A Fighting Man: A Political Life of Museveni, Volume I, c.1944-1986

By Xavier Ogena

Whilst much ink has been spilt on "Museveni's Uganda", far too little ink has been spilt on the life of the country's eponymous leader, which is now in its eighth, eventful decade. The little information on Museveni's life that is in the public domain comes mostly from his memoirs, in which he is, in any case, understandably much more engaged in personal justification than an objective and disinterested essay. Hence this volume. This is the first, full, political biography of Museveni. This book also presents that increasingly uncommon commodity in "Museveni's Uganda": a balanced assessment of Museveni's abilities and activities. This volume of Xavier Ogena's political biography of President Museveni takes the reader from the birth of its subject in c.1944-through his formal education in Uganda and Tanzania, where he became considerably politically radicalised; his brief employment in a curious capacity in the Obote (First) President's Office; his dogged guerrilla struggle against the Amin military dictatorship; his changing fortunes in the post-Amin, transitional dispensation; his studied reluctance in running, if unsuccessfully, for the Presidency in the rigged general elections of December 1980; and his rebellion against the Obote (Second) and Okello regimes-to his triumphant accession to power in the dry season of 1985-86. This book is an essential reading for anyone who is interested in the history and politics of post-colonial Uganda, even Africa.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Driberg Books Limited
• Release date: Dec 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9789970675012

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Preface and acknowledgement

Numerous books, papers, and articles have been written about Museveni’s Uganda, that is, Uganda under President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni. These have been, more often than not, written by his enemies and detractors than by his friends. But precious little has hitherto been written about Museveni’s life, which is now in its eighth, eventful decade. Whatever little information is publicly available on the subject comes mostly from Museveni’s highly-influential ‘autobiography’, Sowing the Mustard Seed: The Struggle for Peace and Democracy in Uganda (1997, 2016). The rest of the information comes from the occasional article or speech by him, which is published in a national newspaper or the odd book. There has also been the odd article, which is often written by an ‘independent’ journalist. This usually assumes the form of a partly-abridged interview-article with allegedly long-forgotten, contemporary witness or witnesses to an incident, which is adjudged by its author to be absolutely pivotal in Museveni’s early biography, which purportedly provides previously-unavailable material, which complements, or, more often than not, contradicts, if available, Museveni’s version of the incident in question to the thinly-disguised delight of its author.

The sheer paucity of the literature on Museveni’s life seems attributable to the sheer lack, or perhaps more accurately, inaccessibility, of reliable sources of information on the subject. This is because Museveni reveals unambiguously precious little about his life in his autobiographical narrative and other writings. It is also because his close friends and colleagues are extremely reluctant to reveal, if at all, any information about his life, especially if they might appear to rival Museveni’s own version, as set down in the autobiography and elsewhere. This is nothing unique. Samuel Johnson:

The necessity of complying with times, and of sparing persons, is the great impediment of biography. History may be formed from permanent monuments and records; but lives can only be written from personal knowledge, which is growing everyday less, and in a short time is lost forever. What is known can seldom be told immediately; and when it might be told, it is no longer known’.¹

Besides, even the little that Museveni apparently unambiguously discloses about his personal life in his autobiography is not always completely unproblematic: his autobiography is much more of a memoir than an exercise in historical ‘objectivity’.

But we should not despair. Museveni’s memoirs, and indeed his other writings, which must, for good or ill, remain the starting point for any exploration of his life, seem, upon more consideration, to reveal—with any ‘revelations’ requiring to be qualified with hedging locutions, which flag up their ultimately speculative nature—more about Museveni than he seems to intend. This is through the things that he has said. This is also, perhaps more importantly, through the things that he has left unsaid. It is thus that the present book has largely been possible.

**

I have set out to accomplish two things in this volume of my political biography of Museveni. First, present sufficient information for the reader to reach his or her own judgement (my own, for what it is worth, notwithstanding) on the political abilities and activities of Museveni during his early years: from his birth in c. 1944—through his formal education in Uganda followed by Tanzania, where he became politically radicalised; his employment in a rather dubious capacity in the Obote (First) President’s Office; his dogged struggle against the Amin regime; his changing fortunes in the immediate, post-Amin dispensation; his reluctant participation in the rigged general elections of December 1980; and his ‘protracted’ war against successively the Obote and Okello regimes—to his triumphant accession to power in the dry season of 1985-86. Second, leave the reader with a clear and distinct impression of myself as a biographer of Museveni, to borrow the words of Samuel Johnson, ‘without malevolence, who thought it much his duty to display beauties as expose faults; who censored with respect, and praised with alacrity’.² The result is before the competent reader. He or she must now decide if, and how far, I have succeeded in achieving these aims.

**

Museveni’s active participation in politics has spanned about 60 years now. It all started in the 1960s. This was when he became a ‘sympathiser’ of the DP. He has since been, among others, radical student leader; UPC functionary; guerrilla leader (twice); party leader (for the second time now); Minister of Defence; Minister of Regional Corporation; Vice-Chairman of the Military Commission; and, for the last 35-odd years, President of the Republic of Uganda.

Museveni’s membership of the DP had been motivated by a sectarianism, which had been passed from parent to offspring. But he had, by the middle of the 1960s, developed a profound sense of ‘revulsion’ at sectarianism. This was in its manifestation in the contemporary politics of Ankole, which itself represented in microcosm that of the wider Uganda. Museveni has since persistently fought sectarianism through political education. He has also fought it through forging alliances across sectarian cleavages: ethnic, cultural, religious, political, military, regional or national. This started with his group of five young men at Ntare School, in which his native Ankole’s antagonistic ethnicities were all represented. It was followed by USARF, FRONASA, UNLA/UNLF, UPM, PRA, NRA/NRM, Uganda, and East Africa and beyond. Museveni’s early anti-sectarianism was part and parcel of his youthful idealism. This also propelled him, not only into the Protestant sect, Scripture Union, at Ntare, but also the radical ‘study group’, USARF, at the University of Dar es Salaam. But Museveni’s idealism has always had a hard and expanding edge of pragmatism. This has, in the fullness of time, for better or worse, all but edged out idealism.

Museveni is a man of considerable courage, resourcefulness, mobilisational acumen, and staying power. This was abundantly exhibited successively during the anti-Amin and anti-Obote struggles, especially the latter, which culminated in his NRA becoming, not only the first internally-based, guerrilla organisation in Africa to overthrow an indigenous government, while relying largely on internal resources, but also one of the only two ‘revolutionary’ organisations—the other being the Chadian Front de Libération Nationale du Tchad, FROLINAT—to seize power in post-independence Africa.

He was magnanimous in victory. He abhorred revenge on the vanquished Obote, Okello, and Amin forces, and indeed their respective ethnicities, as had hitherto been customary in post-colonial Uganda. But this only lasted until those very forces re-mobilised and embarked on an armed rebellion against him. He then proceeded to use against these, and indeed their suspected sympathisers, the very counter-insurgency methods that he had rightly condemned when they had previously been used by both Amin and Obote against his own guerrilla organisations and their suspected sympathisers. There have also been occasions when he appeared to glory unabashedly in the massacres by his much superior forces of unarmed, or poorly-armed, insurgents.

Museveni has never been sufficiently forthcoming about certain episodes from his early years. These include the precise nature of his employment in the Obote (First) President’s Office, and the nature and scale of the human rights abuses in the former Luweero Triangle by his NRA insurgents. The latter has rendered impossible any meaningful reconciliation between his Government and the former UNLA forces, which he has always blamed, if increasingly implausibly, for virtually all the human rights violations in the former ‘Luweero Triangle’ during the civil war.

Museveni’s passion and facility for languages, especially African languages, know no bounds. This has meant that, like no other Ugandan politician to date, he always uses the indigenous language, or generously intersperses his speech in English with expressions from the indigenous language, of wherever in Uganda he happens to be. He has co-authored a particularly well-received Runyankore-Rukiga thesaurus. He is well-known for his striking use of image, metaphor, and simile. He does this: to inform, to persuade, to warn—perhaps most memorably when he picturesquely compared physical assault on his supporters to the insertion of ‘a finger in the anus of a leopard’—and to rouse. He has an abiding interest in the application of linguistic methods to the study of African history. This is so as to discover purportedly extensive connections, contacts, and exchanges between the pre-colonial peoples of Africa, in order to suggest that sectarianism in post-independence Africa, especially present-day Uganda, is the creation of ‘egocentric’, ethnic leaders and foreign, religious proselytisers.

He is a long-time advocate for wider access to education. It started with his campaign, in the 1960s, for the abandonment by the Banyankore Bahima of the nomadic life, which had rendered formal schooling well-nigh impossible for their children. It culminated in his introduction, as the President of Uganda, from the late 1990s onwards, of, among others, Universal Primary Education (UPE, notwithstanding the lack of preparations for its introduction) and Universal Secondary Education (USE); not to mention commitment to have a secondary school in each sub-county of the country.

Museveni has a particularly profound and virtuous sense of gratitude to those who have been of help to him in his rise to power. The man who gave him his first, substantive job, which enabled him to observe the ‘ideological enemy’ at close quarters, H. E. Abdalla Anyuru, has had, among others, a secondary school built in his memory. Those who served in top leadership positions under him in his guerrilla organisations are often publicly acknowledged, even kept in the upper echelons of his Government and National Resistance Movement (NRM). But this is only for as long as they exhibit no burning desire to supplant him any time soon. The survivors of the ‘sacrifices of the [NRM] revolution’ also often receive moral and material support. Foreign state and non-state benefactors of his former guerrilla organisations, FRONASA and NRA/NRM, who have no issues with it, are also often publicly acknowledged.

Museveni’s profound and virtuous sense of gratitude to those who have previously been of assistance to him has meant his always standing by these. These include even those against whom accusations of corruption have been dismissed by court under particularly dubious circumstances. This has unwittingly encouraged the public perception—which is most probably wrong, but in politics what counts is the apparent, not the real—that he secretly condones corruption, which reached historic, epidemic proportions quite early in his Presidency. Corruption has since persisted at particularly alarming and outrageous levels, including in the upper echelons of his Government. This has all but deprived him of the moral high ground to combat corruption everywhere else. His tendency to keep his fellow, former, leading guerrillas in the higher echelons of his Government and party for as long as practicable has also meant something counter-intuitive: compared to those of his historical archrival and ideological punching bag, Obote, the upper tiers of his Government have, on the whole, tended to be dominated by individuals from certain ethnicities and regions of the country. This is partly owing to accidents of both history and geography, which meant that individuals from certain ethnicities and regions of the country predominated in the leadership of FRONASA and, its successor, the NRA/NRM.

Museveni has for long been a strong advocate of science and technology as the great antidote to Africa’s ‘backwardness’. He has over the years introduced in Uganda manifold initiatives towards the advancement of science and technology. He has also been a fervent champion of African self-reliance and African solutions to African problems. He is sorely prepared to back up his words with action. He has, for example, dispatched Ugandan security and medical personnel to other African countries, including Liberia and Somalia, on peacekeeping or humanitarian missions. He is also a passionate and persistent promoter of the integration of the regions of the continent as a stepping stone to the integration of the entire continent.

Museveni has made the eradication of poverty one of his life’s missions. It began with his campaign in the 1960s against impoverishing nomadism in his native Ankole. It culminated in his well-known, anti-poverty programmes. These have included initiatives, which involve increased agricultural modernisation and commercialisation at least as a central ‘pillar’, such as Rural Farmers’ Scheme (1987); Entandikwa Credit Scheme (ECS, 1996); Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP, 1997-2007); Plan for Modernisation of Agriculture (PMA, 2007-2010, one of whose key pillars is the well-known National Agricultural Advisory Services, NAADS); Bonna Bagaggawale, or Prosperity for All (PFA, 2010-2014); and Operation Wealth Creation (OWC, 2014-Present). The mixed fortunes of these anti-poverty schemes are not ascribable to any shortage of political will on his part to see them succeed, but rather, the sheer incompetence, corruption, and nepotism of the very public officials and politicians that have been charged with their concretisation. He is, admittedly, responsible for this in so far as he has presided over it. There has also been the perennial poverty of commitment on the part of the overwhelming majority of the poverty-stricken themselves to exploit the anti-poverty initiatives as officially envisioned for their long-term, as opposed to short-term, economic advantage. He has, nevertheless, succeeded in bringing his country to the very threshold of becoming a middle-income country. This has, admittedly, been by sheer dint of having effectively given himself such a long time to do so.

Museveni, upon his accession to power, embarked on major economic, educational, health, local-governmental, civil-service, and constitutional reforms. But the last two reforms owed more to political calculus—namely purging the civil service of supposed sympathisers of previous regimes and the perpetuation of himself in power respectively—than to any disinterested pursuit of long-overdue, technical reforms. This is, come to think of it, perhaps why some of the more notable achievements of these reforms (including smaller, optimal-size civil service; and presidential term and age limits) have since been reversed by Museveni himself.

Museveni has, during his fourth term, made a particularly repressive and sexually-discriminatory turn in his long Presidency. This has been through the enactment of the Public Order Management Act, 2013; Anti-Homosexuality Act, 2014 (subsequently repealed on a technicality, but the terrible spectre of its resurrection haunts his country); Anti-Pornography Act, 2014; and Non-Governmental Organisations Act, 2016, which have had the cumulative, if deleterious, effect of diminishing the freedom of assembly, association, and expression in Uganda considerably below internationally-acceptable standards. It is a particularly cruel irony, considering the sub-title of his autobiography: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in Uganda.

Museveni has never forsaken his cattle-keeping roots. He is the proud owner of thousands of Ankole Longhorns. Photographs of these have been published in newspapers and elsewhere, with he alone or in the company of impressed foreigners. He has contributed considerably to the conservation and promotion of a rare breed and an invaluable part of Uganda’s national heritage, which has become seriously endangered through uncontrolled cross-breeding. He has done it through being a breeder of Longhorns himself. He has also done it through encouraging many others, by virtue of his ‘celebrity’, to follow his example. Museveni, unlike any of his presidential predecessors, also possesses, on account of his being an ardent breeder of cattle, an up-to-date, firsthand experience of what it is like to engage in the country’s predominant, economic activity: farming.

Museveni has that rare knack for making ‘ordinary’ people feel a concrete sense of connectedness to him. He has done this through, for instance, judiciously using indigenous languages as much as he can (as adumbrated above); riding a bicycle or riding on a boda-boda (motorcycle taxi); releasing, and publicly performing, a hit rap song; talking on the telephone while sitting in a folding chair by a roadside (in Kyeirumba village, Isingiro District, photographs of which went viral on the Internet, with many photographs and videos of Ugandans, and indeed foreigners, imitating him also going viral); racing to the rostrum upon his re-election for the fourth time as the NRM presidential nominee; and, following his proscription of outdoor exercise to curb the spread of the Covid-19 virus, releasing a video demonstrating how to exercise indoors, in which, 75 years old, track-suited, and barefoot, he warms up by jogging from one end of his office to another, before doing 30 impressive press-ups.

Perhaps one of the greatest ironies of modern, African political history is this. The very man, who acceded to power, while so eloquently decrying and rejecting the tendency of African leaders to overstay in power, has come to typify the African leader, who overstays in power. It is not as if early warnings of Museveni’s excessive desire for power have not been there. There was, for instance, his refusal, in the early 1980s, to form a broad-based, anti-Obote organisation, in which he feared that he would no longer be able to enjoy a secure monopoly of the wielding of power. There seems to be absolutely nothing that he is not prepared to sacrifice on the altar of power. There was, for example, his removal of the eminently-prudent term and age limits on the Presidency. There has been his ruthless treatment of long-term colleagues, who dared to challenge him for the Presidency, including Kizza Besigye and Amama Mbabazi. He has for decades now advanced excuse upon excuse for desiring yet another term in State House. He is now bereft of even the most remotely-credible excuses for overstaying in power. He has all but publicly admitted that, like his ‘backward’ (his word) predecessors that, back in the heady, unforgettable days of 1986, he had engendered every public expectation of effortlessly surpassing in democratic leadership, he himself has, alas, descended into desiring power for the sake of power.

**

I am very grateful to my wife, Winnie, for her customary support and encouragement, and our (then) three-year-old son, Dylan Mayanja Ongom—who would always be picking a fight with me over what he, presumably, considered to be his fundamental right to pore over any illustrations in any publications on or around my desk, whether or not I would be using it—for unwittingly reminding me, whenever I would be bogged down in some particularly knotty explanatory or interpretive problem: there were always more important things in life.

Xavier Ogena

Oyam (Uganda), February 2021

_____________

1S. Johnson, ‘[Joseph] Addison’, in S. Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets , Vol. II, London, Methuen and Co., 1896, pp. 55-104.

2S. Johnson, ‘(Alexander) Pope’, in S. Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets , Vol. III, London, Methuen and Co., 1896, pp. 39-158.

CHAPTER 1

Childhood and Schooldays

I

Yoweri Tibuhaburwa Kaguta Museveni was born to ‘rich’, Banyankore-Bahima pastoralists in Ntungamo in Ankole in south-western Uganda in ‘about the year 1944’. The imprecision in the recorded time of his birth is apparently attributable to his parents’ having been ‘illiterate’.¹ ‘Museveni’ was derived from ‘Abaseveni’, which was the vernacular designation for the celebrated, Second World War battalion of the King’s African Rifles (KAR, a British colonial regiment), the Seventh (Uganda Territorial Force) KAR², or 7 (U) KAR for short, which was ‘embodied’ in late 1939, and which saw active service in Italian East Africa and South-East Asia.³ Whether it was prescience, coincidence, or a case of name influencing choice of profession, that a man, who was named after a battalion, was to become a soldier, and a celebrated one at that, is undoubtedly a particularly interesting question: but it need not detain us here.

Museveni’s father was Amos Kaguta (who belonged to the commoner Basiita clan), and his mother, Esteeri Kokundeka (who belonged to the noble Bashambo clan), who was the first of Kaguta’s eventual two spouses, and the first of whose four offspring Museveni would be.⁴ Kaguta was a celebrated wrestler. He had, as a strapping young man, wrested his freedom from Ntungamo Sub-county prison (where he had been incarcerated for bringing a cow into the country from neighbouring Rwanda) by throwing down Byambogyi (who was another celebrated wrestler). Byambogyi had been unconquered across Ntungamo while Kaguta languished in a colonial prison. Kaguta himself could have (in the language of Chinua Achebe) been unbeaten throughout Ntungamo and even beyond, had he not struck a blow for African independence by defying colonial authority and declining to represent Ntungamo at the Rwampara County competitions, which he would have probably won: Byambogyi, whom he had bested, who ended up representing Ntungamo, won.⁵

When Museveni was about four days old, he underwent the traditional, Banyankore ‘baptism’. He was placed upon a cow. He was presented with an ‘imitation bow and arrow’. The ceremony was apparently intended to engender ‘warrior qualities’⁶ in the child through a sort of sympathetic magic: the desired effect would be produced by imitation.⁷ Whether Museveni’s maturing into a considerable warrior should be ascribed to magic, or heredity and environment, need not detain us here. Suffice it to say: there is now sufficient evidence in favour of an explanation prioritising hereditary and environmental factors. Museveni’s second baptism, on the 3rd August 1947, was in the name of imported religion: Christianity. It involved, among others, a small amount of water being solemnly poured thrice on his head: it symbolised his formal reception into the Anglican denomination. But the traditional requirement of attending catechism school before baptism had been waived for Museveni: his parents had already been Christians, having converted soon after his entry into the world.⁸

Whilst Museveni’s mother had apparently developed into a ‘strong, born-again Christian ... teetotaller’, his ‘stubborn’ father ‘stuck to his traditions ... would smoke, drink traditional beer’ and, as we have seen, subsequently became a polygamist.⁹ Museveni avers that his mother ‘influenced [him] a ‘great deal’: he was apparently ‘more inclined’ to her ‘side because she was more disciplined’.¹⁰ But the very occasion and place of this claim, coupled with the fact that the juvenile Museveni was, by his own confession, not precisely a paragon of discipline or virtue,¹¹ being ‘more inclined’, as we will see, to his father’s rebellious ‘side’, encourages the (strong) suspicion that this particular claim was purely motivated by political considerations.

Museveni started formal schooling in 1951. This was at a Seventh Day Adventist school at Mushenyi. Mushenyi was a missionary-owned, ‘sub-grade’ school. It had only two classes. The curriculum was delivered in the vernacular, Runyankore, by untrained teachers.¹² Museveni could not, however, as an Anglican, attend a school owned by a non-Anglican denomination, unless he was planning to convert ‘before too long to the creed of the denomination owning the school’.¹³ He clearly was not. It had been his no-nonsense father, who had apparently wondered: ‘Why shouldn’t [Museveni] go to the more convenient [school]—they are all teaching the same things’.¹⁴ He had proceeded to send the boy to Mushenyi. But Museveni, undoubtedly owing to the considerable pressure, which had been brought to bear on his family, especially the ‘rebel’ of the family, Kaguta—we need, incidentally, look no further, whence Museveni inherited, as we will see, his rebellious and pragmatic personality traits— by the leadership of the local Anglican Church, ended up spending only a ‘few weeks’ at Mushenyi. He was then moved to the Church of Uganda (in pejorative, colonial lexicon: ‘Native Anglican Church’) school at Muyogo. The school was about a kilometre and a half from his parents’ home: it was much further away than Mushenyi; not to mention that the seven-year-old Museveni had to walk barefoot to, and from, Muyogo. Museveni and his fellow pupils learnt basic literacy at Muyogo. They would, in default of ‘books or slates to write on’, use their forefingers to copy the alphabet into the sand from the school’s only ‘copy of an alphabet book’.¹⁵

Museveni attended Muyogo for about a year. His father then had the foresight, in March 1952, to relocate his kraal from Kirigyime to Kafunjo. This effectively shrunk the distance from his home to the government-aided Kyamate Primary School from about six to three kilometres. Museveni could now attend Kyamate a bit more conveniently. But he still had to go ‘through papyrus swamps walking barefoot’.¹⁶ Kyamate was an ‘elementary’ or ‘vernacular’ school. It had four classes. It taught Christian instruction and practice, geography, history, biology, and English.¹⁷ Museveni joined the school’s girls’ section. This was apparently pejoratively referred to by those in the boys’ section as kyenkobe: ‘the place for monkeys’.¹⁸ It is a measure of the male chauvinism of those days that boys that young already considered women to be inferior to men, even sub-human. Hence their dismissal of young women as ‘monkeys’. It is possible, even plausible, that Museveni’s experience of being dismissed alongside girls as ‘monkeys’ made an indelible mark on him of fellow feeling for women. This was to manifest itself, once he was in power, as we will see in the sequel, in his pioneering policies, which promote gender equality and women’s empowerment.

Kyamate girls’ section was divided into Classes 1A and 1B. Museveni completed Class 1B in December 1952. But he did not join Class 1A in the girls’ section at the start of 1953. He was moved to Primary One in the boys’ section instead.¹⁹ This suggests that Museveni had initially been admitted to the girls’ section, not because, as he would subsequently gloss over it, he had been ‘considered too young, although [he] was then seven years old’ to join the boys’ section, but rather, because his intellectual level had been considered to be below the entrance requirement for Primary One: Class 1B of the girls’ section had practically served as his final year of sub-grade school.

It was at Kyamate that Museveni first made the acquaintance, not only of two of the young men, Martin Mwesiga and Eriya Kategaya, who were to become his close colleagues in the political struggles ahead, but also of a young woman, Janet Kataaha, who joined Primary Three of the girls’ section in 1958, and who was to become his closest colleague in the broader struggle for existence.²⁰ Kyamate had, by 1958, been upgraded to a six-class school, that is, a full primary school, making it possible for Museveni to take his Primary Leaving Examinations (PLE) from there that year.²¹

II

Museveni entered Mbarara High School at the beginning of 1959. Mbarara was a boarding, junior-secondary school. It had two classes for primary-school leavers. Mbarara was, as all the country’s ‘high schools’ had hitherto been,²² headed by a European, who was, in Mbarara’s case, the Scot, Major Edward Cleaver, with another Scot, Major Bothwick, as his deputy. The rest of the staff was African. This was the very first time that Museveni had lived away from home. It is not at all surprising that Museveni apparently ‘felt hungry all the time’ while at Mbarara. But this seems to have had less to do with the Majors not having been ‘feeding’ their charges ‘properly’, as Museveni charges,²³ and more to do with Museveni having for long been accustomed to having an African ‘full stomach’ while living at home.

Museveni left Mbarara in 1960 and, in early 1961, entered Ntare Senior Secondary School. There apparently ‘the food was much better’.²⁴ It certainly can only have helped matters that Museveni had by then become much more acquainted with not having an African ‘full stomach’. Ntare, which had six classes (four ‘O’ level, two ‘A’ level), was also headed by a European, William Crichton, with all but one of the twenty-odd teachers also being European. Ntare had been founded in 1956. It was one of the country’s only seven government-owned, ‘senior secondary’ schools. These had been—as recommended by the (Sir Bernard) de Bunsen Education Committee of 1952 following its famous distillation into practical recommendations of the proposals for the reform of the country’s educational system, which had been made by the Binns Study Group of 1951—established by the Protectorate Government to broaden access to secondary education outside Buganda and Busoga, as well as dilute the pernicious, religious complexion of the country’s educational system.²⁵

When Museveni entered Ntare, the Protectorate Government had, again, as had been recommended by the de Bunsen Committee, already re-structured the country’s educational system through, among others, shortening the duration of junior-secondary education from three to two years, and increasing that of senior-secondary education from three to six years.²⁶ Thus, it is rather disingenuous of Museveni to assert, as he does, that he ‘skipped the third year of junior secondary school’:²⁷ it gives the entirely-erroneous impression that the-then defunct class had somehow proved to be beneath his intellectual level, necessitating his acceleration.

Museveni became, in 1962, a ‘born-again Christian’. He also became a member of the Scripture Union. It is a little surprising that the Protestant sect’s stark, uncompromising theology of eternal damnation and of an austere, personal salvation should have proved particularly appealing to the young Museveni. Museveni had hitherto largely lived a nomad’s austere life. This was characterized by a diet of predominantly cattle products, viz. milk, cattle blood, and occasionally veal. He had also had, from the age of four: to graze calves or cattle, milk cows, draw water for watering cattle from a deep well using a ‘heavy wooden bucket’, clear cow dung from the kraal with bare hands, and fetch water from the well in small gourds.²⁸ Museveni would later attribute his decision to become a born-again Christian to his need for the ‘personal discipline’ and the organisation of a powerful and single-minded ‘moral teaching’ for his personal battles against, among others, sexual and drinking urges.²⁹ But Museveni was not prepared to avail himself of the benefits of being a born-again Christian at any cost. He apparently drew the line firmly at the ‘public confessions [of sins], and their exposing of one’s life’. It