The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget: Murder and Memory in Uganda by Andrew Rice

Author:Andrew Rice [Rice, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-11-05T08:52:56+00:00

The first large-scale outbreak of AIDS in Africa occurred shortly after the war of 1979, in the Ugandan and Tanzanian fishing villages that ringed the western edge of Lake Victoria. The people of the region, who had just suffered the worst battles of the war, initially theorized that the mysterious disease was the result of “fallout” from the Tanzanians’ saba-saba rockets, or that it was a curse brought upon them by the misdeeds of Amin. They gave this strange wasting ailment a morbid nickname: “Slim.” From its point of emergence, the epidemic crept northward, a few dozen miles a year, roughly along the route of the Tanzanian advance and the Ugandan retreat. Truckers carried the disease east to the capital, and then on to Nairobi, Mombasa and beyond. Within a decade, an estimated one-third of adults in Kampala were infected with the HIV virus.

Uganda was not where AIDS originated, but it was the first country where the disease was identified in Africa, and the first to feel the full force of the plague. When epidemiologists later looked back and asked why AIDS emerged in this place, of all places, they kept coming back to Idi Amin’s invasion of the Kagera region of Tanzania. All those women raped in the Ugandan rampage. All those soldiers who picked up bar girls and prostitutes. War was the perfect vector for a catastrophic epidemic.

Alfred Orijabo was a dying man, one more victim of Idi Amin’s ineradicable legacy.

Simon Mugenyi called the next witness for the prosecution, one John Hitler.

“Hitler?” Justice Mukiibi said.

“That’s my name, my lord,” the witness replied, in a practiced deadpan. “It was given to me.”

Ugandans usually don’t have family surnames; their parents choose both their first and last names. There’s a long tradition of calling boys after world leaders, regardless of political orientation. When I lived in Uganda, I met many Muslim boys called Saddam, as well as a youthful member of parliament named Ronald Reagan Okumu. It was John Hitler’s lifelong misfortune to have been born in 1942, when it looked like the Germans might win the Second World War. Now sixty, he had a talkative manner and leathery skin. He’d been a police officer before he’d retired, and on the day of Eliphaz Laki’s disappearance, he’d been stationed at the Ibanda county headquarters, where he’d watched powerlessly as Mohammed Anyule marched the chief out of his office.

“He gave me an identity card,” Hitler testified. “The card said he was an intelligence officer…. The man told me he had his instructions to go with the late Laki to the Simba barracks in Mbarara.”

“Did you know him?” the prosecutor asked.

“No, I had never seen him before,” the witness replied.

Hitler testified that, looking out the window of the county headquarters, he had seen a second soldier carrying a machine gun.

“Did you know this man?” the prosecutor asked.

“I had never seen him before.”

“Would you recognize any of these people?”

“Those two,” Hitler said, pointing a pair of fingers at Anyule and Gille.

The retired policeman happened to possess another key piece of information.

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