Princess Bagaya on Amin's Offer of Marriage

Bagaaya on fashion, acting and why she left university a virgin
It is helpful to have royal blood, eye-popping beauty, and lots of brains to make you the first woman in east and central Africa to study at Cambridge University. Even then you will still laugh, cry, love, serve your country, strive to understand your heritage – just like the rest of us. But if you are Elizabeth Bagaaya or Elizabeth Nyabongo or simply Elizabeth of Toro, well, you also get to act in the movies and to model at the highest levels.

We know all that about Ms Bagaaya through her competently written autobiography, Elizabeth of Toro: The Odyssey of an African Princess, published 20 years ago as the revised edition of African Princess, issued in 1983. Reading the book again, 15 years after I first devoured it, I still find it full of life. It must be down to those arresting descriptions of the ways and cherished rituals of the Toro royal household; the author facing down Idi Amin and then going underground and fleeing to Kenya; or maybe the day she met much, much younger Wilbur Nyabongo and eloped with him only to hear about his death in a plane crash upon arrival at Entebbe Airport to attend her brother Patrick Kaboyo Olimi VII’s wedding. How about that chance encounter with a “young man” named Yoweri Museveni? We, however, leave the politics for next week and focus on the softer aspects today.

Omukama George Kamurasi Rukidi III of Toro had a plan for his daughter, and the future batebe understood and embraced it. On entering Girton College, Cambridge, in 1959, she reflects: “My studies of law, history, and political science were all directed to one end – to mold the power and influence I would wield as the princess royal of Toro.” The parallels with the Pakistanis Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and daughter Benazir, whom he would send to Harvard and Oxford in preparation for her to take over his political party as recounted in her autobiography Daughter of the East, are striking.

At Cambridge, Ms Bagaaya studied under heavy hitters such as E.M. Forster and F.R. Leavis. Classmates included the future feminist scholar Germaine Greer and David Frost, yes, he of “Frost Over the World” on Al-Jazeera English whom the 2008 movie Frost/Nixon celebrates for his 1977 series of interviews with the disgraced Richard Nixon.

When not studying hard, Ms Bagaaya, not unlike the typical undergraduate, was partying hard because, she says, she was “in great demand”. Amongst the many smitten by our princess was Prince William of Gloucester, nephew of King George VI, who roamed about in a private jet. Like most royals, Ms Bagaaya serves up some cockiness. Before the prince, she dated a “tall, handsome, wealthy, sophisticated, and amusing Scot” who “entertained lavishly the rich and the beautiful. I was not rich.”

Hallelujah to that. But even as Ms Bagaaya went from party to party adorned in the “model gowns of the great houses of Paris”, she was conflicted about going all the way. She chose not to in order to protect her image and what it represented: the best of her not-permissive culture in which a public role awaited. “So I stoically denied myself any sexual activity or emotional involvement with any man, leaving Cambridge a virgin...” she writes.

Ms Bagaaya left Cambridge in 1962 and was called to the English Bar in November 1965. A pupilage followed in the chambers of Sir Dingle Foot – the UK solicitor-general and the man who would successfully represent Abu Mayanja, another Cambridge-trained lawyer, in Kampala in the famous sedition case of 1969. To celebrate her achievement, the princess hosted a gala party in London on December 20, 1965 “dressed in a pink silk Guy Larouche gown that contrasted with my dark skin and eyes...” In the morning, news came of her father’s death. Time for her to ascend the batebeship had come. She did and it lasted a short while because the Obote government abolished monarchies just months after the crowning of Patrick Kaboyo Olimi VII to whom she was the batebe.

When she mildly criticised the government for its actions, the “tyrant” Obote’s “fascist” agents made life difficult. So she jumped at an invitation in 1967 by Queen Elizabeth’s sister Margaret to appear as a guest model at a Commonwealth fashion show in London. She stole the show. A star was born. She ditched law – while in Uganda she had been called to the bar, another first for a local woman – and chose fashion as a more visible way to keep a light on her heritage that was under attack. With mostly English aristocrats offering support, Ms Bagaaya would be photographed for British Vogue and American Vogue.

When Jacqueline Kennedy (the Jacqueline Kennedy) and others introduced her on the American scene, our princess hit the top flight. Her accidental hairstyle became the rage in black America as “the Elizabeth of Toro hairstyle” and soon she found herself the first black model to grace the cover of a top fashion magazine, Harper’s Bazaar. Juicier offers followed. She was asked to pose nude for really big money. “I will not do a nude.” A princess is a princess.

In the first part of our review last week of Princess Elizabeth Bagaaya’s autobiography Elizabeth of Toro: The Odyssey of an African Princess to mark its 20th anniversary, we focused on her education and modelling career. We now turn to her work in government. The Idi Amin coup found Ms Bagaaya in Paris. So excited was she that she flew to Kampala without returning to her New York apartment or her modelling engagements. The Uganda Argus splashed her picture on the front page “mini-skirted, with shimmery tights and gold-coloured shoes”.

Amin had invited hereditary rulers back and the prospects of restoring kingdoms looked good. But not quite. The former model was named roving ambassador in July 1971, and later foreign minister, to go counter scepticism in international capitals about Amin, whom she found “unsophisticated” upon their first meeting at a State House luncheon. Over time she found Amin had a gift for languages but was bad at procedures of government; was well intentioned but a little in over his head.

Then the big man started acting funny, asking repeatedly that she, the only woman in Cabinet, joins the boys at the swimming pool. He also made comments like: “Many people ... have come to me to tell me about rumours concerning you and me. I said to them, am I not a man, and is Bagaaya not a woman, what is wrong with it?” When that failed, he got direct. He sent an emissary named Roy Innis who said to the foreign minister: “If Amin asks you, will you marry him?” Out of the question, came the answer.

In a few weeks, the woman who had months earlier dazzled the UN General Assembly and was being swooned over in world capitals for her ability and beauty was fired. She was thrown into a police cell in the night for allegedly having had sex with a white man at a French airport while on official tour. Immediate international furore had Amin blink. He placed her under house arrest the next day for a week. On being freed, she appeared before the dictator at Makindye State Lodge. She had had enough. She fired back at Amin protesting his bullying. She demanded to know why she was being fined Shs15,000. Amin went ballistic.

Information Minister Juma Oris broke into tears. All assembled knew the princess was kalas, dead meat. She swiftly went underground in Kampala as escape plans were crafted. Offers were made, including one from Mr Yoweri Museveni: my men will smuggle you out provided you join and work for my Front for National Salvation (Fronasa). That did not fly. On the night of February 8, 1975, Princess Bagaaya lay on the back seat of a car and was spirited away to Jinja. The next afternoon, accompanied by three men and disguised as a “simple village girl”, she made for the Kenyan border and walked four miles through bush and across a river to the other side.


She returned in April 1979 and quickly fell madly in love with a much younger but “breathtakingly handsome” man named Wilbur Nyabongo, her second cousin once removed. After Obote attacked her and her brother Patrick Olimi, who was running in the 1980 elections on the Museveni-led UPM ticket, she left for Nairobi. She had Wilbur over and they eloped to London to marry secretly in April 1981. Our princess was happy. “I brushed his hair daily, washed his feet with warm water, and massaged his body,” she writes. When he said he would give anything to fly, the princess summoned her vast network of highly connected friends and had him learning to fly in no time. When Ms Bagaaya was being considered for a role in the film Sheena and Wilbur said he wanted the pilot’s bit, she made sure. And together they would rally support for the NRM in Africa and Europe. Then in December 1986 30-year-old Wilbur, a co-pilot, died in a plane crash in Casablanca. A gutted Bagaaya told Mr Museveni she could not continue as ambassador to the United States. She did.

The ambassadorship was the culmination of a chance meeting at a State House reception on the day Ms Bagaaya returned in 1979. As she chatted at the edge of the party, “a young man whom I didn’t recognise slowly walked toward me. He held an African ceremonial stick in his left hand. ‘Hello, Elizabeth. I am Yoweri Museveni.’” They met several times after and when the Bush War started, the princess lent support. Mr Museveni returned the favour, repeatedly appointing her to ambassadorships, the last to Germany a few years ago.

Before her return to public life – she has again slipped out of view – Princess Bagaaya spent time in the United States after her two-year stint as ambassador there ended in 1988, having declined a move to Europe and thus resigned. This captivating book ends on that note of departure. It is the way it begins: with the young princess being packed off for Gayaza High School in Buganda from Kyebambe in Toro. In-between, a lot that is fascinating and is chronologically recounted happens. Fountain Publishers could do well to buy rights of this autobiography, now out of print, from Simon & Schuster/Touchstone to publish it for the broader Ugandan audience. The author would also have the chance to update it and correct a few errors, such as stating the exact year (1924 or 1929) her father was crowned Omukama of Toro.

Original Story by Bernard Tabaire

Africa accused of masking true scale of hunger crisis

In the next few months 6.2 million Ethiopians will need food aid, the United Nations will warn this week. But the country seems reluctant to admit to the rest of the world that it needs help. Twenty-five years since the famine that killed about one million Ethiopians, when Bob Geldof appealed for people to feed the world, and the world rushed food aid to five million starving people, the country still can’t feed at least 12 million of its people even in its good years.

Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi is keen to shift the focus to his position representing Africa in the Copenhagen climate change negotiations next month. He blames climate change for unpredictable rainfall, leading to poor harvests. While in public, they talk up the progress the Eastern African country has made since the 1984 famine, Ethiopian and Western officials privately accuse Mr Meles of burying his head in the sand, according to reports in The Times newspaper. There have been claims that official assessments of the scale of the country’s humanitarian needs have been delayed and obstructed and access to some areas where the situation is worst has been blocked. On Friday, the United Nations will announce that the number needing food aid has risen to nine million. But the Government wants to change the way the figures are calculated to lower that figure to 5 million. The UN and donor countries are worried this will mask the true scale of the crisis. There are also allegations that food aid is being withheld from the regime’s opponents.

Britain is Ethiopia’s second biggest donor and gives the country £200 million a year, but it is now turning up the pressure on the Horn of Africa country amid growing concerns for the coming months. “The Government has just got to embrace the crisis and not be frightened of the statistics,” Gareth Thomas, a minister with the Department for International Development, said on Monday. “It is different from 1984 but there’s still huge need. There’s got to be a recognition that if we are going to stop children from being malnourished and keep people alive we have got to have accurate information and we’ve got to have it in a timely manner.” Speaking before a meeting with Mr Meles, Mr Thomas said his main message was the need for change, and that while food aid does help in the short-term, it won’t stop the hunger crisis reappearing. In 1984, the country’s population was about 35 million. It is now about 80 million and will have doubled again by 2050.

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children

Uganda Has the Capacity to Stop Hunger!

Kampala — I was happy when I read a story in The New Vision of October 19, quoting the minister of agriculture unveiling the Government commitment of sh2 trillion for agriculture improvement.

There is a commitment to transform this country, especially by reforming agriculture, environment and natural resource sectors. Unfortunately, this has not been reflected in the budgetary allocations to these engines of our economy.


From our geographical set up, Uganda has the capacity to fight hunger, guard against famine and consequently, enhance food security. This can be achieved by protecting our environment, which has a bearing on the performance of agriculture. Uganda has to value the environment and agriculture in order to defeat hunger.

The irony is that even with the contribution of agriculture and the environment to the Gross Domestic Product and community livelihoods, the sectors are still marginalised in terms of funding.

It is so sad that we can have floods sweeping people's houses and gardens and two months later, famine claiming lives in the same locality. Why hasn't the agriculture ministry or the National Planning Authority thought about putting up irrigation structures for small scale and large scale farming?


Manoocher Deghati/IRIN
These structures would store excess rain water to be used in dry seasons. Even areas like Karamoja have the potential to move from subsistence production to commercial and industrialised production.

All that is needed are political expressions of commitment translated into adequate resource allocation. Once resources are properly utilised, there will be extension service delivery, which is why I am happy about the announcement of funds for agriculture.

I hope the same goes for environment management to reverse the current rate of resource degradation. Emphasis should be placed on protecting the environment so as to ensure food security for all Ugandans in future.

The writer is a farmer and natural resources specialist based at Uganda Wildlife Society Ivan Ruhanga

African population reaches 1 billion

Dar-es-Salaam, Aug 25 (IANS) Africa’s population has reached one billion as it continues to grow by about 24 million a year, according to a report.
The report published by the Washington-based Population Reference Bureau, jointly with the US government aid agency USAID, says it is expected that the African population will double to nearly 2 billion by 2050, Buanews reported.

Although population growth has slowed in North African countries such as Egypt and Tunisia, on average women in sub-Saharan Africa have more children than women elsewhere.

“While globally the average woman has 2.6 children, in sub-Saharan Africa she has 5.3 children (which is down from 6.7 children in around 1950), the world’s highest,” the report said.

Worldwide, 62 percent of married women of childbearing age use contraception, but in Africa the figure is 28 percent, according to the report, which also revealed that sub-Saharan Africa has the world’s most youthful population, “and is projected to stay that way for decades.”

In 2050, the African continent is expected to have 349 million youth, or 29 percent of the world’s total, a sharp rise from the 9 percent of the world’s youth in 1950, the report noted.

It also pointed out that HIV prevalence appears to be on the decline in Africa, although the rate of infection is still much higher than elsewhere. Swaziland has the highest rate of HIV infection in the world, with 26 percent of people aged between 15 and 49 being HIV positive.

Although Africa has a seventh of the world’s people, it has a quarter of the world’s refugees, the report said, adding that global population numbers are on track to reach 7 billion in 2011, just 12 years after reaching 6 billion in 1999.

Virtually all of the population growth is in developing countries, while the growth of the world’s youth population is shifting into the poorest of those countries, according to the report.



Read more: http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/health/african-population-reaches-1-billion_100237990.html#ixzz0XYvamEtY

Kampala City On Fire

This is the Uganda that that was supposed to have been left behind in the 70s and 80s. one wonders what has happened to the Pearl of Africa. when ever the government gets involved in the micro managing the affairs of the citizens these are the expected outcomes. We hope that the situation does not go from this to worse it is bad as it is. This is an awareness program and we hope that the entire world will be able to see this and pray for the once called Perl of Africa. We will not keep quite while our brothers and sisters die senselessly like this. We shall overcome.

Nelson Mandela at the inauguration of President Jacob Zuma in Pretoria in May

Pool photo by Themba Hadebe

Perhaps this is the greatest man Africa has ever produced. He has such a big heart. I wish we had half the leaders of Africa like, it would be totally a different place than it is now.

By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — The icon is a very old man now. His hair is white, his body frail. Visitors say Nelson Mandela leans heavily on a cane when he walks into his study. He slips off his shoes, lowers himself into a stiff-backed chair and lifts each leg onto a cushioned stool. His wife, Graça, adjusts his feet “so they’re symmetrical, and gives him a peck,” says George Bizos, his old friend and lawyer.



To Mr. Mandela’s left is a small table piled with newspapers in English and Afrikaans, the language of the whites who imprisoned him for 27 years. Family and old comrades sit to his right, where his hearing is better. His memory has weakened, but he still loves to reminisce, bringing out oft-told stories “like polished stones,” as one visitor put it.



“There’s a quietness about him,” said Barbara Masekela, his chief of staff after his release from prison in 1990. “I find myself trying to amuse him, and I feel joyous when he breaks out in laughter.”



Mr. Mandela, perhaps the world’s most beloved statesman and a natural showman, has repeatedly announced his retirement from public life only to appear at a pop concert in his honor or a political rally. But recently, as he canceled engagements, rumors that he was gravely ill swirled so persistently in South Africa that his foundation released a statement saying he was “as well as anyone can expect of someone who is 91 years old.”



Yet even as Mr. Mandela fades from view, he retains a vital place in the public consciousness here. To many, he is still the ideal of a leader — warm, magnanimous, willing to own up to his failings — against which his political successors are measured and often found wanting. He is the founding father whose values continue to shape the nation.



“It’s the idea of Nelson Mandela that remains the glue that binds South Africa together,” said Mondli Makhanya, editor in chief of The Sunday Times. “The older he grows, the more fragile he becomes, the closer the inevitable becomes, we all fear that moment. There’s the love of the man, but there’s also the question: Who will bind us?”



There is a yearning for the exhilarating days when South Africa peacefully ended white racist rule, and a desire to understand the imperfect, big-hearted man who embodied that moment. Because of this, various historians and journalists are at work on a new round of books about Mr. Mandela.



The Nelson Mandela Foundation agreed last month to sell publishers in some 20 countries the rights to a book, “Conversations With Myself,” based on material from Mr. Mandela’s personal papers — jottings on envelopes, journals, desk calendars, drafts of intimate letters to relatives written in prison and documents from his years as South Africa’s first democratically chosen black president.



“He was and still is an obsessive record keeper,” said Verne Harris, who has been Mr. Mandela’s archivist since 2004 and will knit together the excerpts with Tim Couzens, a biographer. “The oldest records we have in that collection are his Methodist Church membership cards, the earliest one dated 1929. So he was 11 years old then.”



There are telling nuggets in unexpected places. In his prison years, the authorities gave him a South Africa tourist desk calendar each year. He typically recorded facts in it — his blood pressure, or whom he met that day — but occasionally he noted a dream, like one in which his daughter Zindzi, whom he was not allowed to see from when she was 3 years old until she was 15, “asks me to kiss her & remarks that I am not warm enough.”



The book will also draw on 71 hours of taped conversations that Mr. Mandela had with Richard Stengel, who collaborated with him on his autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom,” and Ahmed Kathrada, Mr. Mandela’s prison comrade.



“One of the amazing, uncanny things was his memory,” said Mr. Stengel,who is writing a memoir of his time with Mr. Mandela, called “Mandela’s Way,” to be published in March.

“It was like he was watching a movie of his life and then narrating it,” Mr. Stengel, Time magazine’s managing editor, continued. “He would do voices of his father, of his teachers, of his prison guard.”



Eventually, after a team at the foundation has catalogued the entire archive, the foundation plans to digitize it and put it on the Internet. The vast bulk of it is not yet public.

Historians say they are not expecting major surprises about Mr. Mandela’s generally well-known views, but hope to find rare glimpses of the man.


Mr. Mandela is looked after by his wife, Graça Machel, 64, the widow of a former president of Mozambique and a humanitarian activist. “They behave like young lovers,” Mr. Bizos said. “They hold hands.”



Here in Johannesburg, it is not unusual for residents of his neighborhood, Houghton, to gossip about how he is doing. Mr. Harris, seeking to douse rumors that Mr. Mandela was deteriorating, said he was still healthy but tired of small talk with strangers.



“He can reminisce at great length about things that happened years and years ago,” Mr. Harris said. “But you know what old age is like. Short-term memory starts to malfunction and you have bad days.”



His oldest friends, stalwarts of the anti-apartheid struggle, still visit. Mr. Bizos, who went to law school with Mr. Mandela in the 1940s, said Ms. Machel worried that Mr. Mandela would be alone when she was out of town, and eat too little without company. So from time to time, Mr. Bizos gets a call from their housekeeper to come for lunch.



Mr. Mandela sits at the head of a large table, with Mr. Bizos to his right. They relish their favorite dish — oxtail in a rich sauce — and talk about old times. Mr. Mandela tells how he walked into a law school class and sat next to a white fellow with big ears, who promptly changed seats to avoid sitting next to a black man. Mr. Mandela had wanted to invite the man to their 50th reunion at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1999, but the man had already died.



“He repeats it from time to time,” Mr. Bizos said. “He regrets he did not have the opportunity to meet him. He would have said to him, ‘Do you remember what happened? But please don’t worry. I forgive you.’ ”



Like a grown child for whom each goodbye to an aged parent feels as if it may be the last, South Africa seems to be preparing itself for the final farewell to its epic hero. And Mr. Mandela seems to have readied himself, poking fun at his infirmity. Mr. Harris recounted a joke he had heard Mr. Mandela tell and retell.



“When I die, I’m going to get up to the gates of heaven, and they’re going to say to me, ‘Who are you?’ ” Mr. Mandela says. “And I’ll say, ‘I’m Madiba,’ ” he said, referring to his clan name.

“And they’ll say, ‘But where do you come from?’ And I’ll say, ‘South Africa.’ And they’ll say, ‘Oh, that Madiba. You’ve come to the wrong gates. You see the ones down there that are very warm? That’s where you have to go.’ ”



Mr. Mandela’s wish is to be buried alongside his ancestors in Qunu, on the eastern Cape, where he spent the happiest years of his boyhood. In his autobiography, he describes it as a place of small, beehive-shaped huts with grass roofs.



“It was in the fields,” he wrote, “that I learned how to knock birds out of the sky with a slingshot, to gather wild honey and fruits and edible roots, to drink warm, sweet milk from the udder of a cow, to swim in the clear, cold streams, and to catch fish with twine and sharpened bits of wire.”