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. Talking about our father by then was horrible for her. My mum is a very hard person. I can tell you, I have seen my mum cry twice in my life, twice. And that was not the time when my father passed away, no, because I didn’t know whether she was crying or not at that time, but the time my grandmother died and the time she had the toothache.” Emmanuel gave an embarrassed laugh, then quickly went on. “So when we asked about our father and my mum went inside and came back and her eyes were red, I knew there was something horribly wrong. So we didn’t bother asking my mum about our father again. But even though she never sat down and told us intimate things about our father . . . about how he carried us, how he was at home, whether he mistreated us or was sweet to us, or brought us presents or not . . . she did tell us where he came from and who his relatives were. She gave us information about him. That was the only thing that we got from her. Anyway, when my father passed away, or rather, disappeared, it was left to my mum alone to make sure that we safely left that village, because we were not from there. Our presence alone would raise eyebrows, because westerners—especially those from Rwanda, the migrants—were called cowboys.”
Emmanuel had touched on one of Africa’s oldest problems—the troubled coexistence of pastoralists and sedentary cultivators. It echoes the story of Cain and Abel, post-Neolithic conflicts between townspeople and itinerants, and age-old Asian struggles between valley kingdoms and hill peoples.2 As settled populations struggled to protect themselves against mobile and marauding outsiders, nomadism became a synonym for barbarism. Seen to belong nowhere and everywhere, the nomad was stigmatized as the antithesis of civilization. As I write (November 2011), a spate of rapes and assaults in northwest Cameroon is being blamed on Akuh cattle herders, with whom Aghem cultivators have long been in dispute over rights to land.3 In Rwanda, Hutu farmers claimed that their ancestors had generously given land to Tutsi seeking pasture for their herds. But the Tutsi allegedly tricked the Hutu into servitude, and the very word “Hutu” became a synonym for slave.4 Elsewhere in Africa, pastoralists also tended to be in the minority, supplying cattle (for bridewealth and sacrifices) to farmers in exchange for access to grazing land. But as populations grew and herders migrated from drought-stricken lands, ancient cultural or religious differences were invoked to justify