‘Wonderful new world’ that turned sour ...

Press, 30 July 1985, Page 10

‘Wonderful new world’ that turned sour ...

By

Jerry Gray

of the

Associated Press Nairobi “Uganda is a fairy tale,” Winston Churchill said during a trip to the east African country. “You climb up a railway instead of a beanstalk, and at the top there is a wonderful new world.” In the decades since the late British Prime Minister’s visit, Uganda has endured a tyrant named Idi Amin, compiled one of the worst human rights records in the world, and become the only African country to see the same leader — Milton Obote — twice deposed by a coup. Arab traders, moving inland from their enclaves along the east African coast in search of ivory and slaves, first reached what was then Buganda in the 1830 s. It would be three decades more before the first whites, British explorers searching for the headwaters of the Nile River, would reach the fertile land with its high plateaus. In 1862, the British explorers John Speke and James Grant became the first Europeans to visit Uganda and to learn that the Nile flows out of Lake Victoria, 80 km east of the present-day capital of Kampala.

Buganda would eventually become known as Uganda because the translators accompanying the early explorers did not pronounce the “b.” Missionaries followed the explorers into Uganda, the Protestants arriving in 1877 and the Catholics two years later. Like the European nations which fought to claim the vast natural riches of Uganda, the rival Catholic and Protestant missionaries battled to convert as many natives as they could. It sometimes meant supporting one tribe in a war against another, causing a religious animosity that — along with politics and tribalism — is among the roots of the country’s mod-ern-day problems. The missionaries’ influence was to prove so great that Uganda today is one of black Africa’s most staunchly Christian countries. Sixty-three per cent of Uganda’s nearly 14 million people are Christians, 6 per cent are Muslims, and traditional beliefs account for the rest. In 1900, Britain concluded a treaty with the Kabaka, Buganda’s King, establishing “the pearl of east Africa” as a protectorate. On October 9, 1962, Uganda became independ-

ent when the then Prime Minister, Mr Obote, received the instruments of independence from the Duke of Kent as Colonel Idi Amin hauled down the Union Jack and ran up the Ugandan flag. Four years later, Amin would help Mr Obote wrest power from Sir Frederick Mutesa, Uganda’s first postindependence President, by leading an attack on the palace. Sir Frederick fled to England, where he died three years later. Mr Obote became President and dissolved the Brit-ish-drafted independence constitution that had placed power in the hands of the favoured Baganda tribe. Upon assuming full power in 1967, Mr Obote proclaimed Uganda a republic, abolished the four traditional tribal kingdoms, and replaced them with a central Administration. Mr Obote’s first regime was to last less than four years. On January 25, 1971, Amin took power in a military coup while Mr Obote was attending a meeting of Commonwealth leaders in Singapore. Amin, a member of the minority Kakwa tribe, was welcomed as a deliverer from the rule of Mr Obote who had unmercifully por-

secuted the Baganda tribe. But he soon started a tyrannical rule that left 300,000 of his countrymen dead, many of them murdered by his troops, during his eight years in power. On April 11, 1979, Ugandan rebels and exiles backed by soldiers from neighbouring Tanzania ended the dictatorial rule of Amin, who fled the country and subsequently was granted political asylum in Saudi Arabia. In the first post-independ-ence elections, in December, 1980, the Uganda People’s Congress scored a sweeping victory and Mr Obote returned from exile in Tanzania to again take over as President. Mr Obote soon resumed his campaign against the Baganda after forming an uneasy alliance between the Langi, his tribe, and the Acholi. Opposition groups, charging that the 1980 election was rigged in Mr Obote’s favour, began an insurgency campaign. The strained alliance between the Acholi and Langi finally broke on July 7 this year.

On Saturday, troops under Brigadier Basilio Okello took over Kampala and announced that Mr Obote had, for the second time in his political career, been ousted in a military coup.