is said to have been co-ordinated from a place called Nanyuki in central Kenya by a senior Israeli intelligence officer to- gether with Colonel Bolka Bar-Lev, who was at the time the head of the Israeli military mission to Uganda. Beverly Gayer Barnand was in charge of the whole opera- tions on behalf of the British government. Many Ugandans consider this as a
betrayal. To make matters worse, Ken- yatta denied Obote asylum in Kenya. When Obote was toppled again in 1985, Kenyatta’s successor, Daniel arap Moi, again denied him asylum in Kenya. Obote ended up in Zambia where his bosom friend, Kenneth Kaunda, made him wel- come. Obote’s call for Western countries, es-
pecially Britain, to stop supplying arms to South Africa angered the British whose
multinational corporations were reaping billions of dollars from such deals. In fact, at the time of the Amin coup, Obote was in Singapore attending a Commonwealth conference where he was slated to give a landmark speech to include condemna- tion of the continued selling of arms to South Africa. The then British prime minister,
Edward Heath, is on record as having as- sured delegates that some leaders in attend- ance would not return to their countries. He implicitly meant Obote. Obote also angered the Israelis, who
were camped in northern Uganda train- ing and arming the Anyanya rebels against the Sudanese president, Gaafar el-Nimeiri. Obote entered into an agreement with Nemiery to flush out the Anyanya (mem- bers of the Southern Sudan guerilla move-
ment) who had been fighting for years for full autonomy of the South. They were operating from northern Uganda to overthrow Nemiery’s government in Khartoum. Interestingly, it is the same region that
has for a long time been a theatre of war between Yoweri Museveni’s government and Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army rebels who Museveni now accuses Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, of arming.
Colonial economies Betrayal and the prevailing mistrust in East Africa also have their roots in coloni- alism and the post-independence economy of the region. Uganda, for example, was a peasant economy where export crops were produced by millions of scattered peasant households. In contrast, colonial Kenya was a settler economy based on squatter labour. Tanganyika – before the merger with the Indian Ocean islands of Zanzibar to become Tanzania in 1964 (and its subse- quent renaming as the United Republic of Tanzania) – was a plantation economy based on migrant labour. Uganda’s major export crops were cot-
ton and coffee. Kenya produced mainly pyrethrum for export. And Tanganyika was better known for producing and ex- porting sisal and sisal products. Politically, Uganda officially became
a British protectorate in June 1894 and in August of that year Britain established its administration in Kampala. Kenya, on the other hand, was a British colony, which is why granting it independence, just like in other British colonies includ- ing Zimbabwe, for example, was no walk in the park. British interests were deeply entrenched in Kenya. German East Africa since 1890, to-
day’s Tanzania, was renamed the Tangan- yika Territory in 1920 and placed under the mandate of the British after the First World War. Te region’s political history, therefore,
has it that when Obote’s Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) came into power after independence, the economy was starting to out-compete Kenya’s – the settler economy that still had remnants of British settlers and farmers, who, after Kenya’s independ- ence, continued to occupy the country’s fertile highlands. Te economic prosperity of a neighbouring country (Uganda) under
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