1. It is not every day that one lives through an experience that could easily qualify to be a candidate for the ‘King Alfred’s cakes’ stakes, in that it expresses some essential truth, but it may, alas, be akin to that tale in being apocryphal. Thus it was that on an ill day in the spring of 1988, as it happened, I woke up to see my situation rapidly turn from the sublime to the ridiculous. The excitement at taking up my place at Cliff College the previous autumn, which was, shall we say, the sublime, suddenly descended into the realms of the ridiculous upon receipt of certain information from Uganda. I was summoned urgently to see the Acting Principal in the principal’s study that morning to discuss the note whose contents were devastating, namely, that the world as I knew it had completely changed. I do not remember much as to the exact contents of the note, to my shame, but the gist of the note was: my family in Uganda were no longer in a position to support me. I was stunned, dazed, and swooned at the news. You couldn’t make it up really; and, even if you tried, you would most probably be accused of possessing a fertile imagination – but then, as it is often said, fact is stranger than fiction.
2. But if you think I was in an awkward tight spot, spare a thought for the poor wise old elephants running Cliff College; they very nearly had kittens at the news, they had a strange sense of déjà vu, as I was later to discover. I learnt afterwards that a few years earlier, the authorities at College had had their fingers severely burned, following a stand they had taken respecting an African student. I don’t remember the exact facts; for I was lost in my own world trying desperately to understand what was happening to me, but the gist of it was, a student, allegedly from Zimbabwe, had made unsubstantiated political claims at a hugely sensitive time in Zimbabwe’s political history. The authorities at Cliff College took the student at face value, and went out of their way to make representations to the British government on his behalf. After much toing and froing however, it was discovered afterwards that the alleged student was not all he seemed; thus leaving the authorities at Cliff College somewhat red faced, and embarrassed. It was a very bitter experience for them.
3. Considering how exceptionally difficult it is to independently verify facts on the ground in Africa, and especially in Uganda at the time, as she was experiencing major political upheavals of her own, the wise old elephants at Cliff College were understandably anxious not to repeat the same mistake so soon. It is therefore to their credit, that they resolved the situation by permitting me to complete the year at the College on compassionate grounds; after which they left it up to me to decide what to do next. Thus it was that from that day on, I was left to shift for myself, an alien in a foreign land, as insignificant as a flea. It was the beginning of my strange career in the school of affliction, and long did I remain in it. Nothing, as far as I can tell, prepared me for the desolate life of an exile. The loneliness was so profound that I was like a sparrow on the housetop. Subsequent difficulties and harries exposed my vulnerabilities, weaknesses and infirmities. The pressure of life was nothing like anything I had hitherto experienced. It was a living nightmare! The wickedness of those trying times as an exile forced me into extraordinary straits, temptations so overwhelming that it is a continuing mystery to me and to those who know me that I somehow, and against the odds, did not make a shipwreck of my life.
4. To be a refugee is to exist in a strange topsy-turvy world, in which a kind word can make a real difference; that is, if a refugee is lucky as I was to come by one, nay, many kind words, that the sum of them amounted to a powerful argument for me, and in the famous words of Sir Winston Churchill, to keep buggering on. It is indeed a strange providence that these kind words were the kindling, which, as it were, saved my smouldering wick of hope from giving out. They were the irresistible flame in which I kindled my lamp. The particulars of various instances of a kind word, which still loom large over my life to this day, may be traced back to the land of my ancestors, a land of both generalissimos and desperados, Uganda.
How it all started
5. Although I did not know it at the time, the preparation for enrolment to the school of affliction started at the age of thirteen, in 1979. And well do I remember 1979; the year is etched on my memory for a thousand reasons. There are two reasons which stand out prominently however. They deserve a special mention: I remember 1979 in the first place, because it was the year in which Uganda’s most infamous generalissimo, Idi Amin, fell from power. How I well remember the cacophony of guns, bombs, and missiles falling out of the sky; the near starvation for those of us who remained in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda. The city had been under siege for several months, and how our food stocks were ever so depleted. At one time our family was reduced to eating boiled green chili pepper leaves, which were served up with a little pancake made out maize flour, fried in cheap cooking oil bought on the black-market. We ate one meal a day. How sweet that little morsel tasted! We were especially glad that our fumbling gardener had not chopped down the chili pepper plants – growing wild in the compound flowerbeds. We were the lucky ones however; we discovered after the war that many people in the city had nothing to eat at all.
6. The noise of the Middle Eastern of wars, lately filling our news airwaves day in day out transports me back to my own war days in Uganda. To this day, I am completely baffled as to how it is that some survive any given war and others do not. I well remember how people, mostly father’s friends, outdid each other as to which of them was the better and reliable radio Katwe (Radio Katwe was Kampala’s version of the ‘grapevine’ – sometimes more reliable than the official radio). Radio Katwe was often supplemented with the BBC World Service and Voice of America to piece together the true picture of what was really going on in the country. They risked their lives to bring us a few scraps of war gossip they had picked up here and there; how so and so had not been so lucky, or how an entire family had been wiped out after a missile missed its intended target in the city and landed on their home; or how one well known army officer in Amin’s government, who it seems was as corrupt as the day is long, but who had created a new role for himself as an indispensable spy collaborating with the incoming forces, to the astonishment of us all.
7. Many of those visitors were natural story tellers, embellishing their tall tales of scenes of war so that all their geese were swans. I also remember the immediate aftermath following the fall of Kampala. The city fell on the 11th April 1979, after the Tanzanian troops, the Uganda National Liberation Front, including a coalition of desperate banditti and free-booters marched on Kampala. We could tell which group was which by their ghastly signature, the sound of their guns.
The horror and futility of war
8. A vivid image of the war that will remain with me for the rest of my life was an event broadcast live on television; the entire family was glued on the TV, watching a blow-by-blow account as the fall of Kampala unfolded before our very eyes; and, to our amazement, we saw on live television a man with a striking face which looked like a weasel, slowly collapse on the dusty road in the Bat Valley area of Kampala, and die under the weight of a 25 kilogram sisal sack of sugar, just a few feet away from a foreign reporter. I can’t remember which country the foreign reporter was from, but it was rather shocking; for the man had been running back and forth in stifling humid heat, at around 12 o’clock noon, carrying heavy sisal sacks of sugar, which we surmised he hoped to sell on the black-market for a quick profit. In those days, Uganda had a thriving black-market where people sold all sorts of goods for more than they cost new. At a time of his death, so word had it, he was on his seventh sisal sack of sugar! The image left a powerful impression on me, I can still see the man in my mind’s eye as I write, and, if anything, the image is a fair representation of the void of greed into which Uganda is presently sinking.
9. We lived through yet another vicious and chaotic civil war from 1981 to 1986, in which fierce skirmishes between different warring rebel groups often broke out very close to our home-compound. Each skirmish more terrible than the last. But the strangest thing of all was our elderly, one-eyed askari (Kiswahili for a night watchman), Ochola, a Luo from Kenya; whose claim to fame, so he told us, was that he had once worked as a body guard to Mr Tom Mboya, one of the founding fathers of the Republic of Kenya. Mr Mboya was assassinated in 1969, causing Ochola to leave Kenya for Uganda for good, ending up working as a night watchman. Ochola was however, much too old to continue working as a night watchman by the time second war broke out, but had no family to go to, so he remained with us as an extra member of the family. He used to wander to and fro his local pub in the village in the midst of these skirmishes without ever being hit.
10. I tremble as I write, reliving as it were, as if describing events that are happening right now. How our family rescued wretched child soldiers, who were so traumatised by the civil war that they had eyes which looked like the barrel of an AK47. The AK47, also known as the Kalashnikov, is the freedom fighter’s weapon of choice in Uganda. We never asked questions when child soldiers came to us, we simply took pity on them and helped them as fellow human beings on condition they surrendered their weapons to the police. The Ugandan police, although they too were as corrupt as other public institutions, were nevertheless still trusted by ordinary people; they were seen as non-combatants, and therefore enjoyed a degree of community and popular support. The psychological impact those child soldiers experienced, can only be imagined.
11. One particular child soldier comes to mind most vividly; he suffered terribly from combat stress, a form of mental illness which is little understood in Uganda, then as now. He had deserted the colours of a certain band of so called freedom fighters based in the Luweero Triangle, the epicentre of the 1981-1986 bitter civil wars to liberate Uganda, as we are constantly told, from dictatorship – once and for all. I can still see him in my minds’ eye as I write. Apparently, he allegedly shot dead in cold blood a captured government officer, probably a major, after the officer had surrendered, details were difficult to ascertain. The child soldier seemed to us half mad. I remember how he was continually haunted by the memory of that particular experience, often falling into a trance – as if his entire body had been taken over by some evil spirit, shouting in a thick local tribal dialect, we knew not which tribe he belonged to. Uganda has as many as 17 tribes, an even higher number of sub ethnic groups; united by ancient and deep-seated animosities, which are too complex to describe here. Sufficient to say however, it was difficult to translate what he said intelligently. And, after much thrashing about on the ground, gasps, letting out groans which gradually subsided, he fell into an almost hypnotic sleep. No wonder, Plato once said it is only the dead who have seen the end of war; those who live through war continue to live it wherever they go. Whenever I see reports of modern civil wars on the television, I think of those poor child soldiers, who are expendable. Child solders, alike with impoverished peasants, are the proverbial cat’s paw which so-called freedom fighters use to rescue political chestnuts from the burning fire. I often wonder how many precious lives are frequently sacrificed to the caprices of proud so-called freedom fighters.
Youthful misdemeanours
12. The second reason I remember 1979 is because it marked the beginning of my coming of age; that is, this was the time I started to learn the true worth of a kind word. During the 1979 war, as it happened, there was a lot of military traffic on the Kampala–Hoima road, which was but a stone’s throw from our family home at plot number 147 Joyful News Drive (named after an entrance door at Cliff College, my late father was a student there in the 1960s), in Nakulabye, within the compass of Kampala. A dusk-to-dawn curfew was in operation at the time; my elder half-brother and I used to entertain ourselves by sneaking out in the night, catapults in hand, taking pot-shots without aiming at anything in particular, but shot small stones into the night sky at a certain angle; hoping perhaps that we might hit some passing traffic, soldiers who were being ferried to and fro the frontline. A major military barracks was situated not far from our home, at Lubiri (palace in Luganda, the language of the Baganda, biggest tribe in Uganda) on Mengo hill. Sometimes we hit the jackpot as it were; we got excited whenever we heard a soldier scream out, ouch, with curses and obscenities in Kiswahili or some other local African language – sending us in feats of laughter.
13. Evidently, we had no idea the nature of the risk we were running at the time. It was during these foolish escapades that I was possessed with perhaps the stupidest of ideas: “how about making a bomb,” I thought! Oh, how our ears tingled at the sound of bombs and missiles whistling in the air passed our home and exploding in the city! How fear sent streams of cold sweat trickling from our hair down our cheeks and necks, as we dived for cover under tables or anything to hide under in case a rocket fell on our house! We often wondered what it was like to get blown up. War has a surreal air about it that it is impossible to maintain a sense of proportion in relation to anything; a gallows sense of humour was a welcome boon of sorts, a means of surviving. Although my idea was laughed to scorn at the time, I pressed on regardless. I remember how we worried about dying, and how we prayed that if the end should ever come, that it would be quick and painless. So I rationalized my stupid project that it would probably be for the best to die while working on something interesting. It was a handy way to kill time during war, especially those long instances when nothing seemed to happen. Looking at the whole thing now, and living as we now are in the age of terrorism and bombs, I now see how absurd and absolutely reckless my project was.
14. After many experiments which ended in failure; one day and much to my surprise, something did happen – an explosion – it went off prematurely leaving the kitchen in the main house black in parts. Luckily, no one was in the kitchen at the time, else they would got caught in the blast. It marked the end of my career as a bomb maker. I got into deep trouble after father found out; he couldn’t wait to lay his hands on me. But I gave him the slip and locked myself in my room, refusing to come out unless he first assured me he would not use his beloved cane on me. Father was into corporal punishment in a very big way; he was a disciplinarian. But my pipe-smoking grandmother, father’s mother, sprung to my defence as soon as she found out what had happened, pleading with him to show mercy. This was the second time she came to my aid; the first time, when I was about 8 years old, I got into big trouble with father after I successfully took apart his beloved black and white television. It had been a gift given him when he left his teaching post at Makerere University; it was very special to him, it had a little Ugandan flag embossed on it. He was so upset with me that he always reminded me of it many years afterwards. Father let the first matter lie, but he was not prepared to let this one go; he was determined to teach me a lesson. He demanded I come out of my room, but I refused to budge. I paid a price for my stubbornness however: I went without the meagre morsel alluded to earlier for a day or two, that is, until the coast was clear.
A softie at heart
15. My grandmother, eager to keep the peace in the family amid the chaos of war going on outside the family compound, so it seemed, even deployed her best weapon in her armoury; for she was very close to father, and as such he really had no answer to her very powerful eloquent tears. Father relented. After the kitchen had been cleaned up and repainted, and, after father’s fury had subsided, he asked me to go and see him in his study for a little chat. It was his plan B. The real war had by now passed over Kampala. I turned up in fear and trembling, the miscreant that I was; he received me with a silent speaking look, the sort which left me in no doubt that although he had passed over my second major misdemeanour, he had by no means forgotten it and probably would not forget it for a long time. But his bark was worse than the bite on this occasion.
16. So, when he opened his mouth, he could have knocked me over with a feather on account of his kindness. Father put before me an alternative to making things that went bang. He told me how both he and his Scottish wife, my step-mother, loved to read, showing me some of their prized books. Now father’s study was nothing like the elaborate private studies I have seen in some big houses in England, there was nothing ostentatious about his study, but modest as it was, it boasted a surprising and diverse collection of books. Subjects included politics, history, theology, literature, art, psychology, economics, business and biography. He had a considerable collection of books written by leading African authors on pan-Africanism. Nearly 35 years later, after he had lost his money, the family home and the beloved collection of books, he confided in me that he thought pan-African writers had a wholly superficial grasp of freedom, democracy and the rule of law. It was his explanation for the calamities we see in Africa today. But at the time, I remember protesting that I cared for none of the subjects. He encouraged me to consider looking at some of them; urging me that widening my reading habits would help me debate better. He knew how much I loved debating, as we often sparred together. The long and the short of it, and much to my surprise, I fell in love with reading serious books. I have never looked back.
Biography is one of the most persuasive of teachers
17. One book caught my eye however. I don’t know why! It was an old, tattered autobiography of Gandhi, ‘The Story of My Experiments with Truth,’ published in 1925. I must confess, I didn’t fully understand everything in the book, I had to read it again years afterwards, but it marked the beginning of my awakening to politics, justice and the rule of law. So when Richard Attenborough’s 1982 film on Gandhi finally reached our home, I was wholly sold on Gandhi. Ben Kingsley, my favourite actor, brought Gandhi the man to life; I fell so completely in love with Gandhi, and what his stood for. The subsequent reading of another biography, ‘Gandhi’s Passion: The Life and Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi;’ confirmed in my heart that Gandhi was a worthwhile role model. I wanted to be like him.
18. Now I must admit Gandhi was something of a controversial figure in his day; he too had feet of clay. He held some obnoxious views: he for example referred to black South Africans as kaffirs and half-heathen natives; he was also criticised in India for perpetuating a discriminatory cast system. But Gandhi’s contributions to justice and the rule of law outweigh these controversies. He is a hero for his role in the movement which saw India win independence from Britain. And, his vision of non-violent protest is an inspiration to many the world over. As a foolish teenager, Gandhi was a worthy example for me to imitate, and it is thanks to him that I dreamt of becoming a barrister. But dreams, as we know all too well, rarely ever come true; this particular dream was fraught with many challenges. Chief of those challenges was how to make it to the Bar of England and Wales, after I had become a penniless refugee in England at the end of the 1980s. Let’s face it, poor African refugees do not read for the Bar. Such a dream, to be brutally honest, was then as now, a tall order at the best of times, even for native white Englishmen.
The mystery of providence
19. But my first break came when a strange providence led me to an extraordinary meeting with one of the most colourful judges of Guyana, the retired Supreme Court Justice, Mr Justice Akbar Khan, on the Norwich to London – Liverpool street train. My knowledge of Guyana at the time was limited to vague notions I had picked up in my geography class at school, and nothing more. Mr Justice Khan and I became acquainted and it was at his behest that I applied for a place at the Law School, the University of Buckingham. The glowing terms with which he spoke about Buckingham, were such that I was over joyed when my application was accepted and offered a place. The chief reason the late Mr Justice Khan recommended Buckingham was, in large measure, due to Lord Denning. Lord Denning was the legendary Master of the Rolls, but, to my shame, I had never heard of him; the worst of it, his title was a complete mystery to me. But all was revealed however, when I went up to Buckingham in 1990, to take up my place at the Law School. In a very short time after taking up my place, I discovered who Lord Denning was. I too fell in love with the man. The long and short of it, and thanks in no small degree, to a small circle of friends in England, especially those in Cheltenham; I too made it to the Bar. I was called to the Bar of England and Wales, by Gandhi’s very own Inn of Court, the Inner Temple.
20. Denning made a profound impression on me. His Hamlyn lecture entitled “Freedom under the law” left me completely fascinated by him. An excerpt may assist to show why: “The freedom of the individual, which is so dear to us, has to be balanced with duty; for, to be sure everyone owes a duty to society of which he forms part…What matters in England is that each man should be free to develop his own personality to the full: and the only duties which should restrict this freedom are those which are necessary to enable everyone else to do the same. Whenever these interests are nicely balanced, the scale goes down on the side of freedom…By personal freedom I mean the freedom of every law-abiding citizen to think what he will, to say what he will, and to go where he will on his lawful occasions without let or hindrance from any other persons. Despite all the great changes that have come about in the other freedoms, this freedom has in our country remained intact. It must be matched, of course, with social security, by which I mean the peace and good order of the community in which we live. The freedom of the just man is worth little to him if he can be preyed upon by the murderer or thief. Every society must have the means to protect itself from marauders. It must have powers to arrest. To search, and to imprison those who break the laws. So long as those powers are properly exercised, they are themselves the safe-guards of freedom. But powers may be abused, and, if those powers are abused, there is no tyranny like them. It leads to a state of affairs when the police may arrest any man and throw him into prison without cause assigned. It leads to the search of his home and belongings on the slightest pretext – or on none. It leads to the hated gestapo and the police state. It leads to extorted confessions and to trials which are a mockery of justice. The moral of it all is that a true balance must be kept between personal freedom on the one hand and social security on the other…The law itself should provide adequate and efficient remedies for the abuse or misuse. Be it government, national or local. Be it trade unions. Be it the press. Be it management. Be it labour. Whoever it be, no matter how powerful, the law should provide a remedy for the abuse or misuse of power.”
21. As someone who witnessed the frequent humiliations my father suffered at the hands of the authorities, and, saw the desolate wretchedness of families whose loved ones had been murdered in cold blood; it is impossible to exaggerate the impression reading this lecture had on me. I wept inconsolably the first time I read it in the Denning Library at Buckingham. I still weep in my heart for Uganda, even as I write this. Believe me, nothing can so breakdown the human spirit as to be subject continually to contempt – the visible and manifest contempt of one’s fellow. And, if I may go further, shame is so frightful to man that it is one of the ingredients of hell itself; it is the bitterest drop in that awful cup of misery. As recently as November 2016, the government of Uganda visited this awful cup of misery upon her peoples; when she savagely and disproportionately used violence to settle a local dispute with a minor tribal king in the western region. A significant number of people were killed. And, that is not the half of it; for the government was not content with killing, those that survived its wrath, that is, the women, men and children were stripped of their clothing, exposing their nakedness in broad day light, making a public spectacle of them. It is indeed an ill bird that defiles its own nest; this single instance speaks eloquently that the Uganda of the 21st century is a stranger to freedom under the law. Each passing year since independence in 1962, is to the majority of Ugandans, an annus horribilis.
See www.newscastmedia.com for more details.
A kind word is no laughing matter
22. But it was my participation in a “Symposium in honour of the contribution of Lord Denning to the Jurisprudence of the 20th Century 23rd January 1999 – his 100th Birthday”, which removed any doubt I had about how eminently desirable a role model Denning really was. He was more than just another lawyer. His qualities of kindness, humanity and justice speaks to us all, even in our day where immense change is, shall we say, taking place as if it were on steroids. And, speaking of an example; my late father, to use the Ugandan local turn of phrase, was a loser. He held no public office, was not a soldier, not even a police man; he was a man of no consequence and died poor. Father was not exactly a paragon of virtue; he most certainly had feet of clay. But to me, and regardless of what others may say about him, he was a giant, a very compassionate giant. If there is anything I cherish about his memory, it was his kindness. For in addition to his kindness as illustrated above, which is but a single instance, father’s kindness extended beyond his immediate family; he supported and educated many people’s children. I believe it is my duty as his son to honour his memory by imitating this particular quality, with a view of building upon it for the benefit of others. We live in an age where there is too little kindness and few role models; the situation in Africa is probably more desperate than anywhere else. The lack of kindness in African leaders is remarkable; so much so that they are like candles with big wicks but no tallow. When it is their turn to leave the stage as it were, they go out leaving behind them a foul and nauseous smell.
23. And, in the fashion of a boundless upas tree, many African leaders owing to their lack of kindness have so poisoned the fabric of Africa in areas of politics, economics and social justice, that it may take well over several generations to remedy their mischief. There is no denying the fact, Africa has a clear leadership crisis; so much so that we may wittingly say of the continent that there are no real men in Africa, except for those given to ambition, mean-spiritedness, vulgarity and selfishness – men who settle down to buy and sell evil influence in Vanity Fair market place. Poor leadership has reduced many African states like Uganda to the status of smouldering powder kegs of unrest, ready to go off at the slightest provocation. It is a tragic state of affairs that it is difficult to find a kind or good man in Africa, not even a pale shade of Mandela. Where one exists he is invariably condemned to a certain fate which Shakespeare summed up exquisitely in the Life of Timon of Athens: ‘Poor honest lord, brought low by his own heart, undone by goodness! Strange, unusual blood, when man’s worst sin is, he does too much good! Who, then, dares to be half so kind again?’ It was at the symposium that things begun to stir in my soul as to how best that I, a mere flea, and a refugee, might imitate the example of giants in kindness such as Gandhi, Denning, and yes, to a lesser degree, my poor father, in the cause of justice. To be continued on 8th May 2017.
24. In the second part, I will show you how a kind word from complete strangers in England, helped me recover from the setback of becoming a refugee.
Have you been touched by someone’s kindness in a particular way?