if his father hailed from Kumi and had family there, Emmanuel said his father was originally from the Ruhenjeri Prefecture in Rwanda, a region that bordered Uganda, though he had only learned this recently.
Hutu-Tutsi conflict in Rwanda and Burundi has a long history, though most ethnohistorians agree that it had its origins in the loss of Hutu autonomy as Tutsi pastoralists entered the country from as early as the fourteenth century, imposing, by the mid-sixteenth century, a quasi-feudal state on the autochthonous Hutu majority. Nonetheless, at the time of colonization in the late nineteenth century, there was little to distinguish—culturally, linguistically, or ethically—the people whose “differences” would be played up, played upon, and racialized under successive colonial administrations and postindependence governments.
As countless oral histories testify, almost everyone in Africa was once a migrant, belonging to an ethnic minority that displaced people already settled in the lands they would come to consider their own. Some arrived as pastoralists (like the Tutsi) in search of greener pastures; others came as conquerors, and still others as refugees from religious persecution or hunters looking for forests replete with game.
In the late 1950s, as the Belgian administration tried to engineer a more equitable balance of power between Hutu and Tutsi, ethnic tensions increased. Following municipal elections in 1960, the Tutsi monarchy was abolished, and many Tutsi fled the country. On 1 July 1962, Belgium, with United Nations oversight, granted full independence to Rwanda and Burundi. As the Hutu revolution gathered momentum, so did Tutsi guerrilla raids from bases in Kivu (Congo) and Uganda. Tens of thousands (mainly Tutsi) were killed in these clashes, and as many as 150,000 were driven into exile, including Emmanuel’s father. The Hutu-dominated government of Grégoire Kayibanda now established quotas to increase the number of Hutu in schools and the civil service. This effectively penalized Tutsi, who were allowed only 9 percent of secondary school and university seats, consonant with their proportion of the population. These quotas were also extended to the civil service. The Kayibanda government continued the Belgian colonial government’s policy of requiring ethnic identity cards and discouraging “mixed” marriages. Following more violence in 1964, the government suppressed political opposition and executed Tutsi rebels, who were called inyenzi (cockroaches), an ominous foretaste of the large-scale genocides that would devastate this region in the 1990s.
The natural symbols are striking: the other as an insect, oneself as autochthonous—born of and belonging to the soil. I was also struck by the tragic ironies in Emmanuel’s father’s story, for not only does autochthony underpin Hutu claims for ur-belonging; it denies full citizenship to Tutsi, who are alleged to be second-class citizens at best because they were migrants. Driven from his homeland, Emmanuel’s father became a cosmopolitan, rootless individual whose tenuous identification with Uganda would shape the destiny of his son, who also wound up in a foreign land where autochthony was invoked to justify the marginalization of foreigners in national life.1 As a child, Emmanuel was aware of his anomalous situation, raised in his mother’s village but with no real relationship with his father’s kin—practically an internal exile.
Emmanuel said his father and mother first met in 1969, probably in Kenya. His father returned to Rwanda with his wife and four children in 1974–75, but the mountainous region in the north, with its dire poverty, vertiginous slopes, and difficult living conditions brought them back to Uganda.
“The story is a bit cloudy,” Emmanuel explained, “because talking about how you met your husband and the intimacy and so on is something that people don’t share, especially the old generation. Maybe they met in a bar. Maybe it was in a restaurant . . .”
“So you are in Kumi . . .”
“We stayed there until 1979. April 11, I think. The Amin regime was breaking up. That same day, we learned that our father had disappeared.”
Idi Amin Dada (1925–2003) had come to power in a military coup in January 1971. Amin’s regime was characterized by gross human rights abuses, political repression, ethnic persecution, extrajudicial killings, nepotism, corruption, and economic mismanagement. By 1978, Amin’s support was eroding, and he faced growing dissent from ordinary Ugandans dismayed at the crumbling infrastructure and ruined economy. Following the murders of Bishop Luwum and ministers Oryema and Oboth Ofumbi in 1977, several of Amin’s ministers defected or fled into exile. In November 1978, Amin’s vice president, General Mustafa Adrisi, was injured in a car accident, and troops loyal to him mutinied. Amin sent troops to confront the mutineers, some of whom had fled across the Tanzanian border. Amin accused Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere of waging war against Uganda and ordered an invasion to annex a section of Tanzania’s Kagera region. In January 1979, Nyerere mobilized the Tanzania People’s Defense Force and counterattacked, supported by Ugandan exiles calling themselves the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA). Amin’s army retreated, and despite military backing from Libya’s Muammar al-Gaddafi, Kampala fell and Amin went into exile on 11 April 1979. After a year in Libya, he settled in Saudi Arabia, where the Saudi royal family allowed him sanctuary and provided him with a generous subsidy on the understanding that he would stay out of politics.
Emmanuel’s mother was adamant that her husband had not been politically active during the Amin years. But eastern Uganda opposed Amin, and Emmanuel’s father was associated with the opposition simply because he lived in that part of the country. He was detained only days before Amin’s government collapsed. “After he was picked up, we never saw him again,” Emmanuel said. “Apart from a bloody pair of shorts and a shirt they brought us, indicating that he had been killed, we have never been completely sure what happened to him.”
“Who brought the bloody clothes?”
“Strangely enough, it was his friend. They had been traveling together. His friend brought back the clothes and said he’d been given the clothes by the security people. So he brought them to my mum. It was a message that he had been killed. But we never saw the body; we never got any results or any information on where the body was or what happened to the body, so we took it that he had been killed. But in that situation, where we hadn’t seen a body and we had no proof that he was actually killed or by whom, we kept hoping that he was in prison and would come out one day, or he was playing a game, leaving the clothes to confuse the security people. But he never came back. Up to now, that hasn’t happened.”
“Do you have memories of your father?”
“To tell you the truth, no. I don’t think I have anything I can remember about what he looked like physically, apart from the stories I was told about him when I was young. He was a massive man, very big, tall. I have never met his relatives, but when I sent them my picture, they told me that I’m a replica of my father. And this brings me back to the issue of why my mum never let me go, never let me visit my father’s relatives. Maybe that was the reason, because I looked exactly like him. But no, I don’t have a memory of him. Sadly, even pictures, the two or three pictures we had have worn out with time, and now when you look at them you can’t actually see many details. There’s one picture my brother sent me, but it’s not that clear either. So I don’t have any visual memory of him, and I can’t even remember whether we played together or he carried me, though those who knew him said he had a soft spot for his children. Which was very strange because with most fathers back then, their work was to look for food, to be away working, that kind of thing.”
“Did your mother ever talk to you about him, describe what kind of person he was?”
“It was . . . it was, eh . . . what can I say? It was a topic that one wouldn’t want to go into, even asking her. Because we tried one time, as children, asking my mum, ‘What was our father like?’ and ‘How were you people?’ and she just said, ‘Well, I can’t say much, he’s not there.’ It was as if something in her . . . as if we were cutting her heart into two. She seemed to be in pain.
