The Big Three. Obote shown with Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta and Tanzania’s Julius K. Nyerere. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Today, May 27th marks the 41 year anniversary of the return of Apollo Milton Obote from eight years exile in Tanzania in 1980.
Before he died on October 10, 2005, Obote had served as Uganda’s first prime minister as well as the country’s second and sixth president, having been deposed twice.
As a student at Busoga College Mwiri, Obote reportedly led a protest march to the headmaster’s office to raise a defiant fist over the declining quality of the food. A stirring orator, his silver tongue lined the angry cloud hovering above a phalanx of students with the power of protest. The fellow students fell in with him as he made his way to the head teacher’s office.
As soon as Obote reached the destination, he rapped the door as his followers stood in complete silence behind him. When there was no answer, he knocked harder and the air around them cried like a pane of glass as the silence was shattered. The door opened, slowly, agonizingly. Obote instantly launched into a diatribe in which he kept referencing the full support of his fellow students standing behind him.
“Which students?” the head teacher asked in confusion.
Obote glanced back and found that his followers had melted into thin air. Now Obote stood blinking eyeball-to-unblinking eyeball with the head teacher.
Years later, at Makerere University, Obote fell under the spell of the epic poem written in blank verse by the 17th-century Englishman John Milton (1608–1674). The poem was entitled, Paradise Lost. There, Obote found the famously embittered line: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” Hooked, Obote adopted the name Milton in tribute to a poet who played a key role in the overthrow of the English monarchy after the execution of King Charles I in 1649. Obote himself would overthrow his own kings in his later political career. And, reign in Hell too.
Weeks after Uganda’s independence, Obote, shown with Grace Ibingira and John Kakonge, visited
with President Kennedy in the White House in October 1962.
In the late 1950s, Obote took to the rostrum in the Uganda Legislative Council (LEGCO), which was a unicameral national assembly, and he unleashed hellfire and brimstone. Nominated as a member of the LEGCO by the Lango District Council, Obote immediately took off the gloves and continuously called the white members of LEGCO “gormless,” or lacking intelligence.
As expected, such vehemence electrified the university students along with Obote’s peers seated in the Strangers’ Gallery of the LEGCO. They had never seen a Black man talk to Europeans in this way. And, although averagely eloquent by the standards of his day, Obote’s put-down of the colonial masters turned him into a hero; a tribune of the masses.
In the autumn of 1961, Obote and Benedicto Kiwanuka attended the Ugandan Constitutional Conference held at Lancaster House to pave the way for Uganda’s independence from Britain. The Secretary of State for the Colonies, Iain Macleod, asked both Obote and Kiwanuka how they would raise revenue to run the newly-minted government of Uganda.
“I will tax the people,” Kiwanuka said, to which Macleod rolled his eyes.
Then it was Obote’s turn to answer and he stomped his feet on the ground then declared: “From the land.”
Macleod was duly impressed.
Always quick with a trick up his sleeve, Obote’s wit enraged and encouraged many an enemy to turn him into the bogeyman of Ugandan politics. And, like Snowball in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Obote was targeted for name-calling once he was driven off Animal Farm—read Uganda—by these armed enemies.
Obote’s enemies sought to use him as the scapegoat for everything that went wrong in Uganda. In so doing, they presented themselves as a foil to Obote’s “evil.” Just as the pigs did with Snowball. And, in later years, when Obote’s Nimbus-haired crest turned snowy the strands of hair on his head, the picture was complete. He physically appeared like a snowball.
Having endured overthrow in 1971 and exile, here was Obote speaking with Churchillian spurts in May 1980 during his second tenure as president: “Fellow countrymen, let us therefore take a vow here and now that never again shall we allow a situation to develop in our country which through disunity would enable any individual or, for that matter a group of people to wrest control of our country, destroy our democratic institutions, plunder our natural resources or tamper with the freedom and personal liberty of our citizens.”
With these words, he spoke truth to power to the soul of Uganda.
To paraphrase words of farewell to another president, Apollo Milton Obote now belongs to the ages.
Columnist Matogo can be reached via [email protected]
