Shooting History: A Personal Journey

‘Oh yes, sir, and I want you to be a best man at the ceremony.’

John’s wife-to-be, Elizabeth, came all the way from Kamuli town, at the other end of the murum road; she had a large family, and looked gorgeous on the day. Generations of the bride and groom’s families ran in and out of the open side walls of the church. Jesus wrestled with local tribal custom throughout the wedding ceremony. Long after I returned to England, I became a godfather to John and Elizabeth’s first child by mail. But their marriage, the villagers, the school itself, were all for me a part of coming to terms with a world that a few months earlier I had not even dreamt existed.

Father Grimes ruled by missionary example and rod of iron, or rather of bamboo, which he wielded with great ferocity and regularity. I had upwards of 150 workbooks to mark each week. Hired to teach English, I ended up with both biology and technology added to my workload. In both subjects I would have to swot the night before to keep one step ahead of my pupils. I was constantly outsmarted by some of the brighter kids. Whatever happened to Noah Omolo, who wrote so lyrically and who, had he been tutored, could have made it into any top-flight Western university?

‘I want to come with you when you go, sir,’ he said to me once. ‘I will be your servant, and look after you for the rest of your life, and your wife and children too.’ Noah was to prove one of the very few Ugandans I would meet again.

Or Margaret Nsubaga: ‘Dance with me when you leave, sir.’ Adding, ‘Come live with me in Uganda.’

Or Praxedes Namaganda, who came for a few weeks’ teaching practice from Makerere University. We kissed on the banks of the Nile, but she was a good Catholic, and anyway the relationship was not to survive the unpredictabilities of the postal service.

On Saturday nights I had to organise the enormous disco in one of the former engine sheds, where I would dance rather too enjoyably with the older girls. On Sunday mornings I would set sail in the battered school bus for the twenty-seven-mile run to collect the Protestant padre – despite the Catholic mission status of the school, more than half the children were Protestants. Sometimes I wouldn’t be able to find the man, who was frequently inebriated, and I’d return empty-handed to the engine shed, by now transformed from disco to matins, and have to take the service myself. ‘Our father, which art in heaven …’ ‘Thank you, God,’ I thought, ‘for those dining-room prayers at Ardingly. Thank you, Jane Austen, for lying undisturbed in the nave of Winchester Cathedral while I intoned the Te Deum.’ So ‘to the manor born’ was I that the kids asked me eventually not to bother with the padre, and to continue taking the services myself.

And so I became an inseparable part of this Nile-side community, talking liberation theology with the priests or Communism with Gus and the Welshes at night and working by day from 7.30 a.m. to 7.30 p.m., with an afternoon siesta. There were no newspapers. Early and late I would listen to the crackly BBC World Service fading in and out of the ether on our old valve-mains Marconi wireless. World events took on a new poignancy. I was beginning to set them in the context of my own new world. This was how, in April 1968, I heard the devastating news of the assassination of Martin Luther King, an event that was to impinge so forcibly on both my old and new worlds.

Fruit and flowers abounded naturally, as did sweet potatoes and every kind of banana. Wild dogs ran about, goats and chickens wandered aimlessly, and there was eternal talk of a leopard I never saw in the nearby forest. This was my isolated Utopia. My daily rations came from two identical Asian shops in Namasagali. Both were dusty and seemed to be collapsing under the weight of what they tried to sell – huge bags of rice and flour, small bags of smelly spices, batteries, spare bicycle tyres, elderly dry biscuits, cotton, and rusty tinned peas. Ugandan boys toiled for their Asian employers in the back of the shops. In earlier imperial days the British had brought many mainly Indian workers to East Africa to build the railways and staff the civil service; later they diversified into more entrepreneurial activities. The locals regarded Asian shopkeepers as exploitative. Even in remote Namasagali there was evidence of the low-level racial friction that Idi Amin would soon trade on for post-coup popularity.

Parting, when it came, was sore indeed. Each day towards the end of my time in Namasagali, as I walked from my little house to the classroom beneath the mango trees, looking out to the wide river beyond, I would think, ‘I shall never come here again. This is almost the last time I shall tread this path.’ On the final Sunday afternoon, putt-putting in the battered old school boat with its flat corrugated-iron roof along the Nile with a line draped over the stern – heaving in the massive Nile perch, enough for lunch tomorrow – I felt the tears of impending departure welling. No more tomorrows, I thought. On my final night I pledged to my students that I would return, little thinking I ever really could or would. In the event, I was indeed to be in Uganda again within a few years, although I wasn’t to make it back to Kamuli College for three more decades.

I wrote to my parents of my last day at Namasagali, having gathered with the school to sing ‘Oh Uganda’ one more time around the flagpole:

Transport at the best of times is virtually non-existent. One or two taxis from Kamuli had heard that it was the end of term. 320 students waiting for transport at 7 a.m. By 9 a.m. a ramshackle forty-eight-seater bus and three 195oish Peugeot estate car taxis deigned to appear. The bus managed to accommodate about ninety-five students with their boxes. With some of the other students heaving and shoving and with more than a little persuasion, it began to move. Needless to say, the starting mechanism had long since ceased to function, and it seems that it is an accepted part of one’s fare to get out and push. The taxis, boxes piled dangerously high on the roofs, had their doors finally forced shut by gangs of students. Inside there were at least fifteen visible bodies, with doubtless more underneath. The remaining students began to surge down the murum road, each trying to overtake the other in order to be the first to meet the returning bus or taxi. In this fashion several must have reached Kamuli on foot. My own departure was embarrassingly luxurious inside Grimes’s Volkswagen with all our bags, a Ugandan drum, a spear, and a mere seven people filling the five available seats.

I left Uganda determined that whatever path my career took would bring me back there. I had not yet concluded that it would be journalism that would provide the means.

Liverpool University in the autumn of 1968 was a strange disjunction of active, potentially angry students, and a deeply conservative institution. My unremarkable ‘A’ level results, a C, a D and an E, in English, law and economics, had not tempted any university to offer me a place, despite my having penned many flamboyant application letters postmarked ‘Uganda’. In the end, a chance meeting on a train between my father and the Dean of Liverpool’s law school clinched an underhand entry to do legal studies, and delivered me within a week to Merseyside. Maybe there is a God in heaven, I thought.

Liverpool was a stark and sudden contrast to the remote banks of the Nile. By the time it reached this northern industrial city, the Mersey was as wide as the Nile at Namasagali. However, even without the African blight of Bilharzia, it was far less inviting. The university was very much part of the city. It sat high on Brownlow Hill, nudging Paddy’s Wigwam, the Catholic cathedral, at one end of Hope Street and within sight of the vast Victorian Anglican pile at the other. Unusually for a British university, some two thirds of the students lived at home, and the place had something of a nine-to-five feel about it.

In October 1968 we were ‘seizing the time’. It was an era of revolution on the streets of Paris and London, and within more limited Liverpool confines I soon turned to revolt. There was a core of extremely active students. In my first few weeks I began to discover that my small pre-Uganda ambition to become a Conservative Member of Parliament had given way to a much larger one, to change the world altogether. It was a bit of a shock.

I won election to the Executive of the Students’ Union as First Year Representative. Politically, Liverpool was a sea of red that was well beyond the wilting rouge of Old Labour. There were almost as many acronyms as students – IMG (International Marxists), IS (International Socialists), SLL (Socialist Labour League) and more. There were anarchists, Trotskyites, Maoists, British Communists and International Communists. I had little idea what most of them really stood for, save that they were hard-line and inflexible, and sold papers like Big Flame and Socialist Worker. The university was awash with issues that fought daily pitched battles with the sheer fun of simply being there. Where else in a year could you see the Who, the Animals, Georgie Fame, George Harrison, the Supremes and the Stones live in concert? The enormous entertainment budget of the Students’ Union, combined with the very name ‘Liverpool’, home of the Beatles, had terrific pulling power. The raves were all staged in the capacious Mountford Hall. And there, amid the detritus of the Who’s guitars, smashed the night before, we would gather in political solidarity and protest – protest that ranged over a whole gamut of disparate causes.

One of the most energised campaigns was in support of Biafra in the Nigerian civil war – an attempt by the country’s most oil-rich region to break away from Nigeria altogether. We backed Biafra with a passion, even after we saw images of the Biafran leader Colonel Ojukwu’s ostentatious white grand piano being hoisted from the dockside onto the ship that was transporting his possessions to some safe haven out of the country. Idealism overcame everything. Vietnam was in the air, and our protests were generally more pro-North Vietnamese than hysterically anti-American, although large numbers of us marched on the US embassy in Grosvenor Square. To my shame, my own personal journey of revolt had not yet evolved far enough for me to make the effort to travel down to the London demonstration, although my brother Tom did. Indeed my cousin Peter, already working for ITN, held a shouted dialogue across the street with him on the evening news as he disappeared off with Tariq Ali’s breakaway group in a bid to storm the embassy itself.

It was around this time that I had my own first brush with broadcasting. BBC Radio Merseyside wanted a regular weekly half-hour of student news, and I was deputed by the Students’ Union to provide it. I would cycle off to a shabby office at the back of Lewis’s department store to talk about the week’s events. Somebody at the station had already written my scripts, and while I did tinker with them, to say anything very radical seemed unnecessarily risky, particularly as I knew no one who ever listened to my broadcasts. Thus they were epic in their dullness, and certainly left me with no sense of romance about the career I would one day pursue.

In amongst the politics I got on with my law course, thrilling to cases that defined negligence like Rylands v. Fletcher, over who was to blame when a reservoir flooded a neighbouring mine; or Donoghue v. Stevens, over what duty of care a drinks company owed an innocent drinker who found a snail in his ginger-beer bottle. I learned much of public international law and nothing at all of tort, or personal property. Every one of my fellow law students wanted to join the legal profession. I thought I didn’t, but that I might drift into becoming a barrister anyway.

I passed my first-year exams with flying colours in June 1969, and left the next day for the most extraordinary adventure by road to India. It was to take every day of the long vacation until the end of September. We who were to travel had to raise the money ourselves. One of my fund-raising stunts had been an attempt to break the world record for sitting on a lavatory. My bid was staged on a platform in the front hall of the Students’ Union. Twenty-five hours I sat on the thing, with my trousers round my ankles, only to discover that the prudes at the Guinness Book of Records would not accept it. In truth I was never able to establish that it was a record anyway, but certainly no one else seemed to be fool enough to claim it. I raised £1200 from sponsors including Armitage Shanks, who made the thing, revealing an unexpected sense of humour. In the final hour students were allowed to buy eggs for 20p each, and reduce me to a ripe old mess.

Our passage to India was courtesy of Comex – the Commonwealth Expedition. This was a mad escapade run by an eccentric who we knew simply as Colonel Gregory. Gregory’s dream was for every university in the land to send a busload of students on a cultural exchange to India, and for as many Indian universities as possible to do so in reverse. It was a brilliant and idealistic way of attempting to give new life to an institution – the British Commonwealth – that already had an elderly, even patronising air of imperial legacy and UK dominance.

I was to be one of our two drivers, so I had to train for and pass my bus driver’s licence in between demonstrations and exams. We twenty-five souls aboard had to decide what our cultural offering should amount to. We suspected that many in India, if they had heard of Liverpool at all, would have done so because of the Beatles, so we lit upon the idea of a four-part close-harmony Beatle band with guitar and drums. In addition to driving, I was to supply the bass harmonies. I was spared involvement in Sheridan’s eighteenth-century play The Rivals, which the rest of the crew proposed to stage.

Somehow the Colonel had cajoled the manufacturers Bedford to supply all the shortened single-decker buses on some kind of subsidised lease-lend basis. When we gathered in Ostend for the first leg of the overland dash for India there were more than two dozen cream Bedford Duples lined up, one each for twenty-five universities, sporting the green-and-gold Comex livery. They looked like an advertiser’s dream. But it was the last time they would. If they returned at all from their ten-thousand-mile odyssey they would have more than lost their sheen.

Once we were under way, countries I’d never expected to visit in my life fell before us like ninepins: Belgium and Luxembourg went without a stop. My whole sense of political geography was changing. Our first night, and first concert, was at a castle above Stuttgart. I found a Germany very far from the one I’d heard my parents talk about in childhood. It felt more prosperous than home, and more energised.

‘Hey Jude, don’t be afraid …’ The close harmony worked beautifully, and the castle walls rang to the applause of the locals who’d turned out to hear us. The Rivals went less well, its complicated plot lines hanging heavy on the German night air. We slept en masse in a gymnasium. I had never slept in the company of so many women. But for our hippy appearance, the expedition had all the hallmarks of a travelling British holiday camp.

Crossing into Yugoslavia from Austria, we tasted the only Communist regime of our journey. Tito was everywhere, or rather his bespectacled image was. The country felt surprisingly mellow, and beyond the somewhat monotone look of the traffic, gave little sign of being very different to the rest of Western Europe. On the wide road running south from Zagreb to Belgrade all twenty-five buses stopped on the hard shoulder to remember the members of an earlier Comex expedition whose bus had crashed at this spot. Seven or eight of them had died, and many more had been injured. It introduced a sombre note to our continuous fast driving and youthful overtaking.

That first glimpse of Yugoslavia was to stand me in good stead later in life, when the ethnic tensions beneath the surface burst into frenzied hatred and killing. In Belgrade, Tito himself turned out in the stadium for our concert. Tough, burly, beaming a warm welcome, he was clearly and massively in charge. I didn’t get near him, but I did catch sight of his foot tapping as I belted out the bass line to ‘All You Need is Love’.

It wasn’t until we reached eastern Turkey that the buses began to pay the price for their large expanses of glass and glinting chrome – too much of a temptation for the locals, who extracted stones from the decaying roadway and hurled them with great accuracy at our passing cavalcade. We lost our back two windows, Cambridge lost all their glass down one side, Aberdeen lost their windscreen and East Anglia most of their windows on both sides. Crossing into Iran, the convoy had taken on a billowing aspect, with curtains and possessions blowing out of assorted openings. Somehow, without the benefit of mobile phone or internet, Colonel Gregory had lined up replacement glass to await our arrival in Tehran.

With nine years to go until the Iranian revolution, this was the time of some of the Shah’s most ostentatious consumption. Persepolis was littered with the paraphernalia of his attempt to mark the supposed millennium of his phoney dynasty. Everywhere were the signs of Westernisation and Americana. The Shah’s Tehran was more than ready for the Beatles, even the somewhat inadequate line-up we had on offer, and we played to packed houses in the basketball stadium.

We left Iran along the coast of the Caspian Sea. Gazing up at the hills overlooking the water, I spotted the telltale giant white golf balls of the early-warning station that the US maintained here against Russian missile tests in the Urals. I knew what they were from having seen a similar installation at Fylingdales, in the heart of my father’s Yorkshire diocese. In a magical kind of way I was laying the superficial building blocks that would assist me later to track the evolving new world disharmony. Yet as we voyaged on towards Afghanistan I still had no idea of becoming a journalist, or of ever retracing my steps here.

The western Afghan town of Herat slumbered in the late-afternoon heat. Old men sat on their white-robed haunches, sipping tea at the roadside. Their hennaed beards and brown features stood out against the tea stalls beyond. Camels and mules fought for street space with ancient bicycles and the occasional highly decorated, heavily overladen truck. The main roads were the best we encountered east of the Bosphorus, for Afghanistan was the archetypal buffer state. They were so straight that they were only marred by frequent head-on collisions induced by sleep and mesmerisation. The international power play here was tense indeed. The United States had built the road from the Iranian border to Kandahar, the Russians had built the rest most of the way to the bottom of the Khyber Pass.

By now our caravan of suburban British buses had broken up into much smaller convoys, having become separated by punctures and breakdowns. Although our own bus was the nexus of our travelling lives, some of us had forged relations with people on other buses. By now the Aberdeen bus held a special attraction for me. I had fallen into easy conversation with one of their crew, Liz, but it was almost impossible to keep track of her; her wretched vehicle rarely coincided with ours. But trying to find her, and then unexpectedly encountering her, provided an extra frisson to an already incredible journey.

Kabul was the capital of the hippy kingdom. There were Western dropouts and druggies everywhere, some in an awful state. Others had simply merged into the scenery. The city was a mellow and tolerant place. What it lacked in tension, though, it made up for in mystery. Whatever the warlords were up to, it certainly didn’t seem to be war. Opium appeared to be present more in the consumption than in the trade. This was a buffer state that, while operating at a barely tolerable level of existence, seemed to work nevertheless. It was hard to see why anyone would want to change it. Yet we were less than a decade from the Russian invasion that would herald the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire, and would sow the seeds of the Taliban and eventually of al Qaida. Sitting round our campfire near the British embassy on our third night in town, smoking marijuana and most definitely inhaling, we thought all was well with the world.

The Khyber Pass, on the other hand, had a distinct presence of the old world disorder: bandits. ‘Passage only between dawn and dusk: military escort mandatory’ read the notice at the bottom of the pass. We decided to divide our buses into convoys of five, with military vehicles between each. It took so long for us to wind up through the Khyber that dusk had turned to absolute darkness for the last stretch. From time to time we would stop while scouts up on the escarpments looked out for bandits. We could hear the Pakistani army and the bandits calling to one another across the valley.

It had taken us five weeks to reach Pakistan, where we travelled past the bustling arms and drug dealers of Peshawar on to Rawalpindi and the seething streets of Lahore, ending up pony trekking for a day in the Murray Hills to the north of the country.

India arrived gradually, its approach reflected in the evolution of the bread through our journey – upright Hovis in Britain, giving way to lower, rounder breads in France, flatter still by Turkey and Iran, until we reached the chapatti and the nan in India. She was to prove an inspiring climax.

This was one of the last periods in the drift to disorder when such an overland trip could be undertaken relatively safely. Our first stop was the sumptuous, and in those days peaceful, Kashmir. Land of mountains, lakes and wildflowers, and to this day one of the most beautiful places to which I have ever been. Thence to Nanithal, an old British hill station possessed of the most spectacular views of the mountains leading to Everest. Sikh waiters served us tea and cucumber sandwiches on the lawn of the Nainital Rowing Club.

By the time we reached Delhi we were feted as if we were the Beatles. A hundred thousand people packed the main city arena that night to hear us in concert with local Indian musicians. We were mobbed, our hair pulled, our ears deafened by the screaming.

Our final destination, however, was not the Indian capital, but the University of Benares. Benares, the Hindu burial centre of the Ganges, was teeming with people. The funeral pyres burnt brightly on the banks, the mourners cascading into the water, boats bearing yet more pyres. Bodies were carried head-high for incineration. Unfortunately, by the time we reached it the University of Benares had been closed by the police after riots on the campus. It was an odd anticlimax to so spectacular an adventure. Three weeks later we had raced back across Asia and Europe to return to Liverpool for the first day of my second year.

In our absence, man had walked on the moon, Vietnam had suffered another massacre, and Nelson Mandela had passed his sixth year in jail on Robben Island. We were angry, stirred by injustice, shaken by other people’s wars. We could afford to be: there was full employment in Britain then, we didn’t lie awake at night wondering how we would earn a crust when we left university. However, our anger was but a bit-part player in the larger anger that still raged across campuses from the London School of Economics to the Sorbonne in Paris.

In some senses, in the autumn of 1969 we were actively in search of the issue with which to confront the authorities at Liverpool. Students at Warwick University had discovered secret files kept on the politically active; doubtless the same thing was happening at Liverpool. Nasty Nixon still had some years to go before his defenestration from the White House, and Vietnam simmered on, but that did not involve either the British or university authorities. Indeed Prime Minister Harold Wilson had wisely, and somewhat courageously, refused active British involvement on the American side.

It was Peter Hain, subsequently a Labour Cabinet Minister, who finally identified our cause. Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, had spent the previous months preaching ‘change through economic engagement’ with the South African apartheid regime. Wilson and others had gone soft on economic sanctions, and the apartheid state was consolidating its hold amid calls from Nelson Mandela’s beleaguered African National Congress (ANC) cohorts to black South Africans to burn their passbooks. British culpability and collusion with apartheid were clear, but what was Liverpool’s connection?

Even in those days, the presence of the great Tate & Lyle sugar empire on the Liverpool dockyards was unmissable. Liverpool was effectively Tate & Lyle’s British capital. The university had sizeable investments, and a goodly portion found its way to investments in South Africa, where Tate was still big. Hey presto! We had our cause. ‘Disinvest from South Africa’ became our clarion cry. The only bank on campus, Barclays, with its notorious presence in South Africa, became a target too. The sheer size of my overdraft rendered me embarrassingly unable to withdraw my funds to join the protest, but join I did, with my Barclays chequebook festering in my back pocket.

Liverpool at the time suffered from a kind of staff/student apartheid which meant there was no provision for resolving such issues through dialogue. The students had no representation on any of the university administrative or governing bodies, which meant that before we could demand disinvestment, we had to demand access to power and representation within the university itself.

These were heady days, when students of every political complexion and none would gather to plot and manoeuvre. One of the most active staff members was Robert Kilroy-Silk, a junior lecturer in the Politics Department, one day to become a Labour MP, later to host the BBC TV daytime sofa show Kilroy, later still to be sidelined from it for making allegedly racist comments about Arabs, and still later to rise again as an anti-Europe Member of the European Parliament. But in those days no one was more enthusiastic in his support of the students; no member of staff talked more earnestly of delivering revolution in their ranks. Kilroy was a rabid revolutionary.

In November 1969 Peter Hain, himself South African by birth, came north with his ‘Stop the Seventy Tour’ campaign. The South African Springboks rugby team were already in Britain, while a cricket tour was to take place in the summer. Hain’s ultimately hugely successful campaign recognised that sport was very close to the heart of the apartheid regime. It was the public, competitive and white face of South Africa. We might not be able to spring Mandela from Robben Island, but we could at least stop his jailers from playing sport in our green and pleasant land. Hain’s target was the Springboks’ match at Old Trafford in Manchester.

‘Come on, Jon, we need you over there today.’ The call came from Dave Robertson, the Prince of Darkness, eternally turned out in black. He was the most articulate student operative on the left, the leader of the university Socialist Society, well to the left of anything I could have subscribed to. Nevertheless, I was flattered that he wanted me along for the ride to Manchester. Dave is now Professor of Politics at John Moore’s University in Liverpool, but in those days he regarded me as ‘a bloody public-school pinko liberal’. Several hundred of us hit the East Lancs highway bound for Old Trafford. Our job was to try to prevent that afternoon’s match from taking place at all. I noticed some of our number carried less than discreet spades with them.

Old Trafford was set for war. There were police and demonstrators everywhere. Hain stood on a flatbed truck outside the ground together with other luminaries urging a peaceful protest. The men with the spades were already worming their way into the ground. It didn’t take long for things to turn nasty. The police started trying to corral us into sectors further away from the gates, so that spectators could get in. The idea that someone had taken the decision to come and watch the match delineated them for us as out-and-out racists and supporters of apartheid, which in a discreet kind of a way I guess they were. Fights broke out. The police charged, and I felt a knee thrust hard into my groin. I thrust back, and within seconds I was pinned to the ground by three Mancunian cops and carted off in a paddy wagon to Old Trafford police station. ‘Jonathan George Snow, you have been arrested and charged with assaulting a police officer.’

‘Damn me,’ I thought, ‘that’s my law career up the spout. No more barristering for me. Is this a criminal record I see before me?’