Monday, June 7, 2004
Abuse Africans, But Beware Their Leaders
By CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO
Denis Hills, who died recently aged 90, became world famous when, in June 1975, when he was sentenced to death for "treason" by Idi Amin after describing the Ugandan dictator as a "black Nero" and a "village tyrant" in a book he was writing.
Hills had been a lecturer at Uganda's Makerere University since 1963, and had stayed behind after Amin seized power in a 1971 coup, and made the country dangerous for Western expatriates.
Though the offensive book, The White Pumpkin, hadn't yet been published, the secret police got word of the contents of the typescript, and arrested him. A magistrate's court dismissed the charges, but Amin intervened personally, ordering that Hills be tried by a military tribunal. He was found guilty and sentenced to death by firing squad.
British prime minister Harold Wilson wrote an apology, and the Queen sent Amin a personal appeal to spare Hills's life. Finally, foreign secretary James Callaghan went to Uganda, and flew back to London with Hills. What often escapes attention is that the episode was a major victory for Amin, because when the book was published the following year, the offending phrases had been deleted.
Hills authored many books, but none of them were famously political. One of his titles, which is hardly known in Uganda, is Man With a Lobelia Flute.
Published in 1969, to the unsuspecting the book will read like a light travelogue on East Africa. But it is also an acerbic tale that mercilessly slashes and burns everything in its path.
If you are thin-skinned, and given to reacting strongly to what you consider to be a racist put-down, then steer clear of Man With a Lobelia Flute.
Hills, for example, describes in highly pejorative terms the sight of Africans crammed onto the floor in the "servants' quarters."
In his eyes, they have sneaked into the compound in the dark after the master (to use the politically incorrect language of the time) and his wife have gone to sleep in the main house, to sponge off their relative who is employed there as a "house boy".
He paints a pathetic picture of a woman he encounters on the roadside while travelling south-westward to Masaka, who is poking away at an anthill in search of the day's meal.
Just for sheer annoyance, Man With a Lobelia Flute reads like the book over which someone should have tried to execute Hills, not White Pumpkin.
That it didn't happen that way reveals a very African political mindset.
Our leaders, and many times we their subjects, don't get irritated when the country and its people are trashed.
But when the ruler is described accurately for what he is, a dictator, or a thief, the whole government machinery is deployed to arrest the writer and sue the publisher in London or New York in an attempt to stop distribution of the book; meanwhile, the ambassador who represents the country of the offending author will be hauled over hot charcoal.
It's hard to figure out exactly what the masses think of all this. Maybe the people think that since the politicians are the ones milking the country, it is their business to defend it when it's written about without respect and sufficient sensitivity.
Perhaps, in the scale of their priorities, the torment they are facing at the hands of the strongman is more important than a disparaging chapter in a cynical Western writer's book most of them will never read.
For the big men, however, the issue is clearer...
Since they consider that their countries (and Treasuries) are private property that they can do with as they please, being described as a "village tyrant" is not an attack only on the person of the president. Because they see themselves and their countries as one and the same thing, criticism of the leader is also an insult to the nation. That is what makes journalism extremely perilous in Africa.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is managing editor in charge of media convergence at the Nation Media Group.
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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