Uganda had a good reputation now, yet nothing I saw in Uganda astonished me with its newness, everything was on the wane. I did not lament this, nor was I impressed by a new hospital donated by the Swedes or the Japanese, a new school funded by the Canadians, the Baptist clinic, the flour mill that was signposted, A Gift of the American People. These were like inspired Christmas presents, the sort that stop running when the batteries die, or they break and aren’t fixed. The projects would become ruins, every one of them, because they carried with them the seeds of their destruction. And when they stopped running, no one would be sorry. That’s what happened in Africa: things fell apart.
The ruin seemed like part of the plan. It had been the idea of the British Colonial Office to establish a university here. The Makerere motto was Pro Futuro Aedificamus — we build for the future. What a nice idea! But it is a rarified humanistic notion of the West, not an African tradition. Change and decay and renewal were the African cycle: a mud hut was built; it fell down; a new one replaced it. The Uganda of the university was a country with a subsistence economy — a hand-to-mouth method, but a way of life that had enabled people to get through terrible times. When the university was closed and became a ruin under Idi Amin, when the structures of government no longer existed, and the markets were empty and the fuel was in short supply, and anarchy seized Uganda it was the traditional economy that kept Ugandans fed. As the university, a useless compound, became ruinous, Ugandans fled and saved themselves in their mud huts, in the ancient refuge of their villages.
The one-story building where I had worked, the Center for Adult Studies, was in poor shape and had not been improved in over three decades. It was being used by the Faculty of Law.
‘Most of the new buildings you see have been put up in the past ten years,’ a law lecturer told me. He was John Ntambirweke, a man in his late forties I guessed, but a big strong fellow, who was pleasantly self-possessed and opinionated. Suitably enough this man was occupying my former office. He showed me around the campus — the old neglected buildings outnumbered the bright new ones. It was obvious that after all the political turmoil in the country the university had still not recovered to the point where it had been thirty-three years before.
I missed the trees. Why was it that I remembered the trees more clearly than the buidings? As we passed by the crumbling main building and the cracked windows of the library I asked John Ntambirweke about the recent election.
‘An election is not the only indicator of democracy,’ he said, at the wheel of his car, negotiating the obstacles in this battered ivory tower. ‘Democracy means much more — after all, the Romans had elections. Was Rome a democracy? We need a wider definition. We need more Institutions, not one thing but many, so that people can be free.’
‘They are free, aren’t they? But they’re hungry.’
‘The people here need to be granted some political space,’ he said.
That seemed an appropriate term for Africans who were always lumped together.
‘What I really object to is an intelligent man like Nsibambi, the prime minister, explaining in so many words that we require a one-party system. That we Africans are not clever enough or mature enough to think for ourselves. That we are somehow less than other people — inferior to people who have a real opposition.’
‘There were several opposition parties fighting the election,’ I said, ‘They lost, right?’
‘The election doesn’t prove anything.’
‘Some African countries don’t even have them,’ I said.
‘We need them, but we need more than that,’ he said. ‘I am really Disappointed with the level of political debate in this country.’
‘Haven’t people in Uganda been saying that since 1962? I used to hear it all the time.’
‘It’s worse now,’ he said. ‘We are treated as though we are unworthy, not capable of making choices and distinctions. It’s insulting!’
‘What do people in Uganda say when you mention these things? Or maybe you don’t mention these things?’
‘I do — all the time. I write them. I say them on the radio. I was saying them last Thursday on the radio just after the election. These days we are free to say anything.’
‘That’s great,’ I said.
‘But it doesn’t do any good,’ he said. ‘They will just say, “Oh, there he goes again — that’s John, complaining as usual.” ’
‘That’s better than being locked up, which was the traditional response here.’
‘No one is going to lock me up for saying these things,’ he said, but with an air of resignation at how ineffectual his opinions were.
He told me that for shooting his mouth off he had had to flee to Kenya after the fall of Amin, when Obote regained power. Realizing that his life was in danger he had gone to Canada to study and teach. He returned to Uganda with the new regime as a consultant in legal affairs and as an adviser to the revived East African Community, an association for the development of trade and communications.
He had traveled to most of the countries in Africa. His opinions on other African countries were trenchant, too.
‘Kenya is another story,’ he said. ‘They had white settlers who were tough and who were determined to dominate. But here we just had a few — those tea planters around Fort Portal. They were nobodies. I’ve been looking at the records. If a white district commissioner offended one of our kings in some way he could be immediately transferred. The white officials had to learn how to get along with Ugandan chiefs and kings. This policy lasted until independence. We were not colonized in Uganda. This was a protectorate. Our kings continued into independence.’
‘That’s fine,’ I said, ‘but if the chiefs and kings had that much power, then maybe that’s a Ugandan problem — authority figures become very bossy.’
‘Maybe. But it wasn’t the case in Kenya. And there’s the racial thing,’ he said. ‘I travel a lot with other Africans. And I notice that Kenyans, Zimbabweans, and Zambians have a strange way of dealing with white people. They behave oddly when they’re around them.’
‘Really?’
He laughed and said, ‘Yes. When we’re traveling in Britain or America, these other Africans detect slights — or they imagine reactions that I don’t see. They are very uneasy around white people, but this is not the case among Ugandans.’
I told him I was glad to hear him say that, because it was how I had felt about Uganda; it was one of the reasons I had liked living there. People looked me straight in the eye. But racism crept into the political rhetoric and at last I was just a mzungu from Wazungu-land, someone to blame, and at last I had found Africa an easy place to leave.
John and I had come to the end of the Makerere campus tour. In spite of some new buildings it looked a ghostly and ruined place. Music blared from the dorm windows, many of which were broken. My old house had become a horror of rotted window sashes and splintered doors and scorched walls. The campus roads were full of potholes. The library — always a good gauge of the health of a university — was in very poor shape, unmaintained, with few users in sight and many empty shelves.
I said, ‘The prime minister you mentioned, Apolo Nsibambi, was a friend of mine — we taught together.’
‘He lives near here, because his wife is in the university administration.’
After John Ntambirweke dropped me I went to Apolo’s house — a stucco bungalow with a well-tended flower garden. I rang the bell, and the door was answered by a woman housekeeper who told me the master was not at home. I left a Remember me? note and asked him to call me.