……………….WALL of REMEMBERANCE………………..

Pease add the names of those murdered or missing during Idi Amin’s reign of terror. Please add the details of the ones you know of who lost their lives at the hands of the Idi Amin killing machine. Let this be a ‘wall of rememberance’ for all those who lost their lives to collate the names of as many people as possible.

    PLEASE SIGN MY FATHER’S GUEST BOOK

My father, Robert (Bob) Scanlon went murderedormissing (MoM?) in Uganda in 1977.  This was during the Idi Amin years. I just wonder does any one out there have any information which might help to discover what happened to him and why?

Why I’m glad they didn’t assassinate Idi Amin

I came accross this commentary on the Independent website:

Why I’m glad they didn’t assassinate Idi Amin  by  Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.

Written in the wake of the death of Idi Amin it is a ramble regarding the role of the British ( and ‘others’) ‘ who helped to create the misery Asians in East Africa went through’. 

She states:

‘Too many white men acquainted with him still say that he was a thoroughly enjoyable man (the same sort of raffish folk who describe the unrepentant fascist Diana Mosley, who also died this week, as “charming”). He made many such men kneel down before him or carry him aloft in a wooden boat in 1975. These whims merely revealed that he was “mad”, they said.’

I have sent the following to her, and to her editor, asking for her to action in making this statement to be remedied: 

‘This paragraph is grossly inaccurate, and defamatory of my father, Robert Scanlon, who died at the hands of Idi Amin.
He was one of the ‘ kneelers’ and ‘carriers’, deeply humiliating acts which the men carried out the to prevent harm to others  if they did not cooperate.

 
My father became a Ugandan citizen and regarded Uganda as his ‘homeland’, the country where I grew up, and my sister was born. My parents risked their lives by helping others (ultimately my father lost his life). They helped deported Asians like you by recruiting family members in Canada to act as sponsors to my mothers work colleagues who were their close friends, and are even now settled in Ontario. They helped a Ugandan friend, a minister in Obote’s government, who was nearly beaten to death by Amin’s regime.

It is disgusting that you associate my father with a fascist like Diana Mitford (Mosley), and that you write about my father in the same paragraph as ‘raffish folk’ who found Idi Amin a ‘thoroughly enjoyable man’. 
 
Vilification of, by inference, my father and his colleagues in this way is libellous and I would like you to take necessary steps to remedy your action.
 

  

 

Burned alive in the State Research Bureaux?

I haven’t really documented very much about how the search is going, or what I am doing and interested readers of my blog will wonder. Of course I have indicated that I hope, through the internet, human web and the ‘six degrees of separation theory’  someone will come forward with information. I have also indicated that progress is slow in my ‘slow and steady wins the race’  blog.  However I have not been like the hare, I have been the tortoise, plodding away. It is in my nature to be like this, I am a Capricorn, a mountain goat who will keep its feet firmly on the ground whilst steadily and safely climbing to the top, slow and steady, nevertheless reaching in the end. I have a strong background in  research and I am a very systematic and organised person, so using my skills and experience I have found my self applying a logical and systematic approach to the problem.

I decided to get as much documented  information together, then analyse the findings, validate the evidence and hopefully form an exact account . I have always been told by my elders that around the time of my father’s disappearance the British  foreign office came up with 3 separate accounts of my fathers fate and that each one confirmed as being ‘from a very reliable source’. Each of these accounts apparently said about the same thing that happened, but in different places at different times, so obviously were not all reliable.  

My mother said that to know what had happened was worse than not knowing, and it was her wish for me not to be told. Destroyed by her grief my mother contracted bowel cancer and tragically died at the age of 52, in 1989. She died a horrible death, grasping for breath and life, crying ‘more‘, ‘more‘, clearly she did not want to die. My mother adored her two baby grandchildren with whom she sadly had such a short time. After she died we had a memorial service at the crematorium for both her and my father and later scattered her ashes on the beach at Blackpool which was her wish, as she was ‘sand grown’ (born and brought up in Blackpool). She had spent so many happy hours ‘on the sands’ and even I have fond memories of sitting in deck chairs eating fish and chips with bread and butter, grains of sand in my teeth. My Aunty (my father’s oldest sister, to whom he was very close) told me that she knew in her heart, that where ever his remains are (presuming they are in Uganda) they are where he would have liked to be,  he so loved the country. Some time after my mother’s death my brother had a dream in which he saw our parents dancing together, waltzing around and around, reunited and happy in another place.  

It is for my brother in the main part that I carry out this research. He told me some years ago, when I asked him for his consent to go on this journey of discovery, that he would like to know where our fathers remains lie, if indeed they do.  I never liked to ask my brother to tell me what is said to have happened to my father, as I knew it was my mother’s wish for me not to be told. I also know that it is still very painful for him to talk about so aggrieved is he. It is not that I am not pained, it is that my pain is different and this journey will, perhaps, help to exorcise my anguish.

My brother was in an interview on ‘Breakfast Time’ TV years ago. I was watching the broadcast from my friends flat in London. I don’t have very strong memories of the interview. I think I must have been too overwhelmed by the idea of my brother being on the television. I have known for years that  ’off screen’ or ‘back stage’, after the interview, my brother was told what had really happened. Like I said, my mother believed it would to be too distressing for me to know and so I was not told. I wonder if this is why I am on this quest, because I have never been told what is supposed to have happened, the information available for all these years, reports from the Foreign Office, oral histories etc have never been shared with me, so I still don’t even know what might have happened.

Out of respect for my brother, not wanting to distress him further by asking him to act against our mother’s wishes, I have never asked him directly for information. A few years ago, after I told him I was going to try to find out what happened to our father, he told me what he had been told. My brother said he was told petrol was poured on my father in a room at the state research bureaux and he was set on fire. My brother did not feel that this was the truth.

“Slow and steady wins the race.”

 I am conscious that this process is slow and I hope that interested parties will bear with me. I have comforted myself with the words ‘slow and steady wins the race’. This comes from Aesop’s fable ‘The Hare and the Tortoise’.

My mother used to read bedtime stories to me and among the many was this old animal fable:

One day a hare saw a tortoise walking slowly along and began to laugh and mock him. The hare challenged the tortoise to a race and the tortoise accepted. They agreed on a route and started off the race. The hare shot ahead and ran briskly for some time. Then seeing that he was far ahead of the tortoise, he thought he’d sit under a tree for some time and relax before continuing the race.

He sat under the tree and soon fell asleep. The tortoise, plodding on, overtook him and finished the race. The hare woke up and realized that he had lost the race.

The moral, stated at the end of the fable, is, “Slow and steady wins the race.”

I think I liked this fable because I liked tortoises. I had a few, as pets, when I was a child in Uganda. I can remember my father stopping the car when we were driving on safari and jumping out and picking one up which was crossing the road. He put it on the floor in the back of the car. It made a horrible smell when it opened its bowels, probably with fear, poor thing. I think that must have been my first tortoise.

I can remember that we used to ride on the backs of some giant tortoises when I was a child in Uganda, I keep trying to remember where they were. I am not sure but think they may have been near or at the Namirembe Cathedral. There are a few large tortoises even now at the Lake Victoria Hotel in Entebbe.

When we lived up on Makindye hill there was this old swimming pool thing in the garden. It was the outer, round, metal frame of  one of those pools which stands above ground, presumably it would have had a liner in it at some time, which would keep the water in.  I think you can find these things even today? Any way, the one in the garden had been there from before we lived there and as there was no liner the grass and wild flowers grew inside making a good home for my collection of tortoises. I seem to remember having about 6 or so. There was the big original one (it had grown a bit over the years…. unless the collection had been added to when I was away at boarding school, they all looked pretty much the same to my child’s eyes) and then a couple of smaller ones (still quite big by English standards), and then, one time when I came home from boarding school in  England (The Royal Masonic School for Girls which was in Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire ), I found that there were all these little ones, so sweet, I didn’t know where they had come from, but thought that ‘they’ must have had babies!

I used to like taking tomatoes and luttice for the tortoises to eat. I liked watching the way they took big decisive bites from the crunchy lettuce leaves,  cool green cucumber and squishy tomatoes. It surprised me how fast the creatures could move. I liked the tortoises because no one else seemed to take much interest in them, so they were kind of  ’my secret’, though of course they were not a secret as such, and I think the house staff or gardeners must have fed them when I was away. I had a guinea pig long before the tortoises, but one day I came home from school for lunch I found that the dog had killed it (I went to the Nakasero Primary School in Kampala at that time). So the tortoises were a safer bet as the dogs could not attack them, they just went inside their shells of course. I had the guinea pig when we  lived at Kawempe.

The saddest thing is that I just don’t know what happened to  them when we left that house and I still wonder to this day.

Six Degrees of Separation – connectivity and connectedness

The Six Degrees of Separationtheory (also called the “Human Web“) refers to the idea that if a person is one step away from each person they know and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people they know, then everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on Earth i.e. anyone on the planet is connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries. 

 

 The theory, first proposed in 1929 by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in a short story called Chains,  has captivated, and been  investigated in abstract, conceptual, and fictional terms, by many mathematicians, sociologists, and physicists within the field of network theory.

Due to technological advances in communications and travel, friendship networks have grown larger and span greater distances. Karinthy in 1929 believed that the modern world was ‘shrinking’due to the ever-increasing connectedness of human beings (even back then!). He posited that despite great physical distances between the globe’s individuals, the growing density of human networks made the real social distance far smaller.

I had thought that I had left it so long to start the search for information about my father being MoM? (MurderedorMissing?). However the internet offers unprecedented opportunity. If the theory of six degrees of separation appliers, and I already know a few people in Uganda, and other people help too, through this blog and their connections, then I can not be so very far away from someone who will know something. It is not a need for retribution, for how would that help any body, but  a need to bring closure to this question of MoM?

Please! Please! Please!circulate this blog as widely as you can,  harness the opportunity presented by technology, word of mouth, snail mail, email, gossip and newspapers to find out once and for all what did happen to Bob Scanlon, my father, in Uganda, in 1977.

Murdered or Missing Memorial (MoM)

I have the idea to create a memorial to all of those who lost their lives at the hands of the Idi Amin, like the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, or the wall of remembrance in America or the wars graves in Flanders. First by collating the names of those missingormurdered right here on this blog and then working towards a memorial site in Uganda. Please add names to my father’s guest book and send your comments to me, and let me know if you are interested  this project.

The Last King of Scotland

Giles Foden lived in Uganda during the Idi Amin years, he went to live there after I had left. He wrote ‘The Last King of Scotland’ <a href=”book“> on which the award winning<a href=”film“> by the same name is based. It is a widely held belief that the doctor, Idi Amin’s personal physician, Nicholas Garrigan, is based on a real life character, usually Bob Astles. I have even read that the character is a composite of three real life characters, and it has been considered that 2 of ‘the carriers’ (the men carrying Idi Amin in the famous sedan chair image) may have been the others (my father included). The truth is, I think, that three main characters in the film are based on the three main characters in the book. You see film is not that close to the book!

There was no connection whatsoever between the character Nicholas Garrigan and my father in either the film or the book as indicated in one of the film reviews on Amazon:

‘I only learned after the fact that James McAvoy’s character is entirely fictional. This is a shame because the film might have made a superb primer to the history, culture and personality of the region had The Last King Of Scotland shown life in Amin’s government from the perspective from someone who had actually been there’

However, contrary to the above reviewer’s opinion, I do think that if you want to get an insight about how it actually felt to live in Uganda during that time, then the film and book really are good for that. The fear I felt watching the film was really like the fear I felt living in Uganda at that time.

Other reviews I have read of the film also support this view (see below).

As far as possible I would like to make this site factual, there is far too much sensationalism and exaggeration around Idi Amin and his killing machine. The truth and the facts are bad enough, no enhancement is necessary. The reason why I mention Giles Foden’s book and the film are purely for you to have an understanding of the ‘atmosphere’ of fear which existed at that time and what the country was like. As some of the reviews I have read have recognised:

‘this film has great scenery and characters and accurately depicts the clothes, buildings and vehicles of the time and place it is set’ and the film ‘brings 1970s Uganda to pulsating life, perfectly recreating that tumultuous era’.

I plan to write about the ‘experience’ of living in and being raised in Uganda before, during and in the aftermath of Idi Amin’s era over the next few years, using the oral histories of friends, family and acquaintances.

Henry Kyemba was a Minister in Amin’s government. He wrote an account <a href=”the book“>’A State of Blood’ based on his memories of the years 1972 – 1977. He fled Uganda before my father went missing, and there is no account from him on my fathers death. He notes that ‘The history of Uganda will be an oral one’ and that his book is ‘only a begining’. During the course of my research I will also contact Henry Kyemba, however I recommend his book to those of you who would wish to read a more factual account of the Amin era. If you read this book you will certainly come to understand that no embellishment or  sensationalism could make the bare facts more horrifying. As with the shocking truth about the holocaust, the truth about Idi Amin’s Killing Machine is, in its nakedness, far more frightening than fantasy. It the stuff of nightmares, and worse than what most normal people would be capable of imagining.

Henry Kyemba’s book  is out of print, there are only second hand editions available for sale (at over £50). You would be better requesting this book through your local library (ISBN: 0-441-78524-4). Isn’t it amazing how one can buy, new, the fiction (The last King of Scotland) for £4.99, yet the truth is almost unaffordable!

I have to also say, most importantly, that this was Uganda then. I have been back several times over the past few years, and Uganda is once again, the wonderful home land I missed so much for nearly 30 years. I actually feel safer there than in Bradford where I have worked during the last decade, before my illness in 2007.

I am sorry if the HTML links spoil this page’s appearance, but it is with very kind permission of WordPress that I am able to include these links to help my readers to easily find information I refer to. I am a new user of HTML and website/blog building and I am self-taught, so maybe in the future my skills will improve.

The Search Begins: Your Past, My Nothingness

This request was posted on the Ugandaninsomniac’s blog, thank you so much for your support Tumwijuke:

A request from the author of the blog ‘Murdered or Missing?‘

My father, Robert (Bob) Scanlon went missing and was murdered in Uganda in 1977. This was during the Idi Amin years. I just wonder does any one out there have any information which might help to discover what happened to him and why?

 That blog post struck a chord in me.  I don’t know what it is.

Perhaps it is mawolu from reading Andrew Rice’s book, “The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget: Murder and Memory in Uganda.”

Perhaps it is ubuntu.

Perhaps it is the fact that so many have died in my country since 1962.  So many.  And nothing, but fleeting memories remain.

If you have any info on Robert Scanlon, please visit ‘Murdered or Missing?’ here.

1 Response to “Your Past, My Nothingness”

1. > 1 DarlkomAugust 3, 2009 at 6:21 pmI think not knowing whether someone is dead or alive is the worst kind of torture. There is no closure, you can’t properly mourn without feeling guilty in case the person you are mourning is not actually gone. This is sad.

White Man’s Burden

 

my father is the second from the left, the one with the moustache

This  image of my father and other white men carrying Idi Amin in a sedan chair shocked the world.  I find frequent use of this image in all kinds of media relating to Idi Amin. The fact that later my father became one of Idi Amin’s victims does not seem to have been recognised. I found one blog discussing the prescence of Europeans in Africa and in particular, Bob Astles and the ‘Last King of Scotland’ :

 ’ The character ( Nicholas Garrigan)  in the movie was a fictional account that  was inspired by 3 real life characters. Bob Asltes part was the one that looked up to Amin. I am not sure who the other two were.’
‘I am thinking its 2 of these guys carrying him .Amin’s Carriers
This is comical but it shows you to whatextent these British people will go to get what they want.’

The Village blog site is written by Grata who says she is:  ’ An East African foreign student expanding my knowledge base in America while trying to make sense of this crazy world’.

Was he Murdered by Idi Amin and Why did he go Missing?

My father, Robert (Bob) Scanlon went murderedormissing (MoM) in Uganda in 1977. This was during the Idi Amin years. I just wonder does any one out there have any information which might help to discover what happened to him and why?