I was closely involved with this operation. Obote and I had a personal radio link with Amin. Ours was code- named “Sparrow”; Amin’s was “Kisu.” The rebels often came to Entebbe, stayed in Amin’s house, and saw Obote. Their greatest need was for arms and transport. They had no cash, but they did have truckloads of gold and ivory, seized as they
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Toward the end of my leave, one incident—the murder of Michael Kagwa, President of the Industrial Court- revealed to the country as a whole that the massacres w'ere not to be limited to the army, or to the Acholi and Langi. Kagwa, who was extremely rich (he had a Mercedes sports car with its own television), had a girlfriend, Helen Ogwang, in whom Amin was interested. In September 1971, Kagwa was seized by Amin’s bodyguards at the Kampala International Hotel swimming pool. They shot him and burnt his body, together with his Mercedes, on the outskirts of the capital near Namirembe Cathedral. No attempt was made to discover who the murderers were. The senior police officers had already been arrested for investigating the Okoya murder. No one would risk death by asking questions that could lead only to Amin. The government “offered” a 50,000-shilling reward for information. So far it has gone unclaimed. Helen Ogwang was later posted to the Uganda Embassy in Paris, where she defected.
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Hundreds of prominent citizens were imprisoned without trial (including the former Army Commander, Shaban Opolot). Regular lists of political detainees—often up to eighty names at a time—were published, as demanded by law, in the weekly Uganda Gazette. Obote, backed by his security forces, ruled supreme. It is ironic that the system later developed by Amin, an illiterate killer who strikes at random, was inherited half-formed from a man raised in the best democratic traditions.
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The only dismissal into which I could read a deeper motive was that of Professor Banage, Minister of Animal Resources, who had been a zoology professor at Makerere University. Amin was now painfully aware of his own reputation for stupidity, and to fire a professor would have given him considerable satisfaction.
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By the 1970’s, 30,000 of Uganda’s Asians had British passports, but the other 20,000 were legally Ugandans. At the time of Amin's original announcement, nobody thought that he intended to expel both Ugandan Asians and British Asians. But it soon became clear that he did not intend to make a distinction between passports. He wanted the Asians’ property to hand over to his troops. It was a brutal and thoroughly racist decision, and one that was to deal the Ugandan economy a terrible blow.
The Asians were sent out of the country with nothing except a hundred-dollar personal allowance. A stop was put on their bank accounts. Amin did not care where the Asians went as long as they went, and he stuck to his deadline—November 8, 1972—with a countdown that proceeded remorselessly day by day on the radio. He announced that any Asians remaining after the deadline would be sent to detention camps. Informed that some Asians were attempting to avoid deportation by blacking their faces with shoe polish, he issued a dire warning to anyone found guilty of such practices. Understandably, all the Asians made every effort to move out of the country.
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To rebuild a real officer corps from Amin’s illiterate sadists, who could hardly speak a word of English, was an insurmountable problem. The British, however, gave it a try. Soon after the coup, Amin requested and was granted a British officer to train the Intelligence Service. The cadets given to him were Amin’s best, yet they were still totally inadequate. I often met this officer on his way to and from the President’s office and he would tell me of the difficulties he was having. He doubted that the men could ever benefit from his presence. “Obviously an intelligence officer needs some basic intelligence,” he would say. “These chaps have none.” Since they were semi-literate, all he could do was describe the basic tasks of an intelligence officer. Not that they could ever perform these tasks, let alone teach others, which was the long-term aim of the project. He often told me how ridiculous he felt. He stuck it out for three or four months, then said he would try to arrange training for them outside the country, and left.
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By mid-1971, an inexperienced junior officer corps virtually ran the country. One of the most feared of these men was—and is—Lieutenant Malyamungu who was in charge of quelling dissent in the army. Before he joined the army, he had been a gatekeeper at Nyanza Textile Industries, where my brother Kisajja was personnel manager. At the time of the coup, he commandeered a tank with which he shot up the entrance to the Entebbe airport terminal, killing two priests. After the coup he headed Amin’s execution gangs, with unlimited power to execute anybody in the army, even officers senior to him.
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In the space of just a few months, Uganda had gone from a peaceful democracy to something very close to a military dictatorship.
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From some thirty of these tribal areas, the British forged Uganda in the late nineteenth century. Britain, the greatest imperial power, had a particular interest in Uganda, because the region controlled the source of the Nile, which controlled Egypt, which controlled the Suez Canal, which controlled the most direct route to India, the jevvel in Britain’s imperial crovvn. Because Uganda was important to the British for its ovvn reasons, the borders vvere set vvithout much thought for the people involved. Thus the borders did not coincide with tribal territories, which overlap neighboring Zaire, Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda.
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The oil money from Libya was good for Amin personally, but it did little to sustain the loyalty of the army. To ensure this, he needed to offer cash or goods. He soon found a way to provide both.
On August 4, Amin appeared at the barracks at Tororo, near the Kenyan border, and announced to the troops that he had had a dream the previous night in which God instructed him to order the 50,000 Asians out of Uganda within ninety days. This he proceeded to do.
The Asian community was an ideal target. Asians almost totally controlled Uganda’s trade, factories, plantations and industries. They were the managers, the bureaucrats, the accountants, the technicians, the doctors, the engineers, the lawyers. They formed an affluent middle class, a distinctive element in the population, with their own language, behavior patterns, names and occupations. On the whole they were not popular with the Africans. They have been described as the Jews of East Africa. They were, in other words, ideal targets.
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