By Henry Wasswa and Sinikka Tarvainen — In August 1943, at a military camp in Somalia, a British major asked a 17-year-old Ugandan soldier who would be his heir if he died in battle. He named his brother, Kayiza. To his shock, the soldier was grabbed, manhandled and kept under arrest in the hot field for the entire day. 74 years on, Elismus Katende believes he was arrested because the British thought he had said “Kaiser” in reference to Wilhelm II, Germany’s emperor of 1888-1918 — a figure he had not even heard of.
“The British thought I was a spy for the Germans,” the 91-year-old says in his home village of Mugomba, south-east of the capital, Kampala.
He was nevertheless allowed to continue serving in the British army.
The memory that haunts Katende reflects the confusion Ugandan World War II soldiers felt over fighting a war about which they knew little — an effort for which, they say, they have never been honoured nor adequately compensated.
“The British told us we would get a lot of money to start businesses and build houses after the war,” says Katende, whose expectations were bitterly disappointed.
Hundreds of thousands of Africans were deployed in the King’s African Rifles (KAR) regiment to fight Italy in East Africa, Japan in Burma and Vichy-controlled France in Madagascar during World War II.
Ugandan troops totalled about 77,000 men, according to 4KAR Luncheon Club, a British association of veterans from those battalions.
The young Katende, like many others, joined the war because “I was excited by war. I wanted to wear... uniforms and boots.” Holding the profession of soldier also raised recruits’ status in their home villages.
The British prepared recruits with pictures that allegedly showed Germans and Italians killing defenceless people, Katende recalls.
Another veteran, Stephen Kayebe, repeatedly crossed battle lines in Abyssinia — today Ethiopia — to take messages to and from headquarters.
“The Italians shot people even when they put up their arms to surrender. We lost many friends,” the frail 97-year-old recalls, sitting on his bed in the village of Kikusa, south-east of Kampala. — DPA
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