First foreign service post abroad, Kampala, Uganda.

AuthorBaker, Robert
PositionEssay

"Don't worry about the upsets in Kampala, Bob," my new boss in Africa wrote reassuringly in 1967 before I left Washington, D.C, "It's more like gang warfare in Chicago than a real war and has already calmed down."

In fact, about two thousand had been killed by Ugandan Army shelling of Rubaga Hill in Kampala a couple months before I arrived on my first Foreign Service assignment. Most of the dead were women and children. The Kabaka, King of the largest and best educated tribe in Uganda, the Baganda, had fled his Rubaga stronghold and palace, to exile in Britain.

Ugandan President Milton Apollo Obote, had broken the major traditional tribal kingdom in Uganda by his attack. During the next couple years, Obote moved fitfully but steadily against the major opposition political party. He wanted to consolidate his power before an upcoming election. He expected to lose that and so had begun to dismantle Uganda's democracy, most potently by creating an unchecked, brutal, secret police. The press remained free but largely self-censored.

As I settled into my job, Uganda was still prosperous, peaceful, had a lively press, an independent judiciary, an uproarious political life and a small, but well-educated African elite who ran much of the civil service. Britain and the U.S. were major donors of economic and military aid designed to help Obote maintain Ugandan unity in the face of ancient tribal rivalries.

Unhappily, the shelling of Rubaga Hill, in hindsight, unmistakably marked the end of political solutions to Uganda's problems, and its slide into corruption, despotism and chaos. Shortly after I left, Uganda's lovely people were dragged into more than a decade of tribal warfare, costing hundreds of thousands of lives and general ruin.

Here is how Uganda looked to an innocent abroad, just as it began to slip over the precipice in 1966. It was green, lush, peaceful, and even cool in the shade when the sun was hot. Kampala lay almost on the Equator but was at about 4,000 foot elevation. Flowers blossomed year round, scarlet, yellow, pink, white, on the rich volcanic soil. The staple food, mashed green bananas, also turned into beer if left in a dugout with a bit of yeast or if left longer, could become waragi, a kind of tropical vodka. If you broke off a three foot sprout from a banana tree, scuffed out a hole, stuck it in and tamped the dirt down around it, you got a week's supply of food in the form of small green bananas a couple months later.

Women...

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