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I was once fairly close to William Pike. Possibly no more than 10 feet, to be exact (OK, that is a very old joke, but I have always wanted to use it in an article).
We were standing in a London church, or possibly a church hall. If memory serves, it was a memorial for ex-President Yusuf Lule, who had died in exile while incarnated as the Chairman of the National Resistance Movement (NRM), the political wing of the National Resistance Army (NRA), which was one of the many armed groups then fighting the 1981–1985 Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) government headed by Milton Obote. This means it was around 1985, unless it was for someone else, which means it could have been a little earlier. I was accompanying Omwony Ojwok, head of the external activities of our own Uganda National Liberation Front (Anti-Dictatorship) (UNLF-AD) organisation. Information gathering from among the assembled exile politicians was high on our minds.
Pike, one of the few white faces among the crowd, walked by and Omwony walked over and had a chat with him; I watched the very tall Pike bend lower to talk to my rather short comrade.
Pike had not been well known as a journalist on Africa, but an article of his about a 1984 trip into NRA areas of operation in Uganda had appeared in Britain’s Observer newspaper and later, in other publications. It brought forth new realities in the information environment about the war in Uganda, and also propelled Pike to some level of “expert” status.
This book, now self-published nearly forty years after the initial events, is Pike’s account of that period, and all that followed. He explains that the book started life as a project in which a well-known British publisher had initially shown an interest but had eventually passed because the necessary use of detail made them feel it would not be readable to a non-Ugandan audience.
That is in a sense, our gain, because the writer gives many details about so many of the key political players of our time in terms of their attitudes and demeanour as they progress from a small rebel movement to an army and party in power.
In terms of style, it can be a somewhat unwieldy text, shifting repeatedly between being a memoir (as claimed), political analysis of a poor type, living history, and outdated propaganda. We can understand him as a participating witness, fortunate or perhaps foresighted enough, to have secured a front-row seat at one of the most significant political events in the region. The reader will have to judge if he was able to make good journalistic use of this opportunity. There are indeed some moments of really good writing. The account of the 1980 election-rigging, for example, is wonderfully succinct.
Pike displayed courage in deciding to go into the Luweero triangle and spend time with the NRA. At a journalistic level, it was certainly a career breakthrough for him. For the NRA, the work was a propaganda breakthrough, in that on top of it exposing the lies being promoted by the British Foreign Office that there was no serious unrest in Uganda and the epic nature of the human rights violations being carried out by the UPC regime, it framed the NRA as the only opposition.
And this is a key weakness of the work. Perhaps it could have simply been subtitled “Memoirs of the NRA’s participation in the Bush Wars”. It is not generally appreciated how many armed Ugandans wanted Obote out, and how diverse their reasons were.
If, on the other hand, he just wanted to tell us his personal story, then after having read and reviewed Pecos Kutesa, Sam Njuba, Eriya Kategaya, Yoweri Museveni (excerpts), Kizza Besigye, and John Kazoora’s accounts, I think I am now officially tired of these personalised recountings of an essentially political event that was the NRA experience of the bush wars. Many – such as Sam Njuba’s The Betrayal – are well written and well meaning, but in the end, a repeat of the same approach is where Pike’s work can become tedious and frustrating.
This NRA cadre (of which Pike was one, for all practical purposes) problem of presenting matters of structure and ideology as issues of personal experience and choice also serves as a coverup for all the glaring contradictions in the reasoning and posture of their organisation. Pike is no exception here.
Up to today, certain key questions remain unaddressed regarding the NRA’s journey to state power and whether this should be considered a bad thing or a good thing for the country. It is especially a problem among those sections of the political opposition whose own origins are the NRA and its war.
First, is the question of motives. Did the war end because the reasons that started it had been addressed?
At some point, Pike needed to decide whether he wanted to be a factual reporter covering a political event, or a reporter doing a story on the NRA, or if he wished to engage in political analysis, or base everything on his own opinions. In the end, he failed to make a choice, or perhaps even to recognise that such a choice was necessary, and, as we see with this book, the result is to remain personal and eschew a coherent structural framework.
This war began ostensibly over the question of free and fair elections. It then developed into a wider struggle for protection against human rights abuses. There were differing opinions among the fighting groups as to the root cause of the crisis. Everything, from a “tribal” blame game, to holding the imperialists responsible for reinstalling the Milton Obote government, was put forward. Finally, there was the 1985 signing of a Peace Agreement in Nairobi by many of the belligerents. As to why this agreement was never upheld, or if it was abrogated for valid reasons, that question has never been settled.
In the meantime, therefore, Uganda went on to have another civil war as a direct consequence of the failure of the agreement.
So, the question remains: does a civil war “end” because one side defeated the other, or does it end because the issues that gave rise to it have been settled? Pike does not answer this question, because he does not even ask it.
Second is the question of facts and their meanings. What are the facts, and how do they matter?
On the whole, Pike’s account of the war tells the story as it is officially told in Uganda; from the “twenty-seven guns” foundational myth onwards. This has been very misleading, and has led to a permanent condition of political confusion in the country.
In other words, is it actually possible to discuss the NRA’s war in the absence of other forces, their views and realities?
There is a good illustration of this problem in an interview of Winnie Byanyima, another veteran NRA cadre, by African feminist activist and scholar Amina Mama on behalf of a publication called Feminist Africa. At the time, Byanyima was a member of parliament. This means the interview took place somewhere between 1994 and 2OO4:
WB: Some women were involved in diplomatic work and political negotiations. I was involved in the peace process negotiations. The diplomatic work was not simple, because at that time Museveni was perceived as a communist…
AM: Would these women have been bearing arms?
WB: No. Most were civilians. But even in the case of combatants, there were not enough arms for all the women to have guns. But much later on, when we got enough guns, almost every combatant had a gun. This was during the last year of the war (emphasis mine).
Byanyima goes on to list the various political figures and dignitaries she went on to meet, and the countries she visited. She ends the list with:
WB: … multimillionaires like Tiny Rowland – once described as “the unacceptable face of capitalism” – whose business empire spanned the length and breadth of the continent.
Winnie Byanyima then makes an observation:
“Everywhere I went, I observed powerful men shaping the destiny of our continent. That whole period helped me as a woman in politics. I was seeing how these men used their power, and how masculinity and patriarchy operate.”
This is a remarkable execution of narrative disassembly, in which everything relevant to the story is mentioned, but in such a way as to make them seem unconnected. Instead, “men” somehow get blamed for everything.
The reality is that the peace process, meeting Tiny Rowland, and the fact of the NRA having so many guns in the last year of the war such that “everyone got one” as it were, are in fact not just highly conjoined events, but organic components of one larger process that was unfolding then.
And these too are the actual events that Pike elides and evades as he tells this tale. It is a central weakness of the book, showing a move away from natural journalistic curiosity and rigour, and more towards what would be an understandable bias towards his new friends in the NRA and an association that certainly profited him for the next three decades. Or it could simply be an intellectual inability to comprehend the significance of the issue he was seeing, much as it also marked the real turning point of the war he supported.
Or it could be a bias borne of a bias towards the interests of his home country. Or simply the machinations coming out of a need to still cover up the role of British intelligence in installing the NRA over us, perhaps because he became part of the plot.
As a staffer at South magazine, Pike would definitely have been aware of the significance of the name Tiny Rowland (who passed away in 1998), and his corporation, the London Rhodesia Company (LONRHO). As Byanyima alludes, it was the most notorious of the controversial Western multinationals believed to be making money out of “friendships” with African dictators and warlords.
Like Byanyima, Pike puts on a display of a remarkable lack of curiosity about how the entity he had encountered as a relatively small organisation was suddenly awash with weapons and had cut off nearly one third of the country less than two years later.
And this is in the context of him having said he’d found traces of communication between Kategaya and LONRHO while he was accommodating the former in London. Unless I missed it, there is no mention of the LONRHO connection in the dramatic events leading to the cutting off of western Uganda.
Again the reality is different, and the key word is artillery. We, for our part, had picked up information that the top NRA leadership in the bush were engaged in secret talks with a key player inside the Obote regime. This was mid-1984. In fact, I do recall Omwony Ojwok putting this question to war participant and member of the NRA High Command Gertrude Njuba, who had come to London from the bush for reasons unknown, but also addressed a gathering of Ugandans there. She was clearly taken aback; one could see that she was not expecting the question but recovered well enough. Her more than a little cagey response was to feign ignorance but then also say: “We are willing to talk even to the devil, if that will bring peace to Uganda.”
For our part, what we learned later was that Obote’s military found out, and some factions within it were not happy. They managed to intercept the designated go-between, and brutally extract better quality information about the locations of NRA bases before killing him. Their next move was to bring in artillery (using advisors from North Korea of all places), and begin pounding NRA positions. In both (if I am not mistaken) Pecos Kutesa’s and Kiiza Besigye’s accounts of that period, there is unwitting reference to it, where they describe the impact of these attacks.
It was that harassment which led to the decision to get as many of themselves out of Luweero as was feasible. Talk of a “decision to open a second front”, as faithfully repeated even by Pike, is yet another retrospective cover-up.
In short, our then long-argued prediction that the NRA’s militarist adventures in Luweero were one day going to get them into serious trouble was now beginning to manifest itself. The artillery situation was rooted in the reasons as to why the NRA found it necessary to be in discussions with Vice-President and arch-Obote henchman Paulo Muwanga; their gung-ho Luweero activities had seriously depleted the area of the very resources (human and natural) necessary to sustain them there.
They ended up in the Rwenzori Mountains region because of one Chefe Ali (real name Eriya Mwine) who, before joining the NRA, had been a senior commander of that part of the UNLF-AD army based in the Rwenzori Mountains in preparation for a less wasteful and flamboyant, more sustainable and therefore much longer, war. Pike himself makes this reference to Ali’s past.
The coup against Obote then happens in the middle of the following year, while the NRA was still in some level of disarray, and this is how the British (meaning the UK foreign intelligence service) – also reeling from the loss of their Obote – after some initial dithering and doubts, recovered incredibly well and settled on investing in the NRA as its worthy replacement for the UPC apparatus, and were able to scoop them up with a lot of money and a big plan.
Like Byanyima, Pike does not so much tell the NRA’s version of this, but rather leaves a disjointed scattering of names and moments in such a way as to have the reader arrive only at the wrong conclusions about what happened back then.
Here is what actually happened.
As part of recovering their position so as to secure their interests, British intelligence eventually paid heed to what Tiny Rowland had taken a gamble on and seriously engaged the NRA leadership. Two major conduits were Ben Matogo and Eriya Kategaya, both of the NRM/A external wing, and who Pike tells us were his first contacts with the NRA and who organised his initial trip for him.
Pike talks about his high regard for Matogo, a man we clashed with more than once at those Ugandan London meetings as his partisan passion for all things NRA often spilled over into outright thuggishness. He is also mentioned WikiLeaks as an information source for British intelligence back then.
It is this turnaround that sees the setting up of the Nairobi Peace talks under the aegis of Rowland’s good friend, Kenyan President Moi, which were simply an NRA time-buying ploy so as to re-arm and re-equip and numerically expand through massive recruitment.
The “guns” that Byanyima refers to were weapons flown in from Israel which had been the stockpile created by the truce that ended the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The terms were that the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) fighters (the Hamas of that time) would agree to lay down their weapons and get shipped from Lebanon to North Africa, and the Israeli army would pull back from the Lebanese capital. Instead, this was the disarmament that led to the infamous Israeli-organised massacres of up to three thousand now unprotected Palestinians and Lebanese Shia Muslims in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
Anyway, LONRHO used a chartered plane to collect and fly in these stockpiled weapons from Israel into now NRA-controlled western Uganda and then return to Israel laden with coffee that the NRA was looting from the farmer co-ops’ stores in the region. Because of a convenient frost in South America, the price of coffee was particularly high that year, and Israel’s exports of coffee mysteriously followed suit.
This was the grubby reality of the NRA “revolution” as Pike later describes it: looted peasant coffee, weapons stolen from an anti-colonial resistance movement, and barter trade with the Zionist state. All organised by a Western imperialist intelligence agency working with a Western multinational named after a white setter colony in Africa.
It is his silences on these matters as one who, either as a journalist or as an insider, would have had some knowledge and curiosity, that raises the question of Pike’s own role and interest in continued participation in NRA support activities when he got back to London. He does give accounts of them quite interestingly though (especially his run-in with some big shots at the Obote-regime Ugandan embassy).
Which point brings one all the way back to our encounter with Pike at that London gathering. Omwony chuckled as he related the exchange. He said that he had asked Pike why, of all the rebel organisations, he chose to focus on the NRA and also what his exact area of interest was when he decided to go to Uganda.
“I went to meet Museveni,” Omwony told me was Pike’s reply.
“And what did you talk about with him?” Omwony had asked.
“I had only one real question for him,” was the reply.
“Which was?”
“Are you actually a communist?”
“And how did he reply?”
“Well, he said he was not.”
This was important information to us. Not because we had ever imagined the NRA to have been led by actual communists (we always knew they were anything but, despite their rhetoric), but because it raised the question: Apart from actual communists (meaning ourselves), to whom else would it matter whether Museveni was an actual communist or not?
This is because the primary and general task for any actual communist – as it had been with the Russian, Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions – would be the work of mobilising and educating the population to confront and kick out all the physical, cultural, and economic manifestations of Western – mainly British – imperial domination of our political and economic space. In our case, if that meant dismantling even the European-created Uganda itself, and expanding the struggle into the wider Great Lakes region, then so be it.
So, apart from actual communists (ourselves), the only other interests to whom it would matter as to who is a Ugandan communist or not, are those that stood to lose the most in the event of a communist takeover, namely, the imperialists.
To say that we have not been very successful in our quest would be to make the understatement of the millennium. And the gap between our goals then, and the reality in Uganda now, is called the National Resistance Army, who were not only brought in by Western imperialists, but have worked with exceptional diligence to both expand and protect the imperialist presence in the region.
Just as Byanyima talks about the hurdle created by rebel leader Yoweri Museveni being initially mistaken for an actual communist back then (while avoiding saying by whom), Pike also recounts having to make this point to those British officials he talked to back in the UK.
So this, therefore, is actually the story of how the NRA-British intelligence deal got done, but with those retelling it pretending that it is something else.
Pike eventually gets round to addressing this long-running question of what his actual relationship with British intelligence was and how it may have developed over the years. He does so in a sort of backhanded way in recounting how, in his final days in Ugandan affairs, his twenty-plus years working relationship with President Museveni had somewhat soured.
“In my last year at the New Vision, President Museveni told John Nagenda that he had come to the conclusion that I was an Mi6 agent. Nagenda said ‘That’s impossible, Pike can’t keep a secret.’ to which Museveni replied, ‘He is deeper than he looks.’”
This is very, very clever, because in fact Nagenda’s (a writer since the 1960s, a national-level cricketer, newspaper columnist, and legendary loyal Museveni confidant and media advisor) seemingly sardonic remark is actually an act of protection, since Nagenda himself had affiliations with British intelligence from as far back as at least the early Amin era.
And since President Museveni’s regime had (as said here) been financed into power by the Western corporate interests that Mi6 works for anyway, even his own “suspicions” would have been both quite meaningless, and also coming very late in the day.
This was simply a clever literary ploy of staging a nullity so as to cover up, and then cover up the cover-up. Mind games.
The problem here for the average African and/or Ugandan reader will be largely conceptual. Most Africans have been citizens in countries where we can safely assume that the state and government are at the very best indifferent to their wellbeing, but more usually actually and actively hostile to them.
In the Western world, it is different. The average citizen believes themselves to be living in a democracy that allows them to speak up and participate in the peaceful removal of any government that they do not like. As such, they see a distinction between a governing party and the state. This allows them to understand the state as – if anything – a guarantor of those freedoms. So their attitude towards people collecting information or even carrying out actions on behalf of their state is not to see them as emissaries of a hostile regime but the necessarily secret custodians of a good system and be willing to help them.
This does not mean everybody becomes James Bond, but it does mean that the average citizen in the West, if called upon to help the state to examine, analyse or collect information on a situation, as well as convey messages between points, and even do propaganda (all depending on who they are and where they work), many would not see a problem with saying yes. And especially if it is not a domestic matter.
This is why some of the most celebrated characters in popular Western fiction and drama tend to be agents of the state – like spies and special ops soldiers – and why so many of such fictions have scenes in which a state agent visits some helpful expert professor or some such for a specialised insight into something being spied on.
Pike would therefore have been far from exceptional in this. He was well placed to be of information and messaging value to and between the interests of Britain, and sees his country of origin as a benevolent force in the world.
There are many such people who walk among us: priests, lawyers, backpackers, NGO missionaries and expats who would be happy to also do this. And there are many Africans also happily doing the same. My point is that this is not the tension-filled point of high drama that we Africans often assume it to be. It is just another day in the life of Empire; it and its citizens do not see themselves usually as being on opposite sides, and this has been one of its greatest strengths.
What we in our party had not been able to predict was just how deftly the British would be able to recover from their loss of Obote, and especially how little internal opposition to becoming the new tool of the West there would be among the wider NRA leadership. The Negroes all just simply folded.
This is the significance of Omwony’s brief conversation with Pike in that church all those years ago. It was partly thanks to Pike’s work, and that one key question, that the imperialists were able to settle on this choice.
As I have said, three parties benefitted: the British state were given a lead and access to who would become their next agent in Uganda; the NRA were given centre stage in the anti-Obote struggle and soon became the government; Pike consolidated his bond with the NRA and would go on to work for the (essentially) government paper for the next 20 years while building up his own media businesses in the region.
The third question, therefore, is the question of outcomes. What has the NRA’s acceptance to enter into the service of Western imperialism cost Uganda (and the wider region)?
From their victory day in January 1986, the usual happened as happens when establishing a new dictatorship: political party activities were banned, troublesome journalists got detained, those deemed potentially dangerous opposition activists were either also detained, harassed in the courts, exiled or killed. A unilateral extension of power was announced, and civil servants deemed to be especially supportive of the ousted regimes were also often sacked and lost their official homes. In short, a new human rights crisis quickly unfolded over the next few years. Except this time round Pike did not see it that way; instead he calls it a “revolution”.
There were some significant additions, though.
First, there was the handling of the war that broke out in northern Uganda. It was initiated by those members of the ancien régime – soldier and politician alike – still smarting from their defenestration and the violation of the 1985 Peace Agreement, and who also felt persecuted by the incoming NRA. The conflict birthed its own rounds of horrendous human rights abuses before degenerating into desperation.
Britain had supported Obote’s regime while it butchered those engaged in both armed and unarmed resistance to it and was now supporting the NRA regime as it carried out is own abuses against the communities it most associated with the Obote regime.
It was a situation very similar to how the United States were special best friends with the Ethiopian dictatorship of Meles Zenawi as it used his Tigrayan party and army to brutally hold the Ethiopian state together for twenty-seven years from 1993. After Meles died in office, war eventually broke out between the Tigrayans and the successor regime. Today, the Americans remain new best friends with the Abiy regime even as it carries out horrendous abuses against the Tigray region.
Then there was the massive privatisation and economic liberalisation programme that was sketched out from day one but did not reach full implementation until the 1990s.
An important context to this was the development of a political practice of ever-expanding accommodation of middle-class Ugandan professionals and politicians into the public sphere. This is why Uganda has some of the highest numbers of elective positions and presidential appointees ever seen in our history, especially for women. It is also why opposition to the regime remains unstable, fragmented and often easily bought off.
Pike’s engagement with each of these things is very revealing. Having been at the New Vision for twenty years from when the new government took power, he was present at the time when all of these events occurred, and headed an organisation designed to collect and publish information about such events.
Instead, he invites us to indulge in misrepresentations of what I say amounted to a new level of political, economic and human rights crises.
Pike’s telling of the war in the north brings with it dramatic accounts of the frontline activities in the northern war in an almost deliberate standing down of the scepticism expected of a journalist. Alice Lakwena and Joseph Kony become a gift, allowing for all manner of drama and a good dose of prejudices to explain the war away.
In fact, those two did not start the war in the first place. That was done by much more run-of-the-mill northern Uganda politicians from the recently overthrown regime.
If anything, the two aspiring mystics could actually be better understood within the context of a much wider occurrence of a turn to attempted spiritual explanations in the face of an existential crisis. The collapse of the Obote and Okello regimes in quick succession, followed by the wide-scale removal of ethnically northern politicians, soldiers and civil servants from their positions (and southern homes) from 1986, and then the brutal NRA military operations in the north created some form of epistemic shock leading to a temporary collapse of northern politics.
It is similar to the Ghost Dances phenomenon of 1890s Native America, and even the 1905–1907 Maji Maji rebellion in Pikes’ Tanzanian birthplace; these were half-remembered spiritual expressions of resistance to secular defeat.
But there are also many contemporary examples. In 1989, a lady mystic named Nanyonga began distributing portions of “holy” soil as a cure for the then rampaging incurable AIDS pandemic. This was not in northern Uganda but in Buganda. Thousands, including “educated Ugandans”, flocked to her home. Various quasi-Christian cults regularly spring up among pastoralist communities in Uganda’s “cattle corridor”, we, of course, have the massive rise of miracle-working Pentecostal churches, and there was even the “Catholic” one in 2000 where a man and a woman named Joseph Kibwetere and Credonia Mwerinde persuaded hundreds of their followers to allow themselves to be burned to death. So, this kind of spiritual crisis or meltdown should not be seen as an Acholi or a northerner phenomenon but as a problem of dispossessed and pressured people anywhere coping with the cognitive dissonance of any kind of catastrophic new normal.
Perhaps Pike, despite having lived among us for all these years, was simply too mediocre a journalist to make these connections, or perhaps he was the “deeper” person of Museveni’s observation who recognised that feeding into racist tropes about northerners in particular was a good way to conceal the real cause of the war and confuse the onlooker.
As for bad governance, Pike sticks to his chosen method as displayed at the New Vision: to focus on specific scandals and the particular individuals associated with them, as opposed to engaging in a wider structural analysis of the system that was creating those situations.
But when it comes to economic policy, Pike does not hold back in his enthusiasm for the NRA’s implementation of the (World Bank/International Monetary Fund-imposed) policy of privatisation and liberalisation. He himself acknowledges that this is a stark contradiction for a person like him who was a member of the UK Labour Party which had most vehemently opposed the 1980s onset of UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party government’s equally wide-reaching privatisation programmes back in Britain. Pike even states how he regularly put the editorial voice of the New Vision behind this neo-liberal point of view without external prodding.
In this, Pike unknowingly followed the path of one Sir Andrew Cohen, one of the last, but the most substantive colonial governors of Uganda (1952–1957). Like Pike, Cohen claimed a strong affiliation to the UK Labour Party. Nevertheless, as a civil servant, he accepted the appointment from the then Conservative government in the UK. Once here, he set about dismantling the anti-colonial mass movement, especially by driving trades unions out of political organizing and vice versa. This was in stark contrast to the fact that at the very time, his Labour Party back home was literally funded and controlled by the British trades unions through their then powerful Trades Union Congress which basically also formed the party’s National Executive Committee.
It was simply a case of believing that what is not acceptable when being done to Europeans should be acceptable when done to Africans. There is a word for that.
There are many other things in the book that I have not commented on, but all fall within those three questions. On a personal note, it was fascinating to see the names of many political actors we locked horns with – not to mention the venues for those battles – forty years ago brought up and in some cases back to life. It was also satisfying to finally fully learn what they had been getting up to with the imperialists behind our backs and the backs of the Ugandan people.
But the reader will have to find their own copy to properly discover all that. The book is a very useful insight into the five-decade adventure that has been the National Resistance Army. For that reason alone, it should be worth the while of historians, journalists and ordinary Africans to read.
As for Mr Pike himself, what can finally be said of him is in the lines of that Shakespearian character Othello, another man who made himself a person of consequence among people not of his race; the essence, as Othello assesses his life while on his deathbed, is the same:
“I have done the state some service, and they know it. No more of that.”
