Kyalwazi checked the board in the surgeon’s room to confirm what theatre he had been assigned, and then made his way down to Theatre 2. The anesthetist was busy securing an intravenous line on the first patient. “Maama, wasuze bulungi?” he asked the patient. “How was your night?” He always made a point to talk to the patients before they were put to sleep.
***
Karungi’s earliest memory of Kweete was at a family gathering. It might have been a wedding or a funeral. They could not have been older than seven years. All the kids were running around, and Aunt Adrine reminded them repeatedly that Kweete was not to run too fast or she would end up in the hospital. Kweete looked just fine to the other kids and so the warning fell on deaf ears. In a sea of children of all ages, three little girls were inseparable: Karungi, Biitu, and Kweete. Like Kweete, Biitu’s full name was hardly remembered and rarely used. Few would have made the connection between it and the English royal name Beatrice. While Karungi and Kweete were first cousins, Biitu’s family was from a different clan, although their homesteads were only a stone’s throw apart. During the school holidays, Biitu would sometimes arrive at her friend’s home early enough for breakfast, and she might not return to her own home until after supper. The parents had long stopped the threats and beatings that they had used to try to keep her away from Kweete and Karungi, who Biitu called Rungi. The parents should not have worried though. The only mischief the girls ever got into, if it was that, was to climb every fruit tree on the property. Otherwise, they usually spent the days playing hide and seek, ‘kwepena’, marble games using riverbed stones, and hunting for guavas and other fruits. It was later, when the girls were nearly ten, that Kweete became critically ill, and had to spend nearly two months in hospital. The doctors determined that she had an infection involving the inner lining of her heart, on top of the asthma that had bothered her episodically since she was about four. Because she missed the most critical term of the school year, she had to redo the class, falling behind her peers by a whole year. For Karungi the following holiday was not much fun as Kweete could not climb trees, did not want to run around, and she absolutely could not play in the rain. These restrictions were to remain for the next several years. The following year Karungi’s parents sent her off to boarding school, so her contact with her two soul mates was further curtailed.
With Rungi gone to boarding school and Kweete not well enough to join her in their usual escapades, Biitu now had no choice but to take on the chores and tasks that her mother insisted were essential for every girl’s survival. She was taught how to peel matoke perfectly without looking, how to winnow and grind millet, and how to take care of little babies. Her mother told her this was the meaningful education, not the reading of books that had little to do with real life. Without Rungi and Kweete life was dull but not lacking in activity.
***
In the evening of 19 December 1969, Professor Ian McAdam, the Head of Department of Surgery, was just exiting the hospital when he heard on the car radio that President Obote had been shot at while leaving Lugogo sports stadium, where he had just closed the UPC annual delegates’ convention. Usually by this time McAdam would already be at the club, but on Fridays he sometimes did an evening round to especially make sure the post-operative patients were comfortable, and to preempt calls late in the night. As he swung his car into Kira Road to head towards Mulago roundabout and on to the doctors’ club, he saw a convoy speeding towards the hospital entrance from the opposite direction, sirens blaring. His sixth sense told him to turn around and head back into the hospital. By the time he made the full turn at the roundabout, the motorcade had disappeared into the hospital. He returned to the parking that he had just left on Level 3, and entered the hospital through the Casualty Department. The previously calm waiting area was busy. There were soldiers and police officers standing around, and although he had taken the precaution to put on his clinical coat, they would not let him take the lift. He walked straight through to the main staircase in the central block, and then ran up to the 6th floor, taking two steps at a time. As he came up to the landing he was met by the 6th floor Matron and two younger doctors.
“We have been trying to reach you”, the Matron said, visibly relieved to see him.
“I heard the news on the radio. I was just leaving so I turned and came back.”
“This way please. He is in Room 1.” Room 1 on Ward 6B was the top VIP room. The entire floor had been cordoned off, and for the duration of the President’s stay there were soldiers at the entrance, and the elevators were closely guarded.
Dr. Kyalwazi arrived shortly afterwards. The two surgeons reviewed the patient and ordered that he be taken to the theatre immediately. They then called Dr. Martin Aliker, the dental surgeon, to join them in theatre.
The stories from Lugogo were as varied and numerous as the people willing to tell them. Some said an assassin had taken a shot at the President as he emerged from the hall, but that the split second before he pulled the trigger, a super-alert Obote had spotted him and dived to the ground, which was how he survived. The bullets that followed, according this version of the story, were by his security as they both covered him and tried to take out the assassin. Others swore that Mr. President had really not survived a bullet, but had had a little too much to drink. They argued that any bullet that knocked out his teeth and injured his tongue would have ripped through his brain, or at the very least shattered the jaw. As it was, the news from the hospital was that the President was safe and stable. Obote himself insisted later that someone tried to kill him, and that he got broken teeth and a tear in the tongue from the gunshot. Over time the stories were laundered in bleach and dyed every color of the rainbow, so it was impossible to know what really happened. What was remarkable though, was that the head of state was rushed to Mulago, which at that time was synonymous with the highest level of medical care in the country, if not in the region. The time for presidents to move with their own emergency medical teams complete with an operating theatre on wheels, as was rumored to be the case with a later administration, and for evacuations to European capitals on the first sign of a medical ailment, was yet to come.
From East and West, From North and South
All voices singing, Arise Makerere
Rise up and rise, High up and high
All voices singing
Arise Makerere
Dr. Lumu’s plan had stipulated that a 600-bed hospital would be constructed in each of the four regional headquarters: Mbale, Gulu, Fort Portal, and Masaka. Another 600-bed hospital was to be built in Kampala to relieve Mulago of congestion, and to allow the national referral hospital to serve its main functions of referral, teaching and research. The Amin presidency heralded uncertainty that escalated rapidly. In 1972, barely a year into the presidency, he expelled all the Asian doctors, creating a huge void in the capacity of the hospital and the medical school, literally overnight. A number of non-Asian senior doctors left shortly after, either in protest of the treatment meted out to their Asian colleagues, or for fear of the escalating violence. The heads of department of Surgery, Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Internal Medicine resigned and left in the same week. Amin’s ministers of health, first Dr. Justin Gesa, and later Henry Kyemba, seemed to have been spinning around Amin’s insanely unpredictable plans and demands that any serious intentions for the construction of the hospitals fell by the wayside. Despite the extreme violence that engulfed all professionals, Amin singled out the doctors and judges for unexpected favors. He gave senior consultants Mercedes Benzes, and other doctors got cars as well. As the self-declared economic war intensified and common commodities disappeared from the market, Amin created a special outlet for doctors in Industrial