Above and below, Athina Club in Kampala. PHOTO | SUSAN LINNEE
What you need to know:
It’s a small hotel and restaurant from another era, with a lovely patio and a fascinating story.
The next time you’re in Kampala and want a respite from the hustle and bustle of the city, as well as some excellent moussaka and spanakorizo (Greek rice and spinach), go down Windsor Crescent in Kololo to the blue and white sign and turn right into the Athina Club.
It’s a small hotel and restaurant from another era, with a lovely patio and a fascinating story.
It begins in 1938, on the eve of the Second World War, with the arrival in Juba of Andreas Roussos, a man from the British crown colony of Cyprus, whose uncle was already living among the prosperous community of Greek traders in the Nile port in what was then the southern half of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.
Greek connections got Andreas a job in the Kivu region of the eastern Belgian Congo, picking up coffee from Beni and Butembo and smoked and salted fish from Lake Edward and transporting both to neighbouring Uganda.
Andreas liked Uganda and decided to settle there, but he needed to find a wife.
Some Greeks in Kampala said there were always beautiful Polish girls at the Saturday night dances at the Imperial Hotel, so he went along and met Eugenia Genoveva Kakwa, a nurse who had been uprooted from her native Poland by the war and had ended up in a camp for Polish refugees in Masinde.
They married and moved to Fort Portal in the Uganda Protectorate, to be closer to Andreas’s business across the border in the Congo.
Mary Roussos Joly, the lively blonde woman with the throaty voice who greets you in the Athina Club’s patio full of plants, was born in Fort Portal. When she was two, the family headed south to Kabatoro where they opened the only hotel in the area to serve Greek transporters travelling between the Congo and Kasese and the Kilembe mines in Uganda.
Mary went to school across the border in Butembo, where she studied in French and Flemish. On June 29, 1960 — the day before the Congo became independent — fearing political unrest, Mary’s mother went to Butembo to take her and her sister Elizabeth home.
They continued their schooling in Mbarara in Uganda, before being sent to boarding school in in Cyprus and Athens where Mary finally learned Greek.
Meanwhile, her parents bought the two-storey house on Windsor Crescent in 1961. A year later, Uganda gained its Independence from Britain, and Andreas become involved in setting up agricultural co-operatives. Ten years later, when Idi Amin came to power, the entire family was expelled; some went to Kenya and others, including Mary, to England.
Mary returned to Uganda in 1980, after Amin had been ousted, and married a Frenchman, Mr Joly. But Kampala was not a peaceful city, and they went back to England where Mary worked for Olympic Airways.
Back in Kampala in 1982, Mary’s mother was served with a notice that No 30 Windsor Crescent was owned by London-based businessman Nazmudini Gulam Hassein Virani, even though Eugenia had signed the purchase papers herself.
The court battle went on for 24 years with 10 different judges presiding and seven lawyers. It seemed the title deed had been fraudulently transferred to Virani in 1969, and someone had forged Eugenia’s signature — and not very well at that.
Nevertheless, Eugenia, brother Nicholas and Elizabeth went ahead and opened a hotel in the house and decided to call it the Athina Club. It also became the Honorary Cyprus Consulate in Kampala. And after Andreas’s death. Nicholas, who had married Ruth, a woman from Kenya, became the honorary consul with Elizabeth as his deputy.
Mary returned to Kampala in 1990 on the death of her mother, and the court case dragged on until a court finally ruled, in November 2006, that the house had all along belonged to the Roussos family.
Jason, one of Mary’s two sons, and his wife are now taking on more responsibility for the Athina Club and are encouraging Mary to finally sit down and write her memoirs.
In the meantime, the Kiswahili-speaking cook prepares the moussaka and the spanakorizo every day for lunch, members of the Mountain Club meet periodically in the patio and drink up all the wine, and the rooms are still a great bargain: $50 for a large, airy room with a double bed, TV, fridge and $65 for the “executive suite.”
