I quickly came to the conclusion that this was not a simple murder, and that someone had killed the woman and wanted to hide her identity, or the mode of her death, probably both. Given the circumstances, I thought it best to not make a detailed report. Something told me this body was going to cause us problems. It was dangerous. I wrote a very short report, and said the body was burnt beyond recognition. We sent for prisoners from Lugazi prison and they buried the body right there in the plantation. I gave the Police officer the short report, and went back to the hospital, hoping that was the end of the matter.”
It was not. In a day or so, news broke that one of the hostages, Dora Bloch, had been killed, and that her body had been dumped in Namanve. Kimala began to worry in earnest. He consoled himself that he had not been near Namanve. He prayed that the Police detective and the prisoners would keep their mouths shut. He did not have to wait for long to discover that people could not keep secrets. A few mornings after the postmortem, Kimala was walking to one of the wards when security officers came into the hospital. They asked him for the Medical Superintendent’s office. “I pointed them to my office. As they headed there, I got into the car, and drove to Bugerere. I told my staff that I had to supervise work in the Province - Kyaggwe, Bulemeezi, and Mubende. Three times, the security officers came to my office and did not find me. They searched my office. They went to my home and asked my wife if she knew of my whereabouts. They wanted to know if I had brought any reports home recently. She knew what they were after. She told them that she had heard me talking of a report that I had deposited at the Police. They went straight there and they were given the report. One of them returned and told my wife to let me know that everything was okay, that I had given a good report. After that they never came back.”
***
The date for the execution was set as 9 September 1977. The men to be executed had been tried by an army tribunal and found guilty of various crimes, including plotting to overthrow the government of President Idi Amin, being economic saboteurs, and spying. The program was quite elaborate. The government radio station had aired announcements of the planned executions, and the public was invited to come and witness how enemies of the state were punished. On D-day the prisoners were brought to the Kampala Clock Tower grounds in the Prisons Department vans. They were blindfolded and frog-marched, each to a metallic pole set up for the purpose, where they were tied. An army officer moved from pole to pole ascertaining that they were all properly secured. The soldiers to execute the prisoners lined up with their guns at the ready. The army chaplain was then invited to come and give the men their final benediction, or whatever spiritual comfort he could impart in the grim circumstances. At exactly 4 o’clock the officer in charge of the execution gave the single command to fire, and the shots were discharged, each prisoner stopping three shots directed to the head. After that the doctor, who had been in attendance from the beginning, came forward to confirm that the men were indeed dead. He had been so anguished by having to participate in the executions that he did not think through exactly how he was going to confirm the deaths of the men, shot at close range only moments before. As he approached the poles he suddenly realized he had no tools, and in the same moment realized the absurdity of the very thought of tools. One of the bodies was all but decapitated. He moved along the line barely touching the bodies, although it occurred to him that he could perhaps try to feel for their carotid pulses. He was relieved that the men assigned to remove the bodies were following quickly in his wake, cutting the lifeless bodies off the poles, and placing them in coffins. He did not recall how he left the Clock Tower grounds. He did not recall who he talked to, if anyone. He somehow managed to make it back to his house in Makindye where he downed one Uganda waragi glass after another until he passed out on his living room floor.
***
In 1979 when Amin’s government fell, Kimala was back in Mulago training to be a surgeon. The Israeli government requested Uganda to help locate Dora Bloch’s remains. Kimala led the team that located and exhumed the body. “I could remember where the body was buried. We dug up the bones. Benjamin Bloch, Dora’s son, had brought with him her medical records to help with the identification. Based on some documented dental work, and an implant in her vertebra, we were able to make a positive identification. It was a somber moment, but the son appreciated that we were able to find his mother’s remains. He took them and she was given a proper burial back home in Israel.”
Do not forget, through all the years
Those who have gone through the gates of Makerere
Give them the pride, Give them the joy
Oh! To remember, the gates of Makerere
The first weeks of medical school went by in a flash. Everything was new. While the students in other faculties carried on partying as was the custom at the beginning of every academic year, the medical students plunged into serious study. Every morning the medics walked from Makerere main campus across the valley to Mulago, mostly through Katanga valley. The cadaver room was the center of the new class. Small groups of five or six students were each assigned a cadaver. The introductory lecture in Anatomy was on the breast, but nobody called it that. Here in Anatomy it was the mammary gland. The arm, also called the upper limb, was more appropriately called the brachium. It was here that the seeds of complete language alteration were sowed, so that in future the doctors would think that pedal edema communicated better than swelling of the feet, and that epistaxis was clearer than nasal bleeding. It was here in the cadaver room that fears were overcome, and that lifelong relationships developed. There was something comforting about discovering that the smartest sounding guys did not necessarily have the steadiest hands at dissection, and that some unassuming students with thick rural accents had incredible capacity to memorize endless random facts about the human body. In a few weeks, everyone was comfortable in the company of the cadavers, which were slowly but surely being taken apart layer by chloroform infused layer. Prof. Sebuwufu said these were the students’ first patients, and they were to take good care of them. Dr. A. Galloway, the first head of the Department of Anatomy, would have been impressed.
Some organs were described as being pear or almond shaped although there was not one pear tree in all of Uganda, and God help the student who dared to liken them to an avocado, a fruit the students and their teachers saw and ate on a regular basis. The normal ovary was said to be almond shaped. The students had never seen an almond, and the ovaries in the cadavers were anything but normal, so their imagination of what an almond looked like would have to do. In the clinical years there would be other curiosities, such as the cobblestone appearance of a trachoma eye membrane. No student had seen real life cobblestones, and perhaps neither had some of their teachers, but cobblestone it would be. Then there was the classic anchovy sauce appearance of an amoebic liver abscess. For goodness’ sake, what was an anchovy? The descriptions tended to obscure rather than illuminate. The height of obscurity was perhaps the ‘café au lait’ spots, which would have been familiar had someone told the students that the exotic sounding phrase was French for milky coffee. Students that had not been within thousands of miles of any snow were taught how to recognize a diseased lung by a ‘snow storm’ appearance on the radiograph. The endless hours in the cadaver room, the physiology lab, and the wards that the students would graduate to after two years of basic sciences, ensured that their new language took firm root. Karungi, by nature generously endowed with a curiosity for words and languages, soaked up – or rather, imbibed – this new language like a sponge.
‘Science should speak the language of the common people’ Rudolf Karl Ludwig Virchow, nineteenth-century German physician (1821-1902).
***
The post-mortem room – PM room – was cooler than the rest of the hospital, being adjacent to the refrigerators that contained what the Pathology professor called the teachers. “The dead teach us many things. They make us wise if we take the time to study them.
