UGANDA AND ITS MANY CONFLUENCES

Uganda is a confluence of all sort, writes Okello Oculi

Uganda’s troops taking blazing military guns into eastern Democratic Republic of Congo hit the international media. Its immediate roots lie in the country becoming a confluence between a war in which its troops have, for over a decade, been fighting to block rule by Islamic Jihadists, Al Shabaab, over Somalia.

The Islamic Ugandan group which bombed government buildings in Kampala have roots in Ottoman Turks ruling over Egypt seeking control of the source of River Nile whose waters feed the country’s irrigated agriculture. Sir Samuel Baker recorded barbaric brutalities by Turkish troops against local populations along the river.

Ottoman Turks hired Swiss, Austrian, Italian, British and Nubian mercenaries. Their Nubian contingent was stranded in northern Uganda when a revolutionary war terminated a horrendous exploitation in Sudan’s Gezira plains by Turks. The Nubians coming up the Nile found fellow Muslims from the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean coast who had fought with the Kabaka (king) of Buganda against British invaders.

Muslim converts in Busoga and Buganda went underground during British colonial dictatorship until Idi Amin’s coup became a renaissance. After Amin’s quick fall and flight to Saudi Arabia, his political mentors, the rump of his army took shelter across the border in DRCongo. Historians have remarked that in their conquest from Egypt across Libya, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, Ottoman Turks combined permanent violence against indigenous populations with Lack of Development. That legacy is marking the character of Idi Amin’s rump in eastern Congo.

The source of the Nile, copper deposits in the foothills of Ruwenzori mountains and fertile lands, urged the British to build a railway line from the Indian Ocean coast to Kampala. The record of nationalist revolution in Sudan made the construction of a railway line from Jinja to Cairo less attractive than one from Kampala to Mombasa. A confluence of a river and railway lines gave Uganda a new importance to Kenya. In the last three decades trade through Kenya and Uganda to eastern DRCongo has both bloomed and drawn politicians towards extending the membership of the East African Federation to the Atlantic Ocean.

British officials also decided to make Kampala the location of the only oasis of higher education for Africans for her colonies in eastern Africa. European immigrants in Kenya, Tanganyika, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) were not admitted into Makerere – a College of London University. In 1963, Milton Obote’s government admitted 45 undergraduates from Nigeria, a few from Ethiopia and Burundi. Dr Lawrence Ekpebu, a recent PhD graduate from Harvard taught at Makerere under a Rockefeller Foundation scheme for job seekers from top American Universities. Dr. Kenneth Prewitt came from Stanford University under the same scheme.

Uganda paid the price for this academic magnetism. Euro-American academics in Makerere’s faculty played an active role in doing the research legwork for the military coup that brought Idi Amin to power on January 23, 1971. The late Professor Ali A. Mazrui walked the tight rope of pleasing President Obote and expatriate academics on campus. As Idi Amin became a pal of Muammar Gaddafi, expelled hundreds of thousands of ‘’Asians’’ – including those who were citizens – ours of Uganda – this academic platoon fled from Uganda.

The Makerere ‘knowledge oasis’ did survive Idi Amin’s hurricane. Its potential for meeting academic thirst from the vast Southern Sudan to the north, the much vaster DRCongo to the west; the equally vast Tanzania to the South. Under Daniel arap Moi’s repeated shutting down gates of university campuses to students and faculty, parents among education-hungry Kikuyu communities, sent their children to Uganda’s campuses. Private universities sprouted and have flourished.

Conflicts over resources that wracked eastern DRCongo following the fall of President Mobutu Sese Seko, have driven into Uganda millions of refugees. They have confluenced with flows from over 50 years of civil wars in Southern Sudan. An earlier flow from a massacre in Rwanda from the day of independence brought infant Paul Kagame into Uganda. A policy of treating these human flows not as ‘’refugees’’ but as ‘’Fellow Africans in Need’’ has been an enormous service to Pan-Africanism.

International commendation of this policy legacy has not been matched by injection of resources for the development of this vast human potential. Even the African Union is yet to invest diplomatic capital towards the construction of quality educational structures including technology colleges and a Pan-African Confluence University.

It has been speculated that President Yoweri Museveni’s support for John Garang’s war made it easy for an enemy diplomat to plant the bomb that killed him in a plane crash on his return from Uganda. It wrecked his dream of a united Sudan. Museveni’s support for Laurent Kabila’s war killed Mobutu and his peaceful ‘’ZAIRE’’. So historic a Ugandan confluence.