Last week we commemorated the death of Archbishop Janani Luwum, who was killed in February 16, 1977 following allegations he was collaborating with the forces opposed to then president Idi Amin.
The official record is that he was killed during
interrogation, but there is a strong suspicion that Amin himself may have
actually pulled the trigger himself.
We read how attempts to portray Luwum’s death as a car
accident didn’t hold. One nurse from Mulago testified that she saw bullet holes
on his neck and chest, while another reported that a badly beaten Luwum joined
other inmates briefly in the cells of the State Research Bureau (SRB) in
Nakasero ours before his death.
During it all the good Archbishop does not seem to have lose
his poise or lost his faith in his God. A useful study courage, defined as
grace under pressure.
Reconstructing the mood of the time does not take a fertile
imagination.
"An isolated Amin, by this time six years into his reign of terror, was seeing opponents – real and imagined around every corner. Either because of his limited exposure to the structures of civil society or because of a total disregard for due process or because he could, he and his system were eliminating people on pure suspicion....
The terror was made all the more universal, the anecdotal
evidence suggests, with some people taking advantage of the situation to settle
personal scores, to grab property or take over people’s girlfriends and wives.
Clearly Luwum fell prey to this heightened sense of
paranoia, whether he sympathised with the opponents of Amin’s clumsy
administration or not.
It has been suggested that the death of Luwum was the straw
that broke the camel’s back, finally raising international awareness to the
extent of how things had gone wrong in Uganda and galvanising support for
regime change in Kampala.
Looking back almost 40 years it is maybe hard to fathom how
things came to that.
A younger person in his 30s who ardently followed the series
of articles on the Vision Group’s various platforms, leading up to the commemoration
on Monday, was in genuine shock while declaring, “So Amin was this bad?”
Shock because in his experience it would be inconceivable for
a senior prelate in such and secondly that a president would be personally
involved (that is what he is convinced happened) in such an act.
It is probably that same naïvete that allowed Amin to run
rough shod over the population and by the time people had got over their gullibility
and stopped giving him the benefit of doubt, they were paralysed with terror
and unable to mount any meaningful opposition internally.
It is useful to celebrate the life of Luwum, even make it a
public holiday, but he would have died in vain if we do not look beyond the
horror of the time to understand how the situation degenerated to such depths.
We can blame it on the politics.
Our post-independence politicians in trying to outmaneuver
each other resorted to extrajudicial methods, circumventing established institutions
and generally setting precedents that continue to reverberate down our history.
Once the powers that be begun to ignore the laws to ensure
they got their way, they had begun the slide down a very slippery slope into
chaos.
By February 1977 anything could go.
Agency or the role of an individual or group of people in
shaping events will always be critical in the unfolding of history, but the
sustainability of those changes or their continued progress, will depend on the
viability of the society’s institutions.
Maybe one can’t fault a young independent Uganda whose
institutions had not matured enough as to call the main actors to order at the
time.
Maybe our major players were just inherently averse to
operating in structured situations and preferred fluid situations where the
ends justified the means and to hell with the rest.
Maybe we can blame fate that a coincidence of events that
did not happen in neighbouring Kenya or Tanzania happened here and the problems
of the 1970s and 1980s were predestined.
"They say that those that do not learn from history are bound to repeat the mistakes of the past. It offers no solace that they also say that, what we learn from history is that we do not learn from history...
Hence the importance of a deeper commemoration of Luwum’s
death.
Thousands of people died during that horrific eight years of
our history, and as inconceivable as it seems we can return to such a time
unless we internalise and learn from what led to that dark age and determine
that “Never Again!”
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