PART 1: When ‘Museveni,’ ‘Bush’ were feared; only to be whispered

William Pike, an idealistic young former ‘hippie’, born and raised in colonial Tanganyika, returns to East Africa to rediscover his childhood roots. He finds, to his dismay, that the optimism of independence has dissolved into ‘shabbiness and decline.’

Inspired to play a part in reviving the lost dreams of liberty, Pike—now a veteran journalist living in Kenya—travels to a Uganda already in the throes of a guerilla war against President Milton Obote, who is supported by the British.

Pike’s object is to make contact with the rebel National Resistance Army guerrillas at their hideout in the swamps, two hundred miles from Kampala.
Tortuous path

Suffering personal hardship, sickness, and constant danger on his sojourn with the NRA fighters, Pike encounters their leader, Yoweri Museveni. His description of the inspirational 40-year-old president-in-the making, at the centre of his classic guerrilla campaign, is one of the highlights of the first part of the book.

Given the key mission of ‘telling the British government not to support Obote’, Pike hikes back to Kampala, discovering on the way the horrors of the ‘killing fields of Kapeka’, littered with the bodies of thousands of peasants massacred by Obote’s men.

He spends several nerve-wracking days in the capital, aware that he has ‘seen what I was not supposed to have seen.’ Back in London, he reveals to the world the truth about the Obote regime.

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“I thought security was improving in Uganda. I thought it was safe to drive at night”, I said belligerently, remembering Eriya’s advice.
Eventually Aston came, apologising for his lateness. I grabbed my bag and we left. They drove me to the Little Flowers bar at the back of the Unicef building, and left me with Bob Kagoro, the leader of their three-man cell.

As night came on, we sat in Little Flowers chatting. Bob was totally relaxed and gradually I calmed down.

Bob lived in a small, two-bedroom bungalow on the outskirts of the city. We slipped swiftly into the house after going through his compound gate. Bob had run the risk of leaving Little Flowers after dark so that his neighbours would not see a white man coming to stay.

Bob’s bedroom flickered with a ghostly blue light from the black and white television as we watched the news in the dark. The news was ponderous and irrelevant.
Bob told me that Obote was sickly.

He was allegedly drinking two bottles of whisky a day. The US was considering providing helicopter gunships to the government so that they could defeat the NRA.
The next day I spent sleeping and relaxing in the safe house with the curtains drawn.

In the afternoon, Bob came back and told me that we would drive out of town that night to connect with the guerillas. In all these conversations, we did not mention the words “NRA” or “Museveni”.

“What time are we leaving for the bush?”, I asked Bob.

“Bush, don’t mention that word ‘bush’”, he said. “Someone on the path outside might hear”.

“Phew”, I thought, “Uganda really is a tense place”.

After dark we drove out with three guerillas in Bob’s car. Half a mile from Bob’s house we came up to a tyre propped up in the middle of the road. It was completely dark and there was no sign of light. Bob drove slowly up to the tyre and stopped. There was no-one in sight. Then a security officer in plain clothes came up a low bank beside the road.

“Where are you going so fast?”

“We are going to Nansana (the next village) for a drink”, said Bob.

“Mzungu (white man)?”

“I am just going along for the ride. I am staying with my friend”.

We were all ordered out of the car and told to stand in the glare of the car headlights. A policeman with a Kalashnikov and other figures materialised out of the darkness. They were suspicious.

“We were giving the houseboy’s friends a lift home,” said Mtwaribu, the tall burly young man who had come in for a chat earlier that afternoon. Our story was disintegrating and becoming less credible.

“I thought security was improving in Uganda. I thought it was safe to drive at night”, I said belligerently, remembering Eriya’s advice in Nairobi to be assertive if in trouble.

“Yes, yes. You can drive around now. It’s safe”, said the first security officer. The others laughed.

Eventually Bob and I were allowed to leave. In forty minutes of interrogation, no other vehicle or person had passed. The three guerrillas with us were detained.
We drove home in a state of shock. Bob told me that we had been lucky that the security officer was from Toro in western Uganda, like Bob. If he had been from another tribe, we would all have been arrested and that would have been the end of my journey.

In the morning, Bob went back to the roadblock to get the three arrested guerillas released. A few hours later, he came back with the boys.

The night before I had been wondering whether to cut my losses and leave Uganda. Things were getting too risky.

At about 8pm, I slipped out of Bob’s house on foot with Mtwaribu. The roads and paths were deserted. Cracks of light were visible inside some houses but they were all locked up.

We had just dashed past a half-deserted bar and were crossing a stretch of open ground when two boys spotted us and started mumbling “mzungu”. They could have been UPC youthwingers so Mtwaribu accelerated and detoured to still smaller paths that circled up and down a steep hill.

We left the suburbs with their electric lights behind and came on to a long straight road leading north through papyrus swamp. There was no traffic, no movement. We moved by starlight. The hum of the crickets was intense. Occasionally a frog croaked or plopped into a puddle.

Paranoia

We had slowed down a bit and I was starting to relax. The adrenalin rush, the laboured breathing and fast heartbeat of our race through the suburbs started to subside. I saw someone pulling on a cigarette in the shadows and I started violently before realising it was only a firefly among the papyrus reeds.

Tall shadowy trees hung over the vague outline of banana plantations with their large, serrated leaves. Conical hills were visible on the night skyline. A drunk boy staggering home mistook us for his drinking partners but Mtwaribu went towards him and threatened him with his bulk.

This place was less menacing than the suburbs. The foreboding had lifted. We were in the country. Everywhere it was deserted. The mud houses were shuttered and their doors closed but sometimes we glimpsed the light of a kerosene lamp or the red embers of a charcoal stove outside a hut.

We turned off the road and moved along a small path. About two hours after we left Bob’s house, we came around a corner and reached a small house. Chief and the other guerilla who had been arrested at the roadblock were talking to three old peasants, one of them dressed in a grimy white kanzu (gown) and skull cap. We entered a coffee plantation and, stooping, followed a narrow path through the dense undergrowth for about twenty yards.

It was an NRA bivouac. Polythene sheets were stretched over branches for shelter. A few soldiers were sleeping while others were cooking around an open fire.

They were dressed in camouflage uniforms and their AK-47s were stacked a short way from the fire. We chatted and they brought me a plate of posho (maize meal) and oily Nile perch.

It was like jumping inside the television. Everything was totally familiar and everything was totally strange. It was like going to America for the first time.

You have never been there but you recognise everything from the movies and TV soap operas. These guns were AK-47s, the quintessential weapon of the late twentieth century. These were guerillas, like the ones in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East, the driving force of modern history. I was with them. It was happening to me. I was in the bush.

Combatants - A Memoir of the Bush War and the Press in Uganda by William Pike, is available at Bookstop Yaya Centre, Prestige Bookshop in CBD and Village Bookshop in Village Market, plus Aristoc and Entebbe Airport Bookshop in Uganda'. (Part two next week)

Michael Asher is a writer and explorer living in Karen, Nairobi