Jolly and your children, relatives, and all friends of Gen Tumwine. And all moaners. I have known Elly for the last 47 years, pretty much in our adult life. I will use a few milestones to help me talk about my friend. I represent a number not here!
1: We met and knew each other at Makerere as students. He was vibrant and had deep spiritual tendencies! In fact, he used to preach to us about God and against alcohol misuse. He was very passionate about cultural institutions and trying to keep the banyankole culture alive! Akaajwara ebibaraho, something to the generally not initiated found funny and sometimes overenthusiastic. His art depicted a fusion of modernity and culture. You can see it everywhere around him but epitomized by his amazing architecturally elegant house at home in Rwemikoma! Basically, three Banyankole round cultural huts stalked together in a UNESCO masterpiece of art!
2: The second milestone was when he all of a sudden abandoned church and school and joined the Army! This was a different Elly from Monduli who had been frozen in time by Church!! He even tested wine when he briefly stayed at my little flat in Mulago kind of hiding away from hostilities already brewing up in the UNLA. He was indeed a completely changed individual! He was more secretive, alert and on the edge for the most part! I knew the reasons later!
3. The major milestone was when he was injured in battle! There are many parts to this must-tell story. Depending on who, when, and why the story is told, there may be differences. This is my story of the part I played. And I was deeply involved in these clandestine operations. It was indeed a close shave with death and a hairline survival! Imagine a 7.62 mms of an object in this case a bullet fired from the right side of the face below the chick bone and removes the left eye and somebody survives! Only one millimeter inside the path of the bullet would have instantly ended his life! Projectiles or bullets fired from a riffled weapon will travel in a straight line until they are stopped by a force or lose momentum to change course! This is Newton’s first law of motion but the other two laws also apply. So, Elly for a brief period of time while in battle was a physics laboratory teaching gunnery mathematics! A teacher he was!! The path of the bullet went through empty airspaces of the face known as sinuses. There was no resistance and so the bullet went through in a straight line. Enos Tumusime was shot through the right back and the bullet came out of the front taking the nipple with it! I always tease him that he was shot thru the heart! Gen Muntu had his left lung shuttered and the bullet went its way leaving vital organs intact! We removed a liter of blood from his chest. These and many other close shaves with death will always be at the back of my mind!
4. When Elly was brought into Kampala, in 1981, and handed to me Causality Mulago, I had very little hope as I wheeled him to the X-ray department incognito! Getting an eye surgeon and finally getting him to ward 6C in Mulago was a real risky situation!!! A risk I was willing to take with a leap of faith because I knew what was at stake! The NRM movement was young. There were few commanders! It was a tricky period! Quite a lot was done in Mulago by different Drs, nurses, etc, etc mostly not knowing who they were treating or preferring to keep quiet if they knew! Others were completely very ignorant! Getting him to my little House at Kisseka Hospital was hell! My wife and I, Jovia Katsigazi, Jolly Sabune and Gweny Kategaya all were in this very risky venture!! I had to get his Late Sister, Kyobutungi and Late Atwine’s mum to see him undercover!
5. Transferred him to Lubaga, Hospital for a prosthesis was another challenge in a hostile environment. Amazingly, as he lay in his hospital bed, he saw a Muslim man around the Lubaga big church walking around! He commented inquisitively about a Muslim around a church and said, that, that man is dangerous! This was a Pakistan mercenary sergeant Sori in UFM on a recce mission to hit Lubiri! Sure enough, two weeks later, Lubiri barracks was hit by UFM! What happened after is a whole story for another day but the population suffered, hospitals were checked for casualties etc!
6. I recall insisting that Tumwine goes back to the bush because we had exhausted our luck! Our guerrilla system dispatched him back to the bush! Sick as he was continued to perform beyond expectations becoming our NRA third Army Commander after the second army commander Sam Magara whom I was going to pick for a dentist appointment got killed due to a sloppy mistake by one of us in clandestine guerrilla operations! By the way, UNLF did not know they had killed an army commander until later! THE OPERATIVE had breached one cardinal operational procedure: stay humble and inconsequential! The first Overall Army commander Late Ahmed Seguya had died in my hands due to a fulminant liver disease.
7. After a while, Gen Tumwine was brought to Nairobi where I was a member of the external committee! Together with other colleagues did more check-ups, emotional stabilization and some cosmetic Surgery! The bullet had cleaned up the path! At every stage, everybody played their parts to the best of their ability and committed to the struggle! The Hero was Elly!
8. Elly was a survivor! Elly was meticulously stubborn, firm in his beliefs and committed to see them through even if he would be mistaken! He was experimental by nature and nurture. There is a lot that we shared privately but he was stubbornly private! About a year ago, at a burial of his Untie, the mother of Justine Rwakakooko, I asked him what was eating him off! He refused to tell me and actually dismissed me as a civilian!!! He often pulled this off whenever we disagreed! In Elly, we may very well have lost an encyclopedia of not only NRA/UPDF wars and fundamental cultural values conveyed through abstract Art.
9. Above all, Elly was a genetic prototype of NRM. A gold standard by all measures! Know yee lumpens and comperados rejoicing, wining and tweeting, that the Gen may have moved on but the strategic goal he almost paid the ultimate price is well and alive!!! Go thee Well General and as the saying goes, Soldiers never die but they fade away!!!
Dr. Warren Namara is the Head of State House Health Monitoring Unit.