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Lost Lion of Empire: The Life of ‘Cape-to-Cairo’ Grogan
by Edward Paice
HarperCollins, London, 2002. (Paperback, 470 pp)

There is something rather unsettling about a book that relates so much of East Africa’s colonial history with so little mention of the ‘natives,’ who appear in these pages only as nameless and voiceless porters, servants or labourers. This is, to be fair, not a history but a biography: of Ewart Grogan (1874–1967), a British imperial adventurer and entrepreneur whose impact on Kenya was almost as formative as the impact of his hero and early mentor, Cecil Rhodes, on what is now Zimbabwe. (Kenya, however, at least avoided the indignity of ever being called ‘Grogania.’) It is, arguably, also apt that the natives should appear here as anonymous and generally passive, a mere accessory to the story of empire: for that, it seems, is how Grogan saw them. He was, on Paice’s account, a prodigiously energetic, stubborn, and in many ways visionary man. The visions, however, all turned on the economic potential of a ‘virgin’ land. What unsettles 21st century sensibilities is that seeing a place as ‘virgin’ entails—much as in the earlier colonisation of the Americas—seeing its existing human population as largely beside the point.

This commentary (minus the last paragraph, which was requested as a supplement but arrived too late to be included!), was published on The Guardian (UK) website on February 10, 2012. Back in 2009, when the Anti Homosexuality Bill first hit international headlines, I discussed it in a longer piece, The strange geometry of an anti-gay rumpus.

Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni has distanced himself from the noxious Anti Homosexuality Bill that has resurfaced in the country’s parliament, saying that he cannot interfere in the country’s democratic process. This is ironic coming from a man who, after a distinctly sleazy election victory last year, ordered violent crackdowns on peaceful protests at rising food prices and proposed a new crime of “economic sabotage.”

“El Hombre que Amaba a los Perros” (“The Man Who Loved Dogs”)
by Leonardo Padura (2011, Tusquets Editoriales, Barcelona; 765 pp)

There are three main dog lovers in this well-crafted reconstruction of the exile and death of Leon Trotsky: Trotsky himself; Ramon Mercader, the Catalonian communist recruited by Moscow to assassinate him, and Ivan, a young Cuban whose literary ambitions have been reduced to sub-editing on a veterinary magazine when, in 1977, he meets the dying Mercader on a beach outside Havana and eventually becomes the reluctant narrator of the assassin’s tale. The narrative manages to generate suspense despite our knowing in advance the sticky end that awaits Trotsky. Equal skill and scrupulous research are brought to the wider, historical canvas, which features ‘live’ excerpts from the Spanish Civil War and the Moscow show trials as well as snapshots of Kruschev-era Russia and the mass exodus of Cuban citizens from that island in the mid 1990s.

Published in Kampala’s The Daily Monitoron August 19, 2011.

A working paper recently published by the Washington DC based Center for Global Development argues that Uganda’s future oil revenues should be distributed equally, in cash, to all Ugandan citizens.

The short piece below was published by Index on Censorship on May 24. A longer analysis of Uganda’s post-election violence, which I contributed to the Foreign Policy in Focus website of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC, can be found here.

Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni appears to have lost the plot. A violent crackdown on initially small and peaceful opposition protests at rising fuel and food prices has over the last five weeks left at least ten protestors and bystanders dead, including a two year old child, and hundreds injured. This show of indiscriminate force has shocked even government supporters, pitching the country towards political crisis. Now the 67 year old president, who came to power 25 years ago at the head of a rebel army, is blaming local and international media for his predicament, and promising to roll back the press freedoms that have been one of the saving graces of his rule.