The Patient. Olive Kobusingye

patient, cautious doctor, and trusted expatriate back-up, D’Arbela was able to survive Amin’s presidency. His unceremonious exit would come later through a different avenue. For the moment, his biggest preoccupation, and that of his senior colleagues, was how to maintain and even expand the teaching and medical services despite the continuing exodus of highly trained staff.

      “Kibukamusoke had taken over as acting Department Head from Bill Parson who left in the first wave of departures after Amin expelled the Asians,” D’Arbela recalled. “When Kibukamusoke left, I was asked to head the department. The Master of Medicine program had been started in 1968 under Parson, and we had to sustain it. Olweny and Kiire were among the first batch from that program. I quickly assigned the promising young doctors to various specialties – Otim to endocrinology, Batambuze to cardiology, there was Mugerwa, Kiwanuka … We ensured that there was succession and continuity of the programs. It was the Masters of Medicine programs that saved the medical school from collapse.”

      Drs. Krishna Somers and Paul D’Arbela conducted most of the original research on endomyocardial fibrosis, a disease of obscure cause, which leads to heart failure in the extreme. When the New Mulago opened in 1962, the medical school received a £10,000 grant (equivalent to £160,000 [UGX881 million] in September 2019) from the National and Grindlays Bank in Kampala. With this, they bought equipment for the heart laboratory.9

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      If the hospital suffered a shortage of doctors, the Medical School was probably even more acutely affected. The biomedical sciences of anatomy, physiology and biochemistry were practically depleted of senior staff. Lab technicians were in some instances taking on the roles of the teaching staff. Anthony Gakwaya, an undergraduate in the early seventies, recalled that the class spent almost a year in the biochemistry class discussing the DNA structure which had been discovered by James Watson and Francis Crick some twenty years earlier. Gene sequencing was still very topical, and Frederick Sanger and others were still racing to see who would be the first to discover a method of rapidly ordering – sequencing – the building blocks of proteins. Ugandan medical students were facing an uncertain future with few teachers and hardly any lab reagents, but they were doing what they could to stay in the mainstream of knowledge. The Albert Cook Library that had enjoyed great prestige, and that had subscriptions to a wide variety of scientific journals, could no longer keep up. First there was a slowing down, then the deliveries stopped altogether.

      In a span of a few years, student life at Makerere changed from one of relative luxury to one of great hardship. Where the halls of residence had been the envy of even the working class around Kampala, now they were often plunged in darkness from frequent power outages, and water was erratic. Food quality suffered, and was the cause of a few strikes in the early Amin years, before it became evident that the problems facing the nation were far graver than poorly cooked meals. Military presence on Makerere campus became commonplace, and the insecurity that had engulfed the rest of the city now extended to the hill that prided itself in being the seat of independent thinking and academia. The stage was set for a violent confrontation.

      President Idi Amin Dada visits Mulago Hospital at its

      10th Anniversary, 16 October 1972. DS Archives

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      On the night of 27 June 1976, Dr. Adam Kimala, Provincial Medical Officer for North Buganda Province, was driving from Mityana to Lugazi when he ran into a big military convoy at Kibuye. He gave the convoy a wide berth and continued his journey undisturbed. The following day he learnt that an Air France plane had been hijacked and landed at Entebbe, and he thought that might explain the military presence on Entebbe road. As the situation evolved, most of the hostages were released, except for some 106 passengers who were either Israelis, or non-Israeli Jews. The hijackers were trading their lives for the release of terrorists held in prisons mostly in Israel, but also in some European countries. All this remained remote to Kimala, whose responsibilities as both the provincial head of the medical services and the Medical Superintendent of Kawolo Hospital kept him busy enough. But fate was about to hand Kimala a strange assignment.

      As he recounted, “One morning that week, a Police detective from Lugazi called me to say that they had found a dead body, and I was required to go and do a postmortem. The body was in a sugar plantation in Namawojjolo along Jinja Road. When we got to the body, I examined it, and noted that it was burnt. There was a burn in some sort of straight line from the head to the legs, a pattern unlikely in a live person who would be struggling, suggesting that the burn was inflicted after death. I could see that it was a short white female, probably in her sixties or seventies. I quickly came to the conclusion that this was not a simple murder, and that someone had killed the woman and wanted to hide her identity, or the mode of her death, probably both. Given the circumstances, I thought it best to not make a detailed report. Something told me this body was going to cause us problems. It was dangerous. I wrote a very short report, and said the body was burnt beyond recognition. We sent for prisoners from Lugazi prison and they buried the body right there in the plantation. I gave the Police officer the short report, and went back to the hospital, hoping that was the end of the matter.”

      It was not. In a day or so, news broke that one of the hostages, Dora Bloch, had been killed, and that her body had been dumped in Namanve. Kimala began to worry in earnest. He consoled himself that he had not been near Namanve. He prayed that the Police detective and the prisoners would keep their mouths shut. He did not have to wait for long to discover that people could not keep secrets. A few mornings after the postmortem, Kimala was walking to one of the wards when security officers came into the hospital. They asked him for the Medical Superintendent’s office. “I pointed them to my office. As they headed there, I got into the car, and drove to Bugerere. I told my staff that I had to supervise work in the Province - Kyaggwe, Bulemeezi, and Mubende. Three times, the security officers came to my office and did not find me. They searched my office. They went to my home and asked my wife if she knew of my whereabouts. They wanted to know if I had brought any reports home recently. She knew what they were after. She told them that she had heard me talking of a report that I had deposited at the Police. They went straight there and they were given the report. One of them returned and told my wife to let me know that everything was okay, that I had given a good report. After that they never came back.”

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      The date for the execution was set as 9 September 1977. The men to be executed had been tried by an army tribunal and found guilty of various crimes, including plotting to overthrow the government of President Idi Amin, being economic saboteurs, and spying. The program was quite elaborate. The government radio station had aired announcements of the planned executions, and the public was invited to come and witness how enemies of the state were punished. On D-day the prisoners were brought to the Kampala Clock Tower grounds in the Prisons Department vans. They were blindfolded and frog-marched, each to a metallic pole set up for the purpose, where they were tied. An army officer moved from pole to pole ascertaining that they were all properly secured. The soldiers to execute the prisoners lined up with their guns at the ready. The army chaplain was then invited to come and give the men their final benediction, or whatever spiritual comfort he could impart in the grim circumstances. At exactly 4 o’clock the officer in charge of the execution gave the single command to fire, and the shots were discharged, each prisoner stopping three shots directed to the head. After that the doctor, who had been in attendance from the beginning, came forward to confirm that the men were indeed dead. He had been so anguished by having to participate in the executions that he did not think through exactly how he was going to confirm the deaths of the men, shot at close range only moments before. As he approached the poles he suddenly realized he had no tools, and in the same moment realized the absurdity of the very thought of tools. One of the bodies was all but decapitated. He moved along the line barely touching the bodies, although it occurred to him that he could perhaps try to feel for their carotid pulses. He was relieved that the men assigned to remove the bodies were following quickly in his wake, cutting the lifeless bodies off the poles, and placing them in coffins. He did not recall how he left the Clock Tower grounds. He did not recall who he talked to, if anyone.