10/03/2014
Idi Amin's torture chambers is something different altogether.
For one, there is no signs orienting or directing a visitor through the over-grown grass toward the desolate cement chamber where Amin's secret police went about their brutal business. Secondly, there is no museum-style narrative that deconstructs or interprets the site, located on the spacious Mengo Palace, the home of the Buganda King.
Oddly, the torture chambers are behind some shacks; chickens run about freely. There, the ground suddenly slopes downwards into a narrow cement tunnel with four rooms on a platform. It is surprisingly small and spare for an infamous torture chamber. A Ugandan who joined me as I searched for the chambers told me that the three rooms that housed the prisoners were on a platform to prevent escape -- the lower channel was filled with water and electrified. The trapped prisoners, often hundreds crammed into a 10-by-10 foot room, had a choice of dying by electrocution by jumping into the water or at the hands of Amin's soldiers. Many, though, simply died due to asphyxiation from the sheer mass of bodies jammed into the cells.
The water has gone, the cement is wearing away. As one climbs the rickety makeshift steps into one of the tiny rooms, he is plunged into darkness. There are no lights to illuminate the room. But if he were to illuminate it a little; to say by use of flash light to see, he would realize why. The walls were covered in messages of despair, written in blood and dirt. For instance one reads: "Cry Far Help Me The Dead". Others are simply handprints, a stark reminder of those who once lived.
How countries remember trauma and violence says so much about their ability to confront and heal the past. To mention in Rwanda, reminders of the genocide are everywhere, marked by fluttering purple and white flags. Vietnam remembers its Hoa La prison as a symbol of both colonial violence and Viet Cong benevolence. In contrast, Idi Amin's torture chambers are neglected, the grim legacy of the place left to the vagaries of time.
The lack of attention to the sins of the past might have also something to do with the nation's conflicted feelings toward a despot once described as "certifiably mad" and " ruthless". But consider that nearly 80 per cent of the population was born well after 1979, the year Idi Amin went into exile. The visceral quality and enormity of his brutality has perhaps dimmed in the public consciousness.
Perhaps Ugandans don't want to remember the enormity of Idi Amin's crimes (between 100,000 to 500,000 were killed in eight years) because it will remind them of how, in so many ways, Uganda has not lived up to its potential.
If the dead, tortured and the exiled are not remembered, Uganda risks forgetting the messages left by the lonely handprints on the decaying cement wall.
