Taste of Death

On some occasion when I’m free and not reading a book or surfing the net, I have tendency of browsing through my pc for things that I did sometime back before I came off age to blogging. Yesterday, I did just that and came across the piece below that I penned down when some incident reminded me of my late uncle and the dark past of our nation Uganda. Heard of Idi Amin, probably not. But he lived and ruled Uganda from 1971 to 1979 and died in exile in Saudi Arabia in 2003.

The Day I felt Death

Cold as a corpse is an expression I hardly hear these days. When I was a little boy growing up in my village though, that was not the case. If village folk spent a night out for a ceremony or some other activity during the rainy season, it was not rare to hear them use such an expression. Never in my life had I touched a corpse. Therefore I had no idea as how it felt. But one night back in in1979 when my uncle died and in the morning my stepmother, of now blessed memory reached out for me and placed my hands on the dead man’s chest.

Back in the nineteen seventies when Uganda was under the reign of Iddi Amin Dada, one of the most brutal military dictators this world has ever known, basic commodities like sugar, soap, salt and paraffin were often in short supplies. In a bid to make up for the shortages many people living along the border with Kenya engaged in informal illicit cross border trade called Magendo. This basically involved smuggling of coffee, cotton, skins and hides from Uganda across the border to Kenya and selling these items to buy the items the ordinary people desperately needed back in Uganda. These items often cost much less than the ones that were officially imported or locally produced that only the well to do, which often happened to be the political elite, soldiers, and senior civil servants, could afford.

The people who engaged in magendo did it mainly for two reasons: As an economic activity it was very profitable since it was tax-free. Some other people did it out of desperation to make ends meet since the nation’s economy was in shambles, having been run down by the military government.