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When a mere war becomes a revolution
BOOK REVIEW The book is about the Luweero war but it is really a reflection on the years after the war and, as in other aspects of life, the present colours the past. In this sense, the first chapter, Why the Struggle, which draws very dramatic scenes about why Kutesa joined the Museveni bush war, becomes less relevant than the last chapter, which does a cost-benefit analysis of the war and asks the question: Was the war worth it? Title: Uganda's Revolution 1976-1986: How I Saw It Author: Col. Pecos Kutesa Publisher: Fountain Available: All bookstores Price: Shs15,000 Reviewer: Kalundi Serumaga Who is the enemy in a civil war?" is the question that Col. Pecos Kutesa poses early on in his entertaining book about his role in what he terms Uganda's "revolution". As a personal recollection of the experiences of an able and courageous fighting soldier, replete with historical photos, this book bears remarkable resemblance in tone and wry humour to President Museveni's Sowing the Mustard Seed. And they both cover more or less the same terrain. The one difference is that one feels this is a much more open account, as Kutesa is not burdened with running the country at the same time. He just wants to tell his story. Nevertheless, both are selective in their approach. For a start, both talk about mere war, but claim "revolution". AUTHOR AND FIGHTER: Col. Kutesa What did happen in Uganda between 1979 and 1986? Revolution, or civil war? Does the difference matter? Early on, Kutesa tells us that "war is not a tea party", and attributes that statement to Mao Tse-tung. This is incorrect. Mao was leader of the Communist Party of China that from the mid-1920s to 1947 led the struggle against foreign imperialist domination and its local agents in that country. He succeeded in mobilising millions of people and laying the foundation for the complete economic and political independence of China. The methods of his mobilisation of peasants and third world workers to liberate his country have become the standard (though often abused) model for third world liberation movements. What Mao actually said was: ".a revolution is not a dinner party. it cannot be so leisurely.. refined. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another." (From: Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, March 1927, in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. I (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1975, pp 23-29). In its wrongness, this quotation tells you all that was wrong about the NRA's misnamed revolution. Nevertheless, (if not because of that), that does not mean that this is not a book worth reading. FIGHTERS: Some of the members of the then NRA high command (1984). (L-R): A political leader Katerega, Gertrude Njuba, Fred Bamwesigye, Pecos Kutesa, Guma Young Frank, Jim Muhwezi, Fred Rwigyema and Elly Tumwine. Photos from Uganda's Revolution This "tea party" quotation is a favourite among many NRA cadres. The way they so easily exchange "war" for "revolution" speaks volumes about their inability to understand the significance of the difference between the two. Kutesa starts with stories about his life as an ordinary young man growing up in west-central Uganda. Like many of that time and later, he suffers indignities at the hands (and feet) of Amin soldiers. The deep anger this sparks off in him leads to him walking across the border into Tanzania, with the intention of joining the anti-Amin rebels. He fails to find them but then later, back in Uganda, he joins those being drafted into the Tanzanian-led 1979 counter-invasion of Uganda through his home area, which led to the fall of Amin's regime. There were a number of small Ugandan armed groups that worked alongside the Tanzanians. Among them was the Front for National Salvation (Fronasa), led by now President Museveni, and others interested in "revolution" as they saw it. Kutesa ends up as a soldier in Fronasa, and works with them as they follow the Tanzanian army, chasing Amin's soldiers up to the Uganda-Sudan border. Fronasa becomes one of the armed factions on the Lule-then-Binaisa-led coalition Uganda National Liberation Front government. Kutesa is among the many young new soldiers then selected to go to the prestigious Monduli Military College in Tanzania for officer training. The idea was that they would form the officer corps of the new Ugandan army (known as the Uganda National Liberation Army) being built by the UNLF. During training, Kutesa faces the realities of Ugandan tribal politics. He faces abuse and discrimination from many of his fellow students on account of his being a southerner. In those days, all southerners, and especially westerners and Baganda, were considered "non-military material" by politicians and senior soldiers from the north (just as their counterparts in the south chose to look at northerners as people incapable of higher education and sophisticated politics). Kutesa recounts how fellow students from the northern-dominated Kikosi Maalum, which was the other main armed faction in the UNLF coalition, looked for ways of hounding southerners out of the officer corps that was being built in Tanzania. "Any degree of rivalry would have been healthy, since we were all just young men from different backgrounds, but ours was more intense, dangerous and divisive. Where people would be arguing about academic or physical feats, at best, our arguments were full of threats about what we would do to each other, given a chance."He cites one co-trainee, Angwella wod Onyango, who constantly abused him about his light complexion, and labelled him a weakling. SOME OF THE HISTORICALS - (STANDING): Prince Jjuko, Simba, Abbey Mukwaya, Rev. Father Sseguya. (SEATED L-R): Kibirango, Katente-Apuuli, Alhaji Moses Kigongo and Kahinda Otafiire The writer Pilipo Oruni who, in his book, What is Right for Uganda, describes us as a country where "racism is officially taught in schools". He tells us how ".this sort of attitude eventually led to the northerners adopting a more bullying attitude towards southerners by acting as the Big Brother in politics and the armed forces soon after independence." This attitude was present even in the writings of the otherwise great Ugandan poet Okot p'Bitek who wrote about weak-boned banana-eating southerners just as Onyango, a strong-boned millet eater in his imagination, used to insult Kutesa. Kutesa states how Uganda ended up with an army heavily populated by northerners in all the early independence years, due to reasons of colonial preference, but he clearly cannot advance his analysis beyond that. It is Oruni who explains that this idea of northerners being more militarily capable was pure British propaganda aimed at keeping the "big tribes" out of the army after using them to win the Second World War, as they could have started mobilising militarily for independence. Oruni reveals that the vast majority of the non-commissioned officers (which was as high as an African could hope to rise in the white man's army), were made up of Baganda soldiers, and that many westerners also fought in that war. This is why we have names like Ntabadde and Kawonawo in Buganda and Museveni (named after the 7th Army regiment, British Army in Africa), in western Uganda. In short, these stupidities meant that the coalition government failed to create a united officer corps from the Tanzanian trainees. The northern factions opted instead to support Obote's scheme to steal the planned 1980 election, starting with the overthrow of the UNLF government in May 1980. The Fronasa faction, comprising mainly officers from western Uganda, eventually ended up in the southern countryside, having lost out in the post-UNLF politics that they initially participated in, with Museveni as the Number Two in the military government. The rest of Kutesa's story, therefore, becomes one of telling us what happened, battle by battle, to that section of the UNLF coalition army officer corps that took to the bush in central Uganda, in order to fight their (mainly northern) co-officers who had pushed them out of power, and then helped steal a national election. He does not see it that way, of course. For him, it was "revolution". He writes in a very straightforward, matter-of-fact style that is both very human but also avoids complex political analysis. This is both a strength and a weakness of the book. On the one hand, it allows us to get a clear sense of what war does to ordinary people caught up in it. On the other hand, it leaves us just as ignorant of who was really fighting whom in this conflict. A strong moment is when he recounts the death of his infant son, Sankara, who is the second Kutesa child to be born in the war zone to his wife and fellow combatant Dora (who surely must be the real hero of this story!) Another is when he describes a battle at Kampomera where he has to find a way of psychologically dealing with the loss of 12 fighters under his command, without achieving his objective. This style becomes a little frustrating, however, when Col. Kutesa uses it to skip political events that shaped the eventual outcome of this war. Maybe this is an honest indication from him that he has little interest in political issues, but then that is somewhat unbecoming of a senior commander of what was claimed to be a political army leading a revolutionary war. Two good examples of this are his failure to talk about who supported the NRA during the war. The idea generally given to the reader is that the NRA did their thing "without external support". He then goes on to tell us about arms drops that were made "from Libya". In fact, the UK's Independent newspaper of the time published an article describing how the rebel Museveni was being flown around in a private jet belonging to a UK-based multinational company, and also mentioned a British military officer working as an "advisor" to the NRM/NRA delegation, all during the six-month Nairobi Peace Talks. This multinational is reported to have delivered large quantities of arms from Israel to the NRA in exchange for coffee looted from public stores. Given that Uganda has been suffering from economic dominance right from the 1896 Imperial British East Africa Company (which invented Uganda in the first place), to all those subsequent "investors" that make immediate friendships with all of our dictators, surely Kutesa should have revisited Mao's definition of revolution, and asked himself if this war had really overthrown any class at all. The second is his failure to deal with Andrew Kayiira's (the leader of the Uganda Freedom Movement - UFM - rebel group) criticism of the NRA as being led "by westerners" fighting in Buganda. This is not really dealt with at all, which in the light of the loud complaints one now hears about who gets to be a general or who gets a State House Scholarship, one would expect a comment on whether Kayiira was right or wrong, all those years ago. These failures lead one into the temptation of not taking everything that the colonel writes as the Gospel Truth. But given the subtitle of the book (How I Saw It), this writing is perhaps entirely reasonable. For example, in his continued mocking of UFM (for whom, it must be said, the war did not go well at all), Kutesa gives an account of the famous 1982 UFM attack on the then Obote-UNLA barracks based at the Lubiri Palace. He describes it as an ill-judged attempt to capture Kampala. In Kutesa's account, one of the outcomes of that battle was a lorry-load of UFM weapons being handed to Kutesa's unit by one UFM officer he calls Sonko Lutaaya who had no other choice during the chaotic aftermath of the attack. The UFM, however, says its men attacked the Lubiri not to capture Kampala, but in an improvised attempt to acquire ammunition for a large amount of weapons that they had already acquired, but the NRA ambushed them and stole the weapons. Kutesa tells us here that, in fact, those weapons (all from Libya) were supposed to have been originally shared out between the two groups when they reached Uganda, but UFM -being "streetwise", had not done so. This is a quarrel that continues between the two. In Bloodstreams: Uganda's Political Problems (1998), Maj. Twaha Mukiibi, who served in UFM from 1981 to 1986, and deserted after it was merged with the victorious NRA in 1990, tells it thus: "We had a few heavily armed fighters, many lightly armed with a few bullets in their guns, but the bulk of the force was armed with unloaded rifles in the hope of loading them when they captured ammunition. The raid was a success in terms of military execution because we secured all the barracks, searched all the marked objects, but sadly where [we] expected to find ammunition, found only sacks of maize. Disappointed and tired, the UFM fighters headed back to the bush. [They had] commandeered a lorry on which they put most of their unloaded guns in order to ease the withdrawal. Commander Ssonko was put in charge of the lorry but before it arrived at base, it was ambushed by the NRA who took advantage of the small number of UFM soldiers on that lorry and their tiredness. The NRA captured both the guns and the personnel. Ssonko was later to come with the NRA in 1986 as their director of transport. That was the basis of this guerrilla war." If you want to annoy a former UFM commander, just raise the issue of the Lubiri weapons. But, as they say, history is written by the victors. The epilogue updates us on the situation since the capture of Kampala (described as the "beginning" of the revolution, which may leave one a little puzzled). Unfortunately, this too fails to link the past to the present. "The balance sheet looks good", says Kutesa, yet many of the examples he then gives are things that have been implemented in many African countries that did not first have to go through such a war. Nevertheless, he tells us how human rights and constitutionalism are generally upheld (though the young men recently photographed lying at the feet of an armed Fox Odoi may have a different view, sort of like the very humiliation that started the young Kutesa on his own long career in the military). Kutesa accepts that we do not have an independent economy, but praises our freedom of _expression and free media. Judgements on those views must be left to the reader. Obote and Museveni have both acquired hero status in their respective "constituencies" by doing what the other side thought they could not do (political and military manoeuvring, respectively). Ugandans have seen many wars that were claimed as revolutions. What is now clear is that all revolutions may involve war, but not all wars are revolutions. If Ugandans have learned one thing, it seems to be that we are all equally capable of doing the same things, be it war or politics. Unfortunately, we choose to demonstrate this by doing bad things to one another, with those skills. What is clearer still, is that Uganda has never had a revolution, but plenty of war Read this book, it has many interesting and honest moments, and long live Dora! The Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in anarchy" Groupe de communication Mulindwas "avec Yoweri Museveni, l'Ouganda est dans l'anarchie" |
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