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Exactly 50 years ago, on October 9th, 1967—on two different continents and across three time zones—two apparently unconnected events occurred within minutes of each other, one’s silent and hushed tragedy furnishing the reflectionless mirror for the other’s measured but jubilant triumph.
As Ernesto [Che´] Guevara—that great exporter of Cuban revolution—was being blindfolded and forced to his knees before a firing squad of the Bolivian Army, Uganda’s young and newly victorious* President—Milton Obote—was beginning to deliver his country’s Independence Day speech before a crowd of thousands that had thronged to Kololo Airstrip from the farthest reaches of our then 5-year old republic, to witness the admirable orator and statesman perform.
It was a chilly, foreboding morning in La Paz, Bolivia’s Capital—a strong rain had fallen the previous night, and as Che´was led out onto the barracks’ grassy execution grounds, the thick mud squelched under his bare feet and wedged itself inside the grooves under the grim-faced soldiers’ boots.
Beneath rain and heavy clouds, a soaked earth grew wetter from the falling tears of South America’s thick canopy of forest—as the life of Cuba’s one-time Prime Minister turned stateless revolutionary, drew to a close.
Meanwhile, Milton Obote strolled across the baking airstrip tarmac of Kololo, and ascended the few short steps to the speaking podium with an almost insouciant swing of his ceremonial cane, and as he waved and smiled at the adoring crowd—his neat dark suit drunk in the warm day, while the immaculately polished leather of his shoes glinted a blinding black under the tropical sun.
The day’s events in Kampala had commenced with the expected display of state grandeur—the Russian-made MIGs of the Uganda Airforce flew overhead in breathtaking acrobatic maneuvers, the paraded infantry of the Uganda Rifles stood in perfect rows as they waited for their Commander-In-Chief’s inspection, while the army brass-band played with a fine mastery—picking out each note in the tristanzaic national anthem with practiced precision under the watchful gaze and clinical gestures of a white-gloved instructor.
On the day of his capture, the evening of 8th October, it is said that Guevara had suddenly shouted to the unit of Bolivian paratroopers who stormed his rebel hideout, crying—
‘‘Do not shoot! I am Che Guevara and worth more to you alive than dead!’’
Che´was an oddity as far as liberators go—born Argentine, he had put his life on the line alongside Castro’s brave band to secure Cuba’s political freedom, and when that war had been won, he had invested so much time constructing the country’s socialist foundations as later Prime but first Economics’ Minister.
But just when his political star seemed brightest, he gave it all up—asking, in his farewell later to Fidel, only that he be allowed to follow his ideological heart to wherever it might lead.
It led to Congo, and later to his ill-fated Bolivian connection.
It is not clear why such a man would beg for mercy in the face of certain death, when he seemed—by his very constitution—to seek danger out in the most daring of ways if not deadliest of places.
Perhaps what Che´ begged for—and never got—for he was executed sans trial the very next dawn, was the opportunity to explain himself. The chance to rework his revolutionary template.
Perhaps he had rethought his methods of bringing about the socialist revolution, and realized that revolutions birthed in blood and death, tend only to breed more of the same.
Perhaps we would remember and idolize a different Che´today—had he only been given the chance to speak at a fair trial, and in public hearing.
Alas—it was not to have been!
It is these might-have-beens that lead me to consider the case of Uganda’s Milton Obote—a figure in our national history who is perhaps only as remembered as he is misunderstood.
Slightly over three years after Che’s gruesome execution, and a few months after Obote’s 1970 Independence-day speech as President—the latter’s own army-commander would overthrow his government in a Western-orchestrated coup d’etat.
Obote was in Singapore delivering a passionate speech—he wasn’t one for lack of passion—against Britain’s continued arms’ sales to apartheid South Africa, when he was curtly informed by then British Premier Heath, that he ‘may not’ still be Uganda’s President when he finished his oratory.
The coup had been a success.
The same forces that had contrived to locate, trace and track Che´and his Marxist guerillas in Bolivia’s rainforests—in this case America’s CIA—had used another limb of their many-tentacled hydra—in this case Britain’s MI6— to finance and equip mutinous army units in readiness for the 1971 Kampala putsch.
An earlier attempt had been made on Milton Obote’s life at Nakivubo in 1969, but that proved abortive. Che´himself had been a long-term survivor of assassination attempts during his Cuba-days—and he and Castro undoubtedly ranked top among the world’s most targeted political leaders.
And while Obote got his literal second chance in 1980, we could say that Che´got his second chance, vicariously, through Castro—who remained Cuba’s leader for an additional 40 years.
Castro fought long and hard to deliver dignity to his people amidst what still proves to be the longest trade embargo in history, and Obote strived to keep a country together that was splitting at the seams with ethnic sub-nationalism.
Castro—and through him Che´—lost their war in 2014, when Raul Castro conceded to open Cuba up to American capitalism, after five decades of what proved to be a less-than-successful experiment in ‘embargo-stunted socialism’.
Obote lost his—first in 1971, when an attempt to nationalize the nation’s foreign-run economy put him on a collision course with her erstwhile colonial overlords—then in 1985, when a band of young military opportunists captured the state after ‘defeating’ what was clearly a weak and ill-trained national army, to whose weakness and desertion they had contributed through a series of earlier ‘selective’ recruitments.
It could be said that the two men—Che´and Obote—fought the same battle, different ways.
And both lost.
May we learn lessons on Uganda’s 55th commemoration of what a South-Sudanese brother of mine, Tetteng Gaduel, chooses to call — Africa’s RE-independence.
Perchance, the greatest lesson of all is for us to cease the numerical count.
*Milton Obote’s victory referred to here is his triumph over monarchical and sub-nationalist actors who threatened to rend the young country asunder in the period leading up to 1966.
Surumani Manzi,
Kampala — 8th October, 2017.
The Lantern Meet of Poets 