalists, tribalists and nationalists, men who were united only in their resolve to rid Uganda of Amin. Nyerere scraped together a 50,000-man people’s militia, composed largely of illiterate youths pulled off the streets and out of the bush. It was more a mob than an army, for its members had no rank and little training, but together with a handful of Uganda rebels they pushed north, crossed the Kagera River and moved into Uganda. Amin’s soldiers—supposedly the best armed and trained in East Africa—threw down their weapons at the first sound of gunfire and fled. Several hundred Libyan soldiers, dispatched to Uganda by Colonel Muammar Qaddafy in an eleventh-hour attempt to save Amin, took up the front-line positions around Kampala. They broke and ran too, and the capital fell without a battle. Amin escaped on a military flight to Tripoli, and Yusufu L. Lule stepped out of the shadows of parliament to speak about the new beginning that was never to be.

Uganda no longer exists today as a viable nation. It has disintegrated into a cluster of tribal states. Its cities have become frontier towns, terrorized by bandits who will kill for a Seiko watch. Its government is a collection of outcasts and misfits serving only themselves. Most of the bright young Ugandans who came home after Amin’s overthrow already have returned to exile. There was nothing left to rebuild. The economy, the governmental infrastructure, the spirit of reconciliation had all been destroyed. The Ugandans had committed national suicide and by the summer of 1983, upwards of 200 people a day—most of them women and children—were dying as government troops and antigovernment guerrillas leveled villages, ambushed buses, shot up churches, raided houses and did their utmost to make sure the legend of Idi Amin was not forgotten.

I telephoned Amin one day that summer at his modest villa outside Jidda, Saudi Arabia. He was living on a dole from the Saudis, did his own sweeping and cooking—“I’m an excellent chef now,” he said—and spending his ample free time studying Islam. Every
Friday he prayed at Mecca or Medina, unrecognized in his Muslim robes and lost among the crowds. Wherever he went, he carried a satchel filled with world maps which he would spread on a table when he wanted to discuss a particular region.

“I’ll tell you this,” he told me. “I have studied a lot here, and I am convinced that democracy is much better than being—what is it the press called me?—a dictator. People in the United States and the United Kingdom have the freedom to express themselves. This teaches me a good lesson.

“That’s what Uganda needs—democracy. Of course, I can see that democracy would not work immediately in Uganda. It would take two or three years. Security is very bad there now, and there are many problems. But a tough person with military knowledge like me could teach the people discipline and prepare them for democracy.

“I think you will see from this example that I was not responsible for what went on. Obote is in power now, right? Can anyone say that he himself is killing all those people? No. I found myself in that same particular situation.

“The problems in Uganda are tribal, economic, selfishness. Obote should sit down with me and the opposition, and we could discuss Uganda’s problems. But this Obote man”—and on the phone line from Jidda there was an impish chuckle—“he is very afraid of me. If he even heard my voice on the telephone, he would be scared.”

Uganda raises many troubling questions. Is it an isolated case or is all Africa destined to follow the same course of self-destruction? Can Uganda ever recover? What should the role of the West be? What lessons should Africa have learned from watching the sorry spectacle of a prosperous country fall a millennium behind the times?

To be sure, Uganda represents the ultimate horror of what a tribalistic, misled, primitive country can become. But it would be unfair to say that Uganda has any more lessons for Africa than Northern Ireland does for Europe. The failing is a human one, for no continent has a patent on the injustices man inflicts on man. Africa produced Amin, but Europe gave us Hitler. Uganda, a nation for only two decades, dug its own grave; Cambodia, part of a great empire dating back eleven hundred years, dug a bigger one. The lessons of Uganda are for all mankind, not just for Africa.

Because of its great agricultural potential, Uganda has an economic base that could be revived with foreign assistance. That alone holds out hope that Uganda could, in a generation or two, forge some kind of meaningful nationhood. Recovery, though, can never begin until the Ugandans themselves are given control of their national destiny and the Obotes and Nyereres retire to the sidelines.

A first step in this direction would be to bring in a foreign peacekeeping force—from the United Nations, the British Commonwealth or Africa itself—to supervise fair elections, an exercise Uganda clearly is incapable of handling on its own. The country should be disarmed, and a new army reflecting a tribal balance should be formed. Only then can tribalism be diminished, for until all thirteen major Ugandan tribes believe they have a stake in their country’s political and economic future, there can be no Ugandan nation. Uganda had this opportunity when Lule became president and Julius Nyerere took it away in imperial style. But Africa is a land of second chances, and the choice is still Uganda’s.

The United States and other Western powers quite wisely curtailed their promised financial assistance when Uganda’s rulers started playing musical chairs. To invest a nickel in Uganda, other than that needed for emergency food and medicine, would have been to throw good money after bad. This was not the time to build dams or repair roads. To think that Uganda’s problems could be solved with money was about as foolish as giving King Freddie another bottle of whiskey to cure his alcoholism. Uganda is a derelict and no one can get it to the rehabilitation center but the Ugandans themselves.

One afternoon before Obote’s return to the presidency, I stood on the patio of a young accountant’s home, talking about the demise of Uganda. I remembered how good I had felt when Lule took office, and I now knew I had been naïve. Uganda had individual concerns more pressing than national integrity. There was, it seemed, nothing any outsider could do to alter the inevitable. I suddenly felt detached, as if I had been walking through the Bowery in New York and knowing that that alien world belonged to no one but the unfortunates who inhabited it.

I asked Richard Mulondo, the accountant, how it had all happened. He had no explanation for the past, he said. But what he did know was that the present was terrifying. He had sold some of his
furniture to get food—he was still working but the Uganda shillings he earned were worthless—and at night he and his family slept in the backyard, wrapped in newspapers. They armed themselves with machetes and they took turns standing guard, ready to flee at the sound of a breaking twig or a whispered word. Kampala belonged to the thugs with guns. As we talked, a yellow dump truck moved slowly along the street. It was full of corpses and on its door someone had scrawled in red: “Kampala City Body Removal.”

Mulondo watched the truck stop. Two men sauntered out of the cab, picked a body off the curb and flung it onto the pile of corpses. It bounced off and tumbled back onto the pavement. The men grumbled and tossed it on again. This time it stayed and the truck moved on. Mulondo remained silent for several moments. Finally he asked, “What can you say except that Amin turned us all into savages?” Then he went inside and locked the door.

E
VERY
SUMMER
in early July, fifty men who hold the world’s riskiest political jobs gather in an African city to discuss the affairs of the continent. This is the annual summit of the Organization of African Unity, and for the heads of state it provides a forum to confront—or more often, side-step—the immense problems retarding Africa’s development: war and famine, superpower intervention and border disputes, failing economies, inadequate leadership, ideological differences, human rights violations, political instability, soaring birth rates. The meeting starts with brotherly embraces and pledges of unity and ends three days later with the presidents and generals flying home in a huff, having accomplished little except the denunciation of apartheid in South Africa, and having found no consensus other than agreeing to disagree.

“Trying to get these people to agree on anything,” said Sir Harold Walter, the foreign minister of Mauritius, after one OAU summit sesson, “is like trying to play a violin by pissing on it.”

The OAU was founded in 1963 roughly along the lines of the United Nations. All African states, except white-ruled South Africa, are members.
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In the ideal, the OAU gives black and Arab Africa an opportunity to speak with a single voice and provides a forum to study and resolve African problems. Among the purposes stated in its charter are the “total advancement” of the African peoples
through political and economic development, the eradication of colonialism in all its forms, and the promotion of African unity. It is an important marketplace for the exchange of ideas, and however few its achievements thus far—its major one is simply to have survived—it does hold out hope that all Africa one day may move with a common resolve to right the injustices and inequities of past and present.

Unlike the United Nations, though, the OAU has no Security Council and no provisions to give its decisions teeth. It must depend on persuasion rather than punishment, or consensus through cooperation rather than correction through condemnation. Its authority is all but crippled by a charter clause stipulating that member states cannot interfere in each other’s internal affairs. The intention is a good one, but by interpreting the clause literally, African leaders have denied the OAU any mechanism to settle wars, impose sanctions, pressure barbaric rulers or encourage unity.

When President Idi Amin kills upwards of 300,000 Ugandans, as he did between 1971 and 1979; when six wars engulf Africa, as they did in 1981; when Ethiopia stuffs its jails with 30,000 political prisoners, then the OAU’s loudest response is silence. To speak out, individually or collectively, would be internal interference, violating an unwritten code in the fraternity of Africa’s presidents: Leave me alone to run my country the way I want, and I’ll leave you alone to do the same; that way we’ll both stay in power a lot longer.

The code was tested when Tanzania invaded Uganda in 1979. Nigeria and the Sudan protested the action at the OAU summit meeting, not because they had sympathy for Idi Amin, but because Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere had set a dangerous precedent. If he had assumed the right to decide who was qualified to govern next door, what would stop other presidents from making similar decisions? There were two stern speeches condemning the invasion, then the summit moved quickly on to other business. Interestingly, no one challenged Libya’s Muammar Qaddafy, who also had intervened, sending combat troops to bolster the crumbling Ugandan army. The lesson was clear: Intervening to keep a president in power is acceptable; meddling to unseat him is not.