Joash Mayanja Nkangi: 48 years in service

He is 80 years old but Mayanja Nkangi is still serving the country as chairman of Uganda Land Commission (ULC). When I call on him for an interview, which I get after four attempts, he offers me only 30 minutes but he is such a good story-teller that he soon forgets.

The conversation lasts well over two hours. We hold the interview at his office where he tells me he is kept busy, seeing people almost all day as well as handling cases related to land.

“You’re welcome sir,” he says as he ushers me to a seat just opposite his, separated by a pile of paper work that threatens to make it hard for me to interface with him.

“Work, work, work,” is his response when I make a joke about him working a little too hard yet he should be taking it slower now that he is a senior citizen.

A humble man
Whereas Mayanja Nkangi is an accomplished lawyer who would otherwise carry himself with pride and self-importance, he carries himself with simplicity and accessing him is not as hard as it is with some ministers or politicians in town.

At any given time, there will be a line of people from all walks of life, seated on a bench, waiting to see him. And he is willing to talk to each of them. The guest he attends to before I go in, is a stranger who needs his help.

“She was here to see me because she had come to see someone in town and didn’t have enough transport back to Masindi. Can you imagine?” he says smiling, before we exchange pleasantries.

Mayanja Nkangi is adorning a straight suit, nicely pressed and a neat fit. He has always been a smartly dressed man and maintains his moustache and sideburn, a style he has kept through the years.

He has served his country in a number of capacities, previously as the Katikiro of Buganda Kingdom, and in the Uganda government as Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, Attorney General and Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs.

He is a deeply spiritual man and when I ask him how he has managed to age gracefully, he gives all honour to the “Lord”. But first he cheekily asks, “Gracefully? I think part of it is hereditary, owing to one side of my parents. Some people age gracefully as you put it and others don’t. I happened to be in the middle. But it was also by the grace of God. If I had been sick most of the time, I wouldn’t be ageing gracefully,” he explains.

I prod him further on his spiritual inclination. “Well, let me tell you something. My inclination is that I really want to be what God wants me to be. God says in the book of Leviticus, Chapter 19, verse 2, ‘you shall be Holy because I the lord God your God I am Holy’.

“Also Chapter 20, verse 8, the Lord says, ‘I the Lord sanctify you’. Meaning I make you holy. If the Lord wants you to be holy, why don’t you become holy?” he asks in a light-hearted manner, pointing at me with his forefinger and smiling at my surprise at his knowledge of the Bible.

I have always thought he is Catholic, so I ask him whether he is actually one.

“Did you say Catholic?” he asks, and continues, “You asked a terrible question. There is something I am studying. Catholic means universal so in that sense I am Catholic but am I a Christian? Yes, I am. Christ in Chapter 17 in the gospel of John told the disciples, ‘I want you to be one as your father. You in me and I in you and you in them.’ Perfectly well, he said the world may know that you sent me,” he elaborates.

He adds, “I am (a) born again (Christian) not under a church but under Christ.”

The debate on religion and spiritualism is one that can go on and on, so we switch to politics. The octogenarian tells me that the need for justice primarily led him into politics, and more precisely the deportation of Kabaka of Buganda, Frederick Muteesa II on November 30, 1953, to England by the British colonial governor, Sir Andrew Cohen.

“We got mad. You come from some thousand miles away, you come here and have the temerity to depose the king of Buganda. We started from that point and we said that the British must go,” he recalls. That marked the beginning of his political activism.
“To any Muganda, be it a man or a woman, that issue of deporting Muteesa made us annoyed. Many detested it. From that time that spirit of independence started. That is why we started pushing for independence,” the veteran politician recollects.

Meeting the Kabaka
“At the time I was in England where I had gone to study, around 1954 to 1959, so I wasn’t here.” He was one of the first Ugandans to study at the prestigious Oxford University in England. And while there, he met the Kabaka who was in exile.

“He came to Oxford where I was studying. There was a fellow called Ernest Sempebwa. He used to work as a secretary in the palace so when he came to visit, Sempebwa asked me to come and pay my respects,” he recounts.

“And that was my second time to come in close contact with him. The first time was about 1938 when the Kabaka came to my primary school, in Kabungo in Buddu County. You know, poor fellow, I just wanted him to touch me. You know what I did? I put my arm out there so that he would touch me but he just passed by. I was about seven or eight years; I never knew why he never touched me till I became the Katikiro,” he tells about his first encounter with the Kabaka.

“I later learnt one is not supposed to initiate this gesture. It is him instead who puts out his hand, so you can touch it. You don’t initiate it.” But when they met the second time it was an organised meeting. “I just sat in a car which was being driven by Sempebwa who was incidentally my music teacher at Kings’ College Budo. We didn’t talk about politics at all,” he narrates.

“What did you talk about?” I ask. “Those usual things. What do you talk about when you meet the Kabaka as his subject? You know, you say, ‘How you are sir,’ that kind of thing, nothing political or such as ‘let’s do this and that,’ no,” he adds.

But he did not see himself becoming Katikiro even as he had met the Kabaka. It never crossed his mind at all until 1964 when the Katikiro of Buganda, Michael Kintu was deposed. To become Katikiro during that time, the Constitution said the Lukiiko of Buganda would select three names and submit them to the Kabaka of Buganda. And that is what they did.

“My name was submitted and I think I had the highest votes, 76, if I remember. He selected me, but he also had the power to say, ‘Although this man has the highest votes, I will not give him the Katikiro-ship’,” the former Katikiro argues.

And his age became a matter of debate. “They told the Kabaka, ‘you won’t accept him’ and he asked why. They said, ‘He is young, only 33 years old and he is not married.’ He asked them if he was married by the time he was enthroned, so he asked them to proceed,” Mayanja Nkangi (laughs heartily). So I became Katikiro without campaigning. That is what I told you earlier that I asked God to be what He wants me to be, so I watched on,” he confidently states. He says that Kintu was voted out of power by the Lukiiko on the pretext that he had failed to retain the lost counties Bugangayizi and Buyaga.

And so he started on his tenure working with Kabaka Muteesa who he describes as simply good. “Muteesa was a gem, a pearl. He was a good man. He would talk, listen, he would argue, he was good. But when 1966 came, he started trusting fewer and fewer people,” he recollects.

“One evening, I went to the palace and the attorney general of Buganda, Fred Mpanga was there. He was being advised I think to appeal to the United Nations Secretary General but I told them we had no access there, we weren’t members. Uganda was but not Buganda. So he made a remark that, ‘Oh, Mpanga is the only one left with courage’. I didn’t say anything, I kept quiet. That was 1966,” he further narrates.

“There was a person whose name I won’t mention but was in the palace, we were studying together at Makerere. She said to me that the Kabaka trusts me. And when I asked why she said that it was only me that would tell him the truth. I kept quiet thinking about that remark. I think he went through people who would tell him lies but when I said something it came to be. I think it was borne out of future events. I liked him, although the Lord took him away. May be one day we shall meet,” the Katikiro remembers of his time in office.

Getting deposed
Soon Mayanja Nkangi got deposed too. “Because I was the Katikiro of Buganda, Obote was looking for me saying that wherever I would be found, that place would be burned. So my friends advised me to leave.

I ended up in a hotel in Nairobi and some Baganda there at the time like Peter Mpagi and others arranged for me to leave Kenya and fly to England. My late brother Grace Lumala Kalemba brought me my passport in Nairobi.” This was 1966. And naturally a lot was going through Mayanja Nkangi’s mind.

“First I was angry because Dr Obote had not kept peace with the Baganda. It was Buganda that made him the first Prime Minister of Uganda after independence. Without the votes of Buganda he wouldn’t. It would have been Benedicto Kiwanuka. He wasn’t fair. If I had more time I would tell you more about this.”

Some historical literature captures Mayanja Nkangi as having campaigned to pass a resolution about the constitution which called for the separation of Buganda from Uganda. “The May 1922 resolution never said that Buganda should leave Uganda. It was government, Obote. Even constitutionally, Kampala was outside Buganda. It was talking about a particular person in government, Dr Obote. If you don’t want to govern the country constitutionally, you leave. It was talking about one person, Obote,” Mayanja Nkangi says.

He says hypocrisy of leaders like Obote are the reason Uganda was thrown into turmoil and that without peace there can never be real development. “We need to have peace and love each other. If you want to be in State House, you go, let people vote you provided you don’t cheat at the poll. But fighting, removing others by force for all these 50 years has not been helpful. To wade through blood to go to State House, I don’t like it,” he argues.

But he adds, “Of course, I am not saying we should never fight. I am saying, fight for a good cause. Museveni had a cause. He told Muwanga and someone I have forgotten. He told them ‘if you rig elections, I will fight’. And they rigged. For me, that would be a good cause to fight if it is the last resort. He had no choice at that time.”

Life at Oxford
Although he faced hard times, he also had good experiences. As a brilliant student, Mayanja Nkangi became a recipient of a scholarship to Oxford University, becoming one of the very few Uganda of his time to attend school at this prestigious campus.

He went there during winter. “I had been given a scholarship by the Uganda government to study for three years but I wanted to reduce the period to two years because I didn’t like the weather. But one of my tutors encouraged me to stay and I stayed for three years,” he says.

At the college there were only two Africans, himself and another student from Sierra Leone called Desmond Luke. “The others were English people, about 260 of them. Two black heads in a sea of white people, but they were nice people. They would take me to their homes during vacations, they were nice to me,” he adds about his experience at Oxford. Like any young man he went to clubs and cinemas in Oxford city because during vacations they went to London where most of other Ugandans were.

“Did you find any attractive white girls to date?” I ask him. “Yes, they were there, beautiful English girls. Let me tell you something and I will stop there. When I was leaving Makerere some friends of mine, elderly people, threw me a farewell party. There was a certain fellow, a muslim and he told me that I was going to Europe but I have to remain a Muganda as the river Nile passes through the red sea,” he recalls.

He goes on, “Now, one evening at Oxford during dinner, one young man asked me if I would marry an English girl. I looked at him sharply and he apologised. The way I looked at him, he knew I didn’t like what he had asked. His colleague, a boy who was also a friend of mine laughed and said, “You don’t ask Mayanja Nkangi such a question.”

He explains, “I know there were beautiful girls. Let me tell you something, they are all God’s people, alright. But my mother was a Muganda woman of the lion clan, so I had also to marry a Muganda girl and I did so. This is not to say the other people weren’t beautiful, I thought this was what should be done. If we go on marrying other people all the time, there will be no more Africans.”

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His thoughts on past leaders
“This country has been a terrible place. I will tell you why I say so. Uganda became independent in 1962, Tanzania 1961, Kenya 1963, but see what has happened. Tanzania has never fought, no coup d’état.

They have many more tribes than Uganda. The Kenyans only fought colonialists, Mau Mau. They never fought but look at Uganda, the first president was deposed violently. Who deposed him? President Obote. He, Obote was deposed violently although he was away in 1971. Amin took over.

Amin was deposed violently in 1979. He was deposed by the Museveni group and Lule YK. Lule who was my teacher at Kings College Budo. So he was deposed and replaced by President Binaisa. Godfrey was also pushed out.

Then in 1980. A second Obote comes back after elections. When he comes back he is pushed out again in 1985 by Lutwa. In 1986 the NRA take over again by the gun. We must ask ourselves a question, what kind of life are we leading in Uganda really? Removing every president by force, what are we?”

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